Time seemed to slow into something viscous and terrible, every detail sharpening with the particular clarity of a moment Wren understood, distantly, she might not survive.
Then the world exploded into motion from an entirely unexpected direction.
The shed's rear wall — the one Wren had never fully examined, tucked behind the workbench where Dutch had once revealed the safe — burst inward with a violence that sent splinters and dust across the small space, and through the sudden gap, Wren caught a blur of movement, a shape moving fast and low, and then Preacher, still visibly favoring his cracked ribs, still moving with the pained stiffness of a man barely out of a hospital bed, tackled the nearest of Vance's men with a fury that spoke to twelve years of grief finally finding its target.
