Page 91 of Warrior Security
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.
