“The safe room,” Rawley said, voice steady. “Go.”
But we never made it to the door. The second shot punched through the front door—a clean hit, center mass on where a person would have been standing—and in the space of one breath I read the pattern: whoever was out front knew the interior layout well enough to be aiming into it, which meant they had been watching this house, which meant going deeper into it meant getting cornered.
The safe room was no longer the play.
I grabbed Jasper’s wrist and reversed direction toward the kitchen, the tactical calculation happening too fast for words. Rawley read the change without a word, already getting Jojo moving, the baby now completely silent in his father’s arms.
“Kitchen,” I said. “Back door.”
Rawley nodded once—the acknowledgment of a man who’d reached the same conclusion—and we changed course without breaking stride.
The hallway felt suddenly twice as long, the distance to the kitchen door stretching out in front of us with the wrongness of a place that wasn’t what it had been a minute ago.
I reached the kitchen first, flattening against the wall beside the back door, the Glock held at ready. The window above the sink showed nothing but darkness—the yard behind the house still and empty, no movement visible, which meant nothing and I knew it.
Darkness was cover, not information.
I looked at Rawley, who was braced against the opposite wall with Jojo and the baby behind him. He gave me a tight nod.
“On three,” I said, keeping it simple. “One, two—“
I opened the back door low and fast, clearing the immediate frame with the gun, then stepped through in one smooth movement. The yard was exactly as it had been when we’d closed up for the night—the gravel path to the equipment barn, the wood pile stacked neatly against the east wall, the darkness of the tree line thirty yards out.
Nothing moved. Nothing changed. The quiet of the ranch at night continued exactly as it had before, as if the front of the house wasn’t currently being shot to pieces.
Jasper came through the door behind me, then Jojo with the baby, then Rawley bringing up the rear. We pressed against the back exterior wall of the farmhouse, the rough wood cool through the thin fabric of my T-shirt, the Black Butte mountain a dark mass against the sky beyond the tree line.
The gunfire continued from the front of the house—not random, not panicked, but controlled and measured, the cadence of professionals who had done this before and knew exactly how it should sound. Two shots, a pause of exactly three seconds, then two more, then a longer pause while whoever was behind the trigger assessed results and adjusted accordingly.
Jasper’s hand found mine in the dark and gripped hard, his fingers cold against my palm. I squeezed back once—brief, definitive—then pulled free, because I needed both hands. I needed to count the shots, map the positions, figure out how many there were and where they were sitting.
I needed to find a way to get Jasper and Jojo and the baby off this property without dying in the yard.
The fear I was carrying was not for myself—it was for the man pressed against the wall beside me and the child he was carrying—and it was the sharpest, most clarifying thing I had felt in years. I pushed it down to where it could move me rather than stop me, and started working the problem.
Three shooters, minimum. Professional positioning—one covering the road, one on the east tree line with sightlines to the front door, one mobile between positions. Not locals—the timing was too precise, the spacing too deliberate for amateurs. Not random—the front door shot had been too clean, too specifically aimed at where a person would have been standing.
I looked at Jasper—the firm set of his jaw, the careful way he held himself—and made the calculation I’d been carrying since the first shot: we couldn’t stay here. We couldn’t go back inside. We couldn’t make it to the equipment barn or the Callahan place or Macon’s without crossing thirty yards of open ground with at least one professional marksman already sighted in on the property.
We needed to move.
Now!
Chapter Eighteen
~ Jasper ~
I pressed my back against the cold clapboard siding of the farmhouse, ribs aching where the wood dug in, the controlled gunfire from the front of the house punching through in short professional bursts.
Three seconds, two shots, three seconds, two shots.
The pattern was deliberate—whoever was out there had done this before, knew exactly what they were doing, and had apparently decided the people inside this house were worth the bullets.
I ran my inventory the way I ran all frightening things: what I could feel, what I could hear, what I knew for certain.
My shoulder blades pressed into the weathered wood, each breath pushing a different spot against a different splinter. Wet grass soaked through my shoes—I’d come outside barefoot, had no chance to grab boots. My toes curled into the cold ground, seeking purchase that wasn’t there. My stomach hurt—not the baby, just the ache of a body braced for impact.
Each crack of a shot registered in my sternum like it was happening inside my body. The wind off the mountain carried the scent of pine and early summer heat, mixing with the smell of gunpowder and broken glass. And underneath it all, the worst sound in the yard: Ethan’s silence in Jojo’s arms.
