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I end up on top of him, and I keep hitting him. There's no bell down here and no ropes.

Somebody is shouting my name. An agent has a fist in the back of my shirt, and I barely feel it.

Dutch's hands come up to cover his head and then quit coming up. I don't quit.

I've lost it like this twice before. Outside the Roadhouse Bar, Jesse talked a broken bottle out of my hand. In a parking lot outside San Angelo, it took a handful of stock handlers to drag me off Del Carnegie.

My arm goes back again.

"Bandera."

Delilah says it from the floor beside me, quiet, hoarse and steady.

My fist stops in the air. I gave her that word at my kitchen table before I ever gave her an order in my bed, and I swore to her it ends anything I'm doing. It ends this. I open my hand.

The agent still has hold of my shirt. Nobody dragged me off this time. I stopped on her word.

I get off him. Agents are on Dutch before I'm all the way up, and they roll him over and cuff him.

His face is wrecked. He'll live, and he'll sit in a courtroom. He's leaving this hill in handcuffs, not driving off it, and that will do for what I promised him in my barn.

An agent reaches for my chest, and I step back out of his reach. My hands are shaking, and I let them.

Torres comes down the stairs at a run with her pistol low. She looks at Dutch, then at me, and goes to her lead agent without a word.

I turn. Delilah kneels on the concrete with her hands still tied behind her. Blood has run down from her cheekbone onto her neck. Dutch tore the front of my flannel open, exposing the red marks the wire left on her skin. I drop to one knee in front of her and pull the torn edges together, covering her before I reach behind her for the bindings.

She isn't looking at Dutch or the agents or the dark. She's looking at me.

"You stopped," she says.

"You said it."

"I didn't know if you would."

"I knew I'd stop for you. I didn't know I could stop that fast." My voice comes out rough. "You got Hector out. And you named all three of those bastards to their faces."

Her eyes go wet, and she blinks the tears back.

Over her shoulder, the lights shine through the open door of her cell. The walls are concrete up to waist height and raw rock above that. Rusty steel rods jut from the rock, and one empty socket shows where a rod used to be. Dried blood stains the floor by the crooked drain, and a plastic water jug lies on its side.

She worked one of those rods loose from that wall and drove it in under Royce's ear. I look at it, and my hands close into fists. Dutch is cuffed on the floor behind me, but I don't go back for him.

I open my pocketknife and crouch behind her without touching her.

I slide the blade into the space between her wrists, where the plastic doesn't lie on her scars, and turn the edge outward. The zip tie snaps.

She brings her hands around in front of her and holds them against her stomach. The plastic has cut a fresh red line across the old ones.

She looks at my right hand. The knuckles are split open, and Dutch's blood is drying in the creases.

"You hit him in anger," she says.

"I did."

"Your rule says you keep your hands off me tonight."

"It keeps them off you till morning."