Chapter 21 #2
My pulse was up. I could feel it in my neck, in my wrists, in the grip of my hand around the weapon.
The air was cold enough to sting my lungs on the deep breaths I was pulling through my nose.
Fifty yards between me and six people who didn’t know I was here and were using the property I loved to traffic drugs.
These bastards were going down.
“Now,” Hunter said.
I crossed the draw at the shallow point I’d mapped in my head, came up the south bank, and moved toward the clearing with my weapon raised.
From the east, Beckett emerged from the tree line.
Coop was already at the shed, appearing from behind the south wall so quietly that the man nearest him didn’t register his presence until Coop’s hand was on his shoulder.
“On the ground! Hands out! Now!”
The clearing split open. Two of them went down immediately, flat on their stomachs with their hands spread in the dirt.
The third tried to swing a duffel bag at Beckett, and Beckett stepped inside the arc, caught the man’s wrist, and put him on the ground in one clean motion.
I had the fourth facedown with my knee between his shoulder blades before he’d decided which direction to run.
A truck door slammed.
The sound hit wrong, heavy and metallic and percussive.
For a half second, it folded over on itself in my ears and became something concussive and familiar, and the clearing wasn’t a clearing anymore.
The pine trunks were walls and the flashlight beams were muzzle flashes and the cold Montana air was hot and thick with dust, and I was somewhere I hadn’t been in six years.
My vision started to slide. The man under my knee was breathing and I could feel it, but I couldn’t see him. I couldn’t see anything that was here.
“Logan.” Hunter’s voice in my earpiece. Not loud, not alarmed. Deliberate. The voice of a man who’d said we’ll be watching and meant it. “I need you to check in.”
The words cut through because they were specific and present and aimed directly at me. Not a general broadcast. Not tactical chatter. My name, followed by a task.
Reality snapped back into place.
“I’m here,” I said. My hand was on the man’s back. The grass was cold. The air burned my lungs on the way in, and it was Montana air, pine and diesel and cold dirt, and I was here.
“Two runners headed north from the tree line,” Beckett said. “You’re closest.”
I looked up. Movement in the brush, two figures running toward the main property.
“I see them,” I said, and my voice held. “Moving to intercept.”
I secured the man’s wrists with a zip tie and got to my feet. One of the runners cut west toward the county road.
“Lachlan.” I forced the word out as I sprinted. “You’ve got a runner headed your way. I’m following the one going toward the main property.”
Because there was no fucking way I was letting this bastard get to Lark.
He had a head start, but the terrain was working against him. Uneven ground, low brush catching at his legs, and he was running blind through property he’d never set foot on in daylight. I’d been walking this land at three in the morning for weeks.
My feet knew where the roots crossed the path and where the ground dropped and where the footing went soft near the gullies.
His didn’t.
The channel that cut across the property between the shed and the main buildings was four feet deep with steep dirt banks on both sides. In daylight, you could see it coming. At night, running full speed, it was invisible until the ground disappeared.
He went over the edge. I heard the slide of loose dirt and the heavy thud of a body hitting the bottom and a sound that was either a curse or the air leaving his lungs.
I reached the bank, dropped into the channel in a controlled slide, and landed on my feet. He was scrambling up the far side on his hands and knees, grabbing at roots, his boots slipping in the loose soil. I caught his ankle and pulled.
He came down hard, rolled onto his back, and swung at me, a wild punch that caught the side of my neck.
I blocked the second one, got my weight on top of him, and pinned his arm behind his back.
He bucked once, hard, and I drove my knee into his spine and held him there until the fight went out of him.
I got the zip tie around his wrists. He lay in the dirt at the bottom of the channel with his chest heaving and his face pressed into the ground.
“Last one down,” I said into comms. “He didn’t reach the property.”
“Copy that,” Hunter said. “That’s all six. Lachlan?”
“Mine’s on the pavement. We’re good. We’re headed your way for official arrests.”
We’d done it. Caught these guys in the act. They were going to jail.
I stood up. My hands were steady. My breathing was coming down. My eyes were tracking what was in front of me and nothing else, and every bit of it was real.
I climbed out of the channel on the north side, hauled the drug runner up after me, and walked him back toward the shed where Lachlan was moving in from the county route to take custody.
I handed the runner off and told Hunter I was heading back to the house to make sure everything was good on that end.
Hunter, Beckett, and Cooper had the others secured. The radio chatter had settled into the flat, methodical language of cleanup, and the urgency was gone from it.
“Lark, it’s over,” I said into comms. “You okay?”
“I’m at the barn.”
That wasn’t where she was supposed to be.
“Copy that,” I said and started walking faster.
I stopped at the edge of the gravel. She stood in the wide doorway with the barn lights behind her, throwing her shadow long across the ground.
A shotgun in her hands, held low and ready, the barrel angled toward the earth.
Her hair was down, and her mouth was a hard line I’d never seen on her before.
Behind her was every animal on this property. Every dog, every cat, every horse and goat and rabbit and Clarence on his perch, offering a running commentary of curse words.
Every living thing she’d spent five years feeding and healing and protecting was behind that doorway, and Lark Monroe was standing between them and whatever might have come out of the night.
She saw me, and the shotgun lowered another inch.
“I heard the runner heading toward the property.” She adjusted her grip on the stock. “Somebody had to cover them. Just in case.”
This woman.
I’d never known anything like her. She’d been doing this alone for five years because she didn’t know any other way. And she’d done it tonight with a shotgun, willing to protect every single one of those animals at her back.
I walked to her, took the shotgun from her hands, and leaned it against the barn wall. She let me. Her fingers were cold when I wrapped mine around them.
“It’s over,” I said. “All the drug runners are in custody. Lachlan’s handling it.”
She exhaled, and the hard line of her mouth softened. She looked past me toward the back acreage, toward the land she’d built everything on, and then she looked at me.
“Thank you.”
“Don’t thank me. Thank the Warrior Security team. Thank Lachlan.”
“I’m not thanking them right now.” She squeezed my hands. “I’m thanking you.”
I pulled her into me, and she came without resistance. She turned her face into my neck and her arms locked around my back, and I held her in the doorway of the barn she’d been guarding while the animals shifted and settled behind us.
Tova was just inside the barn door, tail going, nose pushing at my hand. Clarence offered a comment from his perch that would have made a sailor blush. Duchess stamped once in her stall because Duchess always needed the last word.
Lark laughed against my neck. Small and worn out and entirely her.
“Your animals are fine,” I said. “Every single one.”
She tightened her arms around me. “Of course they are. They had a team who had their backs.”
So had I.