Page 94 of Irish's Clover

I thumbed it open.

Hope you still have your old number. How have you been since the army?

The room went still. Not quiet. Still. The particular stillness that happens when every system in a body locks simultaneously, the breathing stopping, the heartbeat pausing, the muscles freezing in the configuration they occupied at the moment of impact. The way a blade freezes at the apex of a throw, suspended between the hand that released it and the target it hasn't reached.

I knew who it was. The way you know the weight of a weapon you haven't held in years, the balance still imprinted in the muscle memory of your palm. The way you know a voice you haven't heard in six years, the frequency still tuned in some receiver you thought you'd decommissioned.

My thumbs moved. Fast. The same speed that put knives into targets at twenty feet.

Logan?

I sat on the edge of the bed. The phone in both hands. The screen bright in the dim room. My pulse had gone from post-workout steady to something faster, something that didn't have a tactical justification, something that lived in the same territory as the name I'd refused to say in the gym.

The typing indicator appeared. Three dots, pulsing.

Six years. Six years since I'd walked out of Fort Bragg with a duffel bag and a discharge and the taste of a goodbye that hadn't been a goodbye because I hadn't let it be one. Six years since I'd left behind the only person who'd ever made the sheath feel unnecessary, the only person who'd seen the blade underneath and hadn't flinched.

The dots stopped pulsing. The message arrived.

Yup. Where are you? I'm in Montana.

The phone sat in my hands. The screen glowing. The two words sitting there the way a grenade sits after the pin's been pulled, innocuous and patient and carrying the potential to rearrange everything.

I set the phone down. Stared at the ceiling.

Logan was in Montana. The Iron Wolves were in Montana. And the war that Hawk had warned about, the war that was coming whether we were ready or not, had just acquired a variable that none of us had planned for.

I picked up the nearest knife from the rack. Turned it in my fingers. The weight familiar, the balance perfect, the edge sharp enough to split a hair.

Whatever was coming, I'd meet it the way I met everything.

Fast.