Chapter Eighteen
~ Jasper ~
I pressed my back against the cold clapboard siding of the farmhouse, ribs aching where the wood dug in, the controlled gunfire from the front of the house punching through in short professional bursts.
Three seconds, two shots, three seconds, two shots.
The pattern was deliberate—whoever was out there had done this before, knew exactly what they were doing, and had apparently decided the people inside this house were worth the bullets.
I ran my inventory the way I ran all frightening things: what I could feel, what I could hear, what I knew for certain.
My shoulder blades pressed into the weathered wood, each breath pushing a different spot against a different splinter.
Wet grass soaked through my shoes—I’d come outside barefoot, had no chance to grab boots.
My toes curled into the cold ground, seeking purchase that wasn’t there.
My stomach hurt—not the baby, just the ache of a body braced for impact.
Each crack of a shot registered in my sternum like it was happening inside my body. The wind off the mountain carried the scent of pine and early summer heat, mixing with the smell of gunpowder and broken glass. And underneath it all, the worst sound in the yard: Ethan’s silence in Jojo’s arms.
He hadn’t cried. Not once. Not through the first shot, not when Jojo had dropped to cover him with his body, not as we’d sprinted for the back door. A ten month-old infant who could detect a can opener at fifty yards and had zero impulse control had gone completely silent in his father’s arms.
It was the wrongest thing I’d heard all night, worse than the bullets, worse than the glass breaking, worse than the careful footsteps I’d been counting in my head since the first shot.
What I knew for certain was this: Decker had stopped touching me and started moving, which meant there was a plan and I was not in it yet.
Decker crouched three feet away, back to the wall, facing out toward the dark pasture. His face was expressionless in a way that meant he was three steps ahead of whatever was happening, his eyes doing a constant scan of the tree line where the moonlight caught the tips of the pines.
He raised his left hand and made a gesture I couldn’t fully decode—two fingers, a flat palm, a direction—and Rawley responded with a single nod, the silent acknowledgment of a man who’d been reading Decker’s hand signals for years.
Rawley turned to Jojo, his free hand coming up to rest on the back of Jojo’s neck for exactly one second, and said something too low for me to hear. Jojo nodded, adjusted his grip on the baby, and braced himself against the wall.
Rawley and Jojo peeled off toward the equipment barn with the baby, using the shadow of the house to cover the distance—Rawley moving first, Jojo following with Ethan tucked against his chest, their bodies so close together they formed a single dark shape against the lighter dark of the night.
Decker turned to me, putting his mouth directly next to my ear, his voice so low I felt it more than heard it.
“Get to the barn,” he said, each word precise. “Stay low. Stay behind Rawley. Do not stop.”
I nodded, not trusting my voice, and then Decker was gone—already moving in the opposite direction along the wall toward the front corner of the house, his body making no sound against the clapboard, the Glock held at his side rather than aimed.
I watched him go for exactly one second—one long, careful beat where I memorized the wide set of his shoulders, the economy of his movement, the way he disappeared into shadow the moment he stepped away from the house—and then I turned and ran.
The thirty yards of open ground between the farmhouse and the barn were the longest thirty yards of my life. The grass was slick under my feet, the darkness between the buildings absolute.
I couldn’t see Rawley and Jojo, but I could hear them—the soft exhale of breath, the occasional footfall, the carefulness of people who knew exactly how much noise they were making.
I kept my body low and tight, following the sound rather than the shape, and tried not to think about what was happening at the front of the house—the rhythm of the shots, the fact that Decker had gone toward them rather than away.
My hands were over my belly before I decided to put them there, a reflex so instinctive I registered the movement a full beat after it happened.
The baby inside me was still, the kind of stillness that wasn’t sleep or peace, but something closer to waiting—the patient quiet of something that knew I was afraid but couldn’t yet understand why.
A shot sparked off the gravel somewhere to my left—close enough that I felt the air shift with the bullet’s passage.
I did not look back. I did not slow down.
I kept my eyes on the dark shape that was Rawley and my feet moving in the exact path he had taken, my breath coming in careful, controlled inhales that I’d learned in clinical rotations during codes and trauma responses.
