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T hey were on their way to Willowbrook moments after seeing the video. But it wasn’t fast enough.

Gray pushed the van to the limit. The engine growled like a caged beast, echoing the racket going on inside Honor’s veins.

Honor still stared at her phone, her knuckles white as she gripped the device like it was the only thing keeping her together. Her breaths came in shallow bursts.

As Gray pressed the van past the speed limit, he kept glancing at her. She couldn’t bear to meet his eyes right now, and all she saw out the window was a blur of landscape as they raced home.

Home. A strange word that never had much emotion attached to those four little letters. She had called places home before, but none felt like it until she moved to Willowbrook.

The Malone brothers were already at Felicity’s house and had scoured it for sign of her, even though they all knew she wasn’t there. Sully had her.

Now they were combing through the town’s traffic cams, working every angle to track down her sister.

She stared harder at her screen.

“What are you looking at?” Gray asked.

Honor’s heart felt like a fist clamped around it. “The tracking app.” She lifted her phone to show him the dot pulsing on the screen. The longer she stared at it, the faster it seemed to pulse. But it was all her imagination.

He whipped his head around.

“Is it showing that her phone is inside the house, in the garage or on the street?”

“None of those places.”

“What?”

“I think it’s…with her.” She bit down on her lip. For the past mile since she noticed the blinking dot on the screen, she had been too afraid to mention it for fear it was wishful thinking.

“How can that be? Your ex patted her down before throwing her in his van. I saw it. It’s why I didn’t bring it up. How did he not find her phone?”

“He patted her down, but he didn’t check her boobs.”

He gaped at her.

“That’s where she keeps it.” She issued a hollow laugh. “Sometimes we don’t always carry a purse, or our outfits don’t have pockets. She tucks her phone in her bra.”

A surge of adrenaline blasted through her at what this could mean.

“Smart. Really damn smart.” Admiration warmed his deep voice.

But his praise didn’t change facts.

She swallowed the hard nodule of emotion in her throat. “None of it matters if we can’t reach her in time.”

“Even in a crisis, you figured out a way to turn the tides, sugar.” Gray gripped her knee. “This means he doesn’t have the upper hand—we do.”

She nodded, but her shoulders felt stiff. Her spine locked. Not only was she anxious as hell but tension radiated off Gray in waves, and she picked up on every flicker of his eyelids.

The van surged forward, parting the darkness with its small headlight beams. Every second stretched into an unbearable minute, an eternity wrapped in uncertainty.

She raked shaky fingers through her hair. The intimacy she shared with Gray in the van seemed light-years ago, not mere hours. What had begun as the best day of her life ended as the worst.

She turned her face to the window, her reflection a ghost amid the night.

Gray’s voice rose and fell as he spoke to his brothers again on the phone, giving them the latest information about her sister and the tracker. When he ended the call after a few brief minutes, she met his stare.

“We have to be smart about this,” she said. “We can’t trust Sully’s word about any of this. If he’s looking for diamonds, then he’s desperate. God, how could I be so clueless? I look at my bead stock all the time . Every single day. I take inventory of all the items.”

“You probably wouldn’t notice more clear glass gems.”

She shook her head in disbelief.

“My brothers are digging into everything right now. And tracking down that phone’s location. I already have a good idea of where it is on the map, and they do too. I just want to ask you a few things about your ex.”

She nodded.

“That van is an expensive model. And he had no steady job. No credit. And he paid cash for everything.”

“Yes.”

“You didn’t think any of that was odd?”

She shrugged. “Looking back, I’m not sure how I ever missed it. But in the thick of the relationship, no. I thought he was just being private, not secretive.”

“That’s not someone being private. It’s someone hiding something.” He gentled his tone, giving her the impression he wasn’t blaming her for missing something.

“I thought he had a trust fund or family money and didn’t discuss it with me because he thought talking about money was crude.”

“He couldn’t exactly tell you about his illegal activities.”

She snapped her head around to pierce him in her stare. “Your brothers found something on him.”

He gave her a grave nod. “The background check shows a lot of red flags, but nothing solid yet. They’re digging deeper now. But it’s bad, Honor. You know about his fake ID. But he’s been on the move for a long time, living just under the radar. And there’s a pattern.”

“What kind of pattern?” Her voice wobbled.

“All the places he’s lived in also have reports of high-profile burglaries. Missing coins. Cash. Things that were easy to move.” He shot her a glance. “Especially jewels.”

Her breath hitched. “You’re saying he’s breaking into places?”

“Not just places. Homes with high-value collections, namely jewelry. A few years ago, there was a home invasion. The victim was a woman. Married. Her husband wasn’t home. The intruder tied her up, took the jewelry collection and vanished. The case hit a dead end. No information at all on the thief.”

Revulsion washed over her. “Oh my god.”

“He never told you about his source of income because he couldn’t. You weren’t his partner, Honor. You were his cover.”

She waited for pain to slash through her. The thought of a person she once had feelings for using her that way should hurt, right?

“I broke up with him because I felt like we’d drifted too far apart to ever be close again. I felt like I didn’t know him. Turns out I was right.”

Gray rested a hand on the back of hers. “I’m sorry, Honor. You did the right thing in leaving him. Now we’re going to stop him and get your sister back.”

