Page 3

CHAPTER THREE

This place was so cold.

Not in the sense she expected. Just…empty. Lonely. Though she should’ve been used to that by now. North Dakota, Montana, Utah, parts of Colorado. She hadn’t let herself stay in any of them long or get to know anyone. She couldn’t take the risk with her father and his army on the hunt, but Socorro’s headquarters felt even more isolating. Like a prison.

Charlie lowered herself onto the edge of the mattress. The bedroom Ivy Bardot and Granger had stuck her in looked comfortable enough, but there was a reason she’d survived this long. She never took anything at face value. What was this place? A private military contractor and bed-and-breakfast? Her stomach growled at the thought. She hadn’t stopped moving since she’d crossed state lines.

Pulling Erin’s journal from the back of her waistband, she flipped to the first page. She could still recall the expression on her father’s face as she’d sped away last night, but disappointment came with the job of being that man’s daughter. And Henry Acker was the kind of person to never forget a grudge.

He would punish her if he got the chance. Just as he had when she’d been a kid. Whine about how much her body hurt after training all day? Run ten laps around the farm. Fail to clean her rifle that week? Stand outside in below freezing temperatures until her fingers no longer worked.

At the time, she hadn’t considered how wrong those punishments had been. How…traumatic. She’d simply seen them as a way to become a better daughter, facing them head-on and believing her father was only doing it because he loved her. In reality, all he’d wanted was another soldier to add to his ranks.

Tears prickled at her eyes as she traced the well-loved leather of her sister’s journal. Erin and she used to write notes to each other in a journal exactly like this. They’d designed a secret code only they knew. If their father ever found it, he wouldn’t know what to make of it, because they’d been the only ones who’d had the key to decipher the message. She missed that. The cover wasn’t new. It’d once belonged to their mother. Erin had reused it a hundred times as she recorded events throughout their childhood, a much-needed habit the Acker matriarch had instilled in only her youngest child. Charlie had always claimed to have better things to do. Learning the latest war-game strategy, checking the perimeter of the farm for the dozenth time, running inventory on emergency supplies. Though there were times she wished she’d journaled. For evidence. But maybe there was something in these pages that could help. Could point her in the right direction.

She flipped through the notebook. The contents were routinely swapped out for new pages whenever Erin filled the latest journal up. This one was half-full of coded handwriting, with the final entry dated four days ago. The day of Erin’s death. Only this code wasn’t the one they’d created as kids. This was something more…complicated.

“Thought you could use something to eat,” that deep voice said.

She hadn’t heard him come in, too distracted by Erin’s final words. Rookie mistake. If Henry Acker had witnessed her slip, she’d have to dig ditches until her hands bled. “How long have you been standing there?”

He moved slowly, as though approaching a wild animal, and, in a sense, that was exactly what she was. Feral, without a home, alone. Granger maneuvered to her side and set a tray of what looked like sweet-and-sour chicken and white rice on the bed. The scent alone was enough to remind her she hadn’t been taking care of herself the past few days. Hell, he could probably smell the three days’ worth of sweat and tears on her. “Not long.”

She wouldn’t get anything else out of him. Not unless it was on his terms. That was one of the things she’d liked about him the most when they first met, one thing that they’d had in common. It wasn’t much, but it’d been more than she’d had with anyone else. “Thank you.”

He added a good amount of distance between them. At least as much as the room would give him. “Is that Erin’s?”

“I took it from her room last night.” Her attention was split between her need for answers in the journal and her need for calories. Her father would be so disappointed to learn her stomach was winning the fight.

“You went back to Vaughn.” A concern she recognized from the old days tinted his words and set her nerves on red alert. They weren’t friends. They weren’t even acquaintances at this point. “And you lived to tell the tale.”

“I saw him. My father.” Charlie held herself back from shoving in more food than her mouth could take, simply pulling the tray onto her lap. She stabbed at a hefty piece of chicken covered in sauce and sticky rice, and her mouth watered. Chinese food had always been her favorite. It’d been such a delicacy compared to the canned and dehydrated foods she’d grown up on. Had Granger remembered that? “He caught me, tried to drag me back. Even had a couple of his lieutenants try to bring me in.”

“But you escaped.” Was that a hint of respect she sensed in his tone?

