Chapter Sixteen
What a hell of a way to heal, spending days in bed with Sinead tucked in beside him.
It made what he had to do all the harder.
Hawk hovered over the bed, careful not to jostle her awake. She was so damn strong, but that didn’t mean she wasn’t affected by their ordeal. Days of hiking difficult terrain, sleeping rough…and finally ending with him getting shot…had taken its toll on her.
He saw it in the paleness of her face each time he woke and found her sleeping on the pillow beside him.
He pressed a soft kiss to her forehead and felt her start awake. “Sorry, darlin’. Didn’t meant to wake you.”
Her eyes fluttered open, the depths hazy from sleep but as deep as the finest walnut.
“Stay in bed as long as you want,” he murmured.
She grabbed his shirt before he could straighten, the sleep in her eyes replaced by panic. “Where are you going?”
“To find out who sent those mercs.”
She held on tighter, fear rippling over her face. “Promise me you’ll be careful, Heath. Promise me you won’t try to be a hero.”
He gave her a crooked twist of his lips. “You know better.”
He eased back from the bed, careful of his side, and stared at her for a heartbeat longer, taking in her mussed hair and eyes gone soft with worry, before he made himself turn and walk out.
He left the guest lodgings in the therapy lodge and walked out into the mountain air.
The scent of the mountains greeted him first—a crisp, pine smell that roused a lot of memories for him, both old and new. He sucked in deep pulls and felt the light tug of his stitches.
The ranch was already alive, with people walking back from sunrise yoga with Zee or going about ranch chores. One of the vets, Deke Truman, emerged from the hay shed, a bale balanced on one shoulder, on his way to the paddock.
He spotted Hawk and lifted his free hand to thumb his hat in greeting.
Hawk gave a nod in return and continued to the security office. When he entered, Ayla looked up from her computer. Her gaze swept over him in a quick assessment, professional and yet warm at seeing him out of bed.
“Well, look at you. Standing upright. No wincing. A few days ago, you looked like you’d lost a fight with a woodchipper.”
He huffed out a laugh. “Guess I heal fast.”
Lex walked out of the war room, surprising him with her presence. She must have flown in from the city to work more closely on a project.
“Guess you’re stubborn,” she said, coming to lean against Ayla’s desk, not looking up from her phone. “Did Carson actually clear you, or did you just decide you were fine?”
“He cleared me for light duty.”
Lex glanced up, appearing unimpressed. “Tracking down the guy who hired these mercs is light duty now?”
Ayla made a noise between a laugh and a warning, but she returned to her computer screen.
“Compared to getting shot? Sure.” Hawk moved toward the war room.
Lex stopped him in his tracks with her words. “You really are one of the team.”
His chest welled. He knew what she was getting at. No one had said it quite that way before, but he saw it in the way the team treated him. Taking a bullet didn’t make him part of the team—his devotion to his role did.
He gave her a small nod and entered the war room.
Gray was already seated at the table. The monitors were filled with everything the team could dig up on the two dead guys from the forest and the ones from the mine.
Four bullets. Four kills.
He straightened and took a seat across from Gray.
“You good?” Gray asked, watching him.
“Better than good.” His side ached with every movement, stitches pulling tight under the bandage.
The pain was manageable now, background noise instead of the screaming urgency it had been on that mountain.
“We get the name of who dispatched these four mercs, we’re one step from ending this whole thing. ”
The two of them began to sort through the digital trail, uncovering names and connecting lines between them, including everything from the plate on that abandoned vehicle, registered to a shell corporation, to the financial trail Denver’s buddy pulled.
Everything led to a private security contracting outfit two states over—a small operation that supplied muscle to anyone willing to pay and asked few questions while doing it.
Hawk met Gray’s stare. “Short flight. In and out. We’ll have the name of who hired them.”
“They won’t be happy to see the man who killed four of their men.”
“That’s not my problem.”
“Crew’s been doing flyovers of the region around the mine to deter anyone else from going there. He should be back by now. I’ll have him ready the chopper.”
They got in the truck, and he threw a look at the lodge, wondering if Sinead had fallen back to sleep. Probably not, he thought with warmth spreading in his chest. She would be talking to the vets about what would provide them with better lives and planning how to use that gold.
He and Gray drove to the training facility a short distance away. There was a field exercise going on, and he watched the students they referred to as operators run through drills.
