Chapter Twelve #2
She hates it. I see it in her eyes, but she also knows I’m right. Cash is already on the phone calling backup. Luis is sprinting across the field on foot. Paige and Lena are herding stragglers up the porch steps, yelling for people to get inside now.
The first real wind gust hits sharp and cold, the storm wall isn’t far.
Delta steps close, voice low. “Be careful.”
“I will.”
“I mean it.”
“I know.”
For a second, everything else drops away, and it’s just her and me until another gust hits louder, we don’t have time.
“Go,” I tell her again. “I’ll be right behind you.”
She hesitates once, then nods and runs toward her house, hair whipping in the wind.
As soon as she’s a safe distance, Cash yells to me from the field, “We got maybe twenty minutes before this wall slams us!”
I’m already moving. The sky flashes long, wide streak of lightning too far away to hear yet.
“We’ll get ’em,” I say mostly to myself. Because we don’t have another option.
Over the wind, I hear the barn gate clang open and Romeo shout for Gabe to swing left.
Luis whistles for the lead mare, trying to draw the herd toward the paddock.
It’s chaos and through all of it, one thought anchors me: Delta is inside and safe and now it’s my job to make sure everything else is too.
We get it done fast, everybody moves like we’ve practiced it a hundred times.
The cattle are pushed back into pasture, gates chained, horses in their stalls with grain thrown and doors locked before the wind really starts to scream.
The second the last latch snaps shut, Cash, Gabe, Luis, and Romeo split off toward their assigned houses and I head straight for Delta’s.
By the time I reach Delta’s porch, the wind is loud enough to drown out my own thoughts, and I shove the screen door open and step inside fast, locking the door behind me out of habit before moving through the living room calling her name.
“Delta?” Nothing, so I keep going, “Delta,” again, but still nothing, and the house feels wrong because it’s too quiet, she talks to herself when she moves around, hums, clatters dishes when she’s thinking, and there’s none of that now.
I move faster through the kitchen, pantry, bathroom, bedroom, office, and guest room, all of them empty, and my stomach drops hard because something’s not right.
My chest starts to tighten as I call Cash, and he picks up on the first ring saying, “Everybody’s inside here.
You good?” and I answer, “No. I can’t find Delta,” which makes his voice go sharp when he says, “What do you mean you can’t find her?
” and I tell him, “I’m checking the house now.
I’ll update,” before hanging up and calling Romeo to ask, “You seen Delta?” and he says, “No. Last time I saw her she was with you,” so I tell him, “Stay inside until you hear from me,” and hang up and call Delta.
Her phone rings, and I follow the sound and find it on the floor next to the island, screen cracked and still ringing, and that is when I see it her earring on the tile right beside the phone, the set her father bought her, and she would not take it off, not tonight.
I look at the back door and pull it open it’s not locked, Delta would never leave it unlocked. I step out and the rain hits sideways, and on the ground right at the bottom step is her second earring, and my stomach drops fast and cold because she didn’t walk out here, someone took her out.
I shut the door and sprint upstairs to the bedroom and the nightstand and the top drawer where my 9mm is, the same one I’ve carried since overseas, and I grab two loaded mags and shove them in my pocket before I bolt downstairs and go straight to the side-by-side, the fastest way to track whoever dragged her off.
Key in, turn, nothing, and I hit it again, nothing, so I drop into the seat and rip open the access panel with muscle memory and see that the main fuse is gone, somebody planned this. Someone came on this ranch, in Delta’s house and took her and everything in me goes cold.
I run for the barn where the horses are losing it and Ranger is smashing the ground with his hooves and blowing hard and Coop kicks his stall like he’s trying to break it open, and the storm is coming in heavy and close, and I don’t have time to saddle anything.
They know something is wrong. I grab the stall latch and Ranger nearly pushes the door into me trying to get out. I don’t blame him, I feel the same.
I don’t have a saddle and I don’t have time to grab one and no bridle either, just the halter, and Ranger is jittery and scared, but I get the halter on him anyway and he fights for one breath, then presses his forehead to my shoulder for half a second I grab the reins and swing up bareback, my thighs clamp down hard and Ranger is already moving before I’m fully on him.
