Chapter Eight
Chapter Seven
Marius
By the time I reach Briar Hollow, the night is already broken.
I know it before the gates come into view.
The road leading in has changed. Not visibly at first, not to anyone who hasn’t been taught to read disturbance the way other men read weather, but enough.
Mud is churned too hard along the shoulder.
Fresh tracks cut over older ones in confused layers.
One set veers too sharply near the outer fence line, where no vehicle should have been.
Another reverses hard near the drive as if the driver had to reposition in haste.
Mist clings low over the fields, silvering the dark and flattening distance.
My family has run roads like these too long for me to mistake what I’m seeing.
My great-grandfather came into these mountains with Dutch freight money, timber contracts, and men willing to do the work the law couldn’t or wouldn’t.
He built the respectable version of the business first, on paper and in public.
Trucking routes. Storage depots. Land. Fuel.
Timber rights. The real version he built underneath it, in debt, leverage, disappearances, and fear.
By the time my grandfather inherited it, the de Witt name sat in the bones of half the county.
Freight lines, repair yards, hunting parcels, warehouses, county officials who preferred order to truth, and enough local dependence to make resistance costly.
Men like to imagine organizations like mine as loud, vulgar things.
They’re not. They’re patient. They wear legitimacy well.
Until nights like this. Until someone makes the mistake of touching what sits too near us.
I take the last stretch faster than I prefer and stop hard enough to spit gravel. The porch light still burns. The house doesn’t. I’m out of the vehicle before the engine finishes settling. Willem moves behind me, silent and fast. Daan doesn’t. I stop for half a beat and turn, already irritated.
“Where is he?”
Willem doesn’t waste time softening it. “He didn’t check in tonight.”
My mouth hardens. Of course he didn’t. Daan has always mistaken usefulness for immunity.
He pushes when told to hold. Arrives late often enough to make it a habit rather than an accident.
Treats structure like something negotiable if he thinks the result will justify the breach.
On lesser nights I’ve tolerated it because he’s effective, and effective men are harder to replace than obedient ones.
But I’d already begun considering whether that balance had tipped too far, whether his instincts had stopped being an asset and started becoming rot. And tonight he chooses silence.
A cold irritation moves through me first. Then I look at the dark house, the lit porch, the yard already reading wrong from the road, and irritation hardens into something worse.
Not now. Not on this night. Because if Daan is merely late, I’ll deal with him later.
If he’s missing, then this breach runs deeper than I thought.
And if he’s decided to freelance inside my line while a woman under my watch is taken off her own land, I’ll put him in the ground myself.
“Find him,” I say.
Willem inclines his head once. “Already trying.”
Good. Because Leona gone and Daan dark on the same night isn’t coincidence. It’s spread.
The farm feels violently awake. Animals are unsettled in their enclosures, their agitation moving through the property in waves.
A bird shrieks from somewhere high in the barn rafters.
One of the horses strikes a fence rail hard enough to make it ring.
Farther back, one of the wolves lets out a low, sustained sound that would lift the hair along the back of another man’s neck.
I cross the yard quickly, eyes sweeping everything at once.
The side door is open. The grass and mud between the side porch and the north fence are torn up by running feet.
Glass glitters around the broken mudroom window. No body. Not here.
I mount the porch steps in two strides and enter through the splintered back entrance.
The dogs are shut in a room off the hall, frantic and hoarse from barking.
One launches itself against the door until Willem moves to secure it.
The house smells of cold air, wet earth, spilled tea, gun oil, and panic.
I stop once in the kitchen and let the room speak.
A mug abandoned on the counter. Tea gone cold.
A chair shoved back too quickly. The overhead light off on purpose.
Her phone missing. The moment arranges itself almost immediately in my mind.
She heard something. She made a decision.
She chose darkness and movement over waiting to be cornered. She wasn’t passive. Good.
My gaze lands on the pantry door hanging slightly open.
The shotgun is gone. My jaw tightens. I turn and head back into the yard, following the shape of what happened rather than the obvious route.
The grass tells the rest. A sliding mark in the wet ground.
A heel dragged hard enough to gouge. One patch of mud is crushed deeper behind the outer pens, where someone heavier planted his boots and braced to control a resisting body.
Then I see the shotgun lying half hidden near the fence line.
I bend, pick it up, and check the chamber automatically.
Recently fired. I straighten slowly. The fury moving through me is so clean it almost feels like cold.
Willem calls from near the back service gate. “Here.”
I go to him. A spent shell glints in the mud.
Nearby, the ground gives up more of the story.
A heel mark twisted sharply into the earth.
Two deeper grooves where a body was lifted or dragged.
Not far from that, something darker stains the fence post. Blood.
Not much. Head wound, perhaps. Split skin. She was alive when they moved her.
Willem crouches near the disturbed ground by the gate. “Vehicle was waiting off the back service track. At least one SUV, maybe older suspension. Three men, possibly four.”
“Possibly?”
“Driver may never have left the vehicle.”
My gaze tracks the route outward through the trees, already mapping it against the roads beyond, the abandoned access cuts, the old service lines through state land and disused county roads. I know exactly how far behind I am. Not long. Long enough.
No Daan. No update. No call. On another night I might have let that sit for an hour before deciding whether to punish it. Tonight it folds into the scene in front of me until I can no longer separate negligence from betrayal. I say nothing for several seconds.
“Find the dart,” I say quietly.
Willem glances up. “You think they sedated her?”
My eyes stay on the ground. “She fired once. There’s no second shot. No blood trail suggesting they carried her unconscious from blunt trauma. If she fought, and she fought, they needed speed.”
He stands and begins scanning outward with renewed precision.
I move farther along the yard, slower now, letting my eyes rake every inch.
Lantern logic. Human logic. Predator logic.
There. A tiny plastic cap near the edge of the grass.
I bend and pick it up between thumb and forefinger.
Injection cover. My hand closes around it once, hard enough to bite plastic into skin.
Not dead, I tell myself. Not yet.
A colder thought follows immediately. If they wanted her dead, they could’ve done it here.
Which means she was taken for a reason. That should help.
It doesn’t. Because reasons extend suffering.
Reasons create time in which men begin to believe they have rights over what they’ve stolen.
They threaten. Pressure. Use. Break. And Leona, with her sharp green eyes and spine of iron and refusal to yield even when strategy demands it, won’t make captivity easy.
That thought would fill another man with admiration.
In me, it mixes with dread until both become something ruthless.
Willem returns first. “Dart casing found by the fence. Fast-acting veterinary sedative, likely transferred by hand syringe or short injector. Crude dosage.”
“Can you confirm?”
“Not yet. But enough to drop weight quickly.”
Weight. I hate the clinical shape of the word in this context.
Willem’s phone buzzes. He checks it, listens for two seconds, then looks up. “County patrol passed the road twenty minutes before the grab. Sheriff’s office has no active report yet.”
So she either told no one, or not the right person, or not soon enough. I look toward the house once. I see her there too easily. Standing at the sink. Lights off. Listening. Realizing too late that instinct wasn’t paranoia. My body goes still in a way my men recognize and don’t interrupt.
I should’ve moved her.
The thought arrives ugly and immediate. I should’ve ignored my own instinct about her defiance and overridden it with force.
I should’ve put her somewhere secure until the breach in my line was contained.
I should’ve accepted her hatred as collateral and kept her alive through it.
Instead, I respected her autonomy like a man pretending he still lives in a world where respect protects anything.