Page 28 of Untamed Sinner

He looks back. “Someone smarter than you.”

I grin. “That narrows it down to almost nobody.”

The door closes and the lock engages. I stay exactly where I am.

One second.

Two.

Three.

Then I laugh. The war might happen sooner than I planned, and Gabriel might hand me the distraction I need to get out.

Thirty-six days is a long time to leave a plan unattended. People improvise. Loyalties shift. Men get nervous—particularly men like Ashford. They have an unfortunate tendency to mistake panic for intelligence.

I’ve been wondering how much damage he’s done without me.

But I’ve been asking the wrong question. I should have been wondering how much damage I could do from here.

Someone is getting close. And if they get close enough, they’ll do exactly what frightened people always do. They’ll try to save her.

I smile. That could work, because the girl was never important for who she is. She’s important for what happens when the wrong person puts his hands on her.

And suddenly Gabriel has bigger problems than the man chained to a wall in his basement.

I look at the steel door. For thirty-six days, I’ve been wondering how I’m going to get through it. Maybe I don’t have to. Maybe all I have to do is make sure Gabriel has a reason to open it.

28

HENDRICKS

The secure facility is outside of Bozeman, buried in a nondescript industrial park that looks like every other forgettable building in Montana. Inside, it's state-of-the-art—biometric locks, encrypted servers, facial recognition software that can pull a match from a database of two billion faces in under three minutes.

I hand over the notebook to Marcus, my contact who specializes in digital forensics and database mining. He's ex-NSA, paranoid as hell, and doesn't ask questions I don't want to answer.

"Run it through everything," I tell him. "Facial recognition, missing persons databases, social media scrapes, dark web trafficking forums. Blow it up for details—background elements, reflections, metadata if there's any embedded. I need to know who she is and where this was taken."

Marcus takes the notebook and studies the photo. "Timeline?"

"Fast as you can get it."

He spins his chair to face the monitors. "Forty-eight hours, maybe less if I get a hit early."

I leave him to it and head back to the truck. The two-hour drive back to Iron Ridge should clear my head. It should give me time to reset, to rebuild the control that's been slipping since Mandy walked into my kitchen and made herself at home.

It doesn't work.

As I drive through stretches of timber punctuated by the occasional ranch gate, all I can think about is her in my house. In my space. The way she looked at me this morning. The challenge in her eyes, the way her body responded even when she was trying to hide it. The way she said Gabriel's name and something dark and possessive clawed its way up my throat, so potent I had to leave.

I'm losing it.

I grip the steering wheel harder and force myself to focus on the road. On the case. On anything except the fact that she’s been under my roof for less than twenty-four hours and I'm already coming apart at the seams.

29

MANDY

Igo into town for toothpaste.