Chapter Fifteen
~ Rawley ~
You always know a man by how he parks his truck.
Macon O’Reilly’s old white pickup took the curve on two tires, slalomed the potholes, and rolled up flush against the fence like he’d measured the gap in a geometry textbook.
The engine didn’t idle—it brooded, coughing diesel ghosts even after he cut the key. Then he waited a full ten seconds before stepping out, like he had to check his perimeter before unsealing the cab.
Burke Callahan, on the other hand, parked his F-350 in the open.
Didn’t hug a line, didn’t bother with symmetry.
The thing was so polished it reflected the sunrise, and when he killed the engine, the silence was almost cocky.
Burke hopped out first, adjusted his Stetson, and took a long, savoring look at the property, as if he was cataloging the land’s flaws for sport.
I stood on the porch, arms crossed, waiting for the inevitable banter. Macon’s first look swept past me, checking the barn, the ridgeline, the flagpole, before circling back. Only then did he nod. Burke grinned so wide I half expected him to tip his hat and do a little two-step.
When they hit the porch, we fell right into it. No “how’s the family” or “good to see you”—just Macon’s hand catching my shoulder, thumb digging into the scar that only he knew was there. His handshake turned into a chest bump, then a split-second squeeze so hard it threatened to crack ribs.
“You get uglier every year,” he said, voice like gravel and bourbon.
“You’re one to talk,” I shot back. “Your beard looks like it lost a bet.”
Burke swept in next, bear-hugging both of us at once. “Who’s the lucky bastard?” he said, glancing at the house with the glint of a man who could smell secrets. “Heard you got domesticated.”
I cocked a brow. “Only thing domesticated here is the livestock.”
Macon released the handshake, then held up a battered cardboard box with crude air holes punched in the sides. A muted, frantic peeping came from inside.
“Got your cargo,” he said. “Ten Barred Rock chicks, unsexed. Feed store’s out of Leghorns till next month.”
The sound cut through the tension like sugar in gunpowder. I took the box, the warmth of it seeping into my palm. For a moment, all three of us just stared at it, the soft vibration of life weirdly anchoring.
From inside the house, footsteps. Not the heavy, booted kind—light, almost hesitant, like the creak of a shutter in wind.
Jojo appeared in the doorway, hands dusted with flour, hair still wet from the shower. He saw the men, blinked, then zeroed in on the box in my hands.
His eyes went full blue-sky. “Are those—?”
I nodded, then held it out like a peace offering. “Backup for the losses.”
He reached for the box with both hands, careful, almost reverent. “Oh—God, I—thank you. I’ll set them up in the brooder.” He glanced up at Macon and Burke, his smile crumpling into shy confusion. For a second, he just stood there, clutching the box and vibrating in place.
I’d never seen a SEAL get taken off-guard by a farm boy with baby chicks, but it was a sight worth dying for. Burke’s eyebrows shot up to his hairline.
“Gentlemen,” I said, “this is Jojo. My omega. And, as of yesterday, the mother of my child.”
The words landed like a flashbang. Silence, then Burke laughed—a real, reckless, happy sound, the kind that could shake off a week’s worth of death. “Damn, Steele. You move fast.”
Jojo blushed so red it was a minor miracle the chicks didn’t cook right there in the box. He hugged it tighter, then, as if remembering the rest of his body, curled one hand unconsciously over his stomach.
Macon just nodded, the way a man does when he’s too smart to put his feelings into words. He took a step forward, then surprised me by offering a hand to Jojo.
Jojo set the box down on the porch and wiped his palm on his jeans before taking it. His grip was firm, but his whole arm shook with the effort of being present.
Macon’s gaze flicked from Jojo’s eyes to his belly, then back, and for a moment something like awe leaked into his stone face. “Congrats, kid,” he said, voice low. “That’s a hell of a thing.”
Jojo ducked his head, but I caught the smile blooming at the edge of his lips. “Thank you,” he whispered. “It’s—it’s really nice to meet you both.”
Burke tipped his hat. “Likewise. You need anything, you ask. And if he’s an asshole,” he pointed at me, “you tell us. We’ll handle it.”
Jojo’s laugh was so bright it could’ve lit the barn.
With that, he scooped the box of chicks back up, cradling it like a box of dynamite, and retreated inside. The screen door gave a final squeak as it shut behind him.
We watched him disappear, the three of us lined up like a bad cartoon. Only when the house was silent again did Macon speak. “He’s good for you,” he said. “I can tell.”
