When he was finished—when the words had run out and there was nothing left but the weight of what he’d carried—he stood up, brushing his palms against his jeans. “I should go in,” he said, voice steadier than it had any right to be. “It’s getting cold.”
I nodded once. “I’ll be in soon.”
He turned and went inside, the screen door closing behind him with a quiet click. I stayed where I was, watching the mountain turn from purple to black against the darkening sky, and started running the problem.
Gerald Hughs. Omaha. Money, connections, and a clear agenda. We had time, but not unlimited time—a week, maybe two, before he narrowed the search enough to send someone to look. I needed to make calls—to a former teammate who worked private security in Chicago, to a lawyer I knew in Billings who specialized in protection orders, to Rawley, who had resources I didn’t and contacts who could make certain kinds of problems disappear.
But underneath the tactical thinking—the careful assessment of threat vectors and countermeasures—a different kind of calculation was happening. A slow, non-professional anger was building in my chest, the kind that had nothing to do with operations or security protocols and everything to do with one person deciding another was property rather than a human being.
I’d seen it before—the cruelty that was reserved for omegas in certain contexts, the way certain men felt entitled to bodies that weren’t theirs. But knowing it existed and seeing its impact on Jasper’s face were different things entirely.
The anger was a liability if I let it drive decision-making. I needed to sit with it, acknowledge it, then set it aside until the immediate problem was handled. Threats first. Feelings after.
So I sat on the porch steps, the mountain dark to the west, and let myself feel exactly what I was feeling—not performing it, not denying it, just letting it exist in the space between one breath and the next.
It wouldn’t change what came next. It wouldn’t alter the decisions that needed to be made. But it was part of thecalculation now, one more piece of data to factor into whatever happened tomorrow.
The screen door opened behind me, then closed with a soft click. I didn’t turn—my body recognizing the timing of the footsteps before my brain had processed who they belonged to.
Jasper came down the porch steps and sat near me—not where he’d been before, but closer, close enough that our shoulders would touch if either of us leaned slightly to the side.
He didn’t say anything. Didn’t ask what I was thinking or what came next or whether he should start packing. Just sat with his knees pulled up, eyes on the same piece of horizon I’d been staring at, and let the silence between us expand to fill the space it needed.
After a while—long enough that the cold had worked its way through my jacket and into my bones—he reached over and set something on the step between us: a carved wooden horse, small enough to fit in the palm of my hand, its surface worn smooth with handling.
“My grandfather made it,” he said, voice low in the darkness. “When I was seven. It’s the first thing I grabbed when we left.”
I looked at it—the careful detail of the mane, the set of the ears, the way the wood had darkened with age—and understood exactly what he was offering. Not just the object itself, but the story behind it, the piece of himself it represented.
“It’s good work,” I said, accepting what he’d offered without making it into more than it was.
He nodded once, then turned his face back to the mountain. We sat like that as the last of the light faded from the sky, the carved horse between us on the step, its wooden body holding the day’s warmth long after everything else had gone cold.
Chapter Six
~ Decker ~
The coffee at my elbow had gone cold hours ago. I didn’t notice until I reached for it, then set it aside without drinking—just one more detail lost in the careful work of building a threat assessment.
Gerald Hughs had a pattern, and it wasn’t pretty: legal pressure, financial leverage, at least two prior incidents with omegas that had been settled quietly with non-disclosure agreements attached.
The overhead kitchen light was the only one on in the house, throwing my shadow across the table’s scarred surface. The rest of Black Butte was still asleep—Rawley and Jojo in the master bedroom, Burke and Danny at their place down the road, and Carter and Macon in their place. I’d been at it since 3:30, my body running on SEAL-time even after years out of the service.
My laptop screen glowed blue in the kitchen’s pre-dawn darkness. I’d placed two calls to Navy contacts—one in Omaha who did private security, another in Chicago who had connections to people who handled problems that couldn’t be solved through official channels. I’d also reached out to Carver, an Omaha PI I’d used before, and promised him double his rate if he could get me information on Hughs by morning.
The results had come in forty minutes ago. They were worse than I’d told Jasper last night.
Hughs had a hospital board member in his pocket. The “budget cuts” that had eliminated Jasper’s position had been manufactured—three other nurses with less seniority had been kept on when Jasper was let go. The six-figure bonus the hospital administrator had received two weeks after Jasper’s termination had been routed through a shell company that traced back to Hughs’ real estate holdings.
The man had the kind of money that made problems disappear—the kind that could buy police response times or make court records vanish. He also had the specific patience of someone who’d never been told “no” by someone he couldn’t break.
The Omaha contact had sent photos of the last two omegas Hughs had fixated on—both young men with dark hair, both nurses at different facilities, both relocated after settlement payments that carried airtight confidentiality clauses. Neither had returned my calls when I tried to reach them.
I was halfway through a message to Rawley—an abbreviated version of what I’d found, with “need to talk when you’re up” attached—when I heard the soft click of Jasper’s bedroom door. I closed the laptop with a quiet snap and moved it to the side, my coffee cup creating enough cover for the motion.
Jasper came into the kitchen thirty seconds later, dressed in the same jeans and flannel he’d been wearing when we left Nebraska. His hair was damp at the edges—face washing, not a full shower—and the bruise on his cheek had darkened overnight, spreading toward his eye socket in a smear of purple that would take weeks to fade.
He moved with the careful deliberateness of someone carrying something fragile overnight and not wanting to spill it. His eyes did a quick read of the room—me at the table, the closed laptop, the kitchen’s early-morning emptiness—before he crossed to the coffee pot and reached for a mug.
