Chapter 10 #2
Raven thumbs the safety on and lowers the rifle, turning to face me fully. The shift from target shooter to operative happens in the span of a breath. "About?"
"Javier Alvarez."
The color leaves her face in stages. "My supervisor?"
"Former supervisor." I nod toward the fallen log at the edge of the clearing. "Sit down."
"I'm fine standing." Her jaw sets hard enough that I can see the muscle working beneath the skin. "Tell me."
I pull up the surveillance photos and turn the screen toward her. "Alvarez is in Fredericksburg. These were taken yesterday."
Raven steps closer, her eyes narrowing on the screen.
The first photo fills the display. Alvarez outside a warehouse, gray hair swept back, wearing a suit that costs more than a federal supervisor's salary should allow.
He's talking to two men in designer jeans and leather jackets, watches that catch the light even in a grainy surveillance photo.
Cartel money, cartel posture, cartel confidence.
"When was this taken?"
"Yesterday afternoon. Your uncle's team has been tracking cartel movement in the area. They spotted Alvarez at the warehouse and followed him from there."
I swipe to the next photo. Different angle, same meeting. Alvarez is gesturing with one hand, making a point, and the cartel enforcers are listening with the kind of focused attention that men only give to a person they consider an equal.
"Your uncle's team photographed him meeting with known cartel members." I keep my voice level and let the facts do the work. "He's not being careful, which means he's either confident in his protection or desperate enough to stop covering his tracks."
Raven stares at the screen. Her breathing has gone shallow, but her eyes are moving across every detail in the frame the way mine did twenty minutes ago—cataloging faces, clothing, body language, exits.
I swipe to the next photo. "Same day. Different location."
Alvarez at a roadside diner, caught in profile with a coffee cup halfway to his lips. The man sitting across from him wears a tan sheriff's uniform with a star badge visible on the chest pocket.
Raven's breath catches. Her hand wraps around my wrist to steady the phone, and her knuckles go white against my skin.
"Sheriff Harlan," I say.
Her voice comes out level when she speaks, and the control it takes to manage that is visible in the rigid line of her shoulders. "Well. That leaves very little doubt."
I nod. "Your uncle confirmed the ID. Body language between them reads comfortable. Familiar. This wasn't a first meeting."
I zoom in. Alvarez has his elbows on the table, leaning forward. Harlan's set his coffee down, hands folded, listening with the patience of a man hearing an update rather than receiving instructions for the first time.
"How long?" Raven's voice has dropped low enough that I have to lean in to hear her over the wind. "How long has this been going on?"
"Your uncle doesn't know yet. Probably years."
She takes the phone from my hand and pulls it closer, her fingers swiping through the photos again. Warehouse, enforcers, diner, Harlan. Back to the warehouse. Back to the diner. She's searching for a detail that will rearrange the picture into one that doesn't mean what she already knows it means.
"Alvarez signed off on every operation I ran.
" Her voice is quiet and precise, each word placed with the care of a woman dismantling her own history in real time.
"Every briefing. Every debriefing. Every piece of intel that went up the chain.
" Her eyes lock on the photo of Alvarez with the cartel enforcers.
"He knew where I was. Who I was meeting. What evidence I was collecting."
"Yes."
"And he's meeting with the cartel now." Her voice stays flat, clinical. "Morrison tried to kill me, and my supervisor is in Fredericksburg drinking coffee with a dirty sheriff and shaking hands with the people who ordered my death."
"That's your uncle's assessment. The photos support it."
Raven hands the phone back to me. Every line of her body has gone rigid, her weight balanced on the balls of her feet like she's bracing for impact.
"Sheriff Harlan." Her voice has dropped to a murmur. "The same sheriff who ruled every rancher death in this county accidental."
"Yes."
Her gaze tracks across the tree line where her targets hang in tatters, and I can see the connections forming behind her eyes, each one clicking into place like tumblers in a lock. "How deep does this go, Jesse? How many people knew where I was?"
I don't answer that. Can't give her a number without speculating beyond the evidence we have, and she deserves facts, not guesswork.
I step closer and wait.
Raven stands motionless for a long count. Then her shoulders drop from where they've been pinned up near her ears, and when she turns to face me, her eyes have gone hard and bright with the kind of focus that burns through grief without stopping to acknowledge it.
"I trusted him." The words come out level and deliberate, each one costing more than she's willing to show.
