Chapter 3

Kyle was already halfway out the cabin door. 

He shot one hand down, seized a fistful of his son's jacket collar, and wrenched him bodily up into the rear seat.

"Pull up! Go! Now!"

The engine screamed. 

The helicopter clawed its way upward through a lattice of tracer fire, swaying and shuddering, fighting for altitude. 

Then the ground fire fell away. The lights dropped behind them. The black desert swallowed everything.

The cabin went quiet except for the engine drone and four people breathing hard.

Anya lay curled against her mother, her color frightening. 

Liam sat with his back against the bulkhead, staring at Kyle — those sharp eyes burning with something complicated and raw.

Ella finally spoke. Her voice had been sandpapered down to almost nothing. "Ramón Santos."

Kyle pressed fresh rounds into a magazine, not looking up. "He's after me. Six years ago on an unnamed ridge along the border, I killed his heir."

"So he decided to go after my children?!"

"He didn't know you existed." Kyle raised his eyes. Something dead and cold lived behind them. 

"Until three days ago, when someone in Washington sold your location and your files to him. Gift-wrapped."

Ella let out a short, broken laugh. "Do you have any idea what my life looked like after you disappeared? I was pregnant, Kyle. My respectable father threw me out like garbage — dropped me in an El Paso slum and dusted off his hands. I gave birth to Anya in an underground clinic that didn't have antiseptic. "

The magazine in Kyle's hands went still.

"Anya's first cardiac episode hit when she was three years old. I spent an entire night on my knees in a hospital corridor begging doctors to look at her." Ella's voice cracked down the middle. "The first word she ever learned to say was Daddy. She said it to the stars outside her window. Because I told her her father was a hero who died in battle, and that he was watching over her from heaven."

The cabin went dead silent.

Anya's voice came out barely above a breath. "Daddy… you really came back?"

Kyle slowly lowered himself to her level. 

This was the first time he'd looked at his daughter this close. She had Ella's eyes — exactly Ella's eyes. But that straight, proud nose was all his.

"It's me, sweetheart." He kept his voice as gentle as he could manage. "The surgery is already arranged. Someone will meet you on the ground and take you to Houston. I've handled everything at the cardiac center."

Ella stared at him. "What did you just say?"

"You need to be out of Texas before morning. Somewhere Ramón can't reach." Kyle turned to the front and dropped his voice back to command register. "Adjust course. Private airstrip outside Las Cruces, New Mexico."

"You're just going to dump us there?!" Liam's voice came sharp and fast from the back, loaded with hostility toward this stranger who was supposed to be his father.

Kyle turned to look at the boy. "Once I have you somewhere that dog can't sniff out, I can deal with the debt."

"Deal with it." Ella's laugh had no humor in it. "You mean walk into Juárez alone and get yourself killed."

"I won't die."

"Don't feed me the same lines you'd use on a ten-year-old, Kyle."

Kyle was quiet for a few seconds. He pulled in a long breath that tasted like engine oil and desert air. "I'll do my best to come back in one piece."

Ella held his gaze for a long time. Finally she let out a slow, self-mocking exhale. "Six years, and you're still the same arrogant, self-appointed one-man army."

"But I've never broken a promise."

The helicopter began its descent. 

Far below in the New Mexico desert, the faint lights of a private landing strip blinked against the dark. 

Kyle slid the cabin door open. The cold desert wind poured in and filled the space.

"There's a chartered plane waiting on the strip. Six hours from now, you'll be on a private tarmac in Houston."

Ella stood, pulling Anya close, and walked to the open door. Then she stopped. 

She turned around.

Without any warning, her right hand came up.

Crack.

The slap rang out clean and sharp over the roar of the engine.

Then she grabbed his jacket lapels with both fists and kissed him.

It was a violent kiss. Short. Packed with six years of fury and grief and something that had never stopped being love no matter how hard she'd tried to kill it.

She broke away. Her voice was wrecked. "That's the interest, Kyle Miller. Keep your worthless life intact. The principal — you're going to spend the rest of yours paying it back."

Kyle pressed two fingers lightly to the corner of his mouth. A faint curve crossed his face. "Principal and interest. Every last cent. I don't skip out on debts."

Ella didn't look back. 

She stepped out of the helicopter with Anya in her arms and landed clean on the tactical recovery mat spread across the ground below.

Liam stood at the edge of the open door. He looked at his father for a long moment.

"Teach me how to kill people," the ten-year-old said. Cold. Flat. Serious.

Kyle shook his head. "Pulling a trigger is the easiest thing in the world, kid. I could teach you a hundred ways to do it and leave nothing behind. But it's also the most useless, most pathetic way to protect the people you love."

"Why?"

"Because every time you pull that trigger, something human inside you dies and doesn't come back." Kyle crouched down and met his son's eyes straight on. "I'm already in the deep end. I don't want you turning into whatever I am."

Liam's eyes went red at the rims. He held it. "But I want to protect them the way you do!"

"Then stay smart. Stay alive." Kyle's heavy hand came down on the boy's shoulder and stayed there. "In a world this broken, just living — that's the best thing you can do for them."

Liam was quiet for a moment.

Then he slowly raised his fist.

Kyle looked at it. Something shifted almost imperceptibly in his expression. He raised his own fist — scarred, calloused, a weapon in its own right — and knocked it gently against his son's.

The boy turned and dropped out of the helicopter, sprinting across the dark desert floor toward the lights where his mother and sister waited.

Kyle watched the three of them disappear through the door of the charter plane.

Then he slid the cabin door shut.

"Where to, sir?" the pilot asked, carefully.

Kyle reached inside his jacket and pulled out a tactical photograph, its edges soft and worn with handling. 

A middle-aged man in a bespoke suit, smiling with the polished ease of someone who'd never had to get his hands dirty. 

But the eyes behind those gold-rimmed glasses were flat and cold as a snake's.

"Turn around." Kyle's voice carried no temperature at all. "Cross the border."

He looked down at the photograph.

"We're going to Juárez."