Chapter 35
Gravel spits out behind us, the truck fishtailing for half a second before the tires catch and we surge onto the main road.
My foot is welded to the accelerator. The needle climbs, the engine strains, and the road unspools beneath us in a blur of asphalt and winter glare as I tear off toward the road leading into Echo Valley, where the speed trap is.
Freya’s face flashes behind my eyes—sleepy, determined this morning, her hand drifting unconsciously to her belly.
Our baby.
Our future.
Everything I never thought I’d ever get in this lifetime.
The thought hits like a punch. My lungs are tight; each time they move, it’s steel grinding steel.
I just need to see her safe.
My thoughts start to scatter, panic clawing at the edges—I shouldn’t have let her be alone. Not even with Ingram gone.
I mutter tightly, the words scraping out before I can stop them. “Should never have let her drive out.”
Rio snaps his head toward me. “Hermano.” His voice carries an empathy unusual for him. “He signed off for a vacation,” he attempts to reassure me. “Freya told you herself. And we don’t know he told Mace anything yet. She could be out there perfectly fine.”
It lands like a lifeline thrown straight at my chest. I cling to it because I have to.
Rio pulls out his phone. “I’m calling Callum.”
“Fuck…”
“What?” He stops swiping.
“We can’t.” This could land Freya in trouble. “Callum will know we went over his head.”
“I’ll deal with it. This is on me, not Freya, if Callum has a problem. But if Ingram left town because he informed Mace? We can’t afford not to call backup.”
I nod, too focused on the road to answer. My jaw is locked so tight, it aches. My hands feel fused to the steering wheel.
Callum answers on speaker. “Rio…?”
“Listen carefully,” Rio explains. “We need a unit dispatched to Freya’s speed-trap location.”
Callum’s voice comes through the cell. “Why? What the hell is going on?”
Rio chooses his words carefully. “I made progress on the Zoe Marshall case last night. She was murdered, Cal, and we have reason to believe the killer could be in town. Freya’s alone out there, and seeing as she’s the lead officer…better safe than sorry.”
Callum types on a keyboard in the background. “I’m pulling up her log… She’s assigned to Mile Marker 214. That stretch drops into a dead zone—she won’t have cell signal, but I’ll get her on the radio to inform her to leave her station.”
For a moment, relief washes through me.
I hear the echo of Callum’s voice on the cell, speaking into his radio. “Officer Johnson. Come in.”
A beat passes.
Again. “Officer Johnson, this is Chief Murphy. Come in.”
More emptiness, no response. Fuck.
Callum talks back into the phone. “No response. Sending dispatch.” He hangs up abruptly.
She didn’t answer. She didn’t fucking answer.
I push the truck harder, the speedometer climbing past what’s even remotely legal, but I don’t give a shit. The tires hum, the engine growls, and the road blurs into a smear of gray and white that barely feels real.
My pulse is a detonator. Every breath is a countdown.
“Dead zone,” Rio reminds, calm but too still. “Her radio might not be picking up the signal.”
But the lie is thick on his throat. He doesn’t believe that any more than I do.
The plateau rises ahead of us—that wide, cold stretch of open land where everything is exposed and empty. The sky is a bruised white, a washed-out light that makes the world look dead.
She’s out there.
Alone.
My woman.
My family.
The thought guts me so sharply, I almost veer onto the shoulder.
“Easy,” Rio murmurs, steadying himself with a hand on the dash. “We get there fast, but we get there alive.”
Alive.
The word hits something feral inside me.
I slam my foot harder on the accelerator as if I can outrun the images forming in my head—Freya unconscious, Freya taken, Freya cold on the ground. Our baby… My chest squeezes so tightly, I can barely breathe.
And then—
My phone vibrates in the center console.
Rio quickly grabs it. “I got it. Just keep your eyes on the road.”
He’s right. I must be doing a hundred.
He reads…and stills.
“What?” I bark.
Rio’s jaw tightens. “Unknown number. Message says… ‘Go to the quarry.’”
“The quarry?” My voice is a snarl. “Why the fuck—”
And then something inside me snaps.
Everything inside me is raw, bloody, and red fucking hot. “It’s fucking Mace?”
I slam my palm against the steering wheel so hard, my palm stings, and the truck jerks an inch under the force. Rage lances through me, blinding and electric.
“He has her,” I choke out. “He has my fucking woman—my—”
“Anton.” Rio’s voice stays level, but there’s steel under it. “You lose your head, we lose her.”
