Page 21 of Ranger’s Honor (Lone Star Wolf Rangers #4)

KARI

P ale light seeps through the cracks in the hurricane shutters, barely illuminating the salt-streaked windowpanes and the rough grain of the wood floor.

Where the slats don’t quite meet, thin bands of gold slice through, casting angled streaks across the room like fractured blades of sunlight.

The beams move with the breeze, narrow and dust-laced, crawling slowly along the walls as if trying to escape the dimness.

The air is thick—humid, briny, heavy with the scent of the Gulf—and clings to my skin like damp silk, fused with a tacky persistence that makes every movement feel deliberate.

The air carries a faint tang of salt-slicked timber and the stale ghost of coffee left to cool too long—subtle, haunting, like the breath of yesterday curling through the corners.

A breeze slips in through unseen cracks, cool and damp, prickling the heat still radiating from the sheets.

The atmosphere feels alive, charged with a tension that zings along my nerves, an electric hum that sets every nerve on edge. Like the house is wound tight with tension—waiting for something to break the silence.

A gull cries somewhere in the distance, shrill and echoing.

Beneath the floorboards, the old bones of the house creak and groan, answering the restless gusts of wind that slither through the cracks.

Outside, I hear the rustle of palm fronds swaying, slow and rhythmic, like breath.

Inside, the stillness hums with tension.

There’s a subtle change in the atmosphere—the kind that makes your skin prickle before your brain catches up.

My muscles ache from too little sleep, too many half-formed fears. I exhale slowly, grounding myself in the quiet and the fading warmth of Dalton spooned against me. The scent of cedar and salt still lingers on the sheets. Under it—him. That masculine imprint I know I’ll crave every time he’s gone.

I’m already awake, sitting cross-legged in the bed with the air-gapped laptop balanced in front of me, Dalton’s fireproof case beside it, its contents splayed open like battlefield guts.

His body heat still lingers in the sheets, warm and heady against the backs of my thighs, like he just slipped out.

It clings to me like the echo of his touch—broad palms, the scrape of stubble, the weight of him pinning me to the mattress hours ago.

For a moment, I let it soak in—the echo of his warmth, the subtle indent of his body in the mattress, and the scent of him still clinging to the sheets.

It stirs something almost feral inside me.

There’s comfort in the quiet claim of his presence, but also a spike of fear, sharp and sudden, knowing how easily I could lose it.

I press my palm against the fabric, grounding myself in the sensation, fighting the part of me that wants to crawl back into that fleeting peace and pretend the world isn’t burning outside these walls.

The scent of him in the cotton—salt, cedar, and something darker, something mine—pulls at something low in my belly.

A fragile indulgence. A reminder that danger hasn’t dulled what still burns between us.

But there’s no room for craving now. If I let myself feel it, even for a second, the ache of it might undo me.

I’m not sure what terrifies me more—losing Dalton before I can even admit what he’s come to mean to me, or losing myself in the fire of it all.

My focus is the only armor I have left, and I can’t let it crack.

Not now. Not when the mission might be the only thing that keeps us breathing.

Longing tastes too much like weakness right now—and weakness is a luxury I can’t afford. We’re running out of time.

I dig into the files, fingers flying, mind locked in. Gage’s encryption held longer than it should’ve—weeks longer, thanks to the custom protocols he wrote himself after a classified leak exposed critical vulnerabilities. He didn’t trust anyone else’s work to keep us safe. Neither do I.

He once bragged—grinning over his shoulder as he typed—that even NSA-level intrusion, and I quote, would take 'a caffeinated battalion of nerds and a full fiscal year to breach this beast.' But the Reaper isn't using brute force.

He's cutting through code like it's tissue, which means he's either got inside access—or something worse.

His progress isn’t slowing—if anything, the Reaper is getting smarter.

The algorithms show signs of adaptive learning, as if he’s studying our patterns, our defenses, and evolving faster than we can rebuild.

And with every new breach, I feel another thread of control snap loose—like the ground is sliding out from under me, and I’m running out of stable places to stand.

Every firewall we build, he finds a way to slither past. And now that he’s seen everything I decrypted, it’s a race, and one I have to win.

I comb through the last sequence in Sookie’s files.

It’s not labeled—of course it isn’t—but something feels off.

A prickle of unease sparks at the base of my neck, sharp and cold, and my breath catches before I even realize I’ve stopped typing.

My fingertips hover over the keys, heart stuttering like it already knows I’m on the edge of something that was never meant to be found easily.

Sookie didn’t leave trails without purpose.

According to Sutton, she was meticulous—obsessive, even—about layering redundancies and disguising sensitive data in patterns only she could recognize.

That kind of mind doesn’t make mistakes.

It leaves traps. Breadcrumbs. Anchors that look meaningless unless you understand the context.

Sutton told me once that Sookie loved symbolism.

That she buried meaning in metaphors, left personal markers laced in abstraction.

Not obvious, but not invisible either. So whatever this is—whatever thread I’m tugging—it isn’t random.

It’s a message meant for someone who would understand how she thought.

Which means I’m not looking for what Sutton gave me directly. I’m looking for what Sutton might have kept.

The thought slams into me hard enough to knock the breath from my lungs. Sutton never claimed to know what all the files contained—only that she’d held onto them after Sookie’s death, too paranoid to destroy anything without understanding it first.

She said it felt wrong to go digging. But she trusted me enough to hand them over, hoping I could make sense of what Sookie never had time to explain.

That trust weighs on me now—not as a burden, but as a bond.

I feel the pressure of it, sharp and intimate.

Carrying another woman’s secrets, chasing down ghosts she died trying to expose—it’s terrifying.

But it’s also a lifeline. A reason to keep going.

