A ripple of relief cut through Jackson. He’d take breathing over dead any day.
Cal squinted. “The third’s a man. Bigger frame, armed. Looks like he’s holding them at gunpoint.”
Avery leaned in beside Jackson, her breath shallow. “If it’s Mick,” she said quietly, “he got here fast.”
Her tone wasn’t disbelief. It was calculation.
“He could’ve been on his way before we even left the compound,” Jackson pointed out. No one disagreed with that.
Cal angled the monitor again. The figure moved, a blur of orange shifting back and forth. “He’s not just standing guard,” Cal said. “Looks like he’s talking. Maybe shouting. One of the smaller heat spots flinched.”
A low curse slipped from Noah’s mouth. “He’s threatening them.”
Jackson scanned the ridge line, instincts burning. The bunker was somewhere below that slab, just like Riley said. The entrance could be one narrow mistake away from a bloodbath.
He felt Avery’s hand brush his arm. Steady, deliberate. She didn’t need to say it out loud; he saw it in her eyes. They couldn’t wait. Not with two hostages down there and a gunman losing control.
Jackson exhaled through his teeth. The night seemed to hold its breath with him.
Cal adjusted the focus again, the faint hum of the device cutting through the steady hiss of rain. His face shifted from concentration to something darker. “No way,” he muttered.
Jackson’s eyes narrowed. “What?”
Cal didn’t look up. “No way did Mick, Warren, or Darian come out here alone.” He swung the monitor in a slow arc, scanning beyond the glowing bunker outline. “Somebody else is out there. Maybe a lot of somebodies.”
The night seemed to hold still, only the rain and the rasp of Cal’s breath breaking the silence. Then he froze.
“Son of a—” Cal cut himself off with a low curse. “You all need to see this.”
Jackson crouched beside him, the cold mud soaking through his knee. The screen flickered, static catching the edge of the feed before it refocused. Cal zoomed out, adjusting the contrast.
Behind the bunker, barely visible through the outline of trees and rock, was another structure. Bigger. Rectangular.
A building.
Cal steadied the image. “That’s no outpost,” he said tightly. “Looks like a damn training hall. And it’s occupied.”
“How many?” Noah asked, already bracing for the answer.
Cal’s thumb brushed the screen. The orange and white blobs multiplied across the monitor like embers in a dying fire, each one a human heat signature.
“Counting fast, I’m seeing…eleven, maybe twelve. All armed, all moving,” Cal added.
Jackson’s stomach turned to lead. This was organized. Military. Familiar. “The Brotherhood,” he said.
Noah nodded once, grim. “Yeah. And they’re all here.”
Rain pounded harder against the trees, thunder rumbling somewhere far off, like the warning growl before a strike.
Jackson looked back at the heat map, the dozen figures glowing like predators in the dark. They weren’t walking into a rescue.
They were walking straight into the Brotherhood’s nest.
Chapter Twenty
Avery’s throat went dry. Oh, God.
If that really was the Brotherhood, if every member was right there behind that bunker, then Megan and Riley were trapped in the middle of a fortress.