Chapter Six
~ Decker ~
The coffee at my elbow had gone cold hours ago. I didn’t notice until I reached for it, then set it aside without drinking—just one more detail lost in the careful work of building a threat assessment.
Gerald Hughs had a pattern, and it wasn’t pretty: legal pressure, financial leverage, at least two prior incidents with omegas that had been settled quietly with non-disclosure agreements attached.
My laptop screen glowed blue in the kitchen’s pre-dawn darkness.
I’d placed two calls to Navy contacts—one in Omaha who did private security, another in Chicago who had connections to people who handled problems that couldn’t be solved through official channels.
I’d also reached out to Carver, an Omaha PI I’d used before, and promised him double his rate if he could get me information on Hughs by morning.
The results had come in forty minutes ago. They were worse than I’d told Jasper last night.
Hughs had a hospital board member in his pocket.
The “budget cuts” that had eliminated Jasper’s position had been manufactured—three other nurses with less seniority had been kept on when Jasper was let go.
The six-figure bonus the hospital administrator had received two weeks after Jasper’s termination had been routed through a shell company that traced back to Hughs’ real estate holdings.
The man had the kind of money that made problems disappear—the kind that could buy police response times or make court records vanish. He also had the specific patience of someone who’d never been told “no” by someone he couldn’t break.
The Omaha contact had sent photos of the last two omegas Hughs had fixated on—both young men with dark hair, both nurses at different facilities, both relocated after settlement payments that carried airtight confidentiality clauses. Neither had returned my calls when I tried to reach them.
I was halfway through a message to Rawley—an abbreviated version of what I’d found, with “need to talk when you’re up” attached—when I heard the soft click of Jasper’s bedroom door. I closed the laptop with a quiet snap and moved it to the side, my coffee cup creating enough cover for the motion.
Jasper came into the kitchen thirty seconds later, dressed in the same jeans and flannel he’d been wearing when we left Nebraska.
His hair was damp at the edges—face washing, not a full shower—and the bruise on his cheek had darkened overnight, spreading toward his eye socket in a smear of purple that would take weeks to fade.
He moved with the careful deliberateness of someone carrying something fragile overnight and not wanting to spill it. His eyes did a quick read of the room—me at the table, the closed laptop, the kitchen’s early-morning emptiness—before he crossed to the coffee pot and reached for a mug.
The silence between us had weight to it—the awkwardness of a conversation that had stripped something bare and left both people wondering if they were supposed to acknowledge it.
Jasper poured his coffee with both hands on the pot, movements methodical, like he was trying to minimize his presence in the room. I kept my eyes on my computer, not performing nonchalance but not pushing for more either.
The pretense lasted about thirty seconds before I broke it.
“I made some calls,” I said, voice level, eyes on his face. “About Gerald Hughs.”
Jasper’s hand paused halfway to the creamer, then resumed its motion with deliberate steadiness. “And?”
“He’s a more organized threat than a few hired men,” I said, keeping it factual. “He’s got connections, resources, and a pattern of going after omegas who work in healthcare. You’re not the first.”
Something flickered across Jasper’s face—not quite surprise, but close to it. He nodded once, a short, tight movement.
“I want to think this through together,” I said, the words coming out before I’d fully formed them. “Not hand you a briefing. Actually work the problem with you.”
Jasper’s shoulders dropped a fraction, some of the braced quality going out of them.
He carried his coffee to the table and sat down, not across from me where a stranger would have placed himself, but at the corner where the angles met—close enough that conversation wouldn’t require raised voices, far enough that our shoulders wouldn’t touch.
“Gerald’s brother sits on the hospital board,” he said, voice steady in a way I recognized from mission briefings—the calm that came from reporting facts rather than living through them.
“That’s how it started. I was on a committee reviewing prenatal discharge protocols.
Gerald came to a meeting—said he was representing ‘community interests.’ He cornered me afterward, asked me to dinner.
When I said no, the committee got restructured. A week later, I was laid off.”