I drag in a breath like I’m breaking the surface after too long underwater—lungs burning, chest tight. He’s right. He’s fucking right. But the terror is animal, clawing up my throat, trying to choke out every rational thought I’ve ever had.
No.
Not happening.
I clamp my hands tighter around the wheel until the leather bites into my palms. Force air into my lungs. Force my mind back into my body. Back in control.
Training kicks in.
I slow my breathing—four in, four hold, four out.
Tactical. Deliberate.
I repeat the mantra drilled into me in the SEALs, the one that carried me through hell more than once: I am never out of the fight.
Those words slam into me, pulling everything into razor-sharp clarity.
Freya means everything to me.
I fucking love her.
She’s the spark in my day, the sass that keeps me sharp, the woman who floors me just by existing. Watching her grow, watching her fight—it does something to me I can’t explain and don’t want to.
And I want more.
All of it.
I want our kid between us at night when we’re exhausted but can’t stop staring at the miracle we made. I want the life we were just beginning to build.
That’s what I’m fighting for. And I’m still in the fight.
A lethal calm sweeps in, panic burning off.
“Mace…” I hiss. “You think it’s Mace?”
“Yes, hermano. I do.”
“Mace wants me at the quarry.” A darkness creeps into my voice as I consider a killer’s request.
Rio is deep in thought. “He’s either telling the truth or redirecting us.”
“You think he’s trying to pull us off her?”
Rio doesn’t answer immediately. His eyes narrow, scanning the land ahead, calculating. “We’re barely five minutes from her cruiser. Less, if you keep driving like this.”
“And the quarry is at least fifteen,” I add.
I grind my teeth.
“We check the trap first,” I say. “Confirm the scene. If she’s not there…”
Rio finishes my thought with simple execution. “We finish him at the quarry.”
My pulse hammers against my ribs as I wrench the wheel and take the next bend too sharply.
“Four minutes out,” Rio mutters, checking the map. “Maybe less.”
Not fast enough.
The truck growls in protest, but I don’t care. I lean into the speed, into the fear, into the fucking truth that the woman I love might be gone unless I get there now.
The terrain flattens. The air thins. The horizon fractures into that barren, lonely stretch where I hope like hell Freya is sitting in her cruiser.
Rio points. “There.”
Her SUV sits crooked in the dip between the sagebrush, exactly where it should be…but everything else is wrong.
I slam on the brakes. The truck fishtails, steadies, and skids to a stop at an angle that leaves the seatbelt biting into my shoulder.
I’m out before the engine finishes rumbling.
“Freya!” I roar into the dead air.
Rio is right behind me, boots pounding frozen dirt.
The driver’s door is half-open.
Glass blankets the ground and spills across the seat—shattered and violent. A firearm has been thrown to the ground, Freya’s, along with her cell, which has been smashed.
I force myself closer, every instinct screaming to run, to search, to tear the sagebrush apart with my bare hands.
But I have to look for anything that will tell me where she is. It’s foolish to run anywhere blindly. And then I see it, and dread seeps into my veins.
Blood spatter. The shine hasn’t dulled yet.
“This blood is still fresh. They haven’t been gone long,” I say urgently, rushing back to the truck.
My stomach pitches. My throat locks. He’s taking Freya to a place where he’s killed two women.
Rio is scanning the ground behind me. “That’s the direction of the quarry,” he says, voice flat. A death sentence of words.
We pick up the pace and reach the still-running truck.
I throw myself into the driver’s seat. Rio’s door slams, and I yank the truck into reverse, gravel spitting as I turn back toward the quarry.
As soon as he picks up a cell signal, Rio calls Callum. “Freya’s gone. Window shattered. Blood on the door. Tire tracks heading straight for the quarry.”
“Units on route,” Callum says tightly. “I’ll meet you there.”
Rio hangs up and immediately calls Gabriel. “Hermano, bring whatever SEAL equipment you’ve got, and get to the quarry now. Freya might be there.”
The words hit like a blade to the gut.
He needs to bring extraction equipment.
Because there’s a chance she and my baby aren’t on the cliff…but below it.
I force that thought back, but it tears at me anyway, hitting so hard that my whole body goes tight around it.
The silence between us turns brutal and heavy—pressure settling under the ribs, threatening to crack something open.
Why does the killer want us to follow?
And what the hell are we about to find?
I train all my focus on one thing—I go where she is.
And someone’s about to learn what happens when a man like me has something to lose.