I don't answer that. Can't give her a number without speculating beyond the evidence we have, and she deserves facts, not guesswork.
I step closer and wait.
Raven stands motionless for a long count. Then her shoulders drop from where they've been pinned up near her ears, and when she turns to face me, her eyes have gone hard and bright with the kind of focus that burns through grief without stopping to acknowledge it.
"I trusted him." The words come out level and deliberate, each one costing more than she's willing to show. "Alvarez was the first person who took me seriously when I joined ATF. He mentored me. He pushed me toward undercover work because he said I had the instincts for it." She holds my gaze withoutflinching. "And now he's here, meeting with the people who want me dead."
"Yes."
"Morrison I can almost understand. Fear, greed, whatever broke him." She shakes her head slowly. "But Alvarez?"
She needs space to process a betrayal that runs this deep, and I'm not going to fill the silence with platitudes she'd see right through.
"Every operation I ran, Jesse. Every risk I took. He knew exactly where I was and what I was doing." Her voice holds steady, but the tendons in her neck stand out like cables under the strain of keeping it there. "Morrison had access to all of it too. My partner and my supervisor, both compromised. How long was I walking around with a target on my back while they smiled at me across a briefing table?"
"You survived because you were useful," I say. "Alive, you fed them intel. Dead, you were a liability and an investigation. They kept you operational until you stopped being worth the risk."
Raven's jaw tightens. Good. Anger is more useful than grief right now, and she's smart enough to know it.
"Everyone I trusted has turned out to be a lie," she says. "Alvarez. Morrison. The sheriff who's supposed to protect this county." Her eyes find mine. "Everyone except..."
She doesn't finish. Doesn't need to.
Everyone except the man with blood on his hands and no illusions about what he's capable of. The one person left in her life who hasn't lied about who he is, what he's done, or what he wants.
"What do you need?" I ask.
Raven picks up the rifle and checks the chamber with practiced hands, then looks back at me. The grief is still there, buried deep behind her eyes, but what's sitting on the surface is cold and precise and operational.
"I need to burn through the rest of this ammunition." Her thumb settles against the safety. "Then I need you to help me figure out how to make Alvarez answer for what he's done."
I can work with that.
"Take your time. Burn through whatever you need to." I hold her gaze long enough to make sure she hears the next part. "Then we go inside and start planning."
Raven nods once and turns back toward her targets. I head for the cabin and leave her to the rifle reports and the controlled violence of sending rounds downrange, because she's earned the right to tear those targets apart and I'm not going to take that from her.
Inside, I pull up Carmichael's encrypted files on the laptop and start building a tactical picture. Alvarez in Fredericksburg with cartel connections confirmed. Sheriff Harlan tied to him through a diner meeting that looked anything but casual. Morrison dead on warehouse concrete with Holt's bullets in his chest. And Raven Bishop standing in my clearing with a rifle and a list of enemies that keeps getting longer.
The pieces are assembling on the board, but the full pattern hasn't revealed itself yet. Alvarez coordinating with Harlan points to local infrastructure—the sheriff provides cover, makes investigations disappear, keeps federal attention diverted from the pipeline. Alvarez feeds intel from inside ATF, identifies threats before they become operational problems, and neutralizes them through people like Morrison who are close enough to the target to make it look like an accident or a line-of-duty casualty.
It's a clean setup. The kind that runs for years without detection as long as everyone holds their position and nobody gets greedy or sloppy.
Carmichael is playing his own game in all of this, and I'd be a fool not to account for that. He's using us to draw outthe cartel's leadership, expose the network, and gather enough evidence for a takedown that burns the entire operation to ash. But Carmichael's endgame requires keeping Raven alive only as long as she's useful as bait. The moment she stops serving that purpose, his calculus shifts, and sentiment won't factor into whatever decision he makes next. Even if it’s his own niece.
Knox and Beckett will back whatever play I call, but they're exposed at Devil's Acre. The cartel is already watching the ranch and learning their routines. If this operation goes sideways, my brothers become leverage, and that's a vulnerability I can't afford to leave unaddressed.
Raven is the variable I can't model. She wants Alvarez held accountable, and I don't fault her for it. But the desire for justice gets people killed when it overrides tactical patience, and the line between accountability and recklessness gets thin when the betrayal is this personal. She's disciplined. She's trained. She's competent in ways that keep surprising me. But she's also invested in the outcome at a level that bends judgment, and she won't see the bend until it's too late unless I'm watching for it.
I need to keep her focused. Keep her alive. And find a way to dismantle the cartel's operation without getting all of us buried in the process.
Every person she trusted has turned out to be a weapon aimed at her back. Except for me. And I'm the most dangerous one of all. Not because I'd betray her, but because I'd burn the world down to keep her breathing, and that kind of blind spot gets operators killed.
11
RAVEN
The coffee beside my elbow went cold an hour ago, and I haven't touched it.
