“I counted the blind spots.”
I looked back over my shoulder at Caleb. Caleb mouthed ‘counted the blind spots’ with an expression of pure, genuine admiration that made my chest do something I wasn’t going to examine at 2:17 in the morning with two armed contractors moving through the eastern tree line.
I shared the admiration completely.
I would absolutely never say it out loud.
Sterling had Cruz on comms in under thirty seconds. The earbud went in, his thumb on the mic, and Cruz’s voice came back with a single clipped “copy” that told me everything I needed to know about what kind of man Fernando Cruz was at two in the morning. The kind who was already awake. Already positioned. Already waiting for the call, and had probably been waiting for it since the first boot print showed up on the eastern fence line.
“Jackson’s on greenhouse perimeter,” Sterling said, low, his eyes still on the window. “Rawley and Burke have the north road. Hold until the two on the east side clear the tree line, then take them off the board quietly.”
“Understood,” Cruz said.
The whole ranch was awake. Operational. Nobody had made a sound doing it—no alarms, no shouting, no running boots—and I filed that away under things that were both deeply impressive and mildly alarming as a picture of what these people considered a normal Tuesday night.
I’d spent twenty-four years in foster care thinking I knew what hypervigilance looked like. These men had rewritten the definition and hadn’t bothered to tell anyone.
Sterling looked at me. “You’re with me.”
“Obviously,” I said. Then, low enough that only he could hear it: “I’ve been waiting to do something useful for about forty-eight hours. This is a genuine relief.”
Sterling’s jaw did the thing. Not quite a smile. The corner of his mouth, the small stubborn warmth breaking through the operational focus for approximately half a second before the mask settled back into place.
I counted it anyway. That made thirteen. Thirteen almost-smiles in four months, and six of them had happened in the last twenty-four hours, and the trend line was officially a fact.
Outside, the two figures reached the secondary gate in the outer fence line. Stopped. Crouched. One of them pulled something from a pack—bolt cutters, the silhouette sharp against the grayscale dark—and the wrong-feeling in my chest crystallized into something cleaner.
Something I could work with.
Threat identified. Threat being handled. Three men in a hallway, two of them moving toward the door, one of them staying behind a load-bearing wall by mutual agreement, and the coordination of it felt earned in a way I couldn’t have explained at gunpoint.
Sterling’s hand found the doorknob. Cold air waited on the other side. No moon. Ground soft from two days of light rain. Two contractors with bolt cutters and bad timing.
I adjusted my stance. Boots settled on hardwood. Shoulders loose. Breathing even.
Let’s go.
We went out the back through the mud room, past the row of coat hooks where Sterling’s hat lived beside mine in a configuration that had stopped being accidental around week three, and the cold hit like a door slamming.
No moon.
The sky was black above the ridge line, stars sharp and cold, and the ground underfoot was soft from two days of light rain, the kind of soft that held boot prints and didn’t give them back.
Sterling moved like he didn’t have a healing leg. Fluid. Unhurried. Covering ground without announcing it, each stride long and measured, his weight distributed in a way that hid the stiffness I knew was there because I’d been watching for it since the hallway incident and Sterling Callahan was many things, but he was not a good enough actor to hide pain from someone who’d decided to look for it.
I filed that under things to argue about later when nobody was zip-tied on the ground. The file was getting thick. Sterling’s capacity for ignoring his own limitations was impressive in the same way that driving off a cliff was impressive—you had to admire the commitment even as you were calculating the landing.
We came around the east side of the bunkhouse, keeping to the shadow of the board-and-batten siding, the dark brown stain absorbing what little light there was.
The two contractors were at the secondary gate in the outer fence line, crouched, one of them working the latch with bolt cutters while the other stood watch.
Amateur hour.
The guy on watch was facing the wrong direction, his back to the bunkhouse, which meant either he’d misread the terrain or he’d misread the people living on it, and both mistakes were about to cost him.
Sterling put one hand flat on my arm.
Wait.
