Chapter 26
Logan
Hunter called the session. We’d spent the last three hours at the range behind the Resting Warrior compound running tactical drills and comms protocols, getting me back up to speed for part-time ops.
Gear came off, shoulders dropped, and the compound filled with the loose, easy noise that only existed after the work was done.
Beckett was rolling his neck. Cooper was breaking down the comms setup on the table. Travis was inside at his screens, still running post-session checks from the comms drills he’d put us through. Isaac leaned against the tailgate of Hunter’s truck with a coffee he’d been nursing for the past hour.
He and Fallon were staying at Resting Warrior for a few days while Fallon bonded with Gimbal, and Isaac had spent the afternoon watching us train with the relaxed attention of a man who had opinions about everything and the good sense to keep most of them to himself.
“Go home, Stroud,” Beckett said. “You’ve been checking the clock for the last forty minutes.”
“I have not.”
“You have. You’ve got a woman waiting for you, and your head left this compound about an hour ago. I know the symptoms because I have the same disease.”
“Yeah, but I looked better than you out there today. Even distracted.”
Beckett put a hand over his heart. “Excuse me. My tactical stance is flawless, and I will not be taking feedback from a man who’s been out of the game for two months.”
“Dude, you clear a doorway like a penguin.”
Isaac laughed from the truck. Cooper shook his head. Hunter almost smiled, which for Hunter was the equivalent of a standing ovation.
I pulled my phone from my jacket pocket. I’d powered it down when we started the session three hours ago and hadn’t thought about it since.
Texts from Lark popped up immediately.
I don’t say enough how much it means to me that you’re in my life. And I’m glad you’re at Warrior Security, refusing to let your demons get the better of you. Come home safe to me.
I read it twice. Then the second one.
Tova says to come home safe to her too.
I almost smiled.
Also, I never thanked you for the rose you left in my truck the other day while I was in town. You didn’t have to, and that’s what made it so special. Knowing you were thinking about me.
My smile faded as I read it again.
I’d never left a rose in her truck. I hadn’t been near her truck that day at all while I’d been in town. I’d gone to Murphy’s for a hinge I needed, but I hadn’t gone near her truck and I sure as hell hadn’t left a rose on her seat.
My gut went cold before my brain caught up. What the actual hell? Someone had been inside her truck and left a rose?
I stared at the screen. Was there a real threat here?
My hypervigilance had been wrong before.
It turned ordinary things into threats and made me second-guess what was real.
Every veteran I knew had a version of the same wiring, the kind that kept you alive in combat and then spent the rest of your life lying to you about what was dangerous.
There were explanations that had nothing to do with danger. A friend from town being kind. A grateful client leaving a thank-you. Something ordinary that my brain was turning sinister because that’s what it did.
But the last time I’d dismissed my instincts, there were drug runners using the back of the property for weeks, and keeping that to myself had nearly cost me the best thing in my life.
I wasn’t that man anymore.
“Something’s wrong.”
Isaac straightened off the tailgate. Hunter turned from Coop and looked at me, and the space went quiet in a way that had nothing to do with the training being over.
“I don’t know if this is real or if it’s my head.” I held up the phone. “Lark found a rose in her truck when she was in town a few days ago. She thinks I left it. I didn’t. Someone opened her truck and put it there.”
They all looked at me.
Nobody rolled their eyes or glanced sideways at each other. Nobody suggested I was reading too much into it.
But these were men who had learned what happened when you dismissed a gut feeling, and every one of them was listening.
“If your gut is telling you something is off, trust that,” Isaac said. He pushed away from the truck, and his voice had dropped into something that wasn’t casual anymore. “Every time I’ve overridden my own instinct, it’s been the wrong call.”
“Do you have the exact time she was in town? I can settle this fast.” Travis was already moving toward his setup inside the building. “Give me ten minutes and the time frame she was there. Garnet Bend is small enough that I’ll be able to find her. I’ll pull the feeds.”
Lark had only been in town one time this week, the day after the drug bust.
“Got him.” Travis’s voice was flat five minutes later. “Main Street, 11:42 a.m. Her truck’s parked in front of the feed store. A very definitely not-Logan man put a rose in her truck.”
What the actual fuck?
