Chapter Twelve
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Ryker grabbed his coat the second the line went dead.
Emma was already trying to call Charlotte back, phone pressed to her ear, moving toward the door. Her expression was tight, focused, but when she lowered the phone and shook her head, he didn’t need her to say it.
No answer.
She yanked her coat from the back of the chair and shrugged it on
“Jemma,” Ryker called over his shoulder as they passed, “we’re heading to the Ross family house. Possible intruder. Get backup rolling that way.”
Jemma nodded and reached for her radio as they hit the exit.
Ryker barely waited for the cruiser doors to shut before he had the engine running and peeled out of the lot. He didn’t know if this was a trap or if Charlotte had actually stumbled onto someone inside that house. But either way, they had to check it out. Now.
What he hated, what burned at him, was that Emma was being thrown right back into danger. She hadn’t even had time to fully shake off the explosion, let alone the text messages or the body dressed like him.
And now she was heading toward another possible ambush.
Ryker clenched the wheel tighter and pushed the accelerator harder as they cut across town. He knew the place. The old Ross house. He’d spent enough time there with Ethan over the years, barbecues, beers on the porch, late-night war stories, and lies and plans they’d never followed through on.
The house was on the east side, tucked into one of the older neighborhoods where the trees were tall and the yards were wide. Quiet. Familiar.
And now, maybe the center of everything.
Ryker eased off the gas as they turned onto the quiet street, the cruiser gliding past dark driveways and frosted lawns.
The neighborhood still looked like it had decades ago, wider streets, tall trees arching overhead, branches bare and rattling in the cold wind.
Most of the houses were brick or wood-paneled ranch styles, built in the seventies, solid and nondescript.
Then he spotted it.
The Ross house.
It was at the end of the block, slightly set back with a wraparound porch and faded gray shutters.
The lawn was overgrown, the flower beds stripped bare for winter, but it still had a kind of sturdy dignity to it.
Ryker’s gaze swept across the front windows, curtains drawn, no movement behind the glass.
Charlotte was pacing on the porch, arms wrapped around herself, her coat clearly too thin for the biting cold. She looked like a live wire, jittery, scanning the shadows, her breath fogging in quick bursts.
As soon as she saw the cruiser, she stopped and turned toward them, eyes wide and full of something between panic and relief.
Ryker rolled to a stop at the curb and threw it into park. “Let’s move,” he said, already opening his door.
He didn’t know what, or who, they were about to find inside.
Charlotte met them at the base of the porch steps, her arms still crossed tightly, shoulders hunched. “I silenced my phone,” she said before Ryker could ask. “I didn’t want whoever it was hearing it ring if they were upstairs or in the attic.”
Ryker nodded, eyes scanning the windows again. “Do you think they’re still inside?”
“I don’t know,” she whispered. “I didn’t actually hear anyone. I only saw the items that had been moved or were missing.”
Emma was already stepping past her, calm and focused, gun drawn low at her side. Ryker mirrored her, pulling his Glock from the holster, the weight familiar, centering.
The front door was unlocked.
Emma pushed it open first, and they slipped inside together, and he noticed that while Emma was keeping watch around them, she was also watching their backs. So was he. Because, after all, Charlotte was very much a suspect.
The scent of the house hit Ryker first, dust, dry wood, and the faintest trace of something floral, probably a long-forgotten air freshener plugged into the hallway outlet. The lights were off, but the sun filtered in through the thin curtains.
The living room was exactly how he remembered it.
Mismatched furniture, a battered coffee table, a framed high school football photo of Ethan that still sat on the mantle.
But something was off. A couch pillow on the floor.
The hallway rug bunched at one end. Subtle shifts, but enough to raise every internal alarm.
Emma moved ahead of him, clearing the corners, her steps nearly silent across the worn floorboards.
Ryker’s hand tightened on the grip of his weapon.
Upstairs was where the danger might be. And if someone was still inside, watching them, they were about to find out.
Charlotte followed them inside, hovering just behind as Ryker and Emma swept the living room and adjoining hallway. Her voice was thin but urgent.
“That picture used to be right there,” she said, pointing to a space on the wall between two sconces.
A faint outline of a frame was still visible in the dust. “I don’t let strangers rent this place.
Just friends of friends. Everything’s always been left exactly as it was. That photo’s been there for years.”
Ryker remembered it. Ethan and Emma, young, smiling, arms slung around each other like the world made perfect sense. It had been taken at some post-academy barbecue, maybe the only time Ryker had ever seen Ethan genuinely happy. Before everything got twisted.
Now the space where that memory had lived was just an empty patch of faded paint.
They continued sweeping through the downstairs, kitchen, guest bath, den. Nothing obvious had been taken. No drawers yanked open, no cabinets rifled through.
But Ryker saw the back door ajar.
He stepped closer, nudging it open with the toe of his boot. A gust of cold air slipped in. Beyond the porch, the grass was flattened in places, footprints heading toward the back gate.
He turned to Charlotte. “Anything else missing?”
She shook her head. “I don’t know. I-I didn’t go upstairs.”
Ryker exchanged a glance with Emma, then turned back to Charlotte. “Then stay down here. Living room, away from the windows.”
Charlotte hesitated, then nodded and backed toward the couch.
Ryker drew a breath and looked up the darkened stairwell.
