Chapter 17
seventeen
Naomi tried to keep herself busy and her mind off Ghost for the rest of the day.
She’d checked in on the Padillas, even though she hated to report she had hit an investigative wall.
Then she’d visited her grandmother’s house for tea, which turned into an entire afternoon of getting her hair re-braided and helping with “projects” while Grandma Ava grilled her about every single decision she’d made since coming home.
Had she eaten today? Was she getting enough sleep?
Did her cousin Julius ever tell her about that trouble up near Kootenai Creek?
Did she want to run for tribal council this winter?
On and on, endless, until Naomi finally escaped with a Tupperware of fry bread and a new ache behind her eyes.
She drove the long way back to her rental. Snow dusted the mountain shoulders above town, and the clouds hung low and bruised, threatening more.
Now she puttered around her house, unpacking boxes, getting ready for the planned girls’ night with Greta. She’d promised herself a normal night—wine, gossip, maybe a terrible movie—anything to feel like her old self again…
But she couldn’t get a certain man with ice-storm eyes out of her head.
Ghost.
Owen.
Whoever the hell he was. She wasn’t starting to think he didn’t even know, but it wasn’t her problem anymore, was it? She’d seen the look in his eyes as she walked away. He wanted her, maybe, but not more than he wanted to keep his secrets.
Her eyes stung.
“Damn it,” she muttered, tugging the sleeves of his hoodie down over her hands to swipe at the tears she refused to cry.
She shouldn’t still be wearing the damn sweatshirt, but she couldn’t bring herself to take it off.
It smelled like him— the heady cling of his cigar smoke and something cleaner, like rain on pavement.
Her phone pinged with a text from Greta:
Running late. Traffic on the pass. Be there in about 20 minutes. Your turn to pick the movie. Something funny, please, I’ve had a day.
Naomi stared at the text, thumb hovering over the keyboard.
Twenty minutes. She could pull herself together in twenty minutes, right?
Clear her head, get the wine breathing, maybe even change out of Ghost’s hoodie and into something that didn’t scream “I’m hung up on a man who just walked away from me. ”
But she didn’t want to change.
She set the phone down without answering and crossed to her laptop, still open on the kitchen counter.
The FBI database login screen stared back, the cursor blinking accusingly from the password bar.
Using her credentials while on leave wasn’t exactly illegal, but it was ethically questionable since she wasn’t planning to return once her leave was up.
But the doors were still open, for now—a bureaucratic backchannel nobody bothered to close.
“Just a quick look,” she whispered to the empty room and sat down in front of the computer. “Then I’m done.”
She entered her password and held her breath. For a moment, the screen froze, and her heart stuttered. Then it loaded, granting her access to files she no longer had any right to see.
She typed “Owen ‘Ghost’ Booker” into the search bar.
The results loaded slowly. Government databases always did, probably on purpose.
The first few entries were routine—background checks, employment verifications, the usual bureaucratic paper trail that followed someone through life.
But the deeper she dug, the less she found.
The files were a masterpiece of redaction.
Whole pages blacked out, with only tantalizing fragments visible.
Six deployments to locations unnamed.
Security clearances that would make most FBI agents envious.
Psychological assessments that hinted at “exceptional stress tolerance” and “atypical emotional processing.”
Whatever that meant.
Buried in one heavily redacted file, she found a photo.
He looked younger, dressed in desert camo with a rifle slung across his chest. His eyes were the same, but everything else was different.
The man in the photo stood with easy confidence, a half-smile caught mid-conversation with someone cropped out of the frame.
It was like looking at a ghost of the Ghost she knew—someone who’d existed before the walls went up.
The file’s header contained a code name: SPECTRAL. Everything else was black bars and blank space.
A chill crept up her spine. This wasn’t just standard redaction. This was the kind of erasure reserved for operations that never officially happened, for agents whose real names never appeared on any roster.
She scrolled further, pulse quickening. One paragraph stood out amid the sea of black:
Subject: Owen James Booker
Alias: Ghost
Classification: Deep Cover Asset
Operation Status: Compromised
Charges Filed:
Unauthorized arms trafficking
Conspiracy to commit treason
Civilian Casualties:
14 confirmed
7 probable
Sentence: Life imprisonment, Federal Bureau of Prisons. Early release granted. See Addendum 4-B.
Her hands trembled as she scrolled to addendum 4-B, but the entire section was blacked out. Only a handful of words remained visible—”mitigating factors,” “asset protection,” “classified.”
“My God,” she breathed, sitting back in her chair.
The man she’d kissed this afternoon was a convicted arms trafficker and traitor. Someone who’d gotten people killed and then somehow wormed his way out of serving his full sentence.
She kept reading.
Note: Subject demonstrates exceptional tactical awareness and strategic planning capabilities. Recommendation for continued surveillance. Consider armed and dangerous. Trust level: zero.
Trust level: zero.
The words echoed in her mind as she remembered their first meeting at Nessie’s, when she’d accidentally dropped the stack of Leelee’s Missing flyers.
Ghost had helped her gather them, and there had been an unexpected gentleness in his voice when he’d acknowledged the pattern she’d been fighting to get people to see.
Had that been genuine concern, or was he just that good at playing whatever role the situation required?
The man she’d trusted with her investigation—the one person in this godforsaken town who seemed to actually see what was happening—was the absolute last person on earth she should trust.
A traitor.
God.
Naomi closed her laptop with a snap and rubbed her eyes. The blue glow of her screen had burned dots into her vision, shadows dancing across the darkened living room of her rental.
She needed a drink. She reached for the wine bottle she had yet to open, then thought better of it and went for the whiskey.
