Hesh had been out of the hospital for four days. Four days of pacing the cramped confines of a Ghosts' forward operating base that felt more like a tomb. The wound in his shoulder still ached—a deep, gnawing throb that flared every time he moved too fast or forgot to breathe through the pain. The doctors had wanted him on bed rest for another two weeks. Minimum. Something about the bullet nicking an artery, about how close he'd come to bleeding out on that beach before Keegan got the medkit on him.

He didn't care about any of that.

The only thing that mattered was the look on Logan's face as Rorke dragged him away. The way his little brother's broken arm had dangled at a sick angle. The way Logan hadn't screamed—hadn't made a sound—because that wasn't who he was. Even with his arm shattered and Rorke's fist in his hair, Logan had been silent. Stoic. Brave.

And Hesh had done nothing. Just screamed his brother's name into the surf until his voice gave out.

He stood at the window of the safehouse now, looking out at the gray pre-dawn sky. Merrick and Keegan were asleep in the other room. They'd been taking shifts watching him, like he was a grenade with the pin half-pulled. Hell, maybe he was. Merrick had ordered him to stand down, to wait for actionable intel, to trust the process. Keegan had just given him that flat, unreadable stare and said, "You go off half-cocked, you get yourself killed. Then who's left to bring him home?"

Good question. Wrong answer. Because the answer was no one. No one was coming for Logan. Not Merrick, who had a team to run. Not Keegan, who followed orders even when he hated them. None of the other Ghosts, who'd already started talking about Logan in the past tense, like he was already a casualty of war.

No one but me.

Hesh turned from the window. His gear was already packed—had been packed since the first night out of the hospital, sitting in a duffel bag under his cot like a secret he was keeping from himself. He pulled on his tactical vest, wincing as the weight settled against his shoulder. Checked his sidearm. Grabbed his rifle. The movements were automatic, muscle memory carved into him by years of doing this beside his father, beside his brother. Now he was doing it alone.

He slipped out the back before sunrise. Didn't leave a note. Didn't need to. Merrick would know where he'd gone the second he saw the empty cot. Keegan might even understand. Might even respect it. Neither of them would come after him—they had too much shit to deal with, and they knew Hesh well enough to know that the only thing that would bring him back was Logan's body or Logan himself.

The intel he'd gathered was thin. Fragments. Bits of intercepted Federation chatter that Kick had dismissed as "unverified noise." Signal traffic originating from a remote facility in the Sierra Nevada—a place that didn't exist on any official map, but that showed up in encrypted logistics manifests as "Site Argus." Personnel transfers. "Asset conditioning." The kind of sterile, bureaucratic language that made Hesh's stomach turn, because he knew what it really meant.

Rorke was trying to break his brother. The same way the Federation had broken Rorke himself all those years ago.

Hesh had spent the last week running the numbers in his head. The torture methods Rorke had endured took months to fully reprogram a man. Months of poison, of psychological conditioning, of systematic destruction and rebuilding. If Rorke was following the same playbook with Logan, there was still time. There had to still be time.

He'd commandeered a recon helicopter from a supply depot two days ago, hiding it in a ravine thirty klicks north of the facility's suspected location. The damage would catch up with him eventually—Merrick would have his ass for it, if he ever got back—but that was a problem for later. Right now, there was only the mission.

The flight in was rough. Mountain winds battered the helicopter like an angry fist, and Hesh had to fight the cyclic the whole way to keep from getting slammed into a cliffside. His shoulder screamed with every correction, the pain radiating down his arm until his fingers went numb. He ignored it. Pain was just information. The body's way of telling you something was wrong. He'd been listening to that particular warning for years, and he'd learned to tune it out when it didn't serve him.

Dawn was just starting to bleed across the sky when he picked up the Federation transport helicopter on his scope.

It was coming in low from the east, probably ferrying personnel or supplies to the facility. Hesh throttled down, killing his running lights, and dropped into a holding pattern behind a ridge. Through his binoculars, he could make out the markings on the fuselage—Federation insignia, two pilots, room in the back for six, maybe eight passengers. Armed escort unlikely for a routine transport run.

The decision crystallized in his mind before he'd even finished analyzing the situation. If he could force that helicopter down and capture someone with facility access, someone who knew the layout and the protocols, he'd have a way in. It was a long shot. A desperate, reckless, borderline suicidal long shot. But it was also the closest thing to a plan he'd had in a month.

He armed the helicopter's rocket pods.

The engagement was over in less than two minutes. Hesh came out of the sun, a classic attack run, and put a rocket through the transport's tail rotor before the pilots even knew he was there. The helicopter went into an uncontrolled spin, smoke pouring from the rear assembly, and Hesh watched it corkscrew down toward the treeline below. It hit hard, tearing through pines and scraping across granite before coming to rest in a smoldering heap at the bottom of a ravine.

He set down fifty yards from the wreckage and approached on foot. His rifle was up, his breathing even, his mind utterly blank except for the tactical calculus of the moment. The cockpit was a crumpled ruin. Both pilots were dead—he confirmed that with a glance, no need to waste time on a closer look. The cabin had split open along the port side, and the smell of fuel and burning insulation was thick enough to choke on.

Some of the passengers were dead too. Hesh counted three bodies, still strapped into their seats, necks broken or skulls crushed by the impact. But there was movement near the back of the cabin. A fourth figure, crawling through the twisted metal, trying to pull themselves free of the wreckage.

