Page 110 of Tag (The Golden Team #9)

Carter

T hey didn’t ease me in.

Faron briefed me on the move—three girls missing from the same two-mile radius.

Same lure, different day: promises of cash for promo work, a ride to “an audition,” nothing that sounded scary until it was.

One of them had slipped free last night and staggered into the ER with zip ties torn to floss and a story sliced into half-sentences.

We were rolling ten minutes later—Faron driving, Aponi in the back scrolling through street cameras, me riding shotgun and learning San Diego County by instinct. Freeway hiss, palm shadows, salt air. Idaho felt a thousand years away.

Scripps Encinitas sat close enough to the ocean that the air in the parking lot tasted like it. The wind tugged at the flags out front, bright against an unbothered blue sky. It made me think of how the world kept turning while your life tipped over.

Inside felt colder. Hospitals always do.

“Victim’s name is Lindsey,” Faron said, flashing a badge at security. “Seventeen. Detective Keane is en route, but we’re not waiting.” He cut me a look. “Keep your head up. If this crew thinks she talked…”

“They’ll come looking,” I finished. “Got it.”

We found her in a curtained bay—small, pale, bruises like constellations across her arms. A nurse stood between her and the rest of the world, chart in one hand, the other resting lightly on Lindsey’s wrist like she was anchoring her here.

Dark hair braided over one shoulder. Green eyes that didn’t miss a thing.

“Family?” the nurse asked, and then clocked us—posture, boots, the way Faron’s gaze kept mapping exits. Her guard softened, just a degree. “You’re not family.”

“No,” Faron said. “We’re the ones who want to keep her alive.”

Her attention slid to me, pinning me like a thumbtack. “And you are?”

“Carter.” I kept my voice even. “New guy.”

One corner of her mouth tugged—there and gone. “Welcome to the deep end.” She angled her clipboard. “Harper Vale. Trauma nurse. She was dehydrated, hypothermic, and terrified. Two men, black SUV, no plates. One wore a wedding band on a chain. Weird detail, but she noticed.”

“Victims notice everything they think might save them,” Aponi said quietly from behind me. The nurse—Harper—gave her a look of quick, sharp respect.

“Lindsey,” Harper said gently, shifting so we could see the girl’s face without her feeling boxed in. “These are… good people. They’re here to help.”

Lindsey flinched at our boots, at the radio clip on Faron’s vest. Harper’s hand never left her wrist. The girl’s voice came out in a whisper, dragged over gravel. “They said if I talked, they’d come back for my sister.”

“What’s your sister’s name?” I asked, softer than I felt. “Just the name.”

“Ellie.” Lindsey blinked hard. “She’s fourteen.”

“Okay.” I kept my breaths slow. “Ellie’s our problem now, not yours.”

Harper’s eyes met mine for a second, heat flashing there—approval, warning, I couldn’t tell. Either way, it roped a steady line around something inside me that had been drifting.

We handled the details as carefully as if we were defusing a bomb.

Harper told us what she had learned: a scent like motor oil and cologne; a tattoo—compass rose—on the inside of one guy’s wrist. Aponi typed, cross-referencing previous arrests.

Faron called Keane with the update. I logged times, routes, and quickly threw up mental geofences, just like I used to map avalanche risk on the mountain.

It was neat, clean, almost clinical—until Harper’s phone vibrated on the counter and her face changed.

“What is it?” Aponi asked.

Harper turned the screen toward us. A single text from an unknown number, sent to the hospital’s main line and forwarded to the unit: Discharge the girl. Now.

Faron’s hand went to his radio. “We’re locking this down.”

Before he could press the button, the overhead speakers hiccuped, then droned: “Security to ER. Security to ER.”

Harper’s jaw clenched. “They never page like that unless—”

“Unless someone wants us to panic,” I said. “Or someone’s already inside.”

We moved. Faron pushed out to check the hall. Aponi slid her body between Lindsey and the door like it was muscle memory. I stepped to the curtain edge and lifted it with two fingers.

Two men in maintenance blues strolled past, too synchronized for strangers. Their hands were empty. Their eyes were wrong.

“Left,” I murmured.

Faron didn’t look back. He just vanished into their wake.

The air in the little bay thinned. Harper leaned in close to Lindsey. “Look at me,” she said, voice soft but unshakeable. “You’re safe. These people are here to keep you safe.”

The girl inhaled in short, panicked snatches, the kind that never reach the bottom of your lungs. Harper matched her—slow, measured breaths until Lindsey’s synced to hers. It was a small miracle in a place built for big ones.

I watched her do it and felt something shift under my ribs. Not attraction. Not yet. Recognition.

Harper looked up at me. “If I tell you to move her, you move her.”

