Page 33 of Ruthless Enforcer

She turns her head, resting her cheek against the headrest to study me. “This truck feels like it belongs to someone who shoots coyotes off his back porch.”

“And it’s registered to an LLC out of Cody.” Thank fuck for Hendricks and his preparedness. “Better yet, it has precisely zero satellite transmitters connecting it to my family’s fleet.”

“No digital footprints. Clever.”

I catch the faint smile at the corner of her mouth. “I have my moments, Duchess.”

She shifts, looking out the windshield. “I’m surprised we’re going to Portland.”

“Portland is anonymous,” I say. “And nobody looking for either of us has any reason to think we’d cross into Oregon.”

“Mandy said we’d go to California. Big Sur.”

Of course Mandy knows about the Big Sur property even though I’ve never mentioned it. I shake my head. “Mandy assumes I do everything Alessandro’s way.”

“And you don’t?”

“Alessandro likes monuments. He likes three-story glass pavilions on cliffs where the Italian marble costs more than the land it sits on, with twelve armed guards at the gate and two patrol boats in the cove. He thinks security is about displaying enough money and ammunition to make people hesitate.”

“And what do you think security is?”

“I think security is people not knowing you exist.” I ease off the throttle as city traffic picks up. “Big Sur is a family property. If Turner wants to bait a trap, he watches Big Sur. He watches the winery in Napa. He watches the penthouse in Seattle.”

“So where are we going?”

“A cedar cabin three miles down an unpaved logging road that doesn't appear on standard GPS maps,” I say. “Built in the seventies by a retired crab fisherman. No gates. No private security. Just ocean, rocks, and a woodstove.”

Clara’s gaze turns sharp, assessing. “Who owns it?”

“Me.”

“And who knows about it?”

“Me,” I say. “And now you.”

She goes still. I don’t have to look at her to feel the temperature in the cab spike. “No one else?” she asks softly. “Not your brother? Or Mandy?”

I hear the underlying question. She wants to know if I’ve taken other women there. “No one, Clara.”

She absorbs that in silence. I feel her studying me. She isn't naïve; she understands what a man like me keeping a secret place means. For fifteen years, my life has been public violence, high-stakes negotiations, and family duty. A place where nobody can find me isn’t real estate. It’s an escape hatch.

And I’ve just handed her the key.

Before she can say anything, the encrypted burner phone sitting in the center console begins to vibrate.

It doesn’t chime. It just buzzes violently against the plastic tray, the screen flashing with a single red numeric sequence.

Alessandro.

I don’t connect it to the truck’s speakers. I pick it up, press the side button to disconnect hands-free, and raise the receiver to my right ear, keeping my left hand firm on the wheel.

“Alessandro,” I say pleasantly. “You’re calling early. I thought you had a vineyard board meeting in St. Helena.”

The voice that comes through the receiver isn’t the smooth, aristocratic purr Alessandro uses when he’s closing a ten-million-dollar land acquisition. It is raw, vibrating with a fury so hot I can practically smell the smoke through the line. “Gabriel, are you out of your fucking mind?”

“That’s an open-ended philosophical question,” I say, keeping my voice low, light, almost bored. “You’ll need to be more specific.”

“James Whitlock is currently ripping through our Montana assets like a category five hurricane,” Alessandro snarls, his breathing audibly ragged. “He didn’t ask for a meeting. He didn’t threaten an injunction. He called thirty minutes ago to say that if his niece isn’t standing on his front porch in Helena by midnight, none of us walk away from this.”