Page 14 of Ranger’s Oath (Lone Star Wolf Rangers #5)

SADIE

T he bedroom door rattles, slow and deliberate, like knuckles dragging across a coffin lid, and every muscle in me goes rigid. My pulse slams against my ribs, thunder in a cage, so loud it nearly drowns out the voice that finally breaks through the dread-soaked silence.

“It’s me.” Rush’s deep timbre slices through the tension. “Stand down.”

Gage lowers his weapon, though his body stays a wall between me and the door until Rush swings it open. Relief floods me, chased by a sting of irritation that pricks harder with each breath. The monster at the door wasn’t an enemy. It was family.

Rush takes in the room with a soldier’s sweep. His gaze flicks to my face, lingers a heartbeat on Gage, and then moves on. He doesn’t ask questions. He just says, “Debrief. Now.”

The air thickens. Gage’s jaw works, but he nods.

Rush steps back and we get dressed before falling in behind him.

In the war room, the table is a map of controlled chaos.

Open laptops glow against a tray of emptied magazines and a whiteboard full of arrows and times.

The space thrums with unease, every man sharp-eyed and bristling with leftover adrenaline, as if the firefight still stains the air.

Gideon stands to one side, arms folded, eyes hard.

Dalton and Deacon occupy the far end, shirts spattered, knuckles scraped.

Rush doesn’t waste words. “Gideon found the approach vehicle on patrol. Two miles out, tucked in behind mesquite. Engine still warm. Plate is a fake. We pulled a burner phone, a high-zoom lens, and a foldout drone from the back.” His eyes land on me. “They didn’t stumble onto us. They scouted.”

I wrap my arms tight around my middle. “So how did they actually find this place?”

Gideon answers. “Pattern-of-life recon. The burner is set to ping a route from Houston to the island and back. Whoever owned it traced our convoy after the charity dinner, then leapfrogged us. There’s a paper map with circles around public access points along the bay, and a red X on the county road behind our fence. ”

Dalton nudges a plastic evidence bag across the table.

Inside sits a tiny black cube the size of a sugar cube.

“They used a thermal drone at night. Not just guessing which property. They were counting heat signatures. We found the drone controller in the truck with a memory card. We’ll know how long they watched when we finish the pull. ”

A cold thread winds through me. “So they knew exactly how many of you were here.”

“More or less,” Deacon says. “They read us as silhouettes and vehicles, not names and faces. They got bold because they thought we were outnumbered.”

“Who sent them?” I ask.

Silence. Rush studies me like I’m a problem he respects. “We’re still sorting that.”

I hold his stare. “You already have theories.”

“Always,” he says. “But theories get people killed when they get treated like facts.” He turns to Gage. “You and Sadie, debrief later. For now, I want the perimeter reset. Dalton, Deacon, get rid of the truck and burn what’s in it. Gideon, finish the pull from the controller and the burner.”

Rush looks back at me and Cassidy, who has appeared in the doorway, hair braided back, bare feet silent on the floor. “Ladies, take a breath. We’ll loop you in when we have something we can put teeth into.”

A secure chime bleats once from Rush’s tablet. He taps, reads, then blinks. He does not hide the screen. The message is short, clinical and from a registry none of us had expected to touch.

Office of Regional Adjudication, Central Division

Case flagged: unregistered change of status, Aruba incident.

Request immediate notice to Team W lead.

Recommend administrative review and containment interview to assess legal and political exposure.

Liaison available to travel at request. Advise custody or controlled hosting for subject until review.

Rush lowers the tablet and lets the words land.

“Someone in the adjudication office picked up an irregular signal tied to Aruba,” he says.

“They want a face to talk to, and they want it official.” He looks at Cassidy and then at me.

There is no accusation in his voice, only the gravity of a lead ranger reading a new problem.

Cassidy’s fingers tighten around her mug. “So someone above the Rangers wants to get eyes on this, quietly.” Her face hardens in the way it does when she decides practical work must follow emotion.

Rush rubs his jaw. “We can hand her over and let suits and lawyers take over, or we can manage the first meeting ourselves and keep tight control of what they see. I am not letting some paper pusher frame this into a political landmine.” He meets Cassidy’s eyes.

“We host the adjudicator liaison here after the op. Keep it contained. One team debrief now, formal interview later.”

Cassidy nods once, slow. “We host. We vet. We set the terms. No surprises.” She looks at me. “You stay close. If anyone shows up in suits instead of jeans, you tell me first.”

