Jude’s voice cracks over the earpiece. “Civilians secure. Both unharmed.”
The surgeon is operating. His hands are steady.
The Broken Halos hold the perimeter. Blake racks the slide of his shotgun on the north corner. Two brothers take cover on the south. The building is a hard point. The street is the kill zone.
The headlights reach the edge of town.
Two black SUVs. Tinted windows. They pull onto Main Street and roll toward the bakery at a speed that says confidence. Ferraro does not expect resistance here. He expects a baker and a sleeping child and a soft target that folds when a cartel enforcer walks through the door.
He does not know what is waiting.
The vehicles stop. Thirty meters from the bakery entrance. Doors open. Five men. Four of them are soldiers. Tactical gear. Automatic weapons. Cartel money dressed in body armor.
The fifth man steps out of the lead vehicle’s passenger side.
Calix Ferraro.
Tall. Broad. A scar running from his left ear to his jaw. He is wearing a dark suit that costs more than the bakery’s monthly rent and he moves with the unhurried confidence of a man who has never been told no by anyone who lived to repeat the word.
He looks at the bakery. At the Broken Halos bikes. At the armed men positioned at every corner. His expression does not change. He expected the cabin. He did not expect this. But Ferraro is not a man who retreats. Retreat is not in the vocabulary of a cartel boss. He walks forward because walking forward is the only direction he knows.
“I am here for the girl,” Ferraro calls out. His voice carries across the empty street. Accented. Cold. “And the woman. She is my bride.”
Nobody moves.
“You are outgunned,” he says. “And out of your depth. This is cartel business. Walk away.”
The street is quiet. The Pine Valley storefronts are dark. The mountains loom on every side. The bakery light spills across the asphalt and catches the chrome on the Broken Halos bikes.
I step out of formation.
The movement is not fast. It is not dramatic. I walk from the corner of the bakery into the open street with the same unhurried pace I bring to everything. My rifle is slung. My sidearm is holstered. The blade is in my right hand.
Ferraro’s eyes find me. He recognizes the build first. Then the eyes. Golden. He saw them once before. In a compound in the Costa estate. Against the wall. In a security uniform. Silent.
“I know you,” he says.
I do not answer.
“You were in the compound. Costa security.” A pause. Calculation. “You are Halos.”
I keep walking.
“You do not have to do this,” Ferraro says. His hand moves toward his hip. “I have five men. You have a knife.”
I do not stop walking.
Twenty meters. Fifteen. Ten.
Ferraro’s men raise their weapons. The Broken Halos raise theirs. The street is a grid of crossing sight lines and the math is simple: if anyone fires, everyone fires. And the Broken Halos are positioned in hard cover. Ferraro’s men are standing in the open beside their vehicles.
Five meters.
Ferraro draws his sidearm. His hand is fast. Trained. The barrel comes up and his finger finds the trigger and the muzzle is pointed at my chest and I am close enough to count the lines in the scar on his jaw.
I do not stop.
I am inside his range before the trigger pull. My left hand clamps his wrist. Twists. The gun fires once into the asphalt. The sound cracks through the empty street and echoes off the mountain walls.