I nodded, understanding exactly what he meant. “Fight-flight-freeze,” I said, keeping it clinical rather than personal. “Babies get it too. His system got overloaded and shut down non-essential functions. Crying’s pretty far down the list when you’re trying not to die.”
The explanation landed exactly the way I’d intended—Jojo’s face changed, becoming the look of a man who’d been handed a framework for what was happening and could now put his fear in a box rather than carrying it. He nodded again, more firmly this time, and ran one careful finger along Ethan’s cheek.
“He’s going to be okay,” Jojo said, making it not quite a question.
I nodded, the movement tight and definitive. “He’s going to be okay.”
Rawley took position at the barn door, positioning himself so he could see out through a narrow crack of visibility without being visible himself. His weapon was still in his hand, held at ready rather than aimed, his body turned at a angle that spoke of training rather than instinct.
“Two shooters on the front approach,” he said in a murmur that carried just far enough to reach us. “Possibly a third working around the south side of the house.” A pause, brief but deliberate. “No sign of Decker.”
I did not react to that last part out loud. I filed it in the same place I filed everything I could not afford to feel right now—the corner of my mind that handled things like “Gerald will find you” and “your grandfather is alone in Nebraska” and “what happens when what you want and what you need are two different things.”
Instead, I pushed to my feet and scanned the barn, looking for something useful. My eyes caught on a length of rope hanging from a hook near the door—thick hemp, probably used for leading horses, coiled neatly and hanging within reach.
I pulled it down, looped it around the door handle, and tied it off to the nearest support post. Not a lock—nothing would keep a determined adult out of a building with this many windows—but a delay. Something that bought seconds, that made whoever came through that door visible for a beat longer than they would have been otherwise.
Rawley glanced at my handiwork and gave me a look that was brief and approving—not dramatic, just the acknowledgment of a good idea.
Then the shooting from the front of the house stopped.
The silence that replaced it was absolute—not the ordinary quiet of night, but the absence that happened when somethingthat had been making noise suddenly wasn’t. It pressed against my eardrums, against my skin, against the back of my throat when I swallowed.
I sat in it and listened to Ethan’s breathing, the wind off the mountain, the distant creak of the farmhouse settling, and put one hand flat against my own belly and held it there, feeling the lower, slower movement of the baby I was carrying.
The baby moved once—a shift that wasn’t a kick or a turn, but something quieter, more deliberate—and then settled back into the waiting stillness that had become its default state over the past twenty minutes.
I counted seconds in my head the way I used to count respirations on the NICU monitors. One-one thousand, two-one thousand, three-one thousand. The rhythm of a man who knew that the only way through was to measure it out in pieces small enough to handle.
Jojo had moved to sit with his back against the wall, Ethan cradled against his chest, one hand flat on the baby’s back. His face had the expression of a man holding himself together through sheer force of will—not calm, but offering it to his son because it was what the child needed.
Rawley hadn’t moved from the door, his posture unchanged, his attention fixed on whatever was happening in the yard. His breathing was the only thing that shifted—a brief pause, then a long inhale, then a careful exhale that didn’t quite match the pattern before.
I wondered, sitting in that careful silence, what the other two knew that I didn’t—what knowledge about Decker or the ranch or the men who might be coming for us made Rawley’s face set in those particular lines and Jojo’s hands tighten just slightly around his son.
The ranch had resources—I knew that. I’d seen it in the way Rawley organized the hands, in how Decker moved through aspace, in the way Burke’s technical expertise appeared exactly when it was needed and disappeared again when it wasn’t.
But resources didn’t matter if you couldn’t reach them, if the people who could use them were somewhere else when the shots started.
I made myself believe—with the specific deliberate effort of a man who had learned that panic was a choice—that Decker was the most dangerous thing in that yard tonight.
Not the shooters with their professional cadence and clean shots. Not the darkness that hid whatever was coming next. Not the wrongness of a night that had started with dinner and ended with us crouching in a barn while our home was shot to pieces.
Decker. Who had been a SEAL for eight years and a security consultant after discharge. Who had taken down Gerald’s man with two strikes and a knee to the ribs. Who had looked at me in the dark and said “stay” with the knowledge of a man who meant exactly what he was saying.
If I believed that—really believed it, not as a hope or a wish but as a physical fact—I could breathe through the next minute, and the one after that, and all the ones that came after, until whatever happened next was over and we were on the other side of it.
I put both hands on my belly—one covering the baby I was carrying, one stretched toward the baby Jojo was holding—and made myself believe it.
A figure came around the south corner of the barn at a run, low and fast, and I had already pulled the short-handled shovel off the wall and swung it before my brain fully registered who it was.
My body moved on pure reflex—the reaction of a man who’d spent months looking over his shoulder, cataloging threats, keeping mental notes on exit routes and defensive options.
The shovel cut through the air in an arc that would have connected with the figure’s head if Decker hadn’t caught the handle two inches from his own face.
The look he gave me was startled, and then—immediately—something that might have been satisfaction.
He took the shovel out of my hands, set it against the wall with a careful motion that spoke of deliberate control, and then pulled me in hard for one second: one arm around me, face pressed against my temple, the heat of him solid against my chest.