The tablet pings again. Kari’s bubble: Understood. I will pull registry names and find the liaison. I can flag any red notices. Send me the burner trace.

That single, polite ping moves from a remote bureaucratic footnote into a live event on our table. It will have teeth later. We file it, but we do not forget.

Gage moves like he intends to argue, but Rush’s expression closes that door. “Out,” Rush says and then adds in a softer tone to Cassidy. “Please.”

Cassidy slips an arm around me, and we leave the men alone. It steadies me more than I want to admit. “You okay?”

“I’m fine.” The lie tastes bitter. “Except for the part where a small army keeps trying to erase me.”

“You’re not easy to erase.” There’s pride in her voice, which helps until the pride curves into guilt.

“What?” I ask.

“Nothing.”

“Try again, Cass.”

She exhales. “I hate that you’re in this. I hate that I put you here. If I had… if Aruba had gone differently...”

“If Aruba had gone differently I’d be dead.” I stop walking, force her to face me. “You made a call that saved my life. We can fight about the rest later. Right now I need truth.”

Her hand tightens on my wrist. “Then we’ll find it, with or without them.”

In the kitchen, the house is all hushed appliances and long shadows. Cassidy moves with automatic purpose, pulling mugs, pouring coffee, setting sugar within reach because she knows how I take it.

“They’re keeping things from us,” I say. “I can feel it in the way they talk around sentences.”

“That’s part of their training as Texas Rangers.” She slides a mug toward me. “Compartmentalize, need to know, and protect the women. That last one is part of their DNA.”

“I need to know.”

Cassidy doesn’t argue. She wraps both hands around her mug as if warming her fingers. “Then we stop waiting for permission.”

“Explain.”

“Kari,” she says. “She helped me when the Reaper mess twisted sideways. She studied criminal investigation, but found writing romance novels was more lucrative. She'll know how these guys think. If we build a list of names, shell companies, contracts, she’ll start pulling at the strings until we untie the knots.”

"If she's so good, why isn't she some kind of criminal investigator?"

Cassidy laughs. "She's Gideon's little sister and Dalton's mate."

"Mate? You mean like a girlfriend?"

"It's more than that. It's a biological imperative."

"Then should we be involving her in this?"

“If she knew, she'd already be involved. Besides, she’s not walking into a gunfight, she’s opening her laptop.” Cassidy leans in. “And she already called me. Twice.”

“You told her?”

“I told her I needed a favor. She said she was already looking into the island roster on her own because things felt wrong. That’s Kari.”

A small warmth unfurls in my chest at the idea of help that is ours, not theirs. “Then we start now.”

Cassidy and I move into the great room. The fire has burned down to a bed of glowing coals, casting a dim orange light across the room.

I set my laptop on the coffee table and angle the screen away from the hallway.

Cassidy pulls a blanket over her legs, scoots close enough that our knees touch.

The contact says I’m here in a way words could never do.

She gets Kari on the phone.

“Okay,” I say. “What do we actually know?”

“Aruba’s private island,” Kari answers, instantly in analyst mode as the shared data scrolls down, “is owned by a tangle of offshore holdings.Shell directors overlap with the network the boys..."

"You call them the boys?" I ask.

"Yes. It helps to check their ginormous egos. In any event, the boys have been tracking this group of bad guys for months, illicit shipments, dark money. If island security or the cops were tied in, we can assume the shooter you saw was not a rogue actor.”

I type as Kari talks. “Names.”

She rattles them off, precise and calm. I build a table: entity, owner of record, probable owner, notes. Lines fill the screen. Patterns begin to whisper.

“Add this,” Cassidy says. “Rush mentioned in passing there were inventory lists that didn’t match manifests on a job last month. That might connect to the same financier who rented three villas on the island this week under different names.”

“Which three?”

Kari gives me initials and dates. I plug them in. “And how did they find us here? I get the drone and the truck, but they had to know where to look. Texas is a big state and even the Galveston area would be hard to cover with a drone. They didn’t just roll a die and land on this ranch.”

Cassidy chews her lip, then nods to my keyboard. “Type ‘customs leak’ and ‘tail number.’”

I do. “You think they followed the plane?”

“I think they found the charter tail number and watched where it landed," says Kari. "Even if they didn’t know about the ranch, they could triangulate movements from Galveston. If you were them, where would you hide a high-value witness in this region?”