Sterling was quiet for a beat—the silence that meant he was running scenarios, calculating risks, making the kind of assessments that had kept him alive through years of active duty.
“Copy that,” he said finally. “I’ll have people on-site within the hour. You need anything before then?”
“We’re good,” I said. “House is secure. Team’s running the perimeter. Nothing’s getting through that door without someone noticing.”
Sterling made a sound that was almost a laugh—a noise that came from genuine amusement rather than politeness. “Copy that,” he said. “Sit tight. Help’s coming.”
I hung up and stood for a moment in the quiet kitchen, listening to the sounds that came from the living room—Jackson’s voice, low and steady, his father’s responses, gradually moving from volume to something adjacent to actual conversation.
Through the kitchen doorway, I could see Jackson standing in the center of the living room, back straight, voice level,beginning the conversation that had apparently been thirty years in the making.
His mother sat on the couch with her hands folded in her lap, her face giving away nothing. The young woman—Elena—was still in the farthest corner of the room, her carefully arranged composure completely gone.
I found a dish towel in the drawer by the sink—blue cotton, slightly frayed at the edges, the kind of thing that had seen actual use rather than sitting in a drawer for decoration. I folded it with careful attention, pressed it to my bleeding knee, and leaned against the counter with my weight on my good leg.
The grow lights hummed in the greenhouses outside the kitchen window, steady and indifferent to all of it. The house was warm—warmer than it had been when I’d left it at five that morning, the kind of warmth that came from bodies and breath rather than just a functioning furnace.
I stayed where I was—leaning against the counter with a dish towel pressed to my knee, listening to Jackson’s voice carry from the living room.
He did not need backup for this fight—had been handling his father’s brand of performance for thirty years without my help—but the kitchen was close enough that Jackson would know I was there, and that was the only thing I needed it to be.
The conversation continued in the living room—Jackson’s voice steady, his father’s responses gradually losing their edge, the rhythm that meant something was actually happening rather than just being performed.
I listened to it with half an ear, my attention split between the tactical situation outside and the emotional one inside. Three men secured. Property perimeter holding. Jackson’s father sitting rather than standing, listening rather than talking. Small victories, maybe, but the kind that mattered when the alternative was watching everything come apart.
The baby would be due in two months. My baby. Jackson’s baby. A fact that had been true since the moment the doctor had handed Jackson that ultrasound image, and was now suddenly, physically present in a way it hadn’t been before.
Not just a medical reality or a logistical problem or the reason Jackson had gone silent for six weeks, but a person who would have his eyes, maybe, or my height, or some combination of features neither of us could predict.
A person men with guns had just tried to reach, on property I was supposed to be keeping secure, with a team I was supposed to be leading effectively.
I shifted my weight against the counter, adjusting the dish towel on my knee, and listened to Jackson’s voice carry from the living room. Steady. Level.
The grow lights hummed outside the window. The house was warm around me. Somewhere in the distance, a vehicle engine started—Rawley, probably, headed for the farmhouse with whatever security he’d decided we needed.
I stayed where I was—leaning against the counter with a dish towel pressed to my knee, close enough that Jackson would know I was there, and that was the only thing I needed it to be.
Chapter Sixteen
~ Jackson ~
I ate my eggs at the kitchen table in the morning quiet, watching the steam rise from my coffee cup in a straight line that thinned as it reached the ceiling.
The farmhouse around me held its breath—the kind of quiet that hadn’t decided yet if it was going to hold or if the day would break it apart the way yesterday had.
The baby was quiet too, settled somewhere low and central, the weight of it both strange and familiar against the inside of my skin.
Across the kitchen, my mother moved in small, careful increments. She filled her coffee cup at the counter without making a sound, set it down without drinking, drifted to the window to look out at the valley, came back and refilled it again. Her slippered feet made almost no sound on the tile. Her shoulders stayed drawn in, chin slightly tucked, like she was trying to take up less space than her body actually occupied.
I watched her from my seat at the table and registered, with the flat clarity of a man who had spent his whole life cataloguing threats, that she had been doing this exact thing my entire life and I had simply never had the bandwidth to see it.
Not because she was hiding, exactly. More like she was waiting—for permission, for direction, for whatever cue would tell her it was safe to exist at full volume.
The realization landed somewhere behind my ribs like something with an edge—not quite anger, not quite sadness, but something adjacent to both that made it hard to breathe for a second.
Cruz was out on a perimeter walk with Morales—conspicuously, usefully absent. He’d disappeared after breakfast with a two-fingered salute and a look that meant he’d read thesituation exactly right: my parents needed to think the space belonged to me, not to him, at least until they’d decided whether they were staying or going.
The perimeter check was real—three men with guns had tried to breach the property less than twenty-four hours ago—but the timing was tactical.