As he and Gray approached the helipad where Crew was waiting to fly them to their destination, he spotted Colson, the guy who led the group in the search for sign of any vehicle the first two mercs had driven.
Gabe Thorne was acting drill sergeant. He picked Colson out of the group and made him drop into a round of pushups.
Hawk found himself smiling for the first time in days. “Guess he’s learning what not to do.”
Gray grunted. “Colson’s good when it comes to being in the forest. But from what I’ve heard, he’s struggling some with compliance.”
“Think he’ll make it?”
Gray shrugged. “If he wants it bad enough.”
As they approached the chopper, Hawk caught Crew’s gaze.
He stood with his legs braced and arms folded. He relaxed as they neared. “You look a hell of a lot better than you did last time I saw you.”
“I owe you, man.” He held out his hand, and Crew grasped it hard.
“Just doin’ my job. I’m glad to see you’re on the mend.” He tipped his head toward the chopper. “You ready to see what trouble you can get into next?”
“Just doin’ my job,” he tossed his words back at him.
Crew’s face creased with a smile as he climbed into the cockpit. In minutes they were off, rising over the mountains. From the vantage point above, he tried to pick out some of the route he and Sinead had taken but the trees made it impossible to see the ground they’d walked on. Slept on.
Made love on.
His chest heated at the thought of having her beneath him again. Waking beside her the past few days hadn’t been easy when one part of his body insisted it was raring to go and his healing wound told him something else.
There were other memories the mountain held, ones Hawk wasn’t ready to examine too closely. Like three words in a mine shaft he still hadn’t responded to.
Their destination sat in a nondescript strip of industrial buildings outside city limits, the kind of place built to blend in.
He and Gray walked in and they demanded to speak with the guy in charge. The receptionist started to protest, but Gray flashed credentials that weren’t technically law enforcement but read close enough to make people fold.
The owner—soft around the middle and sweating through a golf shirt—folded even faster once Hawk made it clear this conversation had exactly two possible outcomes, and only one of them ended with the man keeping his business license intact.
“I don’t know details,” the man stammered, hands up like that alone might save him. “I just take the contracts. I don’t ask questions.”
“Who hired the men who went up that mountain three days ago?” Hawk’s voice stayed level, controlled, though every instinct in him wanted to push hard. “Name. Now.”
The man’s eyes darted between them, calculating odds that clearly weren’t in his favor, and he caved within thirty seconds, pulling up a contract on his laptop with shaking hands.
“McCrae,” he said. “Evan McCrae. Paid cash, wanted it quiet, wanted the woman alive and unharmed—those were his exact words, alive and unharmed—but didn’t care what happened to anyone with her.”
Hawk went very still.
McCrae. One of the prospectors who’d worked that mine alongside Sinead’s great-great-grandfather.
“Evan McCrae,” Hawk repeated. “Any relation to a McCrae from around a hundred fifty years back? Prospector, worked claims up in that same mountain range?”
The man blinked, clearly out of his depth. “I don’t know his family tree, man. I just took his money.”
But Hawk already knew, with the same certainty he’d felt on Timberline Ridge when he took out the first two mercs.
This wasn’t some anonymous person hunting treasure with no connection to the legend at all. This was blood, a tie to a partnership, a relative still chasing what his own ancestor never got to claim.
And still willing to kill for it generations later.
They pulled every scrap of information the terrified contractor could offer. Address, known associates and financial records, the man handed it all over without argument once he understand how much trouble he’d already bought himself.
By the time they walked into the parking lot, the sun low and orange over the strip mall rooftops, Hawk had what he needed.
A name. A face. A location.
“We’ve got him.” Gray matched Hawk’s stride back to the chopper.
“We’ve got him,” Hawk agreed. The knot in his chest that had been there since he’d seen that red dot on Sinead’s chest didn’t release, though, and it wouldn’t until he saw this to the end.
After his confrontation with McCrae, Sinead would finally be safe. Hawk would ensure that the threat they’d traced back to its root was completely sawed off.
He thought about the sticker Navy had pressed onto the back of her hand, about the way she’d laughed through tears at a child’s belief in the power of a gold star.
He kept thinking about those three words he still hadn’t answered, and how close he’d come to never getting the chance.
He would get that chance, if he had any say in it.