Chapter 3
CHAPTER THREE
The storm peaked around midnight.
The wind shifted from its sustained howl to something more irregular, gusting and releasing in patterns that suggested the system was moving through.
The snow still fell hard, but the whiteout had softened to something merely dangerous rather than lethal.
The tree line, invisible at eleven, was a dark suggestion again by one AM.
Mack noted it, adjusted his threat assessment, and returned to watching the window.
The cabin was quiet. The only sounds were the occasional creak of the structure settling against the wind and the almost inaudible sound of his own breathing, and if he let himself listen for it, the silence of a bedroom door that hadn’t opened since she’d closed it two hours ago.
He told himself he wasn’t listening for it.
He rolled the quarters across the knuckles of his left hand, slow and deliberate.
The cold had gotten into the scar tissue, a deep ache that started at the base of his thumb and radiated up toward his wrist. He’d learned years ago that the exercises helped more than anything.
Keeping the tissue moving was the difference between functional and locked up by morning.
He did them automatically now. Muscle memory working against muscle damage.
The engraving caught the low light as the quarter turned. He could still feel the letters if he pressed his thumb hard enough—he didn’t.
Sit rep, he told himself. Focus.
Weather: improving, still impassable. No vehicle movement would be possible on the backroads until at least noon. He and Alyssa were effectively sealed in, which meant whatever was coming couldn’t reach them. Yet.
Cartel response: hampered by the same blizzard. Their operatives in Missoula were grounded like everyone else. But they’d put a bounty on Lyss’s head. The $500,000 bounty would bring people eventually, but not tonight.
Blake: unknown location. Last confirmed at the party, where he’d contained the situation. Blake knew these mountains. Had spent summers here as a kid, the same as Alyssa. Would he brave the roads and come looking for her?
It was the problem with knowing your enemy too well. You started thinking in circles.
Blake won’t hurt her, and this, at least, he believed.
In all the ways Blake Bennett had proven himself capable of betrayal—of his team, his country, his own moral code—he had never harmed his sister.
Whatever twisted version of love Blake carried, it was genuine where she was concerned.
The cartel might order her death. Blake would find another way.
That wasn’t the threat Mack was worried about.
The threat was the conversation they’d eventually have to have—Alyssa and Blake.
Blake would explain himself with his charismatic certainty he’d always wielded like a weapon.
Blake had been talking Alyssa into things her whole life, convincing her that her own perception was wrong, that her instincts were overreactions, that the truth she’d seen with her own eyes was somehow not the truth.
She’s different now.
He set the quarters flat on the table. He’d been sitting with the information from Claire’s call for hours, which was long enough that the distance he’d constructed around it was starting to erode at the edges.
He went through it again, leaning on his training. Facts first.
Cartel operatives had hit Alyssa’s apartment at approximately two AM.
One fatality: Jenna Lopez, twenty-nine years old, elementary school teacher.
Cause of death: gunshot wound, single round, before a fire was set.
Accelerant had been used—deliberate, professional, intended to destroy evidence as much as eliminate the body.
The medical examiner’s preliminary finding suggested she’d died quickly, if that was worth anything, which Mack had learned over years of delivering this kind of information that it rarely was.
It was a horrible case of mistaken identity. The two women shared a similar build and coloring and lived in the same apartment.
The cartel had realized its mistake almost immediately. It hadn’t changed anything.
A bounty was formally posted through Sinaloa channels.
Mack hadn’t told her yet, wanting to give her one night without knowing the full scope of what her accidental bathroom run had landed her in.
He’d question that call once she was up.
Right now, it felt like the only merciful decision he’d made all evening.
FBI safe house: in progress. Forty-eight hours minimum. Claire had pushed for faster—he’d heard it in her voice even through the sat phone’s compression—but witness protection logistics didn’t bend for weather.
He’d filed all of it. Organized it the way he’d been trained, the way that let him absorb terrible information and still function.
Then he’d thought about Alyssa in the bathroom, voice deliberately quiet, leaving a message for someone already dead.
Lock the apartment door. Okay? Love you.
