The SUV stopped.The driver’s door opened.
A man stepped out wearing a tailored raincoat and an expression that suggested he was used to people doing what he wanted without argument. He was maybe fifty, with the kind of expensive haircut that didn’t survive rain well, and he smiled like someone who’d never faced real consequences in his life.
“Evening, gentlemen,” he called out, his hands visible and elevated. The whole posture was controlled, theatrical. “You’re complicating a very straightforward situation.”“Funny,” Ethan said, stepping forward with the kind of calm that comes from standing in front of an SUV you can’t out-fight and knowing it anyway. “We were thinking the same exact thing about whoever put a cop on the pavement.”
The man’s eyes slid from Ethan to the officer being treated on the ground. “That woman doesn’t belong to you.”
“She doesn’t belong in a ditch either,” the lead medic said, checking vital signs with the focus of someone who’d seen enough death to know he was looking at it. “Sixty seconds. That’s how long she stays alive if we don’t move her.”“Unfortunate,” the man said, and there was real dismissal in his voice, the kind that made something cold settle in Ethan’s chest.
The man raised his hand.
That’s when Ethan heard it—the sound of another engine, much closer than should have been possible. Another SUV. Behind them. They’d been boxed in.
“We’re trapped,” Rafe breathed, but there was no panic in his voice, just statement of fact.
No one moved. No one flinched. The bikers didn’t reach for weapons that most of them didn’t have. They simply held their position, a living wall between the officer and whatever was coming.Then something unexpected happened.
Sirens. Plural. Coming from multiple directions. Red and blue lights started painting the end of Main Street, and within seconds, five—then six—then eight police cruisers appeared through the rain, lights flashing, officers pouring out with weapons drawn.