A promise I didn’t know I was making until now.

And maybe this is what Sookie counted on—that someone, someday, would recognize the pattern buried in the noise.

Someone like me.

I shove away from the table, heart pounding, a cold sweat already gathering at the base of my neck.

The chair scrapes against the warped floorboards with a sharp squeal, almost too loud in the brittle silence.

I lunge for the bag—rough canvas strap biting into my fingers as I drag it toward me, the zipper’s gritty rasp tearing through the quiet like a warning shot.

My pulse is a drumbeat in my ears, fast and insistent, drowning out everything else.

I rip through the contents in a frenzy, hands trembling.

This was the only bag we managed to cram into Dalton’s truck before we fled—some beat-up tote I’d packed in a haze of panic, convinced it was full of nothing but chargers, toiletries, and a few paperbacks to get me through a blackout.

Distractions. Nothing I thought would matter if and when a real storm hit.

But now?

Now I’m tearing into it like it might hold the one thing that could save us all.

The zipper sticks halfway, rusted from salt air and old wear, and I wrench it open with more force than necessary. My hands tear past a mess of phone cords, protein bars, paperbacks from other authors—comfort items I barely remember packing. I dig deeper, pushing past all of it until I spot it.

The floral spine. The worn gold lettering—attractive and jarring all at once.

My hand hovers over it, breath hitching, as a wave of something sharp and hollow scrapes through my chest. It’s not the object itself that hits me—it’s the fact that I overlooked it.

That somewhere in this battered notebook might be the truth we’ve been chasing through blood and fear.

I slide my fingers across the spine, tracing the faded gold like it might burn a path back in time.

What else have I missed? What did Sookie leave in plain sight, trusting someone else to see it when she no longer could?

That question lodges somewhere deep, a stone in my throat, pressing with a weight I don’t want to name.

I freeze for half a second, then snatch the notebook with both hands and flip it open. I’d assumed it was something random Sutton had given me as it was with Sookie's other things. But now, under the sharp glare of hurricane-gray light, I see what I missed before.

I flip the notebook over, picking at the corners of both covers, my nails catching against the slightly bubbled laminate.

A corner of the back panel gives under pressure, and I work it carefully, peeling it up millimeter by millimeter.

The edge lifts with a faint crinkle, then a soft tear splits the lining free—and there, tucked beneath the surface, is something unexpected. Not ink. Not pen.

An impression.

Faint. Almost invisible. I tilt the page toward the light and catch it at just the right angle—a barely-there embossing pressed deep into the paper. Not raised, but etched in. As if someone had carved it in using pressure instead of ink.

Letters. Small. Precise. Deliberate.

Not a name. Not a quote. A code.

My breath catches. It’s not from Sutton—it's from a woman whose face I never knew. A woman who I've only come to know through her friend—Sutton—and only then after she was murdered. A woman I never met, but who somehow managed to reach across time and death to leave this trace for me.

My fingers tremble as I run them over the impression, the weight of what it means anchoring in my chest like a stone dropped in deep water.

This isn’t just a clue; it’s a hand reaching out from the grave, trusting me to pick up the pieces.

The woman who tucked it in here, disguised and buried, like a failsafe only someone like me might recognize.

Someone who can imagine what it means to live behind locked doors and encrypted files.

A thread meant to stay hidden unless everything else fell apart.

Unless the danger got this close. Unless someone needed to finish what she'd started—and carry it further than she could.

And now? Now that someone is me.

The pressure in my chest tightens as I run my fingers over the groove. Heat floods my throat.

She’d carved a password into the damn page.

"Sookie, you paranoid genius," I whisper, throat thick.

I’m already back at the table, inputting the code into the partitioned vault I hadn’t been able to open before. My breath catches. The screen blinks, loads, and then spills open like a confession:

Master File — Project SALVO

Inside are names. Dozens. Judges. Politicians. Military contractors. Syndicate affiliates. And not just names—dates, accounts, recordings.

This is it. The whole damn conspiracy. Everyone who had a hand in killing Sookie. Everyone who let her die.

A cold sweat breaks down my spine. I copy a section—enough for Gage to verify—and load it onto the flash drive.

The upload pings. One percent…

My fingers hover above the keyboard, hands clammy with sweat, the pads of my fingers slick against the keys.

My pulse hammers at the base of my throat, breath shallow, chest tightening like it might collapse under the weight of silence.

Each percentage point crawls by like a countdown to detonation, and still I can’t look away.

The silence in the room suddenly roars—too loud, too still.

The soft hum of the laptop fan sounds like a siren, the tick of the clock above the door like gunshots.

Adrenaline surges, lighting up every nerve ending with fire.

My lungs feel too tight. What if they trace it?

What if the Reaper sees the ping? My eyes dart to the windows, half-expecting to see movement beyond the shutters.

Nothing. But that doesn’t mean we’re safe.

Rush swore we were… swore there was no way to trace us or any transmission we made via the satellite uplink.

I grip the edge of the table, knuckles white, willing the upload to continue, willing Gage to get it, to know what it means. The air feels charged, crackling with invisible danger, like lightning about to strike. My mouth is dry. My heart hammers out a frantic rhythm.

There’s no backup plan if this fails. No second shot.

Just me, a stolen password, and a dead woman’s truth finally clawing its way into the light.

If this crashes, it will destroy Sookie’s legacy and she will have died for nothing.

I won’t get another moment like this. I won’t get another chance to matter.

My hand shakes.

I open a secure channel and send it to Gage. No message. Just data.

Then I sit back, press my hand over my mouth, and whisper the words I didn’t think I’d ever have to say aloud.

"If I die before I finish this... don’t let it be for nothing."