Page 45 of Untamed Hunter Daddy

“It was retrieval,” Ryker says. “They came with batons, not guns. They were trying to incapacitate, not kill. You don’t bother with non-lethal if you’re sending a message. You use non-lethal when you want the target alive.”

“Which means he needs her for something,” Jax says. “Not just to eliminate a witness. Why?”

Silence. The fire crackles. Kane types without looking at the screen.

“The USB drive,” I say.

Ryker looks at me. “Do you think he knows about it?”

The room changes.

“He must, right? Why else would he be after me?”

“Where is it now?” Jax asks. His voice is taut.

“In this shoebox.” I cross the room and grab the shoebox, opening it to show the drive.

Jax and Ryker look at each other. One second. An entire conversation.

“If Tyler knows about the drive,” Kane says slowly, “the retrieval makes more sense. He doesn’t just want the witness. He wants the evidence. Whatever’s on there would connect the street-level operation to whoever’s funding the network above him. That’s not just Tyler’s case. That’s the whole system.”

“He might not know about the drive specifically,” I say. “But he knows I was alone with his laptop. He came back into the room and gave me a look I didn’t understand at the time. He was assessing whether I’d seen anything. Whether the shy waitress who couldn’t make eye contact was a threat.”

“And he decided you weren’t,” Brock says.

“He decided I wasn’t. Because I was very good at being underestimated.”

Brock grins. It’s the first full smile I’ve seen from any of them except Ryker.

“That could be everything we need,” Kane says, holding out his hand, silently asking for the drive.

I hand it to him and instantly feel freer. The most free I’ve felt in a long time.

23

Zoe

The drive is small. The kind you get free at a trade show, logo worn off, plastic scratched and yellowed. It looks like nothing.

It contains the financial architecture of a human trafficking operation.

Kane takes it and plugs it into his laptop he’s designated as a standalone unit, air-gapped from any network. The screen fills with folders. He opens the first one and starts scrolling.

His eyebrows rise a quarter inch.

The files are what I thought they were.

“Walk me through it,” Ryker says. He’s standing behind Kane, looking at the screen over his shoulder. “Zoe. I need you to tell us what you saw that night and how you decided to copy it. The chain of events matters for the case file.”

I nod. I’ve been expecting this.

“I need to go back,” I say. “Not to the beginning. To the night it happened. Is that okay?”

“Take your time,” Ryker says.

I squeeze my eyes shut. The cabin falls away.

I’m at the mine.