Chapter 8
CHAPTER EIGHT
Jasper ran before dawn because his body knew what to do even when his mind didn’t.
The compound was quiet behind him, locked down and silvered by the last hour before sunrise. Frost glazed the grass along the trail, and the mountains beyond Blackridge were still dark shapes against a sky just beginning to lighten at the edges.
He kept his pace fast enough to burn, faster than his usual morning run, letting the cold air scrape through his lungs and the impact of his shoes against the trail drive the night backward one step at a time.
His mind still spun. The gunshot stayed with him.
So did the breaking glass, the static on the line, and the awful silence after Katherine’s phone went dead.
He’d heard combat through radios before, heard men breathing hard under fire, heard shouted coordinates and clipped reports.
This had been different. This had been Katherine’s voice going from controlled to terrified while he was still too far away to put himself between her and the man trying to kill her.
He lengthened his stride as the trail curved through a stand of aspens. The cold bit at his ears. His chest tightened for reasons that had nothing to do with the grade.
She’d fought. She’d hit, kicked, clawed, and survived, and then sat in a laundry room wrapped in a blanket, trying to apologize to him with her eyes for needing help.
He’d watched her freeze outside her own bedroom and then force herself to choose the library because if she didn’t take back one decision, the fear might own the next one.
Jasper had admired that even as every protective instinct in him had rejected it.
The trail rose, and he pushed harder.
By the time he crested the hill behind the compound, dawn had smeared pale gold along the horizon.
From up here, Shadow Point Security looked calm and self-contained, the main building low and dark against the trees, the gate closed, exterior cameras tracking all angles of the landscape.
Calm was a lie, but it was a useful one.
He checked the sightlines out of habit, then again because Katherine was inside.
He slowed on the descent, not because he was tired enough to stop but because his thoughts had finally sorted themselves into categories.
The intruder knew Katherine’s name. He’d known where she was staying.
He’d ignored the file on the kitchen table, which meant his mission had not been retrieval. It had been termination.
The intruder had also made mistakes. He’d lost his weapon, left fabric on the broken window, fired twice inside a house, which gave Mallory ballistics, bullet trajectory, and evidence.
The killer had been forced to flee on foot through a narrow yard rather than leave cleanly through his chosen entry point.
Katherine and Priss had turned his controlled assault into a messy exit.
Jasper liked messy exits. Messy exits left trails.
He finished the run at the west entrance, breathing hard, sweat cooling beneath his shirt. The door opened before he reached it, and Garrett stepped out with a travel mug in one hand and a phone in the other. He was still in last night’s clothes, which meant he hadn’t slept either.
“Perimeter logs?” Jasper asked.
“Already pulled for you. Gate, outer cameras, east trail, this service road, and the rear lot. Sebastian added his notes from the library run and sent them to your email. I sent him and CB home. Reid is eating like he survived a famine, which means Mack is threatening him with a spatula and calling him CB Junior.”
“Normal morning, then.”
Garrett’s mouth twitched. “Normal for us. Not for her.”
Jasper glanced toward the residential wing. “She up?”
“Haven’t seen her. Vivi checked on her an hour ago. Said she was awake but calm. That could mean anything from actually calm to assembling a legal argument against God.”
“That tracks.”
Garrett studied him over the rim of his mug. “You good?”
Jasper almost answered the way he usually did.
Fine. Working on it. I’ll be in the tech room.
Instead, he looked past Garrett to the building where Katherine had spent the last few hours trying to sleep in a strange room after a man with a gun had forced his way into her bedroom. “No,” he said. “But I’m functional.”
Garrett nodded once, accepting the distinction. “Functional works. For now.”
Jasper showered fast and changed into jeans, a dark long-sleeve thermal, and a gray hoodie.
He checked the mirror long enough to decide he looked less like a man who’d spent half the night imagining the line between Katherine alive and Katherine dead, and more like someone who might be trusted with coffee. That would have to do.
The kitchen was warm when he walked in. The smell of eggs, bacon, toast, and Mack’s terrifyingly strong coffee wrapped around him with the closest thing to comfort the morning could offered.
Mack stood at the stove in a black T-shirt, flipping something in a skillet with more focus than most people brought to disarming explosives.
Reid sat at the long table with a plate that looked like it he was preparing for hibernation.