“I didn’t have a choice.” The bite of sweet-and-sour chicken coated her tongue and sent the first real glimpse of relief through her. One bite. That was all it took to lose herself in the experience, to the point this place, the cartel, her father—none of it existed. All that was left was this sweet-and-sour chicken and Granger. A laugh rushed up her throat. “Thank you for this. I haven’t had something this good in a long time. Not a whole lot of options while you’re in hiding. Going to restaurants or anyplace with security cameras was too big a risk”

“And yet the cartel got you on surveillance,” he said.

“I was careful.” She was getting full, but she didn’t dare stop eating for fear she’d never have this small joy again. “Those photos you have of me must be from street cameras, because I sure as hell didn’t put myself at risk. Not after everything I worked to keep.”

He didn’t seem to have an answer for that. Or he’d decided she wasn’t the person to trust with one, and that…hurt.

Deep. Where she thought she’d buried everything about the past and him. It hadn’t been easy. Granger Morais had been a big part of her life there for a while. In more ways than one. But she couldn’t think about that right now. Erin was dead. She needed to know why. Charlie stared down at the mix of vegetables, sauce and chicken, no longer captive to her appetite. This thing that’d brought them together was more important than either of them. “My goals haven’t changed, Granger. I still believe my father and his army are a massive threat. I want to tear them apart.”

“Then why did you leave?” That last word seemed to catch in his throat. “We had a plan. You signed an agreement with the US government, Charlie, and you backed out by running. The feds have your name and picture at the top of their terrorism list, and there isn’t anything I can do about that. If Homeland realizes you’re alive, they’ll do whatever it takes to put you behind bars and keep you there for a very long time.”

“I know.” She’d lived with the reality of what she’d done every day since crawling away from that explosion. And not without scars. “You trusted me, and I… I got scared.”

“Scared.” Granger turned away from her. “From what I remember, there isn’t a damn thing in this world that scares you, Charlie. You were willing to give us intel on your father and the people who raised you, knowing exactly what they would do to you if they found out. Hell, you weren’t even supposed to be there the night of the attack.”

“I thought…” An uncomfortable pit weighed heavy in her stomach, and suddenly Charlie wished she hadn’t eaten before having this conversation. There were still pieces of the past that could get to her. No matter how far she tried to run. Tossing the meal he’d brought her back onto the tray, she slid her clammy palms down her jeans and shoved to stand. Her sister’s journal bounced with the absence of her weight on the mattress. “You know what? It doesn’t matter what I thought. The only reason I’m here is because Erin is dead, Granger. And you’re right. We had a deal. I gave you everything you needed to take down my father a decade ago and get her away from him, but it seems you didn’t hold up your end of the deal either. So here we are. You said this cartel you’ve been fighting might have something to do with her death, to get to my father, and now they’re gunning for me. I want to know everything you know, and I want to know now. Who killed my sister?”

Mountainous shoulders pulled tight and accentuated his chest. Granger didn’t look strong in the sense of the other male operatives she’d clocked in the building. He didn’t need hours in the gym or gallons of protein powder to incapacitate a threat, though she knew he took care of himself. No. He had something far more dangerous packed into his lean six-foot-two frame. Something far more valuable: hard-to-come-by skills the US government wouldn’t have wanted to lose. Strategy, foresight, high deductive reasoning. Not to mention extensive training in surveillance and combat. Everything a counterterrorism agent would need to save the world. In truth, he’d intimidated her the first time they’d met. Though she could argue they were evenly matched in many respects, Granger Morais always seemed to surprise her in the best of ways.

“What makes you think Erin didn’t die in a hunting accident as the coroner reported?” His voice had slipped back into that near-whisper—too calm, too distant.

“Because Erin was the best damn hunter our father has ever trained. She knew her way around a rifle better than any of us. It was one of the reasons Sage and I always felt she was the favorite.” Which left the question of whether her father had anything to do with his third daughter’s death. Had he grown so callous, so vengeful, that he’d sacrifice one daughter to get to the other? Had he known Charlie had survived the explosion before she’d broken into the house last night? He’d seemed genuinely surprised to see her, but Henry Acker was a strategist. Never one to show his hand until the perfect moment. “Erin could hit a buck from five-hundred yards dead between the eyes. There’s no way she made a mistake and got herself killed. Something else is going on here.”

“Could someone have killed her to draw you out of hiding?” he said.

Charlie kept herself from folding her arms, from giving any kind of clue as to what was going on in her mind. She’d already come to a conclusion. The answer to that could be all right there in Erin’s journal. She just needed to decode Erin’s final days. Find the decipher key that would unlock the whole entry. “It crossed my mind.”