She’d called her roommate just a few hours before the attack, maybe less. Jenna had either been asleep or she’d gotten the message and not taken it seriously.
Or—and this was the one he couldn’t stop returning to—she’d heard it and hadn’t understood what it meant, because Alyssa had kept the message vague. Something happened tonight. Don’t worry.
He picked up the quarters. Set them back down. He had to be the one to tell her.
He’d made death notifications before. It was part of leading a team, the part nobody trained you adequately for.
He knew the language—specific, direct, with no softening that would delay understanding.
He knew to make eye contact, to say the person’s name, and to explain what had happened, rather than using euphemisms that made it easier on the speaker and harder on the listener.
He knew all of it. None of it would help when the time came.
Somewhere around four AM, the threat assessment stopped working.
He’d done it three times. Methodical, systematic, starting from the outermost perimeter and working inward.
Weather, cartel, Blake, roads, FBI timeline.
He had contingencies mapped for eight different scenarios.
He knew exactly what he’d do if the roads cleared faster than expected, if they didn’t clear at all, if cartel operatives found the cabin, if Blake made contact, if the FBI moved the safe house timeline.
Then he got to Alyssa. Status: sleeping. Location: his bedroom.
And his mind stayed there.
She was an unknown variable he couldn’t reduce to facts or strategize options for. Every time he tried, his mind strayed to her face, her eyes, that sexy voice, and his heart stuttered.
He hadn’t expected her to look the way she did. He wasn’t sure what he’d expected—he hadn’t let himself think about her, the theoretical someday of seeing her again. Thinking about it was its own particular torture.
She’d pushed back at him. That was the first thing he’d noticed, even in the middle of an active extraction with a cartel enforcer a few feet away.
The old Alyssa would have gone quiet and compliant the second he’d taken charge of the situation, would have smoothed herself into whatever shape the moment required. This one had argued with him.
I’m not going anywhere with you.
He’d wanted to shake her. He’d also, and this was the part he was least proud of, wanted to laugh.
Then, here at this table, she’d drawn his hands.
He hadn’t meant to look at the sketchbook—had glanced at it reflexively, the way he registered anything that moved in his peripheral vision—but he’d seen enough. The scar was rendered exactly right, the way it pulled at the base of his thumb, the quarters beside it.
She’d drawn him from memory a hundred times over his years of deployments, she’d told him once. She’d been keeping him present the only way she knew how.
He reached for the anger. It was usually reliable—the clean fury of choosing Blake over him, of watching her face when she’d said, he’s my brother, Mack, I can’t. Of not believing him, not even doubting Blake for a moment.
It was still there, but other things were behind it.
The way she’d fit against his chest in the hallway.
His arm had known exactly where to go, her body had known exactly how to settle, like the intervening time since their breakup was a technicality that didn’t apply to how they’d been built to stand together.
A sigh escaped his lips. He snapped them shut. He picked up the quarters and rolled them until his hand ached, and then rolled them some more.
At five AM, he called Garrett.
He’d been putting it off, which was unlike him and which he recognized as avoidance, which was also unlike him, which meant the evening had gotten under his skin in ways he’d deal with later.
Garrett answered on the second ring. “Claire called.” No preamble. Garrett never wasted words.
“I figured.”
“You want to tell me why you abandoned an active operation against direct instruction?”
Mack glanced out the window. “The civilian was going to get grabbed, interrogated, and killed.”
“And the FBI couldn’t handle it because—?”
Silence.
“Mack.”
“She’s Blake Bennett’s sister.”
The pause on the other end of the line was heavy.
Garrett Cross had been running Shadow Point Security with Dr. Vivi Montgomery since its inception.
She was the psychologist behind the scenes who’d once worked for the NSA.
Commander Cross had been a SEAL. The two of them had built it from a five-man operation into something that mattered, and Garrett had a particular talent for receiving information and saying nothing until he’d fully processed it.
It was one of the things that made him a good commander.
Right now, Mack found it profoundly inconvenient.
“I see,” Garrett said finally. That was it. Two words.