I stood up. My hands were steady. My breathing was coming down. My eyes were tracking what was in front of me and nothing else, and every bit of it was real.
I climbed out of the channel on the north side, hauled the drug runner up after me, and walked him back toward the shed where Lachlan was moving in from the county route to take custody. I handed the runner off and told Hunter I was heading back to the house to make sure everything was good on that end.
Hunter, Beckett, and Cooper had the others secured. The radio chatter had settled into the flat, methodical language of cleanup, and the urgency was gone from it.
“Lark, it’s over,” I said into comms. “You okay?”
“I’m at the barn.”
That wasn’t where she was supposed to be.
“Copy that,” I said and started walking faster.
I stopped at the edge of the gravel. She stood in the wide doorway with the barn lights behind her, throwing her shadow long across the ground. A shotgun in her hands, held low and ready, the barrel angled toward the earth. Her hair was down, and her mouth was a hard line I’d never seen on her before.
Behind her was every animal on this property. Every dog, every cat, every horse and goat and rabbit and Clarence on his perch, offering a running commentary of curse words.
Every living thing she’d spent five years feeding and healing and protecting was behind that doorway, and Lark Monroe was standing between them and whatever might have come out of the night.
She saw me, and the shotgun lowered another inch.
“I heard the runner heading toward the property.” She adjusted her grip on the stock. “Somebody had to cover them. Just in case.”
This woman.
I’d never known anything like her. She’d been doing this alone for five years because she didn’t know any other way. And she’d done it tonight with a shotgun, willing to protect every single one of those animals at her back.
I walked to her, took the shotgun from her hands, and leaned it against the barn wall. She let me. Her fingers were cold when I wrapped mine around them.
“It’s over,” I said. “All the drug runners are in custody. Lachlan’s handling it.”
She exhaled, and the hard line of her mouth softened. She looked past me toward the back acreage, toward the land she’d built everything on, and then she looked at me.
“Thank you.”
“Don’t thank me. Thank the Warrior Security team. Thank Lachlan.”
“I’m not thanking them right now.” She squeezed my hands. “I’m thanking you.”
I pulled her into me, and she came without resistance. She turned her face into my neck and her arms locked around my back, and I held her in the doorway of the barn she’d been guarding while the animals shifted and settled behind us.
Tova was just inside the barn door, tail going, nose pushing at my hand. Clarence offered a comment from his perch that would have made a sailor blush. Duchess stamped once in her stall because Duchess always needed the last word.
Lark laughed against my neck. Small and worn out and entirely her.
“Your animals are fine,” I said. “Every single one.”
She tightened her arms around me. “Of course they are. They had a team who had their backs.”
So had I.
Chapter 22
Logan
Pawsitive had been quiet all day. Lachlan had handled the arrests and the processing of the drug runners. Travis pulled his cameras off the fence line by noon. Beckett and Cooper stopped by in the afternoon to help me check the back acreage for anything the runners had left behind, and the answer was nothing. The shed was empty, the access road was just a dirt road, and the tire tracks were already filling in with dust.
Lark wasn’t in the barn. She wasn’t in the house either, or at any of the kennels, or in the feed room restocking shelves the way she did when her hands needed something to hold. I checked the office, the cat room, the goat pen. Tova followed me through all of it, unbothered by the search, content to go where I went.
