Which meant no, and we both knew it.
The highway began to thin. City lights gave way to the particular darkness of rural Oregon—thick, close, the kind of dark that felt like it had weight.
Trees pressed in on both sides of the road, Douglas fir standing sentinel, their massive trunks catching the high beams in brief flashes of rough bark before swallowing the light whole.
The road narrowed. The surface changed from asphalt to something older, something that had been laid down before engineers decided every road in America needed to be perfectly smooth.
Then the gate lights appeared.
Amber pinpricks through the corridor of trees, warm and steady, cutting through the dark like landing lights. The Wolfe Estate. Fifty miles west of Portland, and the air had changed five miles back—heavier, damper, the pine resin and wet earth smell of old growth working its way through the vents.
The gravel drive opened ahead, wide and manicured, and the main house sat at the end of it like something that had grown there rather than been built.
I let out a slow breath. The kind you don’t realize you’ve been holding until your lungs finally decide to work again. Portland felt like it had happened to someone else, in some other lifetime, to a version of me who hadn’t yet walked into an office with a cardboard box and a baby and a mouth that couldn’t shut up when it should.
“We have a problem,” Ashe said very quietly. The kind of quiet that doesn’t need volume because the words themselves are heavy enough.
The SUV slowed. Not a brake tap. A deliberate reduction in speed, the engine dropping a register, the tires rolling over gravel with a sound that suddenly felt too loud for the dark.
The high beams swept the road ahead, and the light caught him. Lean. Still. Standing in the center of the gravel road just short of the gate with his hands loose at his sides and his pale gray eyes catching the light the way a cat’s would—flat, reflective, patient.
Declan Morrow.
I’d never seen him before, but I didn’t need to. The way he stood said everything. The stillness of a man who had alreadydecided he was the most dangerous thing in this scenario, and was waiting for everyone else to catch up.
My eyes moved to the tree line. Left side: two shapes, barely visible, the darkness doing most of the work. Right side: another two, positioned at staggered intervals.
I assumed two more I couldn’t see, because assuming less than your worst-case scenario was how people ended up dead, and I had not survived seven years as an Army Ranger by being optimistic about hostile terrain.
I was already unbuckling my seatbelt.
“The back gate,” I said, leaning forward between the front seats. My voice came out level. Steadier than I felt. “Secondary access road, runs east of the main house, comes out behind the kitchen garden. Braham said it when he called. It’s not on the building plans.”
Ashe’s jaw tightened. I watched the muscle work below his ear, the particular tension of a man who had been given an order and didn’t like the variables.
“Get Grace to the house,” I said. “Don’t wait for me. Don’t circle back. Don’t stop. You hit that back road and you do not slow down until she’s inside with the door locked and someone standing between her and every window.”
Ashe looked at me in the mirror. The look carried several things, none of them approving—assessment, skepticism, and the frustration of a man who had spent his entire professional life protecting people who insisted on making his job harder.
Then he gave one short nod, tight and final because Braham’s standing order was Grace’s safety first, and we both knew it, and whatever Ashe thought about my decision-making capacity was irrelevant next to that.
I turned to Grace. Her small face was still pinched, her fists still curled, and the look in her eyes was too old for her body—alert, focused, the kind of awareness that had no business living in a creature who weighed less than a bag of groceries.
I leaned down and pressed my lips to the top of her head. Quick. Deliberate. Her skin was warm, and she smelled like milk and sleep and that faint, specific scent that was just her, and something in my chest did a thing I wasn’t prepared to name.
Her hand found my finger. One tiny fist wrapped around my index finger with a grip that had no right to be that strong, and she held on like she knew exactly what was about to happen.
I unhooked her gently. Finger by finger, careful, the way you’d handle something breakable that had decided it wasn’t breakable after all. “Stay with Ashe,” I murmured. “I’ll be right behind you.”
She made a sound, not a cry, but something smaller, wetter, the noise of a creature who had opinions and couldn’t articulate them yet. I tucked her hand back against her chest and reached for the door.
The cold hit me like a wall. Oregon night air, heavy with pine and damp earth, the temperature low enough that my breath came visible in the SUV’s interior light. Gravel under my boots.
The gate lights threw long amber shadows across the ground, turning everything the color of old honey, and the trees stood dark and silent on either side of the drive.
I closed the door. Didn’t look back.
The SUV reversed behind me. Gravel spat under the tires, the engine growled lower, and then Ashe swung the vehicle wide—a tight, practiced turn that sent the high beams sweeping across the tree line in a brief arc—and the taillights disappeared down the access road I’d pointed him toward.
