Zubair moved forward half a step, the heat radiating from him caused the prisoner to flinch. His shoulders went up like he could hide his neck there.

Sera didn’t blink. "How many men at the plant," she asked, voice soft, almost friendly.

"I-it rotates," Gabe stammered. "Maybe fifty? A hundred when a shipment’s due." He swallowed. "They don’t have girls there. Not for long."

"Routes south," Alexei resumed, as if the subject was weather again. "You said bridges are owned. How many, and who watches."

Gabe exhaled in a tremor.

"Two big bridges on the highway. Three smaller across feeder roads. The Cartel holds the big ones. They put their men on the small and swap them when they want someone to hurt new. Each post has a radio. I don’t know what they did to make them work. One east end keeps a crate of flares to string a line across the road. Takes heads off bikes if you don’t know it’s there."

"Cute," Lachlan muttered.

"Quarry crossing," Elias said. "Left bank or right."

"Left," Gabe replied. "You’ll know it by the stink. Mud that eats boots. Tie them tight." He gave a strangled laugh at repeating his earlier advice, like the normalcy of it tasted good in his mouth. It didn’t last. "Cartel cars patrol twice a day. Dawn and right before full dark. If you set a trap between, they might not see it until too late."

"You’ve run traps," Alexei said.

"Everybody runs traps," Gabe said, a flash of anger carving a line through the fear. "If we don’t slow them, they eat everything."

"Motivation," Alexei conceded. "I respect that."

He let his gaze fall to the drowned notebook. He flipped two pages. Ink had bled, but numbers lived in corners where water had been lazy. Ticks. Tallies. It looked like someone had tried to teach accounting to a knife. "You keep books?"

"Cain did," Gabe said. "He liked lists. Made him feel like the world had rules."

"It does," Alexei said. "We just stopped liking them."

He let the page close and set the notebook back on the tarp. Sera’s eyes tracked it for a heartbeat, then went back to the yard.

"Fuel," Elias prompted, not because he’d forgotten, but because everything came back to math. "Where do your trucks drink."

"Grain elevator," Gabe said quickly, glad to be on a subject that didn’t bleed. "Two drums buried. One is water most times—to catch thieves. Ours are branded with a circle cut into the lid. We check before we pour. Don’t siphon in the dark or you’ll pull bad and choke an engine."

"Cartel taught you that trick too," Alexei said.

Gabe nodded.

Alexei looked at him for a long second, weighing something the man couldn’t see.

He could feel Zubair at his back, his heat a steady line to his emotions. He could feel Elias’s attention like a plumb line through the room. He could feel Lachlan’s blade itch for a next thing to do. He could feel Sera, whole and quiet, the new center of their world.

The horde held steady. The prisoner shook.

"One more thing," Alexei grunted, turning his attention back to Gabe. "If we walk into your elevator and ask for Anson, what happens."

Gabe’s mouth went dry. "You don’t walk out."

"Mm," Alexei said. "Then we will not ask for Anson."

He stood. His knees made a small pop that caused Lachlan to smile and whisper ’old man’. He brushed ash off his palms like he had finished a chore.

Sera didn’t look away from the yard when she said, "We’re done."

Gabe blinked like maybe the word meant mercy in some dialect he’d grown up wishing for. "So—"

Zubair stepped in before the man could attach a second word. He didn’t raise a hand like a man about to throw a punch. He set his palm on Gabe’s shoulder as if steadying him.

Heat moved.

Not fire...no flame, no blackening, nothing that would smoke the barn.

Just a deep, impossible warmth that went in and told nerves to stop insisting. Gabe gasped once, his head dropping like a puppet whose strings had gone soft, and then he wasn’t suffering anymore.

Lachlan blew out a breath and bounced his machete point off the dirt once. "Fast. Respect."

"Less mess," Elias agreed, already reaching to check pockets out of habit. He didn’t find anything worth adding to a neat row. He went back to fuel.

Alexei watched Zubair’s hand lift off the cooling shoulder and saw the way the heat in him dipped—one notch lower, but it was never off.

There was a look Zubair got after he ended a thing for Sera: not relief, exactly, but rather a hum of contentment. He had it now.

Sera hadn’t moved. Luci leaned harder into her knee; she rubbed his ear once with the absentminded precision of a person who knew where all the good places were. "How long until the next patrol finds this," she asked.

Elias did the math without needing to touch a pencil. "If their routine holds...maybe two hours." 𝙧𝙚𝙚𝔀𝒆𝓫𝓷𝙤𝓿𝒆𝙡.𝒄𝙤𝓶

"We’re gone in one," Alexei said. He tapped the drowned notebook. "Let’s head to the bridge first. If they want a toll, we invent a different economy."

"Do you think the cartel is that smart?" Lachlan asked. His tone might be light and joking, but his eyes were not.

"Smart enough to live this long and put dogs on fences," Alexei shrugged. He glanced once at Sera. "Smart enough to want what they can’t have."

Zubair looked toward the field as if the smoke spelled words only he could read. "Then we burn whatever they try to hold."

"After we eat," Lachlan inserted. He nudged the flare case open with his boot and peered in. "And after I take two of these because I think they’ll make pretty pictures when Alexei gets bored."

"I do not draw with fire," Alexei said. "That is our fearless leader."

"You did today," Lachlan grinned.

Elias capped a drum. "We take two trucks," he said, interrupting the pending arguement. "One will die quick. The other will pretend not to."

Sera flicked her wrist. A dark grey barrel hit the tarp, the clean cap intact. "Helicopter fuel," she said. "I don’t know if it works for trucks, but it won’t hurt."

Alexei had the decency not to whistle. "Of course. I, too, carry around jet fuel in my back pocket. Too bad it’s in my other pants."

Sera smiled brightly at him even as Lachlan and Elias were looking at her with wide eyes.

But not a single one of them questioned her as to where it came from or how she had it.

He bent, slid the flares back into the case in a tight row, and snapped the lid. Outside, the field hissed as the last stubborn patch of fuel gave up and went black.

He glanced once more at Gabe’s dead body and then at Sera, still at the threshold, still not pretending to be anything except what she was.

The men who had thought she was worth the risk would not be the last. The Family, the Outfit, the cartel—whatever word they liked would arrive with nicer trucks and better lies.

Good. Let them come.

His Queen enjoyed bathing in the blood of her enemies.

Alexei lifted the flare case, hooked the drowned notebook under his arm, and walked toward the trucks that would get them to the first bridge.

He didn’t bother saying anything. The horde was already moving. Elias with the siphon, Lachlan with the pan, Zubair with one hand on the hood like blessing metal into obedience.

Sera stepped out into the smoke without looking back. Luci’s tail flicked once. The yard had said everything it had to say.

The road south waited.

They just had no idea what was coming.