The plan settles into place almost immediately.
Because this is what we do.
Rev grabs a pen and starts marking points on the map.
“I’ll take the lot,” he says. “Anyone outside goes down before they know what’s happening.”
Riot taps the loading dock camera on the screen.
“You and Ghost go through here,” he tells Rev. “I’ll handle eyes and comms from the truck.”
“You’re not coming in?”
“I’ll be watching the exits.”
I study the layout again.
The angles.
The timing.
It works.
After a few minutes Riot closes the laptop and leans back.
“That’s the play.”
Rev lifts his bottle slightly.
“Tonight we clean house.”
I push back from the table and stand up.
The anger that rode in with me is still there, but now it’s sharpened into something focused.
Voss is breathing right now. The men who held Rae down are breathing too. That changes tonight.
Rev watches me for a second before speaking again. “You gonna go cool off with your farm girl after this?”
My eyes narrow slightly. “Watch it.”
He grins. “I’m just saying. You’ve been out there playing farmer for a week.”
But the truth sitting in my chest has nothing to do with cooling off. Rae thinks this week was temporary. A detour. Something that started and ended because I happened to be in town dealing with trouble at The Rusty Nail.
She thinks I’ll ride back to Jackson and forget the way she laughs when the goats chase her around the barn. Forget the way she curls into me at night like she belongs there. Forget the way that house started feeling more like home after a week than anywhere I’ve lived in the last ten years. Not happening.
I head for the door, my mind already shifting toward the job waiting tonight. We’ll take care of Voss. We’ll take care of the men who thought touching Rae was a good idea.
And when it’s done… I’m going back to that farm. Because Rae Wilder might think she ended things in that kitchen. But this thing growing between us? It’s nowhere close to being finished.
EIGHTEEN
RAE
The driveinto town feels longer tonight, which is ridiculous because the road hasn’t changed and neither has the distance. I’ve driven this same stretch so many times over the years that my body practically runs on autopilot when I’m behind the wheel. Same narrow ribbon of blacktop cutting through the fields, same crooked mailbox leaning like it gave up trying to stand straight years ago, same shallow dip in the road just past the bridge that makes my truck bounce if I forget to slow down. It’s familiar in the way things become when you’ve repeated them enough times that they settle into muscle memory. But tonight the truck feels different around me, the cab too quiet, too still, the empty space beside me louder than the hum of the engine.
My eyes slide to the passenger seat before I can stop them, and the sight of it sitting there empty twists something in my chest that I immediately pretend not to notice. A week ago Cole would’ve been sitting there, one arm braced along the door, boots stretched out like he’d been riding shotgun in this truck his entire life instead of barely knowing me a few days before. He wasn’t much of a talker on the road, which suited me justfine because silence with him never felt uncomfortable. It felt easy. He’d just sit there, occasionally glancing out the window at the fields or the tree line rolling past, like he was quietly cataloging every detail of a place that meant something to me even if he hadn’t known it long enough for it to mean something to him.