Burke nodded. “And that—” he jabbed a thumb at the door—“is the happiest I’ve ever seen a man in the presence of poultry.”
I grinned. “Wait till you see him with ducklings.”
We stood there, not saying the thing that needed to be said, the thing about threats and death and how none of us had survived a decade in the SEALs by accident. But the air was thick with it. Under the easy talk, the gears were already turning.
“Let’s get the security set up,” I said. “We’ve got work.”
“Lead the way, boss,” Burke said, and it wasn’t just a joke.
We tromped off the porch and into the mud, three weapons in search of a target.
The barn was our war room. If you ignored the hay bales and the faint whiff of horse shit, you could almost imagine it was a command tent outside Mosul, every angle watched and every weakness cataloged in blood and sweat.
We left a trail of boot prints in the sucking mud—three sets, each with its own story written in the slop. Burke’s stride was long and a touch careless, Macon’s short and predatory, mine somewhere between, every step calculated for silence even when I didn’t need to be quiet.
Inside, I yanked the chain on the overhead light and swept aside a pile of tarps to clear the bench. I unrolled the county plat map, the one with every fence and creek marked in pencil, and stabbed a finger at our location.
“Hargrove wants this place,” I said. “He’s been here twice. The first time, he left with his tail between his legs. Second time, he sent a message.”
I told them everything—about the chick massacre, the white powder, the midnight break-in with the message painted in blood. I pointed out the river as a natural choke point, and how the water table made the property priceless to anyone farming on the other side.
Burke traced the river on the map, his nail scraping the path like he was flensing the skin off a corpse. “He needs your water rights to irrigate his east fields. That’s not a rancher move. That’s a hostile acquisition, old-school.”
“Control the high ground, control the battle,” I said, and Burke smirked.
Macon circled the barn, silent as a cat burglar. He knocked on beams, rattled the hinges of the back door, then came back with a chunk of rotted wood.
“Your east door would last maybe two kicks,” he said, tossing it on the bench. “And the stalls are lined up for easy sightlines. If they want to take the barn, it’s a two-man job.”
I bristled, but only because he was right. “I had other priorities,” I said.
He leveled a stare at me. “You’re thinking like a homeowner. Start thinking like a SEAL again.”
It landed, like it was meant to. I squared my shoulders, refocused.
We went through the rest—windows, attic hatch, the utility room. Every flaw, every soft spot. The more they called out, the clearer it got: I’d tried to build a safe place by civilian rules, and now it was time to rewrite the book.
Thunder rolled, lazy and mean, the kind that meant business. The air was getting heavy; the storm would hit by dusk.
We started to brainstorm. Macon wanted a perimeter alarm with tripwires and shotgun shells; Burke pushed for trail cameras with IR sensors, plus a thermal drone if I could swing it. I went for layered defenses—motion detectors on the fence, floodlights wired to an override in the master bedroom.
“You want escalation?” Burke asked. “Or deterrence?”
“Both,” I said. “But not at the expense of Jojo. He’s…sensitive to this stuff.”
Macon grunted. “He’s an omega. Bet he knows the smell of adrenaline from a hundred yards.”
I ignored the dig, because it was mostly admiration. Jojo was a lot of things, but fragile wasn’t on the list.
Burke jogged back to his truck and came in with two Pelican cases, each one black and stamped with government surplus stencils. He popped them open with a click that sounded like unlocking a gun.
“Brought some toys from my contractor days,” he said, lips twisting up in a dangerous smile. Inside: enough surveillance gear to make the NSA jealous.
He doled out headsets, trail cameras, and a thermal monocular that looked like it belonged on a spaceship.
We moved as a unit—Burke up the ladder to the hayloft, Macon outside to run cable along the rafters, me to the fuse box to kill power while we spliced in a new alarm relay. Every task was a handoff, the rhythm so familiar it made my teeth ache.
At one point, Burke lost his grip and tumbled off the loft, landing in a heap with a laugh so loud the horses in the next stall startled. He brushed off the straw, then pointed at the camera he’d wedged in the beams. “Motion-sensing. Catches anyone within two hundred feet, even in pitch black.”
Macon ran wire through the storm window and sealed it with putty. “You’ll want to check the batteries every two days. Cold drains them fast.”
I set the new lock on the east door, then reinforced it with a crossbar Macon had cut from a fence post. “That’ll hold,” I said, and for the first time in days, I believed it.