“All right.” Granger crossed the room to the built-in bureau taking up one side of the room. He popped the cabinet open and hit a series of numbers on the gun safe inside. The door swung open, and he pulled a sidearm from inside. “Let’s go test that theory.”

* * *

This was the stupidest idea he’d ever considered.

Setting foot in Vaughn, New Mexico, could only end in a death sentence now that he wasn’t employed by the federal government. Henry Acker had all the rights and reasons to shoot him on sight. And all the answers as to why the Sangre por Sangre cartel had targeted Charlie.

She hadn’t said a word from the passenger seat. Though Granger could argue she wasn’t really taking in the sights out the window either. Her hands were too tense, fingernails digging into her knees with every mile gained on Vaughn.

He checked on Zeus through the rearview mirror. The overstuffed K9 was asleep across the back seat after having gorged himself on the leftovers of Granger’s lunch.

“You don’t have to go in with me.” It wasn’t the first time he’d made the offer. “I’ve done this a few times. I’m kind of good at gathering intel and working my way into places I’m not supposed to be.”

“You think my father is going to just let you walk up to his front porch?” Charlie graced him with one of those rare smiles, as though the thought of him taking a bullet center mass entertained her, before she turned back to the window. “You’ll be dead the second you cross the town border unless I’m with you.”

“And if he’s not in the welcoming mood?” Granger tried not to let his hands tighten around the steering wheel at the thought. Not of him being taken down in action. He’d signed on with Socorro knowing exactly what he was getting himself into and was carrying a piece of a bullet around to prove it. But Charlie was a civilian despite her militaristic upbringing, and there was a difference between thinking she’d been dead all this time and watching her take her last breath beside him.

“We always knew there was a chance he’d kill us for working against him.” Her inhale shook more than he imagined she’d intended. Fear did that to a person. Took everything they believed in and turned it against them. Charlie might believe some part of her father still loved her enough not to shoot her on sight, but there was still a high chance neither of them would walk out of Vaughn alive. “I guess now we’ll find out if that’s true.”

“He didn’t shoot you when you broke into the house last night,” he said. “I’d take that as a good sign.”

“I didn’t really give him the chance.” She pressed her shoulders back into the seat, tense. “I might hate everything he stands for and the way he brainwashes people into following his beliefs, but the only reason I was able to disappear was because of the things he taught me. How to live off the grid, which high calorie foods would serve me better in the long run, how to recognize if I’m being followed. In some weird way, I owe my life to him.”

Granger didn’t know what to say to that, what to think. Trials had a way of preparing the sufferer. Some better than others. “Where have you been living?”

“Here and there. Nowhere longer than a couple weeks at a time. I took odd jobs for cash and stayed in hotels. I couldn’t take the risk of…wanting more,” she said. “North Dakota, Montana. Visited Washington state for a while. They were nothing like this place. Everything here is so…harsh. And up there, I felt like myself. Surrounded by trees and the smell of dampness from the rain. It was like I’d become someone else. Almost enough to convince me I could escape what I’d done.”

“Yeah. I bet it was easy to pretend after convincing everyone who cared about you that you were dead.” Granger regretted the words the moment they escaped his mouth. This wasn’t about him. This wasn’t about them and what they’d lost that night. The cartel had plans for Charlie, and it was his job to figure out what they were. Nothing else mattered. He was here to do a job. Nothing more.

Charlie swung her gaze toward him. “I’m sorry. For everything, Granger. If I’d stuck to the plan, maybe none of this would’ve happened. Maybe Sage and Erin would still be alive.”

“So why didn’t you?” Dirt kicked up alongside the SUV as he maneuvered onto a one-way unpaved road that would take them straight into the heart of Vaughn. He had to tell himself to press against the accelerator to keep himself from letting the vehicle roll to a stop. To give them more time. “Why didn’t you stick to the plan?”

“Because I was afraid.” She hadn’t shied away from him this time, the weight of her attention solid and vulnerable. “We started out needing something from each other. You needed me to help you take down my father, and I needed you to get me and my sisters out of Vaughn safely, but then it became something more than that. We became something more. I was in love with you, Granger.”

That final statement gutted him more efficiently than a blade.

