The doors were all open, which meant either the threat didn’t care about stealth or they wanted us to see something.
First bedroom: empty, bed still made, sunlight running stripes over the faded quilt.
Second room: the nursery. Crib empty, but the baby monitor still pulsing green, the slow, even thump of a heartbeat echoing in the quiet. My own heart jacked up to match it.
Ahead, the safe room—just a door, but three inches of reinforced steel frame behind it, old rancher paranoia built into the house decades before any of us had ever even seen it.
Rawley reached it first. He punched the code in without looking, each key a hard, deliberate strike. The lock disengaged with a hydraulic snick, and the door swung inward, slow and heavy.
Inside, Jojo was on the narrow cot, knees up, face buried in both hands. Ethan was a comma-shaped bundle at his thigh, dead quiet except for the wet snuffle of an inhaled scream, and Emilio was balled up against his chest, both fists knotted in the front of Jojo’s t-shirt, eyes wide but unblinking.
Jojo looked up. His face was soaked, but his voice was calm when he said it: “They took him.”
It took a beat to parse.
“Who?” I said, even though I already knew.
Jojo squeezed his eyes shut and pointed at the door, knuckles white against Emilio’s back. “Liam. He put us in here and locked it. Said to stay down no matter what. Said he’d come back—” the last word broke, “—but he’s not back.”
I didn’t ask how long. I didn’t need to. I was already moving down the hall to the gun safe, not because I thought it would change the outcome, but because it was the next thing on the checklist, and I had run this play so many times in other lives I could do it with both hands broken.
The safe was open, two long guns inside, and I took the carbine because it was fastest, checked the chamber, mag seated, safety on. I stuck a Glock in my waistband for backup, even though my hands always shot high and left with the polymer frame.
I left the door open.
By the time I hit the porch again, Burke and Macon had closed the gap. Rawley’s jaw was set, eyes scanning the road, and Burke was on the radio with the sheriff’s office, voice pitched low and fast.
There are days when you have to admit you’re not the best person for the job. That your hands, however steady, shake too much when the person on the other end of the barrel is one you’d kill or die for, not because of anything as dumb as love, but because if the math changed by a single decimal your entire universe would collapse.
Which is why, when Rawley threw me the keys to his truck, I tossed them right back. “Drive,” I said. “I’ll shoot if I have to.”
He gave me a look, the one that meant he wasn’t sure if this was wisdom or just fear, but he climbed behind the wheel without argument.
Burke and Macon loaded into the other two trucks, the radio link hot and clipped to the shoulder strap so we could talk even with the engines redlined and the world gone full whiteout.
Rawley’s truck led, Macon’s behind, and Burke—who’d always been a little too in love with the possibility of a chase—took the ditch at the south edge, chewing up the scrub and snow until he was running parallel to the county road.
The black SUVs were easy to spot. They’d pulled a quarter-mile lead, but their headlights cut flat and high through the morning fog, and the kind of asshole who’d plan an abduction in broad daylight was also the kind who thought they could outrun the entire state of Wyoming in a luxury vehicle with city tires.
Rawley floored it. The truck roared, the rear end skated once on a patch of black ice, but he caught it, face gone blank and professional, the only sign he was even aware of his own heart rate the tiny twitch at the side of his jaw.
We gained ten yards a second, and when we hit the first cattle guard, both front tires left the ground. I braced my elbow against the dash, carbine barrel up, safety on but thumb ready.
I scanned the SUV’s rear window, looking for movement—anything to suggest Liam was still upright, still breathing, still ours.
I said, “Left lane, they’ll try to block us at the next turn.”
Rawley grunted, “Copy.”
He punched it, engine screaming, and we pulled even with the lead SUV just as it made the sweep onto the gravel turnout at the fence line. The driver, some faceless Beta with a disposable income and a lot of misplaced confidence, tried to edge us out, but Rawley nudged the wheel and let the side panel take the hit, forcing the SUV off its line and into a snowdrift that would take an hour to dig out of.
Burke’s voice crackled on the radio. “Second unit’s boxed, coming up on your six.”
I rolled the window down, cold air slicing my cheeks raw. The front passenger in the SUV dropped his window, leveled something black and short and probably not legal in three states.I drew down, left-handed, just to show I could, and waited for him to flinch.
He did.
The gun disappeared. The window rolled up. Coward.
