The brief silence that followed told me Jackson was deciding whether to listen—the pause that meant he was calculating risks versus benefits, weighing compliance against whatever he thought needed doing.
I didn’t wait to find out—went out the back door over the downed man in the frame and swept the greenhouse path withmy weapon up, moving fast and low through the cold pre-dawn air.
The fourth man—the coordinator—was positioned at the edge of the tree line with a radio and a clear sightline to the house. He was already running when I cleared the corner of the fourth greenhouse, his silhouette visible against the lighter darkness of the eastern pasture.
I closed the distance at a full sprint across the open ground, moving faster than he expected—twenty years of forcing my body to go past the point where most men would stop, to keep going when everything said quit.
I took him down in the grass with a tackle that drove us both hard into the cold ground—not elegant, didn’t need to be—got his arm up behind his back and my knee in his spine and held him there, chest heaving, until Wade came up to take over.
“You want me to—“ Morales started, one hand already reaching for his cuffs.
“I’ve got him,” I said, still breathing hard. “Find the vehicles. There should be two at the eastern tree line. Get me IDs on the bodies inside.”
Morales nodded and moved off toward the tree line, his weapon still at ready position, scanning the darkness with the intense attention that meant he was expecting more trouble.
I stayed kneeling in the grass for a moment after Wade pulled the coordinator up, hands on my thighs, breathing hard.
The sky was going gray at the edges—not quite dawn, but the shadowed darkness that meant it wasn’t far off. The mountains were dark shapes against it, solid where the sky was just starting to lighten.
Behind me, the greenhouse glass caught the first pale light of morning, and through it the grow lights were still running on their timers, indifferent to the fact that the world had just gone sideways.
I thought about Jackson upstairs in the farmhouse—about the way he’d been standing in the kitchen yesterday with a hand resting on the curve of his stomach, about the weight he’d been carrying for four months. About the nursery down the hall from the bedroom—the crib with the recessed hardware and no edges to catch on, the toy box with the cedar lining, the rocking chair Jackson had driven forty minutes to find.
The thought arrived with a clarity that had nothing to do with the adrenaline still moving through me: I would burn down every network Peterson had ever built before I let anything come through that door again.
I got to my feet, wiped my palms on my pants, and keyed my earpiece. “Full status,” I said, my voice coming out steadier than I’d expected.
Morales answered immediately. “Two vehicles at the eastern tree line. Both registered to shell companies we’ve linked to Peterson’s network. Four men down—two inside, one at the front entry, one with you. All carrying Russian-made weapons. All with the same tactical markings on their equipment. We’ve got IDs on three of them—Peterson loyalists, all with previous military or paramilitary training.”
I nodded, the information landing exactly where it needed to—filed, processed, turned into the calculation that meant “actionable intelligence” rather than just “data.”
“Get them secured,” I said. “I want full IDs and background checks on all four. Then call Sterling. Tell him we need to move the ranch to condition three until we know what we’re dealing with.”
“Copy that,” Morales said. “Anything else?”
“Call Rawley,” I said. “Tell him what happened. Tell him Jackson’s fine, but I’m keeping him at the farmhouse until we’re sure it’s contained.”
Another “copy that,” then silence as Morales moved off to execute the orders. I holstered my weapon, ran a hand through my hair, and started walking back toward the house.
The sky had lightened another shade—not quite full dawn, but close enough that the mountains were visible as solid shapes rather than just darker patches against the dark.
The farmhouse sat on its rise, windows still dark except for the kitchen, where a single light had just come on—Jackson, then, moving through the house with the careful attention I’d come to recognize as his default.
I was halfway across the yard when the porch light flicked on. Jackson stood in the doorway—barefoot on the cold wood in a flannel shirt and sleep pants, one hand braced on the porch rail and the other resting low against his stomach the way it always did now. He watched me cross the yard with an expression that wasn’t quite relief and wasn’t quite anger and was probably both.
I climbed the porch steps and stopped in front of him, still breathing harder than I’d like, the last ten minutes sitting between my shoulder blades like something with an edge.
“Four?” Jackson asked, his voice level.
“Four,” I confirmed.
He nodded once, slow, filing it the way he filed everything—methodically, without drama that meant he’d be running the math on containment procedures and sightlines and whether the farmhouse was still viable as a position.
Then: “Come inside. I’ll put coffee on.”
He turned and went back through the door, his bare feet silent on the hardwood. I followed him into the warm kitchen, set my weapon on the counter with careful attention, and stood there in the smell of old wood and the last trace of cordite on my clothes, trying to remember the last time the word “coffee“ had sounded like exactly what I needed to hear.
Jackson moved around the kitchen with the same methodical attention he brought to everything—coffee grounds into the filter, water into the reservoir, the sequence that meant he’d done it a hundred times before.
