Chapter 15
Fifteen
The tyres hummed against the bitumen before it gave way to gravel. The familiar crunch of dirt under the wheels, with gravel pinging against the underbelly before it got tossed around like confetti, was normally a sign for Finn to breathe.
But today it just wasn’t doing its magic, not with the Fed taking up space on his passenger seat.
They were maybe thirty k’s out of town, and she still hadn’t said a word since he’d told her to zip it.
Good.
He didn’t want words. He wanted space to think, to clear his head before he did something stupid—like slam the brakes and demand to know what the hell was she doing getting into his team’s heads.
But his thoughts weren’t just on her. They were on Lydia. And on Brodie, the kid wearing old burns and even older eyes.
Finn went over the conversation again. He’d said the right things, offered the safe house, the station, the fallback plan—but was it enough? If Red was escalating, would Lydia ask for help?
He should’ve pushed harder.
He should’ve—
Finn exhaled through his nose, keeping his jaw locked tight.
At least the intel was solid. He’d suspected a load was coming through soon, but now Brodie had given him what he didn’t have—a timeframe.
Tomorrow morning. Ten sharp. That was when the last truck was allowed through the stockyard’s boom gates, when the yards were closed to focus purely on loading the train.
With a quick text message to the team to get into position, they had one night—tonight—to plan the sting, and pray Red didn’t sniff them coming.
And Taryn?
She shouldn’t have been there, hogging his passenger seat.
He hated that she’d seen Brodie, forcing him to trust her. It was a risk he hadn’t meant to take. But the worst part?
He wasn’t sure if he regretted it.
Taryn sat beside him, flicking through the file he’d slapped on her desk earlier. Her pen tapped the side of her notebook, with her legs braced as the troopy hit a dip and rumbled on.
She didn’t ask for aircon, only rolled down her window, and tightened that bun in her hair. There was no whine about the heat or the corrugations, as she scribbled something down, flipped a page, and kept on reading.
He hated how much he respected that.
Finally, she spoke.
‘SW Rural Contracting,’ she muttered, still scanning the file.
‘Ten pages of government-approved dribble that says exactly nothing. You have to give me more,’ she said flatly.
‘Unless your plan was to drag me out as a seat warmer to play I-spy on your BS? I’ll get out now and send you a copy of my report from Canberra. ’
Figures she’d be thorough. But damn her for being right.
She closed the file with a snap. ‘You knew there was nothing in that folder.’
‘Didn’t say it’d have answers. Just said it was a place to start.’
‘It’s not enough,’ she shot back. ‘Not with your record and that pardon.’
There it was, that bloody pardon. His get-out-of-jail card that had branded him for life with that one question: How the hell did he get that?
‘Spare me the dance, sweetheart. We both know you were sent out here to shut us down—so don’t pretend otherwise.’ His grip on the steering wheel was so tight he might just break the old girl.
‘Fine. I was sent here to shut you down.’ No fluff. No lead-in. Just clean truth.
‘Why?’ He wasn’t ready to let the squad go. Not now. Not when they were this close to nailing the Stock Agent. And hell, people needed them out here. Surely, they’d proven that by now.
‘No one greenlights a pardon for a violent crim, then hands him a badge and a healthy budget, to run some outback cowboy show. Not with your history. Looking at it from the outside, it reads like a stitched-up back-woods fairy tale with blood on the pages.’
She wasn’t wrong.
That’s what stung the most, he’d bled between the pages of his own story for too long to believe in any fairytale bulldust and their happily-ever-afters.
‘And now that you’re here?’ The question left his mouth before he could stop it, when he should’ve been asking himself why her opinion mattered—the woman sent to tear his team apart.
‘I get it,’ she sighed. ‘Sort of… I’m looking at this from the outside, and things like that stockyard,’ she added, tossing her thumb behind her, ‘helps to build a picture. But I need more. And not drip-fed junk, either. My patience is running thin, and I’m on a deadline, with my flight to Canberra already booked.
Right now, I’ve got enough to shut this whole thing down. ’ She wasn’t bluffing either.
Damn.
‘How? Based on what?’
‘The paperwork you gave me was just on your expenses. Besides the official reports on the system, you’ve never told me about your cases, your processes, and your wins. Nothing. All you’ve shown me is just a lot of money being spent on overpriced cow—’
His glare cut her off.
But the damage was done. She’d seen enough to make the Stock Squad disappear—and he’d handed her the bloody matchbook to light that fire!
