Page 85 of Shadow Burn

“If Porter⁠—”

“Jasper.” She placed her good hand against his cheek. “I’ll call.”

He turned his face into her palm and closed his eyes for one second. He wanted one more kiss. He wanted a thousand more. He wanted to put himself between her and every threat in the world, and for once, the threat was time, distance, duty, the life she had before she walked into his.

He kissed her palm. “Go,” he said, because if he didn’t say it, he might beg.

Katherine’s breath shuddered. Then she got into the SUV. Porter closed the door.

Jasper stepped back as the convoy rolled toward the gate. The first SUV passed through, then Katherine’s, then the rear vehicle. He watched as Katherine turned in her seat, her face pale behind the glass, one hand lifted against the window.

He lifted his.

Garrett opened the gate. The convoy drove through. The gate closed.

Jasper stood in the driveway long after the taillights disappeared between the pines. Behind him, the compound waited. His team waited around him, quiet and respectful.

His life waited, every piece of it exactly where it had been before Katherine arrived with a stack of old papers and a cat who judged everyone.

Everything was where it belonged.

Nothing felt right.

Vivi came to stand beside him. “You okay?”

“Not in the least.”

She nodded. “Stupid question. You want me to tell you not to go after her?”

He looked down the empty road. Every instinct in him said move. Get in the truck. Follow the convoy. Stay close. Keep eyes on her until the danger is gone, even if the danger had no face to shoot.

But Katherine had asked him not to make fear the reason he left his home. He hated that she was so damn smart.

“No,” he said.

Vivi slid her hands into the pockets of her jacket. “Good. I wasn’t going to.”

Jasper looked at her.

She smiled faintly. “I was going to tell you to wait until you know it’s not about protecting her but about being sure she’s the one.”

His chest tightened. Katherine was gone.

And for the first time since she’d walked into Shadow Point Security, Jasper had no target, no feed, no locked gate, no camera angle, no weapon, and no way to put himself between her and what came next.

He stood there until the sky began to darken, hollowed out by the space she’d left behind.

EPILOGUE

Three months after Katherine Townsend left Blackridge in the back of a federal SUV, Jasper still hated the sound of the front gate opening and closing.

The new camera system caught it from twelve angles now. He’d made sure of that.

Every vehicle that approached appeared on three primary feeds and nine secondary ones before it reached the reinforced outer gate. Motion sensors tracked the fence line. Thermal cameras covered the wooded edges of the property. The east service gate had been rebuilt, rekeyed, and wired into a redundant alarm system that could survive power loss, signal interference, and the kind of expensive little jammer Nathan Soot had used to turn sixty seconds into a weapon.

Jasper had installed most of it himself. Then he’d checked it, tested it, and checked it again.

He’d created a monitoring dashboard so streamlined and paranoid that Vivi had stared at it for ten seconds before saying, “That is either beautiful or evidence you need a hobby.”