Okay, in hindsight, maybe a little stupid. But I could feel my mind snapping fully out of whatever I had slipped into and was able to think rationally.
If I could just get traction, maybe I could push the car enough to turn around. Going up the mountain would be impossible.If I could just get back down to the paved highway, maybe a snowplow would come by, and I could follow it to town?
CHAPTER 2
Dice
I knewthe storm was coming. Hell, everyone on the mountain did.
That’s why Jacob had sent me to town early, to stock up before it got bad. Being the new guy meant I still pulled grunt work, but after three months on the ranch, it didn’t feel like punishment anymore. It felt like trust.
And trust wasn’t something a man like Jacob Cardosa gave lightly.
The ranch wasn’t just cattle and fence lines. That was what the world saw. The perfectly ordinary, respectable façade. But behind the pastures and weathered barns, there was something very different happening.
It was a cover for the real work that went on here… hunting monsters who didn’t lurk in the shadows, but in plain sight. Men who bought and sold human lives. Men like Jacob Cardosa and his crew were willing to go to war to stop.
To outsiders, the ranch looked like any other spread in the Nevada mountains. To the ones who truly knew it? It was afortress. A place where the broken could be made whole and the lost could finally be found.
These past few weeks had been proof of that. Bear was back from Idaho, battered and bruised but alive after surviving a plane crash with Hailey, the woman he was escorting to safety. And Briar, Jax’s girl… Hell, Briar had nearly been killed in a brutal kidnapping. The whole place was still on edge, every man walking around with tension in his shoulders and murder in his eyes. And it didn’t take much to see there was something brewing in the background. Something they were preparing to fight.
I wasn’t part of their inner circle yet. Not like Diesel or Flapjack. Hell, Bear barely looked at me, and I didn’t blame him. But I’d been there long enough to know what kind of family I’d stumbled into and that I wanted to be worthy of it.
The storm thickened fast, swallowing the road in white. The wipers fought to keep up, screeching across the windshield as snowflakes hurled themselves at the glass. I dropped the truck into four-low and crawled up the mountain, the engine growling like a pissed off beast. The last thing I wanted was to end up stuck and have the guys dig me out.
My lights cut through a wall of white, and something flickered in the distance. Too low to be another truck. My gut clenched.
I slowed, squinting through the blur of snow.
A car.
What the hell was a car doing up here in this weather?
As I crept closer, the outline came into view. A small sedan was half-buried in a drift, the storm trying to swallow it whole.
“Shit.”
I slammed the truck into park and yanked on my gloves. The icy wind hit like a fist when I opened the door. Snow relentlessly stung my face as I trudged toward the car.
When I wiped the frost from the driver’s window, the breath punched out of me.
Sara.
For a split second, I thought I was seeing things. It had been years since high school, years since I’d stood on the sidelines and watched her shine from a distance. She’d always seemed untouchable back then. Too beautiful, too far out of my league.
But the woman staring back at me now wasn’t the girl I remembered.
Her face was pale and frightened, lips trembling as she realized someone was there. And beneath that fear was something darker. Bruises life had left behind, the kind you couldn’t see unless you’d been through hell yourself.
Rage surged hot in my chest, even as the cold gnawed at my skin.
For a second, I just stood there, frozen, while snow pelted my face and the wind howled between us.
Then instinct kicked in.
Her engine was still running, a thin plume of exhaust struggling to escape through the packed snow behind the car. My gut clenched. Shit. If that tailpipe stayed blocked, she’d end up breathing in poison before she even realized it.
“Kill the engine!” I yelled, slicing my hand across my throat in a sharp motion.