Wine wasn’t going to cut it tonight. She poured herself a finger and leaned against the kitchen counter, rolling the amber liquid around the glass as she stared at the laptop.
How could someone with that much blood in his rearview just… live here? Help out at a ranch? Rebuild a bakery?
She’d trusted him. She’d let him touch her, let him see her. Maybe not all the way, but more than anyone else in years. How many times had she told herself he was different? That the way he protected her, the way he looked at her, meant something?
Maybe it did. Maybe that was the problem.
He’d killed people. A lot of people, from what she could piece together. Civilian casualties, arms dealing, conspiracy, treason. Words that didn’t seem to fit the man who’d cradled her face in his palms and kissed her like the world would end if he let up.
Did Walker Nash know who he’d welcomed onto his ranch? Did any of them?
Did she even know him at all?
And he had the nerve to be pissed she hadn’t told him about leaving the FBI.
“What a hypocrite,” she muttered, tipping the whiskey back and feeling it burn a clean path down her throat as her phone buzzed again.
She reached for her phone, expecting a new ETA from Greta since twenty minutes had come and gone, but the screen showed a text from a blocked number.
Don’t trust Ghost.
The glass nearly slipped from her fingers. She set it down with a sharp click against the countertop.
Who is this?
Three dots appeared, then disappeared. No response.
She stared at the screen, willing them to answer, to explain, but the message remained frustratingly empty.
Was it a colleague from the Bureau warning her? But then why not just come out and say, “Hey, it’s Bob, and you’re poking your nose where it doesn’t belong. Cut it out?” At least, that had been the usual response from her superiors when she crossed a line during an investigation.
Her skin prickled with unease. Had someone been watching her digital footprints closely enough to know she’d been digging into classified files? That kind of surveillance required resources, connections, and access she didn’t want to think too hard about.
She walked to the window and peered through the blinds at the empty street. Nothing moved in the pools of streetlight. The cemetery across the way looked peaceful, headstones casting long shadows in the moonlight.
But the hair on the back of her neck refused to settle.
She pulled the blinds closed and checked her phone again.
Still no response from the unknown number.
She tried calling it, but all she got was an automated message saying the number had been disconnected.
Frustrated, she tossed the phone aside. It landed on the couch and bounced to the floor by the coffee table.
She turned away and braced her hands on the kitchen counter. Someone was just fucking with her. Had to be.
Or maybe someone had seen her at Nessie’s today with Ghost and was just trying to warn her about one of the local bad boys. Not everyone in town liked the men of Valor Ridge.
Or maybe it was Boone Callahan, warning her away. He was notoriously protective of the Ridge and its men, but she couldn’t see him sending an anonymous text. If he had a problem with her and Ghost, he’d tell them flat out. He’d had the perfect opportunity to do so this morning, but he hadn’t.
Heat flooded her at the memory of his interruption.
If he hadn’t knocked on the truck’s window when he had, she would’ve fucked Ghost right there in his truck on Main Street.
No hesitation, no shame. She’d been seconds from yanking off his belt and impaling herself on his cock, chasing that wild, mean edge until they both forgot their names.
God. Her pulse still hammered just thinking about it—the heat of his mouth, the bruising grip of his hands. Nobody had touched her like that since… ever. Not even the men she’d pretended mattered. Not a single one ever made her lose her grip the way Ghost did with just a look.
She swallowed, throat raw. She was pathetic. A grown woman, tough as nails, and here she was, getting turned on in her own kitchen by the memory of a man whose file should’ve sent her running for the hills.
Trust level: zero.
Her laptop sat closed on the counter, and she found herself scowling at it. The classified file painted a clear picture: Ghost was dangerous. A man who’d betrayed his country, gotten people killed, and then somehow negotiated his way out of a life sentence.
But that same file had been so heavily redacted it looked like a crossword puzzle. What if the parts she couldn’t read told a different story? What if there was context she was missing?
The rational part of her brain told her it didn’t matter. The man was convicted. Case closed.
The other part of her, the part that had watched too many good people get railroaded by the system, whispered that maybe things weren’t as simple as they seemed.
A creak at the back door made her freeze, every muscle locking in place.
Greta?
No. She discarded the thought before it even fully formed. Greta would’ve come through the front door, all noise and laughter, probably juggling wine bottles and bags of takeout, shouting about the crappy weather and cursing the drive.
Dammit, her gun was upstairs in her nightstand.
And she’d left her phone where it had landed on the floor in front of the couch.
Naomi set her glass down in the sink and reached for the utensil drawer.
She pulled it open slowly, listening for more out-of-place sounds, and grabbed a knife.
The handle was light, too light. Not her first choice for self-defense, but it would have to do.
Naomi choked up on the hilt, braced herself against the counter, and fixed her gaze on the back hallway.
Nothing. Just the tick-tick of the heater, the low wind snaking around the eaves.
She counted breaths. Each one came shallow, quick, her nerves as raw as a fresh burn. She edged away from the counter toward her phone in the living room, feet silent on the old pine floor. Knife up. Heart in her throat.
The back door exploded inward. Wood slammed against the wall, rattling the frame. Two men in black rushed the kitchen, boots heavy, faces blank and wrong.
Oh, shit.
Masks. They were wearing black masks.
Instinct screamed, Move!
She ducked, knife raised, but the first man was faster. Something silver arced through the air—a stun gun, prongs glinting—and pain tore up her spine, white-hot and savage. Every muscle locked. The knife hit the floor with a useless clatter.
She tried to curse, tried to spit defiance, but her jaw wouldn’t work. Another jolt hit, doubling her over. Her legs crumpled. She hit the ground hard and tasted blood.
The last thing she saw was the black boots of her attacker, too close, and the spike of a needle heading for her neck.
Then nothing.