Chapter 45
Blue Skye ranch has always felt wrong to me.
Too quiet. Too pristine. Like a house that knows it’s lying.
We crest the last rise as dusk bleed into night, the headlights cutting across the familiar sprawl of land—and my gut twists hard.
“That’s not right,” John mutters from the driver’s seat.
He’s right.
The main lights are on, bright and careless, but the front door hands wide open, yawning black against the porch like a mouth mid-scream. No trucks. No hands. No dogs. No movements anywhere on the property.
The Richard never leaves his door open. Ever.
John kills the engine without pulling all the way into the drive. Old habit. Old rules. We step together, guns drawn, boots crunching softly on the gravel that should be busy with evening ranch duties.
Silence presses in.
“Spread,” I murmur into my collar. “Check barns and outbuildings. Quiet.”
Men peel off into the dark, shadows moving like muscle memory. Ace, John, and I stay together as we move up the porch steps, every instinct I have screaming that we’re already too late for something—I’m not sure what.
The door creaks when I push it.
Inside, I’m greeted with a thick scent. Something metallic and thick that is sweet in the back of my throat.
Blood.
Ace feels it too. I see it in the way his shoulders tense.
“Jesus,” he breathes.
The foyer is immaculate. No signs of struggle. No overturned furniture. No panic. Just a dark smear trailing across the hardwood like someone tried, and failed, to walk it off.
We follow it.
The study is at the back of the house.
Richard Masterson is slumped behind his desk, chair tipped back at an awkward angle, eyes staring sightless at the ceiling. His throat is opened ear to ear, clean and precise. No rage. No chaos.
Execution.
The blood has soaked into the rug beneath him, long enough now that it’s gone tacky and dark. He didn’t fight. Didn’t run. Whoever did this wanted him dead and wanted it quiet.
Ace swears under his breath. “Who the fuck—”
“Laurel,” I say flatly. She’s the only one who could have done this. The only one he would have trusted to be at his back so openly.
John’s eyes widen as he looks at me. “You think she—”
“It’s the only scenario that makes sense.” I crouch, scanning the room. No broken glass. NO shell casings. No forced entry. “He looks as if he was going about his normal business.”
My jaw tightens until it aches.
Richard Masteron was a weak man when it came to his wife, but he was loyal to my father. Loyal to the old ways. Loyal enough that he would’ve never moved against the family. It looks like whatever his wife is up to, she didn’t need him anymore.
I straighten slowly, rage coiling low and lethal in my chest.
“This isn’t panic, either,” I continue. “This is cleanup.”
John nods grimly.
“So, where the fuck is everyone?” Ace wonders.
“I’m guessing some of the ranch hands worked for her and those that didn’t were most likely sent home.”
Or worse.
My phone vibrates in my hand before I can finish the thought. One of my men outside.
“Boss,” the voice says tightly through the speakerphone. “I’ve got a barn full of bodies here.”
Worse it is.
Laurel Masterson doesn’t like to leave loose ends it seems.
“She’s accelerating,” Ace states as we head back onto the porch. “Richard dead means she’s cutting anyone who could slow her down.”
“She still needs something,” I growl. “This can’t all be purely to get to Peyton. She could have done that at anytime.”
Peyton.
Her name burns through me like a brand.
She took Peyton because she can be used as leverage. Against me. Against John. Against my father.
Fuck, Laurel can use her against the entire fucking family because she knows I will go to hell and back for Peyton.
Headlights flare in the drive.
I turn as a familiar black SUV rolls to a stop, gravel spitting beneath the tires. The door to the back opens and my father stops out, posture rigid, expression carved from stone.
He takes in the open door, armored men, and the tension in the air before his gaze snaps to mine.
“How bad?” he asks.
I don’t soften it.
“Richard is dead,” I tell him. “Throat slit. Laurel’s gone.”
My father exhales slowly, like he is bracing against something he’s known was coming for a long time.
“So she finally made her move.”
“You knew?” I snap, anger flaring hot. “You fucking knew she was a traitor?”
My father’s eyes harden. “I had my suspicions,” he admits coldly. “But nothing I could ever fully prove.”
John crosses his arms against his chest and stares down the man who has been his best friend since childhood. “She has my daughter.”
He closes his eyes for a brief moment, a crack in his armor, then opens them again, steel reforged.
“She won’t kill her,” he says firmly. “Not yet.”
“No,” I agree. “She wants something.”
“Money,” my father informs me. “When Sadie ran all those years ago, she took at least a million from her mother’s family trust.”
I step closer, lowering my voice. “How do you know that?”
He meets my stare, father to son, power to power.
“Because I helped her take it,” he admits, his voice softening as he glances over at John. “I’m the one who gave her access to the trust and helped her run.”
A growl releases itself from deep inside John’s chest.
“Why the hell would you do that?” John roars angrily.
My father doesn’t flinch at John’s anger. That alone tells me how deep this goes.
“Because Laurel would have killed her,” he says quietly. “And Peyton.”