Whatever was waiting up there, if anything, they were about to find out.
Ryker moved to the foot of the stairs. He kept his gun raised and his eyes were tracking the dark.
The hallway above was steeped in shadow. The light fixture overhead was off, and this part of the house didn’t catch much natural light even during the day. Now, with clouds thick outside, it felt like twilight had settled inside.
He called out, his voice firm. “Outlaw Ridge PD. If you’re here, make yourself known.”
Silence.
No creak of movement. No shift in shadow. Just the faint hum of the furnace and the thudding of his own pulse.
Emma took a position behind him, angled slightly, watching their backs as he started up. Second step. Third. The stairs groaned beneath their weight.
Then, as they hit the midpoint, a figure leaned out from the doorway directly in front of the landing.
Ryker barely registered the ski mask before the flash lit the hallway. Gunfire cracked.
He jerked sideways, the shot missing by inches.
“Down!” Ryker barked, already Emma and he were hurdling over the banister and landing on the bottom level floor.
The shooter vanished back into the room.
And now Ryker knew, Someone was still in the house. And they sure as hell weren’t running. They were fighting.
Charlotte screamed from the living room below, the sound high and sharp, cutting through the air like glass.
Ryker didn’t take his eyes off the stairwell as he shouted, “Charlotte, get out! Run up the street. Now!”
He heard her stumble, then the front door crashed open as she bolted outside.
Another shot rang out, splintering the wooden banister just above Emma’s head. Wood shards rained down the stairs. Ryker cursed and ducked back behind the wall, the heat from the shot still clinging to the air.
Everything in him tensed.
He hated this setup. Hated that Emma was on the other side of the stairs, crouched behind a slim sliver of cover. They were divided, cut in half, and if someone came through the front door or the back while they were pinned here, it would be an ambush waiting to happen.
More shots cracked through the hallway, echoing like hammer strikes in a drum. Ryker flattened against the wall, heart pounding, the wood beside his shoulder splintering from another hit.
From outside, he heard the low growl of a cruiser pulling up, backup.
His stomach dropped.
He didn’t know who was in that unit. Hayes? Jesse? Someone else? Whoever it was, they were walking into a damn hornet’s nest if they charged the house blind.
He yanked his phone from his pocket, fingers flying across the screen.
Shots fired inside. Armed suspect upstairs. Hold perimeter. Do not approach.
He hit send, the message firing off to dispatch.
Another round tore down the stairwell. He flinched back, then risked a quick lean to the side to catch a glimpse through the shadows.
And there, just for a flash, he saw him.
The shooter ducked behind the doorframe again, but Ryker caught enough.
Broad shoulders. Medium build. That same stiff-legged movement Ethan had when he was injured in training. Right height, same frame.
Could be Ethan.
Or it could be someone wearing a mask, trained to move like him, meant to look like him. Maybe it was a hired gun or stand-in. Either way, someone in that room wanted them dead.
Ryker wiped a streak of dust from his cheek and narrowed his eyes at the upstairs landing. The silence that followed the last burst of gunfire was taut, waiting, pulsing.
He took a breath and called out, voice sharp and carrying.
“You chickenshit coward. You won’t even show your face. You want to play soldier, but all you’ve got is shadows and ambushes?”
Nothing. Just stillness.
He pushed harder. “C’mon, Ethan. Or is that not you? Maybe you’re just some low-rent knockoff he hired to play the part.”
From across the stairwell, Emma caught the tone and picked up fast.
“This must be Ethan,” she said, her voice ice. “He was never brave enough to face me head-on. Always had to control things from the shadows. Never had the guts for a real fight.”
For a heartbeat, there was no response.
Then a guttural, feral sound tore from upstairs. A roar of rage.
“You’re dead meat!” the voice shouted.
And there was no mistaking it now. It was Ethan’s voice.
He burst from the doorway, face twisted beneath a ski mask, but the voice, the way he moved, it was him. And in both hands, pistols, already firing.
“Move!” Ryker barked, diving back behind the wall as rounds slammed into the stairwell, the banister, the walls. Shards of drywall sprayed like grit.
Emma hit the floor behind her cover on the opposite side, and Ryker could hear her breathing hard, her juts of breath matching his own.
They’d flushed him out.
But now came the storm.
“Damn it, Emma,” Ryker hissed under his breath as she leaned out from her cover, steadied her aim, and fired.
The shot cracked loud, sharp, and a half-second later, he heard it.
A grunt. The sickening sound of flesh taking a bullet. Then a stagger of boots against wood.
But before Ryker could shout a warning or move to take advantage, another sound cut through the air. Fast. Metallic.
Something clattering against the stairs.
Ryker’s blood turned ice cold. Because he knew what it was.
A grenade.
“Run!” he shouted.
He didn’t wait for confirmation, didn’t need it. He was already up, grabbing Emma by the arm as she bolted with him, both of them barreling down the hallway. Ryker slammed his shoulder into the doorframe as they charged outside, Emma on his heels.
The blast hit a second later.
The force of it shoved them both off their feet. The porch groaned under the pressure, windows shattered behind them, the sound swallowing the world in one violent burst of heat and noise.
Ryker hit the ground hard, rolled once, then lifted his head.
Smoke poured from the front door. The house trembled.
And somewhere behind that smoke… Ethan had vanished.
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