Page 53 of Untamed Hunter Daddy

I almost smile. Almost.

“Twenty minutes,” Mason says. “Jax and Brock lead the breach. Kane on communications and perimeter. You on overwatch. I’m coordinating from Bridger with Colt, and the county sheriff as backup. We go in hard and fast and we bring her home.”

“The warrant?”

“Signed forty minutes ago. Judge Carlin had the ink dry before I finished the sentence. We’re legal. Everything we do tonight holds up in court.”

I close my eyes for half a second. The warrant means the case survives. It means Tyler doesn’t walk. It means the women get their day in court.

I open my eyes and get out of the bed. Kane hands me my jacket. I pull it on one-armed. The cast sticks out of the left sleeve like a blunt instrument.

Hallway. Elevator. Parking lot.

Jax is leaning against a black SUV with the engine running. He watches me cross the asphalt.

“She shot a man coming through her door,” he says. Not a greeting. A statement of fact. “She copied a trafficking ledger in thirty seconds with the target thirty feet away. She kept the flash drive hidden for two weeks in a room full of people who would’ve killed her for it.” He opens the rear door. “Your girl isn’t waiting to be rescued, Ryker. She’s buying time.”

Kane slides into the driver’s seat. He pulls out before my door is fully closed. The SUV accelerates south toward Alpha Range.

“Faster,” I say.

Kane doesn’t answer. He just presses the accelerator.

The woman I love is in a warehouse. I’m in the back of an SUV with a broken arm and a team of four men who’ve followed me into worse places than this and come out the other side. Alpha Range is forty minutes away. Every one of those minutes she’s in there and I’m not.

I check the sidearm Kane handed me. Magazine full. Round chambered. Safety on. My right hand is steady. The left is useless in its cast but the left isn’t what I need. I need one good hand and one weapon and the knowledge that the woman in that warehouse loosened her zip ties and hopefully told Tyler the truth about the flash drive to his face.

Which means she’s fighting.

Which means she’s alive.

Which means the waitress from Timber Creek is in there right now being exactly the kind of threat Tyler should have taken seriously.

Jax called her my girl. She isn’t anyone’s girl. She’s a woman. Whole and specific. A woman who keeps important things in shoeboxes and presses leaves into poetry books. A woman who chose me with her eyes open. A woman I’m going to bring home or die in the parking lot trying.

The road eats distance. The stars burn overhead.

And the terror starts to give way to something else.

The color of what’s coming next.

27

Zoe

The warehouse has five women in it. Six, now that I’m here.

The space is large and mostly dark. High ceilings. Corrugated walls that turn every sound into a metallic echo. Floodlights outside throw thin bars of light through the gaps in the panels. The air smells like motor oil and cold concrete and bodies held too long without proper plumbing.

The women are in a chain-link enclosure in the back corner. Not cages exactly, but close enough. Heavy-gauge fencing bolted to the floor. Padlocked gate. Bare concrete inside with sleeping bags and a few blankets. A five-gallon bucket in the far corner that I don’t need to examine.

Tyler’s men put me inside, locked the gate, and left. Their footsteps faded toward the loading dock. A door closed. An engine started. Then silence, broken only by breathing that isn’t mine.

My eyes adjust. The women take shape. They’re sitting or lying on the sleeping bags, taking up as little space as possible. They’re watching me. Not assessing value. Assessing threat. A new arrival is either a fellow prisoner or a plant, and they don’t know which yet.

“My name’s Zoe,” I say. My voice comes out too loud in the warehouse. I lower it. “I was taken from a hospital in Bridger about three hours ago. Before that I was with the US Marshals. They know I’m missing. They’re coming.”

Silence. The woman closest to me shifts. Mid-twenties, dark circles under her eyes, a bruise on her cheekbone yellowing at the edges. She’s wearing a sweatshirt several sizes too large, hands tucked inside the cuffs.