isn’t about you. It isn’t about the town or the center. It’s about Kit.”
“How can it be about Kit? True, this is his hometown, but this ranch has never been his home. My successes or failures do not spill over into his world, except in their emotional impact, perhaps.”
“If you fail, he’ll come home. Your failure is the bait luring him back here.”
Mandy gasped. Her eyes widened as the impact of what he was saying settled in. “I don’t know how much you know of what happened before he left, but he didn’t leave on glowing terms. He’d made a stupid teenage mistake. He can’t have enemies here from that-still-can he?”
“No idea.” Rocco shrugged. “Someone is forcing him to come home. I don’t know why.” He thought of Ivy, Kit’s high school flame. She was a poster child for a woman scorned. She’d only recently come back to town. And now this mess was happening.
“What are you thinking?” Mandy asked.
“What about Ivy? She and Kit don’t exactly have a peaceful background.”
Mandy looked at him. “No. Absolutely not. She did not come back to start trouble.”
“Stranger things have happened, Em.”
“Not Ivy.” She wondered how much he knew, if it would be violating Kit’s trust to tell him the whole sordid story. “He told you what happened, didn’t he?”
“Some of it.”
“Ivy was fifteen and Kit seventeen when they began dating. Kit was planning to go into the Army to get the tuition assistance the GI Bill offered for college. They-they were intimate. Ivy got pregnant. That news came out the day Kit turned eighteen. Her father accused Kit of statutory rape. He wanted him thrown in jail, wanted his life ruined. It was a big scandal in town.
“Sheriff Tate managed to intervene. He had Ivy’s father agree not to press charges if the sheriff personally oversaw Kit’s enlistment. No sooner did Kit graduate and walk off the stage with his diploma, but Tate took him in his patrol car and drove away. Ivy and her family moved away that summer. None of us knew what had happened to her or the baby. She never wrote. She never visited.
“I heard, several years later, that she’d kept the baby. And then, she reached out to me online. It was wonderful to hear from her. We reconnected as if there’d been no lost time.
“I was thrilled that she came back to town, with her daughter. I can’t believe that she would wish Kit harm. You met her. She is lovely and cheerful and well-adjusted. She adores her daughter. She’s excited about the diner and their future. She would not do something so evil.”
He’d once thought Kadisha incapable of evil, too. A memory moved through his mind, there and gone before he could capture it. What had happened the day of the explosion? Why couldn’t he remember?
“Evil has a heartbeat all its own, Em. It may be Ivy. Or it may be someone who was hurt by the whole scandal. Or it may yet be something or someone else. Whatever it is, Kit can’t come home.”
He took out his phone and dialed Kit.
“Hey. What’s up?” Kit answered.
Rocco looked at Mandy, wondering how to break the news to his friend that someone wanted him dead. “There’s a problem.”
“I know. I was about to call you.”
“The accidents here are no accidents. Someone is trying to draw you out.”
“That’s what I picked up on. Remember that chatter I mentioned? Well, it’s gotten clearer. I’m coming out there. I’ll talk to you tomorrow.”
“No. Don’t come here.”
“Too late, bro. Blade and I will be in Denver tomorrow. We’ll be up to Wolf Creek Bend before dinner.”
Rocco cursed. “Don’t bring Blade into this. Tell him convalesce somewhere else.”
“Negative. The chatter’s from a Taliban cell operating out of Denver. They’ve figured out where we live, and they’re gunning for Blade and me. And now that you’re there, you’re a target, too. Shit, they hate you more than they hate either of us combined. You’re probably why they’re targeting me and Blade.”
Holy hell. “This ranch is nearly impossible to secure. It’s wide open and sits inside a bowl of higher ranges. Perfect ground for sniper attacks,” Rocco warned.
“I’m bringing up a team and some equipment. Have Mandy clear us some space in the basement. See you tomorrow night. Keep my sister safe.”
When Rocco lowered the phone, he couldn’t escape Mandy’s worried look. “He’s coming home, isn’t he?”
Rocco drew a breath. His lips pressed together in a thin line, he nodded. “Yep. And Ivy is not the problem.”
The house was silent. Rocco had checked all the windows, upstairs and down. The doors were locked. He looked around at the shadowy interior, dreading the battles to come. Mandy had kept her grandparents’ 1960s reproduction Americana furniture, electing to reupholster the worn pieces rather than replace them. The pieces were large and comfortable, made for the big-framed bodies of Western ranchers. The woven, oval rug looked like the only new addition to the room.
This ranch was her home. It was supposed to be a safe place. He had to do whatever was needed to keep the war from getting any closer. He suspected Kit’s assessment was correct-that just as the enemy had attacked Mandy’s ranch to get to Kit, they would have attacked Kit and Blade to get to him. He was the biggest threat.
He’d moved invisibly through various Afghan villages and camps, blending in with the native population. He’d heard firsthand the whispered rumors about himself, the Gray Ghost-an American commando who’d infiltrated the Taliban. Tactical errors experienced by the insurgents-errors that benefited the Americans-were blamed on him. Women manipulated his legend, horrifying their children with fiendish tales of what would happen to them should the Gray Ghost come to their village, warning them to behave and to beware of strangers.
His mission hadn’t been to kill any of the first tiers of Taliban officers. It had been much more focused than that. He’d been ordered to gain the trust of Ghalib Halim. Observe, learn, document, and report-learn what he could of the Taliban’s internal leadership structure.
In addition to the years of Red Team training that he, Kit and Blade had undergone, he’d had a full year of specific training for his assignment. It had taken one year to establish his cover in Afghanistan, a year to move ever closer to Halim, and four years to wait and observe. The hardest fucking years of his life. His fellow soldiers were being targeted by snipers, IEDs, and ambushes every day while he moved among the enemy with the mind-bending speed of a threatened chameleon, helpless to protect them with anything other than the info he fed to Kit and Blade.
There were others like him, still embedded with the enemy, other linguistic savants. The forward eyes and ears-and sometimes guns-of secret American Red Teams.
And yet now, his team had become the targets here, on American soil. If the bastards were successful in Wolf Creek Bend, who would be next? Other retired warriors? Their families? Was this a testing ground? Or was this more personal? God, he wished he had answers.
“Can’t sleep either?” Mandy’s quiet voice seeped into his thoughts. He didn’t answer her. He hadn’t even been aware she’d come into the room. Some guard he was right now. He’d moved an oversized armchair back against the wall, in the corner, giving him a line of sight to the stairs, the kitchen, the hallway, and both front and back doors.
Mandy sat on the sofa. In the dim light of the room, he could see that her back was upright and rigid, her hands tucked between her knees.
“What’s going to happen, Rocco?” she whispered.
He’d like to tell her everything would be okay, that the good guys always won. But that was a pack of lies, and it was never a smart thing to lie to an angel.
“We’re trained professionals, Em. We’ll take out bad guys.”
“But who are the bad guys? There have been no strangers in town. This is not an operation that can be run from a distance, is it? So they have to be here already. How will you know who to target?”
“We’ll know.”
