We stepped slowly into the clearing. Jeff’s gun raised slightly. All of us scanned the buildings, the porch, and the dark windows of every cabin.
Everything looked normal.
Pop.
A gunshot cracked through the air.
The sound ripped across the clearing, and every bird in every tree went silent at once.
We all dropped instantly.
I hit the dirt hard, my ankle screaming as I rolled behind a low stump. Sloane dropped down beside me. Jeff crouched near the path with his gun raised toward the cabins, body angled in front of Ethan.
My heart raced.
For half a second, I thought we’d walked into an ambush, but a voice thundered across the clearing.
“DON’T MOVE!”
Rough, sharp with command. The kind of voice trained to carry across open ground and make people listen.
“Stay the fuck where you are!”
I knew that voice.
I’d grown up with that voice. Heard it yelling at me across backyard football games and bar parking lots, and at family dinners.
I pushed up from the dirt.
“Lock!” I shouted.
Jeff hissed beside me. “What the hell are you doing—”
“It’s me!” I called louder, my voice breaking across the clearing. “Callan!”
Silence.
A figure stepped out from the shadow of the main cabin’s porch. Rifle raised and aimed directly at us.
Tall. Broad shoulders. Dark beard streaked with gray. Built like someone who’d spent years hauling lumber and running drills and preparing for exactly this moment.
Lockilian. My older brother.
He squinted across the clearing, the rifle still up, clearly not trusting what his own eyes told him.
“Callan?”
Relief hit me so hard my knees almost gave out.
“Yeah,” I called back, slowly standing with my hands raised. “It’s me.”
Behind me, I heard Sloane and the others rising too. Carefully. Quietly.
Lock lowered the rifle a few inches but didn’t drop it. His eyes moved across the group behind me—cataloging, assessing, running threat calculations the way his training had wired him to do before anything else.
“You got about three seconds to explain why you’re walking into Finn’s compound with strangers,” he said.
His voice remained hard.