"Big, probably over six feet, broad through the shoulders. He was sitting in the back corner where the light didn't reach, so that's all I could get without being obvious about looking."
Uncle Robert grunts. "Keep a low profile. If someone's already paying attention to you on your first night, you need to tighten up." His voice carries a tension that wasn't there before.
"I was careful."
"How are you holding up?" His tone softens.
"I'm fine."
"Raven."
"I can do this, Uncle Robert. I wouldn't be here if I couldn't."
He sighs, and I can picture him sitting in his office at Shadowland headquarters, surrounded by screens and intelligence feeds, trying to balance his concern for me against his respect for the fact that I'm not a child anymore.
"Call me tomorrow with updates. And Raven? If anything feels wrong, you get out of there and head straight to me. Don't try to be a hero."
The line goes dead, and I sit alone in the dark house, turning over everything Maria told me. Tom Pritchard's death, Eleanor selling so fast, the way Maria's face tightened when certain families came up in conversation. The pieces are all sitting in front of me, but they haven't arranged themselves into a pattern yet.
And then there's Jesse Hollister. I don't want to think about him, not tonight, not when I'm this tired and raw.
I shower and climb into bed. The mattress is too soft and the pillows are too flat, but I'm exhausted enough that none of it matters. I close my eyes and try to quiet the noise in my head.
Instead, I see a man watching me from across a dimly lit bar. There was something about him that tugged at me, something familiar that I couldn't place no matter how hard I tried.
Sleep pulls me under before I can find the answer, and the last thing I'm aware of is the memory of his gaze and the way his presence seemed to fill every shadow in the room.
2
JESSE
Raven Bishop walks through the door of Maria's Bar, and my heart stops dead in my chest.
Carmichael's text came through telling me she was headed for Fredericksburg. But nothing in those words prepared me for the reality of watching her walk through that door.
Her hair is copper red now, a far cry from the dark brown I remember, and the color catches the dim bar light as she moves toward the counter. Something about her seems taller, though I know that's impossible. In my memory she's frozen at nineteen, fierce and terrified in equal measure, and the woman crossing this room bears almost no resemblance to that girl.
A decade has reshaped her in ways I can see from thirty feet away. The confidence is new, the squared shoulders, the way her eyes sweep the room with the kind of practiced awareness that only comes from years of training.
Her gaze passes over my corner without stopping, a quick professional scan before she settles at the bar. There's no flicker of recognition on her face.
But she can't see me clearly from where I'm sitting. The corner table keeps me buried in shadow, backlit by the single fixture behind me. She'd have to cross the room and stand rightin front of me to get a good look, and she has no reason to do that.
A decade is a long time. I'm not the same man I was in my late twenties. Lines bracket my mouth and eyes now, the kind that come from years of squinting through rifle scopes and swallowing the kind of rage that never fully goes away. There's silver threaded through my dark hair that wasn't there before. But I'm still recognizable enough. Once she gets a clear look at my face, she'll know exactly who I am.
Raven slides onto a barstool and waits for Maria to come her way. Even from across the room, I can read the way she carries herself: weight perfectly balanced even while sitting, every muscle quietly ready. That kind of posture doesn't come from growing up on a ranch. It comes from years of field work, of walking into rooms where the wrong move gets you killed. Carmichael's message said her own partner tried to put a bullet in her.
Maria pours her a beer and the two of them start talking. I can't hear the conversation from this distance, but their body language tells me enough. Raven is asking questions, though they seem general, the kind of thing someone asks when they're getting their bearings in an unfamiliar place. Maria is doing most of the talking, leaning in with that animated warmth she brings to every conversation, happy to have a new audience for her stories about the area.
Raven isn't investigating yet. She's hiding, trying to process the kind of betrayal that cracks the foundation out from under a person. Your partner, the person you trust with your life every single day, tries to kill you. That doesn't just rattle your confidence. It rewrites everything you thought you understood about trust and your own judgment.
For now, she's just trying to stay alive long enough to figure out which direction is up.
My phone sits on the table in front of me, Carmichael's message still glowing on the screen:
Raven is on the run. Cartel and possibly federal involvement. Partner tried to kill her in El Paso today. She's headed for Fredericksburg. I'm sending her to the Cypress Street safe house. Don't ask questions. Just keep her breathing.
She's running for her life, and Carmichael sent her here of all places. Back to the town where her nightmares were born in gunfire and blood.