Lightning flashes across the ridge as I lean forward, one hand on his neck, rain stinging my face, and I tell him, “Find her,” and he lunges forward like the command makes perfect sense.
The ranch disappears under water and wind, but there’s a clear direction broken branches, deep boot tracks, a dragged line across the mud and I don’t need trail skills because the land is showing me exactly where she went and every muscle in my body is locked in one direction: find her.
No name for what’s happening inside me and no time for it either because there’ll be time to fall apart later if I don’t reach her now, and Ranger surges faster, hooves pounding the soaked earth.
Someone touched her, someone took her out of her home, someone thought they could hide behind a storm, and they chose the wrong night and they chose the wrong woman and they chose the wrong man to leave standing.
I lower my body over Ranger and the wind hits like a wall, but we keep moving and I am going to get her back, no matter who I have to go through to do it.
I shut every emotion off because I don’t have time for panic or fear or anything that could cloud my decision-making, but even with that switch flipped, I can’t stop thinking that Delta is a fighter and she will not go willingly and I just hope she doesn’t push whoever went to these lengths to get her over the edge.
Ranger and I surge forward, the rain hammering us, thunder ripping the sky open, lightning throwing jagged white light across the ridge, and then I hear her. Her voice cutting straight through the storm, sharp and furious. I push Ranger harder and he answers like he feels it too.
As soon as we crest the hill everything inside me narrows to one violent point, Delta and a man in the downpour.
She’s doing exactly what I knew she’d be doing: fighting.
She punches him, clean and solid, and for one half-second I’m proud of her in the middle of a nightmare and then he hits her back and she goes down hard in the mud.
Everything inside me goes dark. I don’t think, I don’t plan, I just move, reaching behind me, I grab my gun, raise it, and aim.
Delta
The second I step into my house, I know something is wrong. I take a step and a voice comes from the shadows.
“Well. Look who finally came home.”
I freeze. Preston steps into view like he owns the place; hair overgrown, face gaunt, eyes crazed, and a gun in his hand like it belongs there.
My stomach drops, but my voice stays level. “What are you doing here?”
He laughs like he’s offended I even asked. “What am I doing here? That’s rich. Maybe start with ‘When did you get out?’ Or better yet ‘How did you find me?’”
“That too,” I say, because I’m not giving him anything.
He tilts his head, eyes wild and hungry for a reaction.
“I walked out of prison months ago, Delta. And I spent every day of the last four years thinking about you. Thinking about what you did to me. How you blew up our company. How you humiliated me. How you divorced me, dragged my name through the mud, and left me to rot.”
“You embezzled,” I remind him. “You stole from the board. You stole from me.”
He steps closer, jaw ticking. “I built that business.”
“No,” I say, shaking my head once. “I built it, you funded it.”
The gun twitches in his hand. I keep talking anyway. “You got four years in minimum security. A country club with a fence. You want to talk about hell? Try burying your father, try rebuilding your life while the man who was supposed to love you was busy destroying everything he could reach.”
His face goes red. “You ungrateful bitch.”
There it is, the real him.
“My father warned me about you,” he spits. “Said you’d never be satisfied. Said you were the kind of woman who’d ruin a man the second she got too big for her britches. I should’ve listened.”
I look at the door. Just a glance, a half a second, but he catches it.
His eyes narrow, sharp and ugly. “Waiting for someone to walk in and save you?”
I swallow and stay silent. He smiles. Mean. “Let’s go.”
“Over my dead body.”
He cocks the gun, metal clicking loud enough to slice through bone. “That can be arranged. Move.”
He grabs my arm tight and yanks me toward the back door.
I fight him every step, just slowing him down and forcing him to work for every inch. He gets angrier, which is good, angry men make mistakes. Inside the kitchen I rip the earring from my left ear and let it fall, small sound, but I hear it.
He shoves me forward. “Stop dragging your feet, Delta!”
“Fuck you,” I spit, twisting free just enough to make him lose balance for a second.
He recovers, jerks me outside, storm wind slapping both of us. Before he pulls me off the porch I rip the other earring free and let it drop right on the bottom step. Thunder shakes the air but he barely notices.