Chapter 4 - The Fortress on Blackwood Ridge
I bolted upright, every maternal instinct screaming in my skull. I reached into the nightstand drawer where my grandfather had always kept his vintage .38 revolver. My fingers closed around the cold, checkered wooden grip. It was loaded. Five heavy lead rounds sat in the cylinder.
I stepped to the cabin window, pulling the moth-eaten curtain back an inch.
A solitary vehicle was parked in the clearing: Colton’s personal armored sedan. No convoy. No tactical squad. Just his car, mud spattered across the fenders, the front bumper dented as if it had rammed through a barricade.
The driver’s door swung open.
Colton stepped out into the mountain fog. He wasn't wearing his usual bespoke Italian wool coat. He wore a torn black tactical jacket stained with dark soot, his white dress shirt underneath ripped open at the collar. His face was pale, his dark hair plastered to his forehead with sweat and rain, and across his left cheekbone ran a deep, ugly laceration that was still oozing blood.
He didn't draw a gun. He held his hands out to his sides, palms open, walking slowly toward the front porch steps as if approaching a feral animal.
"Lauren," his voice came through the thick wooden door, muffled by the timber but carrying that distinct, bone-deep resonance. "I know you're in there. I know you have Grandpa’s revolver. Just don't shoot until you look at the passenger seat of my car."
I kept the hammer cocked, stepping toward the heavy oak door. "Stay back, Colton! I swear to God, I will fire! You step one foot on this porch and I will empty this cylinder into your chest!"
"Shoot me if you want, Lauren," he answered, his voice cracking with an exhaustion I had never heard in him before. "Kill me if it makes you feel safe. But please... let me bring her inside first. She’s bleeding out."
I hesitated, my breath catching in my throat. "Bring who inside?"
Colton turned around and walked back to the sedan. He opened the passenger door and gently lifted a woman out into his arms. She was unconscious, her head lolling against his shoulder, wrapped in a blood-soaked emergency blanket.
It was Jade Foresight.
My stomach plummeted. I unlocked the heavy iron deadbolt and swung the door open, the revolver still leveled directly at his forehead. "What did you do to her?"
"I didn't do this to her, Lauren," Colton said, carrying the limp woman up the porch steps without breaking eye contact with the barrel of my gun. "The cartel did. And if we don't pack these wounds within twenty minutes, she dies, and the only evidence that clears me of treason dies with her."
He stepped past me into the cabin, placing Jade carefully onto the worn floral sofa in the living room. The scent of copper and gunpowder filled the small space instantly. Jade groaned, her eyelids fluttering open. Her skin was the color of chalk, but her eyes—sharp, gray, and completely lucid—locked onto me.
"Mrs. Beckett..." Jade whispered, coughing weakly, a streak of pink foam touching her lips. "Don't... don't shoot him. He’s... he’s the one who pulled me out of the fire."
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I stood in the center of the cabin, the heavy revolver shaking in my hands, looking between my bloody husband and the federal agent he was supposedly abandoning me for.
"Start talking, Colton," I whispered, the hammer still drawn back. "Start talking before I finish what the cartel started."