Her gaze snapped back to her phone. The pulsing dot hadn’t moved. Her whole body tensed. She was barely holding it together.

Gray pressed harder on the gas.

The road stretched ahead, dark and forbidding, but Honor felt the shift. They weren’t reacting anymore.

They were hunting.

* * * * *

Gray barely had time to slam the van in park before he was leaping out and rushing around to grab Honor. With her fingers clasped in his, they rushed toward the ranch house. Honor trailed along in the wake of his long strides, jogging to keep up.

He took her in through the side door that led straight to the security office. His brothers were all jammed in Carson’s office. Laptops were open, maps scattered on the desk. A flurry of low, intense voices filled the air.

The second they stepped through the door, everyone stopped and all gazes locked on him and Honor.

Oaks, always the most methodical, had a map on his laptop screen, one finger pointing over a location as he stopped midway through telling Carson some important intel. Colt was scanning even more security footage from over the past week. One frame showed the front of a van, and he was zoomed in on what was visible of it.

When Carson turned to him, he had the same storm brewing in his eyes that raged in Gray’s own chest.

He wasted no time getting up to speed. “What do we know?”

Oaks clicked through a few screens on the laptop. “Out of everything we found on this guy—and all the robberies we suspect he’s responsible for—there’s no history of violence. But it looks like he’s been at it for a while.”

Honor let out a breath, almost too soft to hear. But Gray was so attuned to every move she made, he picked up on it. He turned to her, catching her worried gaze.

“That’s good.” He boosted his tone with assurance he hoped would also boost Honor’s morale. “It’s unlikely he’ll break that streak with Felicity.”

“Maybe.” Her voice came out as a weak wobble. “But what if this time is different? He has a lot to lose.”

He had his doubts that all of the diamonds her ex hid in Honor’s jewelry stash were still there. He would place money that there was one on his own finger…which meant she may have used several more in her wire wrapped technique, and unknowingly sold them to some lucky customer at the festival.

Or hell, those bookstore ladies who took her class could each have one.

Or the vets were wearing them into the barn when they did chores.

A laugh threatened to rumble up his throat, but he held it in check. This was no laughing matter. Not at all.

Especially with Honor and her sister involved. Nothing mattered to Gray except reuniting them.

Sobering, Gray squeezed her hand tight. “Then we don’t give him a chance.”

“We are pretty certain her phone is still on her, like you said.” Colt directed the statement to Honor. She nodded stiffly.

He started to speak again, but she cut across him. “Okay, I need some answers from you, Colt.”

Everyone in the room silenced.

“Why weren’t you at the house? You’ve been going there every single night to keep watch. You could have prevented this from happening!”

“Honor.” Gray pulled her around to face him. “Colt was on his way. Your sister got home about an hour earlier than she usually does, and she didn’t inform him of the change of plan. She closed up the shop early or didn’t stop for gas—whatever reason—she got there long before he did.”

As quickly as it came, the indignation was gone. She slumped against him, head hanging in devastating defeat. “I know,” she said thickly, and he knew she was crying. “I’m sorry, Colt.”

“No hard feelings, Honor. Really .” Colt’s tone was genuine.

Oaks showed them an image. “This footage reveals that Sully’s been driving close to the house all week long, but he must have seen us installing security cameras or guessed that we did, because he never drove directly in front of the house after. This photo here is the closest we have to what could be his van on film.”

Gray was getting edgy. “This is all great. But when do we go in? We know where she’s at—let’s storm the fucking place and get her.”

Honor stepped out of his arms, back rigid as if she was ready to grab a weapon and do just that.

His brothers muttered things about the preparation behind everything. But Gray was tired of waiting. He held out a hand to Honor. “Can I see your phone?”

“Of course.” She hurriedly handed it over.

He opened the app and studied the dot that signified the location of Felicity’s phone. Then he opened the contacts. Finger hovering over the redial button, he met Honor’s gaze.

“I need you to talk to him again.”

“What do I say?” she jumped in.

“Tell him you’re ready to give him the diamonds. Set up a time and place to meet. But tell him it took you a long time to pack up after the festival and you’re delayed.”

She nodded and brushed her hair off her face. “I’m ready.”

Fear still lingered in her eyes. He felt it too. That wouldn’t fade until they got her sister back.

When he dialed and put the call on speaker, he could hear a pin drop in the office. No one moved or even seemed to breathe.

When Sully answered on the third ring, he sounded a little out of breath.

Gray’s gaze shot to Carson’s. It was clear that his brother had the same question running through his mind with a dozen possibilities about why her ex might be winded.

She quickly gave Sully the script as Gray had coached her.

A long pause throbbed by.

Too long.

Honor reached out for Gray, and he steadied her against his side.

“Text me in an hour,” Sully finally roughed out. The line went dead.

A soft wail spilled out of Honor. She clapped a hand to her mouth and twisted into Gray’s hold. He cupped her face to his chest and looked at his brothers. “Two teams. One goes to the location where the tracker says Felicity’s phone is. One goes to wherever the asshole says to meet.”

His brothers nodded in agreement.

“And while we wait, I’m going to make Honor some tea.”