Chapter 3 #2
My sedan sits where I left it, untouched in the cut in the brush.
I slide behind the wheel and start the engine, and my hands are trembling from the adrenaline still flooding my system.
The drive back to town takes less than twenty minutes, and I check my mirrors constantly the entire way. No one follows me.
At the safe house, I lock the door and check every window before I let myself breathe. My phone shows no missed calls and no texts.
I pull out the rounds I pocketed and line them up on the kitchen table. Seven total, all with identical headstamps. Evidence that the gun-running routes through the Hill Country are operational again.
My burner phone rings. Uncle Robert.
"You made contact?"
"Cartel enforcers tried to kill me at the Pritchard ranch." The words come out flat and factual. "Six of them."
"Are you hurt?"
"No. Someone intervened. A sniper, positioned several hundred yards out on the western ridge. They dropped four of them. Only two made it to a vehicle and escaped."
Uncle Robert is quiet for a moment. "Did you see who it was?"
"No. The distance was too great and they stayed concealed the entire time." I pause, weighing how much to share and how much to hold back. "But I think it might have been Jesse Hollister."
Another silence. "What makes you say that?"
"The skill level. The knowledge of the terrain.
And my gut." The admission costs me something I can't quite name.
"The bartender I spoke with last night brought him up when I was asking questions about the area.
She said things have been quiet around here since he came back to town a couple of years ago.
" I let out a slow breath. "I don't have proof.
Just pieces that feel like they fit together. "
"Your gut isn't evidence, Raven. What else do you have?"
"Nothing concrete. The skill level, the timing, and the fact that he's the only person in this area who fits the profile." I exhale slowly. "I know it's thin."
A longer pause than I'm comfortable with. "What did you find at the ranch before they showed up?"
"The barn was cleaned out completely, but there's a storm cellar behind it with empty shipping crates and military ammunition. 5.56 NATO rounds. It points to the Pritchard property being used as a transfer point for weapons moving north."
"Tom refused to cooperate," Uncle Robert says quietly. "That's why they killed him." He says it as a statement, not a question, which tells me he has intelligence he hasn't shared with me yet.
"There are others, aren't there?"
"Tom wasn't the first. Three other ranchers have died under suspicious circumstances in the last eighteen months. All of them were ruled accidents by local law enforcement. All of their properties were sold off quickly afterward."
"They're taking over the ranches again. The same playbook Bo Hollister used."
"And eliminating anyone who won't fall in line. The cartel is rebuilding their infrastructure piece by piece, using the old routes through the Hill Country." He pauses. "You need to be more careful than you were today, Raven."
"Send me everything you have on the other three ranches."
"It's already on its way. Keep investigating, but from this point forward I want you operating under the assumption that you're being tracked.
The cartel knows someone is poking around their operation now, and after today they'll be looking for whoever that is.
" Urgency sharpens his voice. "Be smart about your next moves.
Find out who's coordinating this thing on the ground.
Get me names, locations, and evidence I can use.
Then we bring in federal support and shut the whole pipeline down the right way. "
"Alvarez is dirty, Uncle Robert. If we go to the feds through normal channels, he'll know about it within hours."
"Then we work around him. But none of that matters until you have actionable intelligence to bring to the table.
" A pause, and then his voice softens. "And Raven?
Don't try to confront Jesse Hollister. If it really was him behind that rifle today, let him keep watching your back from the shadows.
Right now, you need him alive and in your corner more than you need answers about the past."
The line goes dead before I can respond.
I set the phone down and stare at the loose rounds lined up on the kitchen table. Jesse Hollister is out there somewhere, watching. I'm as certain of that as I am of anything right now.
I pull out the burner phone and transfer the photos from the Pritchard ranch onto my laptop.
The storm cellar, the empty crates, the ammo can with its stenciled markings.
I organize them methodically into a digital file with timestamps and detailed notes about what I found and where I found it, then make sure everything is backed up to the cloud in case something happens to me or the laptop.
I open a new document and start mapping everything I know. Four ranchers dead in eighteen months. All of them ruled accidental. All of their properties sold quickly after death.
This is bigger than one ranch or one dead man. I just need to find out whether the other three victims Uncle Robert mentioned follow the same pattern.
I close the laptop and head for the bedroom, leaving my Glock on the kitchen table. I'm halfway down the hall when three sharp knocks echo through the safe house.
I freeze. Nobody knows I'm here except Uncle Robert.
The knocks come again, louder and more insistent.
I backtrack to the kitchen and pick up my Glock, checking the magazine out of reflex. Fifteen rounds. I move to the front door and press my eye to the peephole.
A man stands on the small porch, backlit by the streetlight.
He's tall and broad through the shoulders, wearing a dark jacket.
His face is angled downward and mostly in shadow, but something about the way he carries himself, the absolute stillness, the controlled patience of someone who could stand there for hours without shifting his weight, makes my throat constrict.
I know that posture. I've seen it in my nightmares for ten years.
My hand reaches for the deadbolt before my conscious mind catches up to what my body is doing. The lock turns with a soft click and I swing the door open.
Jesse Hollister is standing three feet away from me.
The streetlight catches his face. He's older than the man who dragged me away from Uncle Martin, harder, with deep lines bracketing his mouth and silver threaded through his dark hair at the temples.
Scars I don't remember mark his jaw and trail downward beneath his collar.
His pale blue eyes are colder than the ones I remember, flatter, as though something vital was carved out of him somewhere along the way and never grew back.
But it's him. The same man who, just hours ago, killed four cartel enforcers from a ridgeline to keep me alive.
He doesn't speak, doesn't move. He just watches me with that intense gaze that sees far too much and gives back nothing at all.
Heat floods through me, sudden and completely unwanted.
It's the same heat that hits me in the dreams I would never admit to having.
Those pale eyes burning into mine, his rough hands pinning my wrists, the weight of him heavy against me.
I always wake up gasping and furious with myself, because wanting Jesse Hollister is the one thing I can never justify.
Rage arrives half a second behind it, white-hot and clarifying.
This is the man who dragged me away from my uncle while gunfire split the night. And now he's standing on my doorstep as though saving my life today somehow erases the decade of grief that came before it.
My fingers tighten around the Glock. His gaze drops to the weapon, registers it without any visible reaction, and then returns to my face. Still no words or explanation. No apology.
That steady, unblinking stare sends my pulse hammering and brings the blood rushing to the surface of my skin, and my hands want to do two completely opposite things at the same time. Pull the trigger or grab him by the collar and drag him inside.
I hate him. I want him. And I cannot tell which one of those things is going to destroy me first.