Possibly both.
But what she did know was that Finn cared.Deeply.And that care had shaped the squad’s focus into a design that was working.
And here was the kicker…
Even if she’d disliked him—bashing against his bullish, grumpy ass from day one—and even if they’d never kissed, or had never spent those three long, unforgettable days buried in files with shared silence and sizzling sex, she still would’ve come to the same conclusion, because the data didn’t lie.
The Stock Squad was working.
Taryn leaned back in her chair, with the hum from the office lights suddenly too sharp.Three days.That’s all it had been.Working side by side, sleeping within arm’s reach.No arguments, no tension.Just ease.Like it had always been that way.
She wasn’t ready to admit what that meant.
But her chest ached, like her heart already knew how much she missed him.
Focus, buttons.
Grinning to herself, she scrolled again, crosschecking the data.The NT had green ticks across the board.The other states had livestock losses.Big ones, too.
Her stomach tightened as town after town were listed in recently filed stock theft cases.
The names, however, rang a bell.Not because she’d worked them, but because she’d seen them on Finn’s wall, and in a file.They’d been scribbled on butcher’s paper, pinned beside freight routes and brand registers and even on the odd napkin or five.
They were straight from theGaps File.
Had to be.Somehow?
She dug deeper through freight logs, ag reports, and obscure internal folders.Using the same instincts her father had taught her: go where no one else bothers to look.
And then she found it.
A memo.Buried in an archived state audit report on rural transport risk assessments.Nothing dramatic.Just a footnote, referencing a background source from a federal funding proposal:Operational_Gaps_v2_bby_final.docx.
That was Finn’s file.The very first draft version.Meant only as context.
Finn had handed it over to Drew eighteen months ago.And Drew had used it, by the book, in his submission, to get funding for the trial.
Taryn had followed that paper trail herself.Tracking every step of the funding process, just like her job demanded on how the squad got their money, how they spent it, and whether it stacked up.
And it had.
The right departments, the right memos, the right signatures.
To Drew and Finn’s credit, they’d followed the protocols perfectly.
There was no corruption.Just a desperate team trying to fix a broken system, which made this even more chilling.
Yet, someone else, somewhere along the long, bloated conga line of departments, policy units, funding panels, advisory boards, and god-knows-how-many think tanks that lacked actual brains, had taken Finn’s roughly written draft of the Gaps File and twisted it into a goddamn playbook for organised theft!
Her chest locked.Her throat burned.As all the pieces clicked into place.
They’d used it, but not to fix the system.Based purely on the list of current interstate police reports of stolen stock, they’d taken Finn’s file, and all his research, to exploit the system to escalate stock theft.
Her chest went still.
The nausea returned—not morning sickness this time, but the bitter, sharp edge of betrayal.
The data didn’t lie.