He was on them in seconds. Grabbing the back of their uniform, hauling them out of the smoke and the leaking fuel before the whole thing went up. They struggled—of course they did, adrenaline and survival instinct overriding everything else—but Hesh was bigger, stronger, and he'd been waiting for this moment. He dragged them clear of the debris and shoved them down onto the hard-packed dirt, one knee planted in the center of their chest, his sidearm pressed against their forehead.

"Don't move."

His voice came out calm. Steady. The voice of a man who'd made his peace with what he was about to become. He looked down at the Federation soldier pinned beneath him and felt nothing. No pity. No hesitation. Just the cold, clear certainty of purpose.

"You're going to tell me everything you know about Site Argus," Hesh said, his finger resting lightly against the trigger guard. "And then you're going to help me get inside. If you do that, you might live through the day. If you don't—"

He let the sentence hang. The silence said more than words could.

"Your call."

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The rain started an hour ago. It's the cold kind, the kind that seeps through tactical gear and settles into the marrow. Hesh doesn't feel it.

He's been waiting in this half-collapsed warehouse for hours, pressed into the shadow of a rusted support beam, his Remington R5 balanced across his knee. The intel Merrick scraped together was thin—movement in the sector, Federation patrols breaking pattern, a high-value asset being routed through the area. It wasn't much. But it was enough to get Hesh out of that hospital bed, stitches still pulling in his shoulder, the tendons screaming every time he raised his arm.

The doctors told him four more weeks. Minimum.

He gave them three days.

His shoulder throbs now, a dull counterpoint to the sharper pain in his chest. That one's not physical. That one lives in the space between his ribs, right next to where his brother's name carved itself into his heart a month ago.

Logan.

The name is a wound that won't close. Every time Hesh blinks, he sees it—Logan reaching for him, arm snapping under Rorke's grip, the boot slamming into his own face, consciousness fracturing into static and darkness. He woke up to an empty beach, saltwater in his lungs, and a scream already tearing out of his throat before he knew he was making a sound.

Logan. Logan. LOGAN.

The first week in the hospital was a blur of surgeries and sedatives and Hesh fighting every nurse who tried to keep him in bed. The second week was worse—coherent, agonizing, his body pinned to a mattress while his mind ran endless simulations of what Rorke was doing to his brother. The conditioning. The torture. The systematic destruction of everything that made Logan Logan.

He should have been faster. Should have seen the shot coming. Should have put two in Rorke's skull instead of just one through his chest. Should have held onto Logan tighter. Should have—

The list never ends.

Movement below. A shadow detaching from the alley across the street, moving with the kind of precision that screams training. Federation. Alone. Armed.

Hesh exhales slow, finger resting light against the trigger guard. The asset. He's been tracking this one for two days, watching the patterns, the way they moved through the city like a ghost with a purpose. Too deliberate to be a regular patrol. Too confident to be anything but someone who knew exactly what they were doing.

Someone sent to kill him.

Rorke's been sending them. Brainwashed soldiers, reprogrammed assets, walking weapons pointed at the Ghosts. Hesh has put down three already. It never gets easier.

This one moves different. Faster. Smarter.

Hesh shifts his weight, ignoring the white-hot spike of pain in his shoulder. The asset disappears into the warehouse below, and he can hear the soft scuff of boots on concrete, the whisper of a weapon being readied. They know he's here. Good.

He waits until they're directly below him—right in the kill zone—and then he drops.

He hits the concrete hard, rolling, absorbing the impact the way his father taught him when he was barely old enough to hold a rifle. The asset whirls, too slow, and Hesh is already inside their guard. The rifle gets knocked wide. A knife flashes in the asset's hand—quick, well-trained—but Hesh catches the wrist, torques it, feels something pop. The knife clatters.

They don't scream. They don't curse. They just keep fighting, silent and relentless, and that's how Hesh knows the brainwashing took.

He drives a knee into their midsection, uses their moment of shock to slam them against the support beam. His forearm presses across their throat. His other hand pins their wrist to the rusted steel. Up close, he can see the hollow look in their eyes. The vacancy. The programming.

It makes him sick.

"Stop," he says. Calm. Quiet. The voice he used to use on the battlefield when Logan was about to do something reckless. "Stop fighting. I'm not gonna kill you."

A lie. Maybe. He hasn't decided yet.

The rage is a live thing in his chest, coiling and snapping, demanding release. This soldier—this thing Rorke made—they came here to murder him. They're part of the same machine that took his father, that took his brother, that burned San Diego to ash. Every instinct screams at him to choke the life out of them and move on to the next target.

But this one has access codes. This one knows the facility. This one can get him to Logan.

His jaw tightens. The guilt surges up, familiar and corrosive, because every second he spends interrogating this asset is another second Logan is strapped to a chair somewhere, screaming through the conditioning, having his mind torn apart layer by layer. Hesh should be there now. Should have been there weeks ago. Should never have let this happen in the first place.

"I know what Rorke did to you," he says, and his voice comes out harder than he intended. He presses his forearm a fraction tighter. "I know you're not running on your own steam right now. But I need something from you, and you're gonna give it to me. One way or another."

He leans in close.

"The facility where they're holding Logan Walker. You know where it is. You're going to take me there."