“I was willing to give up everything we were working for if you had just asked. To the point I actually hoped you would, but those words never came. You wanted me to go through with my end of the deal, and I needed you to hold up yours,” she said. “The night of the pipeline attack, Sage confronted me. She knew about us. I don’t know how, but she was ready to expose me to our father. Tell him everything I’d done. That was what we were arguing about before the charges went off. She accused me of destroying our family, when all I’d wanted to do was save it. And she told me you were just using me to get to Dad. That the moment I was done being useful, you would throw me behind bars with the rest of Acker’s Army.”

Hell. An ache swelled along his jaw from the pressure on his back teeth. Granger kept his attention forward, but his entire nervous system had honed on Charlie. On the pain in her voice, in her words. “You believed her.”

“Yeah, Granger. I believed her.” She settled back into staring out the passenger side window. “So I did what I thought I had to do to protect myself, and I never looked back.”

Silence cut through the SUV, apart from the crunch of dirt and rock beneath the vehicle’s tires. A barbed wire fence came into view along the right side of the road, signaling Vaughn’s western border. Granger took his foot off the accelerator, and the SUV slid to a stop mere feet from crossing that sacred, invisible line.

Charlie moved to get out of the vehicle.

“I was in love with you too.” Granger needed to make that clear. That what’d happened between them hadn’t been part of some grand scheme to get inside Acker’s Army and her pants. There were rules against relationships between agents and their confidential informants, but he hadn’t been able to keep himself in check. Not when it came to her. In a sense, the forbidden nature of their relationship had made it all the more exciting, but those initial feelings of lust had quickly dissolved and left something more real behind. “Your sister was wrong. Whatever she convinced you of was a lie, Charlie, and when I got word you were involved in the attack, I wasn’t angry you hadn’t held up your end of the deal. I was worried I’d lost you.”

Zeus’s stomach growled in the silence and seemed to knock Charlie back into the present.

Her attention cut out the windshield, and the tension she’d managed to lose over the past few minutes returned. “They’re here.”

Granger diverted his senses to the threat coming down the road. Dirt puffed around three trucks charging straight for them. For a militaristic operation, Henry Acker could use some new wheels. His training took over then, and Granger whistled low to wake Zeus. The bull terrier launched himself out of the vehicle and followed on Granger’s heels.

He and Charlie moved as one toward the SUV’s front bumper. Ready for anything. They met as a team for the first time in over a decade. “You armed?”

“Don’t worry about me.” Long brown hair blew back over her shoulders as she faced the oncoming storm. Just as he remembered. “My father isn’t going to let anyone but himself kill me, if that’s how he chooses to end this. He’d consider it the coward’s way out, and Henry Acker is no coward.”

Granger fought the urge to unholster his weapon. Acker owned the entire town, the land, the buildings, the people who resided here. This was all private property that’d been incorporated through political pressure and a whole lot of personal funds. One wrong move and he’d lose any chance of figuring out Sangre por Sangre ’s intentions for Charlie.

Zeus’s growl vibrated into Granger’s leg.

“Steady. You won’t be flattening anyone today, mutt,” he said.

“You really need to put that dog on a diet.” Charlie took a clear step forward, crossing the demarcation line, raising her hands in surrender as the lead truck skidded to a stop. The two vehicles behind it each veered off to both sides, one right, the other left. Driver’s side doors fell open, and a handful of pretend soldiers splayed into formation, taking aim.

“Hold it right there! You’re trespassing on private property.”

“Get down on your knees and put your hands behind your heads.”

Charlie cut her gaze back over her shoulder, locking Granger in her sights. A single nod preceded her agreement. She’d warned him of the ways in which Henry Acker would exert his dominance over them. This was just the beginning. She dropped onto one knee, then the other, and interlaced her hands behind her head.

One of the soldiers centered his weapon on Granger. “I said on your knees! Or can’t you hear?”

Granger had faced all kinds of danger in his pursuit of terrorists like these men. The ones who followed orders blindly for a cause that had nothing to do with them. The masterminds who disregarded the lives devoted to them as nothing more than ants under their boots. Like the Sangre por Sangre lieutenants he and his team had taken on. These men weren’t more than thirty, some even younger. They had their entire lives ahead of them, and yet Henry Acker had somehow convinced them to fight against the very country that’d been born into.

“Granger. It’s the only way to get to my father.” Charlie’s voice carried to him. They had one shot at this. They had to play their cards right.

He lowered to his knees.

The soldier who’d ordered Granger down rushed forward.

Charlie reached for him with one hand. “No!”

The butt of the soldier’s rifle connected with Granger’s temple.

And the world went black.