The line goes dead before I can respond.
I set the phone down and stare at the loose rounds lined up on the kitchen table. Jesse Hollister is out there somewhere, watching. I'm as certain of that as I am of anything right now.
I pull out the burner phone and transfer the photos from the Pritchard ranch onto my laptop. The storm cellar, the empty crates, the ammo can with its stenciled markings. I organize them methodically into a digital file with timestamps and detailed notes about what I found and where I found it, then make sure everything is backed up to the cloud in case something happens to me or the laptop.
I open a new document and start mapping everything I know. Four ranchers dead in eighteen months. All of them ruled accidental. All of their properties sold quickly after death.
This is bigger than one ranch or one dead man. I just need to find out whether the other three victims Uncle Robert mentioned follow the same pattern.
I close the laptop and head for the bedroom, leaving my Glock on the kitchen table. I'm halfway down the hall when three sharp knocks echo through the safe house.
I freeze. Nobody knows I'm here except Uncle Robert.
The knocks come again, louder and more insistent.
I backtrack to the kitchen and pick up my Glock, checking the magazine out of reflex. Fifteen rounds. I move to the front door and press my eye to the peephole.
A man stands on the small porch, backlit by the streetlight. He's tall and broad through the shoulders, wearing a dark jacket. His face is angled downward and mostly in shadow, but something about the way he carries himself, the absolute stillness, the controlled patience of someone who could standthere for hours without shifting his weight, makes my throat constrict.
I know that posture. I've seen it in my nightmares for ten years.
My hand reaches for the deadbolt before my conscious mind catches up to what my body is doing. The lock turns with a soft click and I swing the door open.
Jesse Hollister is standing three feet away from me.
The streetlight catches his face. He's older than the man who dragged me away from Uncle Martin, harder, with deep lines bracketing his mouth and silver threaded through his dark hair at the temples. Scars I don't remember mark his jaw and trail downward beneath his collar. His pale blue eyes are colder than the ones I remember, flatter, as though something vital was carved out of him somewhere along the way and never grew back.
But it's him. The same man who, just hours ago, killed four cartel enforcers from a ridgeline to keep me alive.
He doesn't speak, doesn't move. He just watches me with that intense gaze that sees far too much and gives back nothing at all.
Heat floods through me, sudden and completely unwanted. It's the same heat that hits me in the dreams I would never admit to having. Those pale eyes burning into mine, his rough hands pinning my wrists, the weight of him heavy against me. I always wake up gasping and furious with myself, because wanting Jesse Hollister is the one thing I can never justify.
Rage arrives half a second behind it, white-hot and clarifying.
This is the man who dragged me away from my uncle while gunfire split the night. And now he's standing on my doorstep as though saving my life today somehow erases the decade of grief that came before it.
My fingers tighten around the Glock. His gaze drops to the weapon, registers it without any visible reaction, and then returns to my face. Still no words or explanation. No apology.
That steady, unblinking stare sends my pulse hammering and brings the blood rushing to the surface of my skin, and my hands want to do two completely opposite things at the same time. Pull the trigger or grab him by the collar and drag him inside.
I hate him. I want him. And I cannot tell which one of those things is going to destroy me first.
4
JESSE
Recognition hits her eyes first, then rage, then something I have no business seeing. Heat and want and memories I thought I'd buried claw their way back to the surface. I can still hear a nineteen-year-old Raven screaming my name on that tarmac, looking at me like I was the only thing standing between her and hell.
Her hand tightens on the Glock and the barrel comes up, centering on my chest.
"Jesse Hollister." My name comes out like gravel and broken glass. "You son of a bitch."
Headlights sweep across the street behind me. I glance back and spot the dark SUV, tinted windows, rolling too slow for casual traffic. The cartel sent a second wave after the survivors from the Pritchard ranch reported back. Four bodies in the dirt and two witnesses means they're coming with serious firepower this time.
"Inside. Now." I don't ask or explain, just reach for her arm.
She jerks back, gun rising. "Don't you dare."
