Page 72 of Grumpy Lumberjack’s Secret

The morning was normal until it was not.

I was at the mill by seven. The crew was already working, the familiar rhythm of saws and machinery filling the air with the sound of productivity, and I fell into it the way I always did, letting the physical labor quiet the noise in my head. I hauled timber. Checked measurements. Spoke to Josh about a delivery that was running late and a client who wanted custom beams for a house renovation in the next county.

Normal. Routine. The kind of day that felt safe because it was predictable.

I should have known better. Predictable was a luxury I had lost the moment Chloe came back into my life.

It was close to noon when the trucks arrived.

Three of them. Black. Expensive. The kind of vehicles that did not belong on a dirt road leading to a sawmill in the mountains of Colorado. They pulled into the lot in formation, precise and deliberate, and I felt the shift in the air before the doors opened. A tension. A vibration. The same instinct that had kept me alive in Kandahar, the one that lived in the base of my skull and screamed when something was wrong.

I set down the plank I was carrying.

“Josh,” I said quietly. “Get the crew inside the warehouse.”

Josh looked at the trucks. Looked at me. He did not ask questions. He turned and started moving men toward the building with calm, efficient urgency.

Six men got out of the trucks. They were built like hired muscle. Big. Professional. Dressed in dark clothing that was too clean and too coordinated for a casual visit. One of them, the one who got out of the lead truck, was older. Lean. Sharp-eyed. He moved like a man who was in charge and knew it.

“Sawyer Cole,” he said.

“Who is asking?”

“We have a message from Mr. Marshall.”

“You can tell Mr. Marshall to deliver his own messages.”

The man smiled. It was the kind of smile that had no warmth behind it, a movement of the mouth that served no purpose except to show that the person wearing it was comfortable with what was about to happen.

“He prefers to send us.”

They moved.

I had been waiting for it. The shift in weight. The slight adjustment of posture that came before a coordinated assault. The lead man stayed back while two of them came at me from the front and two circled wide, trying to flank, and the sixth hung back near the trucks.

The first one reached me and threw a wide right hook. Sloppy. Relying on size instead of technique. I stepped inside the arc of his arm, drove my elbow into his ribs, felt them crack under the impact, and used his own momentum to send him stumbling past me. Before he hit the ground I was already turning.

The second came low. A tackle attempt. I sprawled, stuffing his shot, and brought my knee up into his face. The sound of cartilage breaking was sharp and wet and he dropped, hands covering his nose, blood streaming between his fingers.

The two flankers moved in together. Coordinated. Better trained than the first pair. One of them had a metal baton and swung it at my head. I ducked, felt the air move above me, and stepped in close where the weapon was useless. I grabbed his wrist, twisted it until the baton dropped, and drove the heel of my palm into his chin. His head snapped back and he went down like his strings had been cut.

The fourth one caught me. A punch to the ribs that I did not see coming, solid and sharp, and it knocked the air out of my lungs. I turned with it, using the rotation to load my own punch, and caught him on the temple with a right cross that put him on his back.

Four down. Two standing.

The lead man had not moved. He stood by the truck with his arms crossed, watching, assessing, and the calm on his face told me this was not his first time watching a fight go wrong.

The sixth man was not watching the fight.

He was reaching behind his back.

I saw the gun come out. A handgun. Black. Compact. He raised it with a steadiness that told me he had done this before, and I was already moving when the shot cracked through the air.

The bullet hit my left shoulder.

The impact was like being hit with a hammer swung by someone who meant it. It spun me half around and the pain came a fraction of a second later, white-hot and consuming, and my left arm went dead from the shoulder down. I staggered. Caught myself. Stayed on my feet through nothing but stubbornness and the training that had been drilled into me in places where falling down meant dying.

Blood. I could feel it, hot and wet, spreading down my arm and soaking into my flannel. The wound was high, the meaty part of the shoulder, and somewhere in the part of my brain that was still functioning with clinical detachment I knew it had missed the bone and the artery. A through-and-through. Painful. Not fatal.