The air thickens around us. Even the men on the perimeter go still, like prey sensing a predator shift its weight.
John steps forward, rage rolling off him in waves. “You’re telling me you knew Sadie was pregnant when she ran? You helped her? That you must have known Laurel helped her and you let her walk free inside of our family all this time?”
“I didn’t let her,” my father snaps back, finally letting steel creep into his voice. He rarely pulls command with John, but I am seeing it now. “I watched her. I limited her reach. I kept her contained as best I could without starting a war I wasn’t prepared to finish.”
“Is Sadie the one who killed Emma?” John asks with a snarl.
I turn to my father, eyes widening. He’s never told me the specifics of what went on between Sadie and John all those years ago. I was a kid and he always said it was on the past.
“No,” my father sighs. “I believe it was Laurel. Everything between you and Sadie, from the beginning, has been Laurel manipulating her daughter to gain control.”
The words land hard. Final. Irrevocable.
“You let her kill my wife, then?”
My father’s jaw tightens. “No. I had no idea Laurel would do anything like that. The most I thought she was capable of was manipulation, not full-blown murder.”
John laughs, sharp and broken. “Emma’s dead, Hudson. Sadie’s dead. Sutton was almost killed today. My daughter is missing because of that woman. Explain to me why I shouldn’t be placing the blame on you.”
I step between them before John does something he can’t take back. Not because he isn’t justified, but because despite them being friends, my father is still the one in charge.
And we don’t have time for their bickering.
“Enough,” I bark. “You can tear each other apart later. Right now, Peyton is alive because Laurel needs her breathing. The second that changes, we’re all too late.”
That pulls John up short. His fists clench at his sides, knuckles white, chest heaving.
My father exhales slowly. “Sadie came to me the night she decided to run,” he admits, quieter now.
“I was about to kill her. Put a bullet in her head for what she did to you, but…she told me everything. How Laurel had Emma’s car crash look like an accident.
About what she had been forcing Sadie to do since she was a child.
About being pressured, controlled, and threatened. She was terrified.”
John’s face twists. “She could have told me.”
“No,” Hudson disagrees. “Laurel convinced her you wouldn’t believe her. She isolated her. Told her that the only one you’d ever protect was your wife and kids. Your family. That you’d destroy her before you’d listen. Like I almost did.”
That one hits John square in the chest.
“And she might not have been wrong,” Hudson adds softly. “You loved Emma. You trusted Laurel. We all did. None of us saw what was happening right under our nose. Even after Sadie came forward, I didn’t have enough to take to Richard about Laurel. I had to wait.”
John drags a hand through his hair, breath ragged. “So you helped Sadie steal the money?”
“I helped her take back what Laurel was already bleeding dry,” Hudson corrects.
“That money was never Laurel’s. It was her families trust to us when she was arranged to marry Richard.
She has no solitary claim over it. I helped Sadie disappear.
New name. New trail. I thought if she vanished completely, Laurel would eventually give up. ”
“She didn’t,” I say flatly.
“No,” Hudson agrees. “She waited. Like a cancer.”
Ace clears his throat. “Then why now? Why kill everyone? Take Peyton after all this time?”
My father’s eyes flick to the barn in the distance, where body bags are already being hauled out under floodlights.
Our men. It weighs heavy on my heart at the thought of our men being gutted like pigs because of that snake of a bitch.
I can see the heaviness reflected in my father’s eyes as well.
The burden he carries for their lives and the families they have been forced to leave behind.
“Because Sadie set the money up for Peyton in a trust,” he says. “I think Laurel sent someone to get the information from Sadie but didn’t succeed. Or didn’t want her to know they succeeded. She most likely doesn’t know what Sadie did which means—”
“The only person left to link to the money is Peyton,” I finish.
My father nods. “Sadie was careful. She moved it in pieces. Laundered it and then set it up in a trust. Peyton doesn’t know anything about it as far as I can tell.”
John’s voice cracks. “So Peyton’s going to what…be tortured for answers she doesn’t have?”
The thought lights something violent in my chest.
My father looks at me then. Not as his son. Not as his heir. But as a weapon he helped forge.
“Laurel will move fast now,” he says. “She knows the bodies will be found. Knows I’ll come for her. She’ll head somewhere isolated. Somewhere she still controls.”
“Where?” John demands.
I already know.
“The old processing warehouses of County Nine,” I say. “Her family used them years ago to move money and cattle under the table for us. It’s off-grid. Shielded. Easy to lock down.”
Ace nods. “It’s the one place that makes sense and it is one I had on my list to narrow down.”
John turns to me, eyes blazing. “We’re going to bring my daughter home alive,” he says, voice shaking with restraint. “Or I burn everything.”
I don’t hesitate.
“That was my plan.”
I turn, already issuing orders into my comm. Vehicles spin to life. Men move. The night erupts into motion.
Peyton is out there, waiting for me.
And Laurel Masterson has no idea what she unleashed.