“Yes, ma’am,” I said, which earned a flash of those green eyes. “Don’t ma’am me. I’m thirty-two.”

“Then yes, Harper.” I didn’t smile. Not here. But the corner of her mouth twitched anyway.

Faron’s voice crackled low in my earpiece. “Two at the service corridor. One more posted at ambulance bay. Not maintenance. Waiting.”

Waiting for who, I wanted to ask, but the answer was obvious.

“Harper,” I said, “does this room have a back exit?”

She shook her head. “Only the supply pass-through. But there’s a staff stairwell ten yards east. If we cut through Imaging, we can—”

The curtain ripped open.

The first guy took one step in and froze when he saw me. The second’s gaze skipped over Lindsey and landed hard on Harper, like he’d spotted the linchpin. He smiled without teeth.

“Wrong room,” he said.

“Yeah,” I answered, shifting my weight. “It is.”

Everything after that narrowed to slices.

Faron’s shoulder hit the first guy mid-spine from the blind side, and the man folded like a bad chair.

The second reached under his jacket, and I was already moving, already closing the space.

My hand met his wrist, torqued, pinned. A gun clattered under the bed and Harper kicked it hard enough to send it skidding into the hall.

Lindsey screamed. Aponi’s palm was on her shoulder in an instant, holding her in place, steady and soft.

A third man appeared at the doorway, face tattooed, eyes glass-flat. He saw the mess—his mess—tilt toward us and pivoted to run.

“Go,” Faron snapped.

I went.

The corridor blurred—bleach, shoe squeak, a crash cart left crooked against a wall.

The third man shoved through the double doors toward the ambulance bay, but I had Idaho legs and a year’s worth of fury riding shotgun.

I caught him at the hinge, slammed him into the wall, felt something in his shoulder give.

“You touch kids,” I said, breath hot in my throat, “and you walk in here like you own the place?”

He spat something I didn’t bother to translate and drove his head toward mine. I angled, let him hit my collarbone, and bounced his cheek off the metal frame. The fight went out of him on a hard exhale.

Sirens wailed outside—real security this time, not a page. I cuffed him with a zip tie from my pocket and dragged him back inside like yesterday’s trash.

When I reentered the bay, Harper had Lindsey’s hands cupped in both of hers, whispering something steady. The first guy lay face down with Faron’s knee between his shoulder blades, the second in a loose, ugly sprawl.

Detective Keane arrived ten minutes late and five minutes after the danger was over. He looked at the pile of men, at us, and lifted his hands in a gesture that said he’d pretend he brought the cavalry if we’d let him keep the paperwork clean.

“Appreciate the assist,” he said.

“Call it even when we get plates on the SUV and eyes on their stash house,” Faron replied.

Keane nodded, already dialing.

Harper finally exhaled and straightened. Up close, I could see the faint tremor in her fingers and the way she forced it quiet. She looked me over like she was checking for damage she’d be expected to fix.

“You okay?” she asked.

“I’m fine,” I said. Which was almost true. “You?”

“Also fine.” She paused. “I hate lying.”

I almost laughed. “Yeah.”

Her braid was coming loose, wisps escaping to frame her face. She tucked one behind her ear, then looked past me to Lindsey, who had stopped shaking and started sleeping, the kind of sleep that takes and keeps.

“Thank you,” Harper said, and the words weren’t fragile. They were flint striking steel.

“Don’t thank me yet,” I said. “We’re not done.”

Her eyes met mine—steady, assessing, a challenge and an invitation in the same breath. “Good,” she said. “Because neither am I.”

Faron jerked his head toward the hall. “Carter. Walk with me.”

I followed him out. The ER buzz settled back into itself—monitors, low voices, the life-and-death rhythm that keeps going no matter what you drag through its doors.

At the corner, Faron stopped. “First day,” he said. “You didn’t screw it up.”

“I’ll put that on a plaque.”

He huffed what passed for a laugh. “Harper Vale,” he added, like he’d been reading my mind. “Works nights. Doesn’t rattle. The kind who puts herself between the world and the person bleeding.”

“I noticed.”

He started walking again. “Keane’s pulling cams from Coast Highway. He said tattoo guy has two prior arrests tied to a warehouse near Oceanside Boulevard. We move in three hours.”

“Three hours it is.”

When I glanced back through the glass, Harper was at Lindsey’s bedside, head bent, hand steady. She didn’t look like someone who wanted saving. She looked like someone who had made a decision a long time ago and kept making it every day since.

I knew that feeling. It was the only one that had pulled me out of Idaho.

Three hours until wheels up. Three hours to learn a new city, a new team, a new woman’s name in my bones.

I didn’t know it yet, but this was the moment my old life stopped clinging.

And the new one started to bite.