Both of them had returned from a protection detail around four, which explained why Mack was at the compound instead of home with his wife. The job had involved a mining executive, a disgruntled former employee, and a six-hour drive through bad mountain roads.
“You look like roadkill with hair product,” Reid said when Jasper walked in.
Jasper went to the coffee station. “You look like a man eating four people’s breakfast.”
“Three. I have boundaries.”
Mack snorted. “You ate the fourth person’s breakfast while claiming it was a structural taste test.”
“It failed structurally,” Reid said. “Fell apart right in my mouth.”
Mack pointed the spatula at him. “Touch the biscuits before I say they’re ready, and I’ll feed you to Vivi’s birds.”
Reid glanced toward Jasper. “He’s testy because the mining executive offered me a full-time bodyguard job and not him.”
“I’m testy because I covered your ass when the shooting started and you didn’t even say thanks,” Mack said. “How’s Katherine?”
The question softened the kitchen just enough that the humor settled into something steadier. Jasper pulled two mugs from the cabinet and filled one with black coffee for himself before preparing Katherine’s with cream, no sugar. “Awake, according to Garrett. I’m taking her breakfast.”
Reid set down his fork. “She hit the shooter with a book, right?”
“Hardcover and thick as your thigh.”
He made an impressed face. “Really? Tell me it was a law book.”
“It was about Cold War intelligence failures.”
Reid stared at him for half a second, then nodded with solemn approval. “I respect a woman who themes her violence.”
Mack slid eggs onto a plate and added toast, bacon, and a biscuit. “Take this to her. Trauma burns through people. She may say she’s not hungry.”
“She will.”
“Then tell her Mack said to eat anyway.”
“That won’t work.”
Mack added a small dish of jam to the plate. “Then tell her that cat needs her human properly fueled.”
“That might.”
Reid leaned back in his chair. “If the cat tripped an armed man, the cat outranks all of us now.”
“Priss already thinks that,” Jasper said.
CB barreled in, freshly showered and shaved. He snagged a plate and started filling it. “She’s not wrong. Sebastian said he’ll be in to see you in ten. He wants to go over the library exterior footage with you. He said something about a sedan that passed twice before we arrived.”
Jasper’s hand tightened around the edge of the tray before he caught himself. “He got a plate?”
“Partial. Mud on the rear bumper, no front plate visible.”
Good. A sedan. Maybe nothing, maybe the first thread.
Jasper balanced the tray with Katherine’s coffee and breakfast, then headed for the residential wing. He stopped outside her guest room and listened. No movement. No cat complaints. He knocked lightly.
No answer.
His pulse kicked once before he reminded himself that she had access to his office. He headed there next, passing two closed doors and the corridor camera that tracked his movement with a faint mechanical shift. The panel beside his office door registered him and unlocked with a soft click.
Katherine was on the couch, hair damp, dressed in slacks and a dark green sweater that made her skin look even paler.
Priss sat beside her, washing one paw with the concentration of a monarch restoring order after a failed coup.
One of Katherine’s leather notebooks lay open on the coffee table, but the page was blank except for three words written near the top.
Agency notification protocol.
Her phone sat beside it. Not her personal phone with the cracked screen; this one was for work. And next to that was the stun baton he’d given her last night, looking completely out of place next the rest.
She looked up, the bandage on her cheek was still in place with ridiculous little Elsa smiling bravely near the curve of her cheekbone. The gauze around her palm had loosened, probably from the shower. Her eyes were shadowed, but clear.
“I needed to work,” she said.
He set the tray on the coffee table. “Didn’t get much sleep, did you?”
Her gaze dropped to the plate. “You brought breakfast.”
Avoiding the question was answer enough. “Mack made too much.”
“Did he?”
“No, but my orders are to deliver it to you.”
The corner of her mouth moved, almost a smile. Priss abandoned her paw and leaned toward the plate with sudden interest.
“Absolutely not,” Katherine told her. “You’ve had breakfast.”
Priss chirped.
Katherine eyed the food. “Sorry, but I’m not hungry.”
Jasper sat in the chair across from the couch rather than beside her. “Mack said trauma burns through people, and Priss needs her human properly fueled.”
Katherine looked down at the cat, who’d placed one paw delicately on Katherine’s thigh and was staring at the bacon as if willing it into her mouth. “That’s slightly manipulative.”
“It’s Mack, so yes.”