“First set, three-quarters of an inch at the heel, half an inch at the toe. Second set, half an inch all the way through. Creek bank mud, so they held detail.”
“The wire cut. Interior or exterior side?”
“Exterior. They cut from outside, came through, then twisted it back together from the inside.”
A longer pause this time—Cruz processing, calculating, deciding. Then, quietly: “I’m going to try to move my timeline.”
My jaw tightened. “You don’t need to do that,” I said, the words coming out sharper than I’d intended. “We’ve got it covered. Rawley’s running a full security sweep, everyone’s accounted for. I just thought you should know.”
“I know,” Cruz said, and didn’t agree to not do it. “I’ll text when I have details.”
The call ended without a goodbye, Cruz already moving on to whatever came next. I set the phone down on the porch rail and stared out at the valley, the starter trays visible through the greenhouse glass catching the afternoon light.
I’d told Cruz first. Before Sterling, before Macon, before any of the people who actually lived on the property. I’d seen the threat, assessed the risk, and my first thought had been to text a man who was twelve thousand miles away, doing God knows what for Sterling’s team.
Not because he could help—though God knows he could—but because I’d wanted him to know. Because something in me needed him to be part of it, even if that part was just receiving information.
I sat with that fact, turning it over in my mind like one of the stones from the creek bed. Examining it from every angle. Trying to figure out what it meant that Cruz had become the person I told when things went wrong.
The phone sat silent on the rail, no new messages, no follow-up calls. Somewhere in Eastern Europe, Cruz was already moving—changing plans, shifting timelines, doing whatever it took to get back to Montana faster than he’d intended.
Because I’d texted him. Because I’d asked.
I picked up the phone again, scrolling through our message history—airport coffee and hotel food and questions about soil pH. Three months of texts, five nights together, and a threat to the ranch that had me sitting on my porch steps, waiting for a call that might not come.
“Pathetic,” I told the empty valley, but there was no heat in it. Just the quiet acknowledgment of a fact.
Chapter Five
~ Cruz ~
I ended the call with Jackson and moved—not because protocol said to, but because standing still wasn’t an option. My body had made the decision before my brain caught up, my feet already carrying me across the cramped Belarus safe house before the connection fully dropped.
Three strides took me past the folding table stacked with radio equipment and laminated grid maps, the surface covered in notes written in Sterling’s tight handwriting.
I’d spent the last seventy-two hours working that table, running frequency sweeps and tracking movement patterns through a sector of Belarus that wasn’t supposed to exist on any American government map. Now it felt like an artifact from another mission, another life.
Sterling sat at the far end of the room, back to the wall, a battered laptop open on his knees. The green glow of the screen caught the angles of his face—the sharp jaw, the focused eyes, the careful blankness that meant he was three steps ahead of whatever problem he was working on. He didn’t look up when I stopped in front of him, just continued typing with steady fingers.
“Problem,” I said, the word landing between us like a dropped stone.
Sterling’s hands paused for a fraction of a second—the only indication he’d heard me—then resumed their methodical work. “Define it,” he said, not looking up.
“Peterson’s people on the ranch’s eastern fence line,” I said, laying it out without preamble. “Cut wire, repaired badly and recently. Cellular trail camera zip-tied to a post with the lens aimed at the main drive. Boot prints near the creek crossing. Military tread, different weights. Two operators, minimum.”
Now Sterling looked up, his eyes meeting mine with the level assessment I’d seen a hundred times before—reading not just my words, but the tension in my shoulders, the set of my jaw, the fact that I was still standing when there was a chair three feet to my right.
“Timeline?” he asked.
“Recent. Past twenty-four hours, probably less.” I kept my voice flat, professional, the same tone I’d use for any operational brief. “Wire’s still shiny where it was cut. Boot prints are sharp, no weathering.”
Sterling nodded once, absorbing this without visible reaction. “Assessment?”
“Not improvised,” I said, the words coming out clipped. “They picked the right camera position—clear line of sight to the main approach, coverage of both the house and the stable. They used the creek for cover, the tree line for concealment. They knew where to cut the fence without being seen from the main drive.” I paused, then added, “This isn’t their first surveillance operation.”
What I didn’t say—what Sterling could probably read on me anyway from the way my hand had tightened into a fist—was that Jackson was at that farmhouse alone. That the thought of something moving on that property while I was sitting in Belarus running comms for a weapons interdiction was making it very hard to think straight. That for the first time in a decade of fieldwork, I was having trouble separating the mission from the man.
Sterling listened without interrupting, without shifting in his chair, without doing anything except absorbing the operational details with the same focused attention he brought to everything.
