The SEAL and the Sheriff (Alaskan Guardians #4)

Chapter 1

Hudson Kane spotted the tail outside Fairbanks.

A black SUV holding its distance. Three cars back in steady traffic, leaving a wider gap whenever the traffic thinned.

Forty minutes confirmed it wasn’t a coincidence.

His travel plans weren’t public, but someone knew he was heading to Aurora Cove anyway and had decided that was a problem worth resourcing.

Hudson filed that away and kept driving.

The Smithton intersection appeared ahead—the last crossroads before the highway narrowed and his options ran out. Left led toward town. Right took him onto an old access road through the forest.

Three hundred yards out, Hudson signaled left.

The SUV did the same.

At the last possible moment, Hudson braked hard and swung right onto the access road. The rental protested, but the SUV was already committed to the left turn toward Smithton. Brake lights flared red in the gray afternoon as the driver realized what had happened.

By the time they corrected, Hudson was under the trees, the access road closing around the car like a hand.

Half a mile in, he passed a narrow logging spur disappearing between the spruce. The access road dead-ended at an abandoned weigh station two hundred yards farther on—no other way out.

Perfect.

He turned the rental around, drove back to the spur, and reversed into it until the trees concealed the car.

From there, he could see the road without being seen. He killed the engine and waited, thumbs tapping against the steering wheel.

Four minutes later, the SUV eased down the access road at a crawl, headlights probing the tree line. It rolled past the logging spur without slowing, taillights dissolving into the gray.

He gave it ninety seconds.

Reverse lights glowed white through the trees. A moment later, headlights swept across the spruce as the driver turned around.

Hudson started the rental and pulled out of the spur without hurrying. He met them nose to nose, sixty yards out, and stopped dead in the center of the track. The SUV lurched to a stop, rocking on its springs.

For a second, nothing moved. The two vehicles sat nose to nose in the dying light, engines idling.

Hudson was out of the car before the SUV’s engine died. The cold hit his lungs, sharp and immediate. He walked toward them, hands loose at his sides, boots crunching over frozen stones.

His pursuers broke in opposite directions.

The one on the left had a head start and used it, crashing off the road into the spruce, branches whipping shut behind him. Hudson let him go. The other made it four steps.

Hudson caught a fistful of jacket, stepped across the man’s path and redirected his momentum into the nearest pine. His back hit the trunk, driving the breath from his lungs. Wide-eyed, he stared at Hudson.

Hudson leaned in until they were almost eye to eye. “Let’s talk about who sent you.”

The man’s hand flew inside his jacket. Hudson caught his wrist, drove it back against the tree, and stripped the pistol from beneath his coat before he could draw it. He dropped the magazine into his palm and ejected the chambered round.

“Looking for this?”

“What the fuck? You’re making a mistake.” The man’s words came too fast, tripping over each other. “You don’t know who you’re?—”

“I know exactly who I’m dealing with.” He leaned a fraction closer. “A guy whose partner ditched him the second things went wrong.”

Color came up the man’s neck, anger chasing out the fear. “Screw you. You think this is over? You think?—”

“I think you’re going to tell me who sent you.”

“Go to hell.”

Hudson waited. Most men filled silence if you let it breathe. The man lasted eighteen seconds.

“I don’t know what?—”

“Contact,” Hudson said. “A number, an app. A guy in a bar. However it came to you. Who paid you to sit on me all the way from Fairbanks?”

“I don’t—” The man recalculated. “It was a broker. Some guy online. We do repo work, skip tracing, whatever pays. Job comes in, we don’t ask who’s behind it.”

It had the ugly, unglamorous ring of truth. Cutouts. Layers designed so a conversation like this one would dead-end exactly here.

“Description.”

The man shook his head.

“Payment method? Anything?”

“Crypto. Guy never showed his face, some blocked number texted coordinates and a photo of you.” Sweat beaded his forehead despite the cold. “That’s it. That’s everything, man, I swear to God.”

Nothing shifted in the man’s expression or voice. Either it was the truth or he was a better liar than he looked. Hudson was betting on the former. It was the smart way to run an op. He straightened. Just another locked door, and Aurora Cove was still hours up the road.

Quickly, he searched the man. Wallet. Cash. A gym membership card. A driver’s license that was probably genuine—men this disposable rarely bothered with good fake IDs. Hudson photographed the license before returning the wallet. Keys. A rental fob. Nothing useful.

But inside an inner jacket pocket, he found a second phone. Cheap. Prepaid. One you bought with cash at a gas station and threw in a lake when you were done with it. Hudson powered it on. The screen opened without a passcode. Sloppy.

One conversation.

Confirm location by 1800.

No contact name or photo. Just a string of numbers that would be dead by morning. The message was unread, which meant whoever had sent it still thought Hudson Kane was somewhere out on the highway, blissfully unaware he was being followed.

An arrest would buy him a low-level contractor, hours of paperwork and an official record of his arrival. Whoever had hired them would disappear long before Hudson reached Aurora Cove.

The phone disappeared into Hudson’s pocket along with the magazine. He tossed the empty pistol on the SUV’s front seat. “Go find your partner.” He stepped aside. “And next time, send professionals.”

The man didn’t argue. He took off.

The sign for Aurora Cove appeared at the side of the road, dented and worn. The road narrowed, hemmed in by spruce and bare birch beneath a pewter sky. Snow was banked along both sides.

He could have driven this road blindfolded.

He and Wyatt had driven it a hundred times before either of them knew enough to be afraid.

Dirt bikes. Frozen lakes. Wind in his face.

Wyatt laughing somewhere behind him, damn near falling off his bike.

Bad decisions that had somehow never caught up with them. It felt like someone else’s life.

The town emerged in familiar pieces—the gas station, the hardware store, Benji’s diner with a fresh coat of paint. Everything else looked exactly the same. Hudson wasn’t sure whether that was comforting or cruel.

The folder lay untouched on the passenger seat. He knew every page by heart. Every photograph. Every reported sighting. Every dead end. A year of chasing a ghost.

He’d pulled strings to take the latest Cord lead himself. Nobody else would recognize what they were looking at—or understand what it had cost. He wasn’t leaving Alaska without Cord. Whatever it took.

Wyatt would be pissed to find out later that he’d rolled into town without a text. He’d call him. Just not yet. Not until the case was further along and he had a reason for being here that didn’t require him to explain anything he wasn’t ready to explain.

He shut the second name down before it had a chance to surface.

Enough history.

Hudson parked outside the Rusty Anchor and let the engine tick down.

He smelled Aurora Cove before he was fully out of the car.

Snow. Cold air so clean it almost hurt. Resin beneath it.

November in Alaska smelled like the church he’d attended every Sunday as a boy.

Still. Ancient. Indifferent to whatever you brought into it.

He stood beside the rental and drew in a slow breath.

His lungs tightened so he waited it out.

Thirty seconds was long enough for the familiar resistance to ease. There had been a time he wouldn’t have noticed the air at all. Now he measured it, adjusted to it, and kept going.

Hudson picked up the folder, locked the car, and went inside.