The barn door appeared in front of me—not gradually, not as distance closed, but suddenly, like it had been hidden and then revealed.
Rawley hit it first, one hand reaching for the latch, the other still on his weapon.
The door swung open with a creak that sounded enormous in the quiet yard, and then I was through it, into the smell of hay and diesel and a dark with no edges to it.
The barn was cooler than the yard had been, the air thick with the particular dust that came from hay and feed and animals.
I stood just inside the door, waiting for my eyes to adjust, listening to Rawley bar it from the inside with a heavy length of wood that dropped into metal brackets with a solid thunk.
The gunfire from the front of the house had stopped. The silence that replaced it was worse—not the ordinary quiet of night, but the absence that happened when something that had been making noise suddenly wasn’t.
Rawley moved to the small window beside the door, positioning himself so he could see out without being seen, his body blocking most of the light that would have come through the glass.
I could make out the wide set of his shoulders, the careful angle of his head, the weapon held at ready rather than aimed.
My hands were still on my belly, my breath still coming in careful, measured inhales. I forced them both down—put my hands at my sides, made my lungs work at a normal pace—and looked around the barn for Jojo and the baby.
Jojo had dropped into the far corner behind a hay bale with Ethan, body curved over the infant like he was trying to make himself into a shield. The baby was still—too still—and I crossed to them immediately, hands already moving before my brain had fully registered what I was doing.
It was the NICU nurse in me—the part that took over when children were afraid and couldn’t explain why.
I dropped to my knees beside them, reaching for Ethan with hands that knew exactly where to look for what mattered.
My fingers went to his sternum first, then his throat, then his wrist—a fast assessment by touch, the kind I’d run a hundred times on the unit when monitors alarmed at three in the morning.
Ethan’s chest rose under my palm—a quick, shallow breath, then another. His pulse was fast beneath my fingers, but strong and regular. His eyes were open and tracking, pupils contracted in the dim light, responsive to the movement of my hand.
Shock response, not injury. Not even fear—shock, the way a child’s body handled too much stimulus, too quickly, with nowhere to put it.
“He’s okay,” I said to Jojo in a low voice, each word precise. “Breathing clear. Pulse elevated, but regular. Pupils responsive. He’s in shock, not hurt.”
Jojo’s shoulders dropped two inches, his breath coming out in a long exhale. He nodded once—the silent acknowledgment of a man who’d heard exactly what he needed to—and adjusted his grip on the baby, bringing Ethan closer to his chest.
I kept my palm flat on Ethan’s chest a beat longer than the assessment required, because the steadiness of that small heartbeat under my hand was the most grounding thing in the room. In and out. Fast but strong. Present and accounted for, regardless of what was happening beyond the barn door.
“I was so scared,” Jojo whispered, the words barely carrying to where I knelt. “He didn’t make a sound. Not even when the glass broke.”
I nodded, understanding exactly what he meant. “Fight-flight-freeze,” I said, keeping it clinical rather than personal. “Babies get it too. His system got overloaded and shut down non-essential functions. Crying’s pretty far down the list when you’re trying not to die.”
The explanation landed exactly the way I’d intended—Jojo’s face changed, becoming the look of a man who’d been handed a framework for what was happening and could now put his fear in a box rather than carrying it.
He nodded again, more firmly this time, and ran one careful finger along Ethan’s cheek.
“He’s going to be okay,” Jojo said, making it not quite a question.
I nodded, the movement tight and definitive. “He’s going to be okay.”
Rawley took position at the barn door, positioning himself so he could see out through a narrow crack of visibility without being visible himself. His weapon was still in his hand, held at ready rather than aimed, his body turned at a angle that spoke of training rather than instinct.
“Two shooters on the front approach,” he said in a murmur that carried just far enough to reach us. “Possibly a third working around the south side of the house.” A pause, brief but deliberate. “No sign of Decker.”
I did not react to that last part out loud.
I filed it in the same place I filed everything I could not afford to feel right now—the corner of my mind that handled things like “Gerald will find you” and “your grandfather is alone in Nebraska” and “what happens when what you want and what you need are two different things.”