“I’ll make the calls,” I said.
Mitch crossed his arms. Chin high, shoulders back, the posture of a man who had decided that being right about one thing entitled him to be pushy about the next.
“I’m coming with you on the next perimeter check,” he said.
“I don’t need backup.”
“That’s not what I said.”
I looked at him. Really looked. His eyes held mine with the steadiness of a man who had made up his mind and was waiting for me to catch up, and the thing about Mitch Pruitt was thatwhen he decided something, he didn’t budge. He outlasted. He waited. He deployed patience like other men deployed force, and it was considerably more effective.
“Fine,” I said.
Without a word, Mitch picked up the screwdriver and then reached for the hinge and a new screw from the kitchen junk drawer. He slotted the screw into the Phillips head with a precision that suggested the butter knife had been performance art all along, and seated the hinge back into the cabinet frame with one smooth, continuous motion.
No commentary. No joke. No acknowledgment that he’d just fixed something he’d broken five minutes ago.
I found that more irritating than if he’d made a joke about it.
Considerably more.
Caleb turned back to the counter. “Whoever cut that fence,” he said quietly, “miscalculated badly.”
I looked at him. “How do you figure?”
“They walked onto a property with former SEALs, a man who can track anything that leaves a print, and a security system built by someone who treats paranoia like an Olympic sport.” He reached for a dish towel, folded it with the same care he brought to everything. “They have no idea what they walked into.”
The truth of it landed in my chest with a warmth that had nothing to do with the wood stove. Caleb—quiet, gentle, baking cinnamon rolls at six in the morning—had just distilled the tactical situation into a sentence so clean it could have been lifted from a briefing document, and he’d done it without raising his voice or changing expression.
I dialed through my contacts. Jackson first, then Rawley, then Burke. My thumb moved across the screen with the muscle memory of a man who had made these calls before, in different kitchens, on different properties, with different threatsbreathing down the wire. The difference was, this time, the kitchen around me was part of the solution.
Mitch three feet away, finishing his hardware work with the quiet competence of a man who fixed things because they needed fixing, not because he needed to be seen fixing them.
Caleb at the counter, his back to me, the line of his shoulders carrying the steadiness of someone who had decided that fear was data, not direction.
The bunkhouse warmed around me. Wood stove heating the room. The smell of whatever was in the Dutch oven, beef and thyme and something richer underneath. Mismatched mugs on open shelving catching the morning light from the east window.
I stood in the center of it with my phone in my hand and the boot-print image sharp on the screen, and for the first time in a very long time, when a threat landed on my doorstep, I didn’t reach for the door.
I reached for the people on the other side of it.
And they were already there.
Chapter Eight
~ Mitch ~
I was cataloguing Sterling’s seventeenth look at Caleb’s back in the last twelve minutes, and making my peace with the fact that I had absolutely zero chance of recovery.
The man was a goner, and so was I, and the bunkhouse smelled like cinnamon and warmth and something worth staying for, and that was pretty much the whole situation wrapped up in one inconvenient, wonderful package.
Caleb worked the range with the focused precision of someone who treated baking like tactical engineering. Flour on his forearm, a dusting across the counter he’d wipe up later, the Dutch oven humming on the back burner with whatever was going to feed eight ex-military men who ate like they were training for famine.
The cinnamon rolls sat on the cooling rack in golden, spiraled perfection, steam still rising in thin determined curls, and the coffee carafe was full, and the morning light caught the east-facing windows and turned the whole kitchen into something that felt, against considerable odds, like home.
Sterling sat at the head of the long plank table with his phone flat on the wood in front of him, his jaw set in that firm line that said he was thinking about something serious and wanted everyone else to be thinking about it too.
His eyes drifted to Caleb again—eighteen, by my count—lingered for a half-second on the line of Caleb’s slim shoulders under his flannel shirt, then dropped back to the phone like he’d been caught doing something he shouldn’t.
