“Go,” I repeat.
Dima lifts both hands like I’ve offended him and strolls off, whistling something obscene. I head inside, the warm evening breeze trailing after me until the door shuts and seals it out.
The contrast hits immediately—inside is cool, quiet, the air dense with the resinous scent of polished wood and the faint tang of gun oil. My boots echo on the slate floor as I go through the atrium and into the private wing of the building.
Jesse is standing in the corner of my office like a statue dragged in from the forest—broad shoulders, windburn face, arms crossed and expression grim. His light jacket is thrown over a chair and covered in pine needles. There’s dried mud on his boots.
He looks like summer never happened to him at all.
“Took you long enough,” he says.
“I was two hours away.” I step around him, loosening my cuffs.
Jesse blows out a breath. “We’ve got a problem.”
I raise an eyebrow. “Just one?”
He ignores that. “Southwest of the ridge. Past the old logging road.”
“That’s a restricted zone.”
“Yeah. Somebody didn’t care.”
My pulse sharpens, and I go still, turning my full attention to him. No one ignores the Ursa Arcane signs. “Explain.”
He hands me a folder. Inside are photos of charred ground, twisted metal fragments, and half-melted crates. A weapons site. One of mine.
My jaw tightens around a curse.
“Burned?” I ask.
“Burned,” he confirms. “Deliberate, clean, efficient. Whoever did it knew exactly what they were hitting.”
I flip through the photos again, slower this time. The ruin of it. The insult of it. What was once orderly is now scattered ash. “Why didn’t we catch it?”
“We’ve been focused on the eastern ridge, and the tracking opportunities there. With nothing moving through right now as far as goods, I’ve put the men on trail cameras—finding the bigger game, prize bucks, for the party arriving next week. The west and south have been on a skeleton crew.”
Of course; the other side of operations. Guided hunts and the like.
The summer light streaming through the window makes the edges brighter, as if mocking the whole thing.
“Who found it?” I ask.
“One of the guides. Not hunting; checking the owl nesting boxes. They had a group from Seattle up there today. He saw the smoke earlier this morning. Went to check it out in the afternoon.”
“And?”
“And he found these.” Jesse unfolds another piece of paper. Boot prints. Several. Deep in the soft earth, layered over each other. “Not hunters,” he says.
He doesn’t have to explain why. I see the pattern. Military-style tread. Heavy gait. Cold precision in the placement.
“Another crew,” I say, low.
“That’s my guess.” He pauses, voice lower now. “Not locals. No one would dare.”
The office feels smaller suddenly, like the walls have been nudged inward. Summer outside, threat inside. Sweat at the nape of my neck despite the air conditioning. No one has tried to touch my property since a very miscalculated mistake right after my father died.
I toss the photos on my desk. “How long?”