The story came out in pieces after that—the job loss, the return to Nebraska to help his grandfather, the first “accidental” encounter at the grocery store, then the gas station, then the library.
Gifts that started arriving—flowers, then jewelry, then a watch worth more than three months’ rent.
Phone calls at all hours. A car that parked across from his grandfather’s house for hours at a time, driver watching the front door through binoculars.
“The men weren’t random,” Jasper said, eyes on the table’s surface rather than my face. “They were sent. Not just to scare me, but to...” He paused, choosing the word carefully. “To establish dominance. To make it clear that refusal wasn’t an option.”
He delivered it all in the same flat, clinical voice he probably used to document patient charts—no dramatics, no pauses for effect. Just words spoken in a careful tone.
I listened without interrupting, understanding that the flatness was doing structural work—that Jasper was holding the story at arm’s length because looking at it straight was still too much.
When he finished—when the words had run out and there was nothing left but the weight of what he’d carried—I asked the only question that mattered:
“Does he know about the ranch specifically? Or just that you left Nebraska with someone?”
Jasper shook his head. “I don’t know. My grandfather called your grandfather. The rest was handled face to face. I did send one anonymous email to my grandfather letting him know we’d arrived, but…”
I nodded once. “That’s what we need to find out.”
Outside, the first hint of dawn was visible along the eastern horizon—a thin line of lighter gray against the night sky. The mountain to the west was still a dark silhouette, its face turned away from the coming light.
Jasper’s hands were steady around his coffee cup, his face neutral in a way that spoke of practice rather than calm. I’d seen it before—the control that came from knowing exactly how bad things could get and building your reactions around that knowledge.
“We’ll figure it out,” I said, the words coming out before I’d decided to offer them.
He looked up at that, eyes meeting mine directly for the first time since he’d walked in. “I know,” he said, the simple statement carrying more weight than it should have been able to.
We sat in the kitchen as the light changed around us, the problem between us not solved but named—given a shape we could work with rather than a shadow we had to guess at. It wasn’t much, but it was a start.
* * * *
After breakfast, I went to find Rawley. He wasn’t in the house or the barn—Jackson said he’d headed north to check the fence line where it crossed the creek.
I found him forty minutes later, a quarter mile from the main house, testing the tension on a section of wire with a methodical focus that would have looked like boredom to anyone who didn’t know better.
The morning was cold enough that our breath showed—white puffs that hung in the air between us before dissipating.
Rawley straightened when he saw me, one hand resting on the fence post, the other holding a length of wire cutters.
He’d been at it for hours already—his jacket dark with sweat despite the chill, a thin line of mud climbing the left leg of his jeans where he’d knelt in wet soil.
“Problem with the fence?” I asked, keeping it neutral, giving him the chance to finish whatever he’d been working on before I dropped the real reason for my visit.
Rawley shook his head. “Just checking. Creek rises another foot, we’ll need to move the whole section.” He clipped the wire with a quick motion, then turned to face me directly. “What’s up?”
I laid it out without softening it—Gerald’s money, his methods, the prior incidents, the fact that I may have brought this to Rawley’s door without fully knowing the shape of it when I arrived.
I kept my voice level, eyes on his face, watching for the shift that meant he was calculating risk against obligation.
Rawley listened without interrupting, his expression unchanging—the neutrality I recognized from mission briefings where the information was bad, but not unexpected.
When I finished—when I’d given him everything I had, held nothing back—he was quiet for a long moment, eyes on the fence line rather than my face.
“How much money does this man have?” he asked finally, voice even, no judgment in it.
“Enough to make problems disappear,” I said. “Enough that the hospital board member who engineered Jasper’s layoff got a six-figure bonus two weeks later.”
Rawley nodded once, accepting what I’d offered. “How far is he willing to go?”
I thought about the answer—about the two previous omegas, about the settlement payments and the NDAs, about the men who’d been sent not just to frighten but to establish dominance—and chose the truth over the comfort.
“Far enough that we need to take it seriously,” I said. “He’s patient. He’s funded. And he’s used to getting what he wants.”