"Alvarez was the first person who took me seriously when I joined ATF.
He mentored me. He pushed me toward undercover work because he said I had the instincts for it.
" She holds my gaze without flinching. "And now he's here, meeting with the people who want me dead. "
"Yes."
"Morrison I can almost understand. Fear, greed, whatever broke him." She shakes her head slowly. "But Alvarez?"
She needs space to process a betrayal that runs this deep, and I'm not going to fill the silence with platitudes she'd see right through.
"Every operation I ran, Jesse. Every risk I took.
He knew exactly where I was and what I was doing.
" Her voice holds steady, but the tendons in her neck stand out like cables under the strain of keeping it there.
"Morrison had access to all of it too. My partner and my supervisor, both compromised.
How long was I walking around with a target on my back while they smiled at me across a briefing table? "
"You survived because you were useful," I say. "Alive, you fed them intel. Dead, you were a liability and an investigation. They kept you operational until you stopped being worth the risk."
Raven's jaw tightens. Good. Anger is more useful than grief right now, and she's smart enough to know it.
"Everyone I trusted has turned out to be a lie," she says. "Alvarez. Morrison. The sheriff who's supposed to protect this county." Her eyes find mine. "Everyone except..."
She doesn't finish. Doesn't need to.
Everyone except the man with blood on his hands and no illusions about what he's capable of. The one person left in her life who hasn't lied about who he is, what he's done, or what he wants.
"What do you need?" I ask.
Raven picks up the rifle and checks the chamber with practiced hands, then looks back at me. The grief is still there, buried deep behind her eyes, but what's sitting on the surface is cold and precise and operational.
"I need to burn through the rest of this ammunition." Her thumb settles against the safety. "Then I need you to help me figure out how to make Alvarez answer for what he's done."
I can work with that.
"Take your time. Burn through whatever you need to." I hold her gaze long enough to make sure she hears the next part. "Then we go inside and start planning."
Raven nods once and turns back toward her targets. I head for the cabin and leave her to the rifle reports and the controlled violence of sending rounds downrange, because she's earned the right to tear those targets apart and I'm not going to take that from her.
Inside, I pull up Carmichael's encrypted files on the laptop and start building a tactical picture.
Alvarez in Fredericksburg with cartel connections confirmed.
Sheriff Harlan tied to him through a diner meeting that looked anything but casual.
Morrison dead on warehouse concrete with Holt's bullets in his chest. And Raven Bishop standing in my clearing with a rifle and a list of enemies that keeps getting longer.
The pieces are assembling on the board, but the full pattern hasn't revealed itself yet.
Alvarez coordinating with Harlan points to local infrastructure—the sheriff provides cover, makes investigations disappear, keeps federal attention diverted from the pipeline.
Alvarez feeds intel from inside ATF, identifies threats before they become operational problems, and neutralizes them through people like Morrison who are close enough to the target to make it look like an accident or a line-of-duty casualty.
It's a clean setup. The kind that runs for years without detection as long as everyone holds their position and nobody gets greedy or sloppy.
Carmichael is playing his own game in all of this, and I'd be a fool not to account for that.
He's using us to draw out the cartel's leadership, expose the network, and gather enough evidence for a takedown that burns the entire operation to ash.
But Carmichael's endgame requires keeping Raven alive only as long as she's useful as bait.
The moment she stops serving that purpose, his calculus shifts, and sentiment won't factor into whatever decision he makes next. Even if it’s his own niece.
Knox and Beckett will back whatever play I call, but they're exposed at Devil's Acre. The cartel is already watching the ranch and learning their routines. If this operation goes sideways, my brothers become leverage, and that's a vulnerability I can't afford to leave unaddressed.
Raven is the variable I can't model. She wants Alvarez held accountable, and I don't fault her for it.
But the desire for justice gets people killed when it overrides tactical patience, and the line between accountability and recklessness gets thin when the betrayal is this personal.
She's disciplined. She's trained. She's competent in ways that keep surprising me.
But she's also invested in the outcome at a level that bends judgment, and she won't see the bend until it's too late unless I'm watching for it.
I need to keep her focused. Keep her alive. And find a way to dismantle the cartel's operation without getting all of us buried in the process.
Every person she trusted has turned out to be a weapon aimed at her back. Except for me. And I'm the most dangerous one of all. Not because I'd betray her, but because I'd burn the world down to keep her breathing, and that kind of blind spot gets operators killed.