Page 10 of Untamed Hunter Daddy

"Zoe Parker. Said she was a waitress at the Timber Creek Diner before she got pulled in. She knows the man we've been calling Tyler. First-name basis. He's the one who recruited her. She hasn't given me the full debrief yet. She's not in shape for it."

He’s silent for a beat before saying, "Ryker. You've got a trafficking victim in your personal cabin."

"I'm aware of what I've got, Mason."

"Are you? Because from where I'm sitting, what you've got is a federal witness with no medical evaluation, no victim advocate contact, no intake processing, and no documentation of chain of custody. What you've got is a situation that a defense attorney would shred if it ever gets near a courtroom."

"What I've got is a woman who would be dead if I'd followed intake protocol and hiked four hours back to the field office to file the right forms before going after her. The storm hit twenty minutes after I found her. If I'd waited even an hour, she'd have been under two feet of snow by morning. I made a field decision. I'd make it again."

"I'm not questioning the rescue, Ryker. The rescue was textbook. I'm questioning everything after the rescue." His voice drops. "You called me eighteen hours late. Eighteen hours where you had a traumatized woman in your cabin and nobody in the chain of command knew she existed. Why is that?"

"The signal was down."

"The signal was down," he repeats. "And?"

"The signal was down and I was also managing a medical emergency. Rewarming protocol, ankle stabilization, fluid resuscitation. She screamed herself awake at two in the morning and I talked her down for forty minutes. I fed the fire all night so she wouldn't wake up in the dark. I called you the first minute I had signal and a free hand. That's the truth, Mason. All of it."

A long exhale on the other end.

"How is she?"

"Alive. Scared. Tougher than she looks, which is saying something because she looks like the mountain should have killed her three times over. She rationed berries, Mason. Laid them out on a rock in groups of three. Made herself eat on a schedule. Scratched tally marks into the dirt to count the days. She's not a trained survivor. She's a waitress in a polyester dress who stayed alive through sheer refusal to die."

"You sound impressed."

"I am impressed. I've seen operators with ten times her training fold faster."

"You also sound like a man who's personally invested in his witness, which is the part that concerns me."

I don't answer right away. The wind screams across the porch and drives snow into my face. Mason knows me too well.

"I'm a professional, Mason."

"You're the most professional son of a bitch I've ever worked with. That's not what I asked."

"Then what are you asking?"

"I'm asking you to answer a question honestly, because you and I don't do it any other way and I'm not starting now. Are you compromised?"

The word sits heavy between us.

"No," I say. And then, because he deserves the whole truth: "Not yet. But the storm's not over and she's in my cabin and I'd be lying if I said the potential wasn't there. I see it. I'm managing it."

"That's the most honest thing you've ever said to me, and I've heard you confess to eating Riley's entire peach cobbler at the Fourth of July cookout."

I almost smile. "That cobbler had it coming."

"Here's what's going to happen." His voice is back to operational. "When the storm breaks, I'm sending a team to you. Jax and a victim advocate from the regional office. We do the intake properly. Medical eval, formal statement, the whole nine. In the meantime, you document everything. Her condition when you found her, her statements, her physical injuries. Time-stamped notes. You keep it clean, Ryker. Clean enough that no defense attorney on earth can argue that the rescue or the recovery was anything other than a federal officer doing his job under extreme circumstances. Can you do that?"

"Yeah. I can do that."

"And Ryker? The potential you mentioned? Keep managing it. Because if this goes sideways, it doesn't just end your career. It compromises every case connected to the mine operation, and there are fourteen women whose justice depends on those cases holding up. Fourteen women besides the one in your cabin."

The line goes dead. The signal's collapsed again. I stand on the porch for another thirty seconds, letting the wind hit me. Mason's math is correct. It always is. Fourteen women. Their cases. Tyler, still out there.

I should request a medevac. I think it clearly, testing the thought. Standard protocol. Put her in a hospital bed surrounded by trained medical professionals instead of in my bed with elk broth and good intentions.

I run the logistics. Sustained winds of forty to fifty miles per hour with higher gusts. Visibility effectively zero. Nearest hospital with a rated helipad is in Bridger, seventy-three miles south. Flight path crosses two ridgelines getting hammered. No pilot would fly into this. Ground extraction is just as impossible. Access road is under three feet of snow and climbing. Even a tracked vehicle would take six to eight hours, assuming it didn't get stuck.