That wasn’t what he’d planned, when he’d been doing his best to avoid her.
Of course he hadn’t explained the wins, the lives changed, the family farms they’d helped, and the numbers in the stock recovered. All he’d done was toss her breadcrumbs in the paperwork like that was enough.
And yet she’d chosen not to pull the plug.
Instead, she’d climbed into his passenger seat chasing answers.
Hold on…
‘There’s more to this,’ he hissed. ‘You wouldn’t have dragged this audit out for nearly two weeks unless something else was pushing you.
’ Whatever it was, it wasn’t orders. And it sure as hell wasn’t some fascination over paperwork.
‘Nah, this is personal. I can smell it. Has been since day one. This isn’t just a job for you—it’s revenge. Or justice. Or both.’
She didn’t deny it.
But she didn’t look at him either.
‘With your skill set, you could’ve wrapped this up in two days.
Paperwork, interviews signed off, done. But you didn’t.
You dug deeper. Booked yourself in for two weeks at the pub, then dragged it out these past nine days, poking around in places that had nothing to do with funding or resource allocation.
You didn’t need to talk to half my team. But you did.’
Taryn’s jaw twitched as she flicked open her notebook.
There was definitely more to this. He could see it. ‘You said you needed to understand the early casework—our very first case, the one that involved Everlight Energy.’
‘I told Izzy I wanted to know who was behind Everlight.’
‘Sure. But there were certain questions you kept asking Izzy. And trust me, she replayed that whole conversation back to me, word for word. It’s one of her skills.’
Oh, yeah, he had her attention now, even though she’d been staring at the same page on her notebook for a while now.
Steering them down the dirt road, he kept her in his periphery reading the shift in her posture, and the way she controlled her breathing.
He was close. Damn close.
‘I asked Izzy why she bothered talking to you at all. She told me you reminded her of someone. Said you cared about what happened to her assistant. What was her name?’
Taryn’s tapping pen went deadly still against her notebook. She didn’t look up. And she didn’t breathe. Only for half a second.
Finn still clocked it.
A tell. The tiniest chink in her armour.
He dug deeper, flipping through his memory like it was an old filing cabinet. Something Izzy had said about her assistant, who’d helped her trace that paper trail through various department registries, trying to uncover Everlight’s owners.
‘Meghan,’ he muttered. ‘Meghan Forrester. That was her name.’
Taryn’s knuckles went white around the notebook sitting in her lap.
‘It wasn’t just a tactic, was it? Saying you wanted justice for the assistant—that wasn’t just to tug on Izzy’s heartstrings. Was it?’
She didn’t answer.
‘You’re not here for policy. Or for your office. You’re here for her.’
The silence dragged on, as if she were asking herself: how the hell did he just figure that out? It’s what he’d do if in her situation.
‘Who was she?’
‘She was my cousin. Meghan…’
He could hear the way she’d said the name it hurt.
‘Go on. You want answers from me, then you go first.’ He wasn’t sure she would, but he kept driving, giving her the space.
‘Fine…’ She huffed, clutching that folder and notebook to her chest like they could shield her from feeling anything.
But he saw it—that crack in her armour exposing a layer of vulnerability, right there beneath the edge. And damn it if it didn’t catch him off guard. He wasn’t supposed to care. Wasn’t supposed to notice the way she gripped that folder like it was her last defence.
He told himself it didn’t matter. After all, he’d spent years spotting weaknesses just to use them to his advantage.
But with her?
She was flipping the rulebook on him in ways he hadn’t even begun to comprehend. Because that kind of hurt—you couldn’t fake.
The only problem was it made it matter to him.
‘We grew up together, that Meghan was more like a sister than a cousin. As a military brat, my family moved around frequently, so friends, well… Besides my parents, Meghan was the only constant in a life built on goodbyes. We spent most summers together on my grandfather’s farm.
She may have been a few years younger, but she was there for me… ’
He’d be damned if he let that little line slip past him: a life built on goodbyes.
She said it like it was nothing, and yet it explained everything.
Like why she kept her distance to not get attached.
And why nothing rattled her, not even the open hostility from the people around her since she’d arrived in town.
Because if you already had an exit plan, why bother unpacking your suitcase in the first place?
‘Meghan was murdered for helping Izzy uncover something no one wanted found. And someone has made sure it stayed that way.’
Finn’s jaw ticked. ‘You’re not blaming Izzy for that.’