He understood.
That moment no one ever talked about—hell, he couldn’t explain it—but there was something about losing someone like that.Missingthat call.The message.And that moment it tilted your world on its axis.
It did something to you.Twisted grief into guilt, then guilt into fuel.Where you then tucked away the pain and turned it into purpose.
And here they were, enemies who had somehow formed a kind of de-facto trauma bond on steroids.
He’d turned it into rage—while she was chasing justice.
‘That’s why you told Izzy your father would back you up,’ he said.‘It wasn’t a bluff.He’s Meghan’s uncle.’
Taryn gave a tight nod.‘He’ll do whatever he can to help… unofficially.My mother, too.’
Damn.A federal intelligence analyst and a JAG officer with reach.Talk about wildcards.No wonder Taryn walked like she had classified clearance in her back pocket.
That was a helluva combination to have in the family, that was more than just a family motivated by shared grief.It was deep government wiring.The kind that could reroute careers and bury bodies if needed.It was also a golden ticket into places very few people had access.
He looked at her again.Like really looked.
Taryn Hayes wasn’t here to chase numbers or headlines.
She was chasing ghosts.
Just like him.
‘Your laptop… Izzy says it’s off-grid and encrypted?Specialised hardware?’He tried not to get his hopes up.But, come on, in Taryn’s hands… That’d be like someone handing him a custom Harley after years of pushing a busted bike uphill.If it were true.
But then she nodded.
It was enough to have him raking his hand through his hair, trying to put a lid on that too-good-to-trust-it feeling.
‘I’m here to dig up the truth.And if there’s something in your files that can help—’
She never got a chance to finish, as Finn pulled the troopy off to the side of the dirt road, stopping on a low ridge where the late afternoon sun was dragging its belly across the scrub like golden fire.
He reached beneath his seat and dragged out a battered folder wrapped in a rubber band, thick with handwritten notes, dog-eared pages, and dropped it onto her lap before he could change his mind.‘Then let’s find out what they buried.Together.’
Before he could get the car back on the road, she’d cracked it open.Flicking through his notes, maps, drawings and clippings from articles with enough red ink to bleed the truth out of each piece of paper.
Her eyebrows rose at the circles, arrows, and what looked like a drawing of a livestock truck with angry eyebrows.‘Amara mentioned she had to decode your chicken scratch scribbles for the Commissioner?What was that—two years ago?’
‘Yeah.That was the first one.’
She grinned, and surprisingly so did he, enough for the heaviness to lift, just a fraction, but in the right direction.
‘What you have there is every hole I found in the livestock industry from transport through to quarantine and exports, mapped out in a nice and neat little dossier, we call theGaps File.’
Taryn muttered, ‘Simple.Easy to remember.’
‘Yeah, up all night thinking up that title,’ Finn deadpanned.
Another short grin, but this time there was some excitement flaring in her eyes.
The engine droned on as she read the file that had lived in this troopy longer than some of his shirts had lasted.It held notes from truck-stop conversations.Cattle yard whispers.Rumours from roadhouse staff.Things Amara had once calledcircumstantial garbage—until some of it turned out to be real.
He kept his eyes on the road, but he could feel her flipping through it as if reading him.In a way, she was.Because every page, every scrawled note or underline was a confession in ink.
He hadn’t built a case.He’d built a map.A trail that uncovered all the holes in a system so flawed that someone could drive a convoy of stolen livestock trucks straight through them—and had.
