Page 51

Grant shrugged. “What am I missing?”

I took a shaky breath. “Nathan West is the son of billionaire Patrick West, CEO of West Technologies.”

“Ah,” Grant said, looking gray. “I see.”

“Evelyn and Nathan West were engaged. Then he revealed his true colors. Evelyn has permanent scarring from his actions, and he’s declared that she’s his. Permanently. The cops only made it worse, and she suffered more damage at his hands.”

Not one of the men at the table spoke, their faces reflecting varying degrees of nausea and rage.

“She’s been running from him for years and has run through multiple false identities trying to hide from him. And the... significant fact that she’s chosen to let us help her instead of running is not lost on me.” I looked over to where she was, eyes now closed in what I hoped was sleep. “She’ll be staying here with me for an extra layer of security, since the Bitterroot House is a mess.”

Liam grinned at me. A shit-eating grin that grated on my skin. Really? Right now? I leveled a stare at him until the smile faded and he looked properly chastised.

“Are you all right?” Harlan asked quietly.

“I’m not the person you should be asking that question.”

He fixed me with a stare. “But I am asking. Are you okay? To do this? To help her?”

“No, I’m not fucking all right,” I said, low and dark. “He’s terrified her for years, Harlan. Years. And he came into our home to do it again. I want to tear his throat out with my bare hands.”

Jude flashed a grim smile. “I’m sure that could be arranged.”

Harlan was still assessing me with deadly quiet. Daniel was too. “What do you want to do?”

“First and foremost, we need to make sure that things are secure, and secondly, we need information. Jude, I drove the perimeter the other day and everything looked normal. No spikes in the control room, but that’s your specialty. Check everything, lock it down. If you have any extra measures to put into place, now’s the time.”

He stretched, almost looking eager. “I can do that.”

“We need to know if Nathan is here in Garnet Bend or if he’s hiring people. He has nearly limitless resources, so we can’t discount anything. I know we all have our own contacts, and I don’t particularly care about redundancy. Reach out to whoever you can—and more importantly, who you can trust with discretion. Figure out how Nathan discovered that she was here, and what he knows about us.”

All around the table their faces were grave. But I didn’t doubt them. I could trust every one of these men with my life. And more importantly, Evelyn’s life. None of us took this kind of job anymore. But just because we’d left a life of stealth and covert operations behind didn’t mean that we’d forgotten any of the lessons we’d learned in that life. Or what had been burned into us.

I winced at my own thoughts. Evelyn had actually been burned. “After that,” I admitted, “I don’t have a plan. We don’t have enough information to make one.”

“You’re right,” Harlan said. “We don’t know enough. But we’re with you. No one attacks us here. No one.”

Soft sounds of agreement from around the table.

“Don’t hold back,” Daniel said, addressing everyone. “Whatever contacts you need, wherever you need to go, do it. I’ll move anything we need to around in our schedule here. This takes precedence over anything else.”

I nodded my thanks at him.

“I think my first priority is to get eyes on him,” I said. “I’ve never been so sick to my stomach that we don’t have cameras in the grounds.”

It was a decision that we’d made early on—to only have cameras watching the fence and the gate to protect our clients’ privacy. Given all the things that we’d experienced and the vulnerable moments that we’d had to go through in our own recoveries... having private moments recorded—even accidentally—would have felt like a violation.

“I’ll check every frame we have of the fences. There has to be something,” Jude said.

“Make sure you check for manipulation. Tampering. We have to remember who we’re dealing with.”

He nodded.

“Thank you for helping me with this. I know it’s not our normal mode of operation.”

Noah cleared his throat. He’d said nothing so far. “You don’t need to thank us, Lucas. You’d do the same for any of us.”

I would. “Find out what you can in the next day. We’ll meet again tomorrow night. Anything important before then, you know where to find me.”