Page 33 of Charging Dodge

“No,” Hulk agrees. “But saying it out loud helps some. You should try it.”

I sit on the arm of the couch, close enough to see the yard myself, the porch light throwing a weak yellow glow across the gravel drive. Nothing moves out there. No headlights. No engines. “How long's it been?” I ask.

Hulk checks his watch, the numbers glowing faint green in the dark. “About four hours since they rolled out from their first stop.”

“Feels longer,” I murmur.

“Always does,” Hulk replies.

We sit for a while without talking. Carter's quiet too, knees still drawn up, eyes fixed on the same gap in the curtain Hulk's watching. I like that about Hulk, that he doesn't feel the need to fill every silence with reassurance he doesn't actually feel. “You ever done this before?” I ask him. “Waited like this?”

“More times than I care to count,” Hulk answers.

“Does it get easier?” I ask.

Hulk thinks about that, and for a second something old and heavy passes behind his eyes, something he doesn't offer up. “No,” Hulk says finally. “You just get better at hiding it.”

By five the sky outside starts to lighten at the edges, gray creeping in around the black, and there's still no sound of engines on the drive. Carter hasn't moved from his spot on the floor, hasn't closed his eyes once that I've seen. Amelia and Noah are still upstairs, hopefully still asleep. Hulk gets up around six, stretches his back with a low groan, and starts a pot of coffee in Miranda's kitchen without being asked. The smell of it drifts through the house, ordinary in a way that almost feels wrong considering everything.

“They'll come back,” Hulk says, setting a mug down in front of me at the table. “Might not be this hour. Might not even be today. But they'll come back.”

“You keep saying that like it'll make it true,” I say.

“Sometimes that's all you got,” Hulk replies.

I wrap my hands around the mug and don't drink from it, just let the heat sit in my palms. Carter's still at the window, watching the drive like he can will Dodge into appearing on it. I think about running. It crosses my mind the way it always does when things get quiet and heavy like this, some old part of me that says grab the kids and go, don't wait to find out what the morning brings. But I don't move from the table. I stay right where I am, coffee going cold in my hands, waiting for the sound of a motorcycle engine that hasn't come yet.

CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

Dodge

The war room sits between us—a long table covered in phones, laptops, stacks of paperwork with numbers printed in columns that mean nothing good. Maps pinned to corkboards along every wall. Winlaw territory outlined in red marker, routes marked, names circled. The room smells like burned coffee and cigarettes and money that never touched a bank. Rebel's at my left shoulder. The three men standing along the back wall of the room have already reached for their weapons.

“Don't,” I tell them. They don't listen. The room explodes all at once. Rebel takes the two on the right before they clear their holsters, and I put the third one down before he finishes his pivot. Three shots, less than two seconds, and the war room is ringing loud enough that I feel it in my back teeth. Gallows doesn't flinch. He stands at the far end of the table with his hands loose at his sides, the maps and corkboard behind him, and he watches the three men drop like he's already accounted for them as a loss.

“Outside,” I tell Rebel. Rebel moves through the door at a run, and a second later the compound goes loud—gunfire from the east side of the yard, then the south, then the roof. I keep my eyes on Gallows. “Your men are going to lose this,” I warn him.

“Most men lose eventually,” Gallows snarkily says, reaching toward the table—not for a weapon, just to straighten a stack of papers, but like the noise outside is a minor inconvenience. “What they lose over usually determines whether anyone remembers them.”

My jaw tightens and I order, “Move away from the table, Gallows.”

He takes one step back toward the corkboard wall, hands visible, unhurried. Outside, the firefight gets louder. I can track it without looking—Cobra's voice cutting through from the south end of the yard, a burst from near the barracks that can only be Speed, then a single clean shot from above that tells me Rebel's already found the high ground.

“You burned my contacts in three states,” Gallows says, conversational as a man discussing weather. “I'll admit I underestimated your reach.”

“Then you knew this was eventually coming.”

“I knew something was coming,” he concedes. “The timeline was faster than I anticipated.” He glances toward the window at the far end of the room, where muzzle flash strobes against the glass. “I take it you don't intend to leave much standing.”

“Nothing,” I tell him, a smirk spreading across my face.

He nods, almost approving. “Thorough.”

The door behind me blows open and two more of his men pour through—not from outside, from the interior corridor I hadn't fully cleared. The first one catches me in the shoulder and drives me sideways into the table. The laptops scatter and a phone hits the floor and I get an elbow across the back of my neck before I can turn. I grab the edge of the table, use it to spin, and put the barrel of my pistol into the second man's ribs before he can get the angle. The shot is close enough that I feel the percussion against my hand. He folds. The first man swings again and I let him, stepping inside the arc so the hit glances off my shoulder instead of my jaw, and I drive him back into the door frame hard enough that the frame cracks. He doesn't get up. I straighten. My arm's bleeding down into my palm from a cut I don't remember taking, and the shoulder's going to be a problem by morning, but I'm standing. Gallows hasn't moved from the wall of maps.

“You should've run,” I tell him, breathing harder than I'd like.

“And go where?” He tilts his head, a motion that's somehow both curious and dismissive. “You burned every exit months ago. I know how you work, Dodge. I've been watching you work.”