We gathered behind the screen. A man walked along the sidewalk, stopped at Lark’s truck, and looked in both directions. He opened the driver’s door, and his hand went inside. A moment later, he closed the door and walked away unhurried. The whole thing took less than fifteen seconds.
The image was grainy but clear enough. Mid-thirties, well-dressed for Garnet Bend, the posture of someone who expected the world to organize itself around him.
Isaac leaned closer. His jaw tightened.
“Oh shit. That’s Carter Hollis.”
The name meant nothing to anyone in the room except me and Isaac.
“Lark’s ex-husband,” I said. “He’s a narcissist, he’s abusive, and evidently, he was in Garnet Bend this week putting a fucking rose in Lark’s truck.”
The compound went very still.
That bastard was here in Montana, not New York. He’d been on the same street as her, close enough to touch her truck, and she had no idea.
I called Lark immediately. By the time the call went to voice mail, sweat had broken out on my forehead. I hung up, called again, and got the same result.
I tried to keep the panic at bay. She could be in the barn. She could have left her phone inside. There were a dozen reasons Lark wouldn’t answer her phone on any given evening, and none of them had bothered me before tonight.
Hunter was already on the phone with Lachlan. I could hear the sheriff’s voice through the speaker, clipped and focused. Hunter gave him the short version: Carter Hollis, camera footage, Lark not answering.
We moved. The compound emptied in under a minute. Hunter, Beckett, Coop, and Travis in the lead vehicle. Isaac and me in mine.
I tried Lark once more from the passenger seat while Isaac drove. Four rings and then voice mail again.
The road from Warrior Security to Pawsitive was about fifteen minutes across property on a good night. Isaac was driving it in nine. Nobody was talking.
We rounded the final turn to the lot.
Isaac saw it first.
“Oh fuck. Logan.”
I followed his gaze through the windshield. Over the horizon, in Pawsitive’s direction, an orange glow shot into the night sky.
Fire.
Isaac’s foot went to the floor. The engine surged, and the glow grew brighter as we closed the distance while my mind started running scenarios.
Every single one of them ended with me wanting to punch through the goddamn window.
Pawsitive’s parking lot came into view, and I took in the whole picture in a flash. The fire was the barn, not the house. Flames at the far end of the hayloft, smoke thickening along the roofline.
Every animal on the property was locked inside that barn. Every dog, every cat, every horse and goat and rabbit. The structure was still standing, but the fire was still growing.
I was out of the truck before Isaac had fully stopped.
I ran for the barn, yelling Lark’s name because Lark was always in the barn, because if something was wrong at Pawsitive, Lark would put herself between the danger and her animals the way she’d stood in the doorway with a shotgun the night of the drug operation.
The smoke hit me before the heat did. I shouted her name through it and got nothing back except the crack of burning wood and the sound of animals in panic.
The team was right behind me, already hauling animals out.
Beckett came through the smoke with a terrified goat under each arm.
Cooper was at the kennels, pulling dogs.
Hunter had Duchess and Maverick by their halters, fighting them toward the door while they nervously shifted and threw their heads and tried to bolt sideways.
Isaac had gone for the smaller animals, collecting them in carriers.
Travis was waiting outside to move them farther away from the flames.
Lark was nowhere around.
I ran for the house as they continued to pull out animals. The front door was unlocked. The kitchen light was on. The pan sat on the stove, covered, burner off. Country music still played low from the speaker on the counter.
Her phone was next to the sink.
Tova was on her feet in the kitchen with every muscle rigid and her eyes locked on me. She pushed against my legs the instant I came through the door, pressing hard enough to move me.
I went through every room calling Lark’s name. She wasn’t there. Her jacket was gone from the hook by the door and her boots were gone from the mat, and she was not in this house.
Her phone was here. Her truck was in the lot. And Lark was gone.
And the goddamn barn was on fire.
I went back outside with Tova at my heels.
The team was still hauling animals from the barn, carrying kennels and leading horses through smoke that was getting thicker by the minute.
Somewhere inside, Clarence was producing a stream of profanity so loud and sustained that under any other circumstance would have been the funniest thing I’d ever heard.
Lachlan’s truck came tearing up the drive, and he was out and moving before his door had fully closed. Sera, Travis’s fiancée, pulled up ten seconds later. He must have called her on the way.
“Is Lark okay?” Sera yelled as she ran to the barn to help.