Gray Wolf Security: Wyoming

by Glenna Sinclair

  Family was everything. But this thing they were trying to do here on MidKnight Ranch was bullshit. You can't build a family out of strangers.

  He'd see them fail if it was the last thing he did.

  SUTHERLAND

  Prologue

  Bodhi

  I’d picked myself up, lifted myself out of the gutter my parents had left me in. No one knew about that part of my life. I was very careful to keep it hidden from all the prying eyes. And that had been no easy trick, considering the way the paparazzi were apt to dig almost anywhere. I thought I’d finally escaped it all, that I could finally feel safe.

  Funny how it’s not until you have that sense of security that things suddenly disintegrate around you.

  If this had happened just five years ago, it wouldn’t have mattered. I had nothing to lose then. But now…I was going to lose everything I’d worked so hard for, was going to lose the first sense of happiness I’d ever allowed myself to feel. It was one of those catch-22 sort of situations: I’d lose my career, my reputation, my security if I didn’t do it. But I’d lose this chance at normalcy that had suddenly fallen into my lap if I did it. No one could really appreciate what it meant to find normal after never having it.

  Maybe I was never meant to rise above. Maybe I was always supposed to exist in that gutter in Boston. Maybe normalcy was always just a dream that fell apart when I reached for it, when I touched it.

  I never should have come to Midnight, Wyoming.

  Chapter 1

  Sutherland

  I woke, and there were all these concerned faces staring down at me, not the least of which was Kirkland’s. Mabel sat on the narrow couch beside me, my hand caught in both of hers. Joss and Mina were there, too, even though they’d been safely resting at the main house when I was last fully aware of what was happening around me – and what was happening was utter chaos.

  There was a rash of unexplained mishaps going on all around the ranch, including missing cattle and a grass fire that seemed to have started on the neighbor’s property. One of our agents, Ryan Babcock, had gone missing – though thank God that she’d returned unharmed. There also appeared to be a mole at Gray Wolf Security, but we weren’t sure who or why.

  Ash was missing after a botched operation to take down a drug operation in Casper that was being run by the Mahoney Cartel. Not only that, but they’d sent a video of Ash that demanded one of our own be turned over along with a detective from Casper who turned out not to be a detective, but a Homeland Security agent. But on the video, Ash made it clear he didn’t want us to do what we’d been told.

  But if we didn’t, they would kill Ash.

  And now…and now…

  That detective—whoever the hell he was—knew things about me.

  “Where…where am I?”

  “You’re at the house,” Mabel said in her soft, be-gentle-or-she’ll-go-berserk voice. “You fainted.”

  I sat up, too quickly, and my head spun as I did. He wasn’t there. There were only familiar faces around me. Kirkland. Mabel. Grainger. Hank. Joss. Mina.

  Mina. She was Ash’s wife. My heart broke for her.

  But he wasn’t there.

  “Where’s Clinton?”

  Mabel shot a sharp glance at Kirkland.

  “We thought…you passed out while talking to him. We thought maybe he’d—”

  I scrambled to my feet, rushing toward the door. Kirkland headed me off, stepping between me and the backdoor of my own house.

  “Lance said you were talking to him, and he started yelling that you’d passed out.” He studied my face, clearly puzzled by my behavior. “What’s going on, Sutherland?”

  “It’s nothing to do with Ash.”

  I could feel Mina’s eyes on me, but I couldn’t look at her. I didn’t want to look at her.

  “You’ve got Clint wrong.”

  Kirkland wasn’t afraid to look at Mina. Or Joss. He looked over at them as though for support before he tried to take my hands. I pulled away because I knew he was going to try to talk me out of what I wanted.

  I couldn’t let him do that.

  “We ran a check on the information Clint gave us. We couldn’t verify any of it.”

  “Of course, you couldn’t. He works for Homeland Security. Undercover. They’ve probably wiped everything that ever existed on him for his own protection.”

  “We called Homeland Security themselves.”

  “And they’re going to tell you the identity of one of their undercover operatives?” I rolled my eyes. “Come on, Kirkland, you know better than that!”

  “We have a mole. Our founder and friend is being held by some pretty dangerous people, and the police have proven to be ineffectual in helping us get him back. And you want us to trust some guy we can’t get enough information about to verify he’s even who he says he is?”

  Kirkland’s exhaustion suddenly shone through his words. I felt bad, really. I wanted to make all this right, but there was so much and I needed to deal with Clint, needed to know what he knew about me, about my past. I needed to know…everything! And this was probably the only chance I was going to have.

  “I just want to talk to him. You can keep him locked in your fancy room if you want. All I want is talk.”

  “And what about Ash? We have a decision to make.”

  I nodded, feeling the tension rolling off the people behind me. I knew this was our priority, knew Ash’s fate was in our hands. I knew I had to fix this for all of them, because I was in charge and they were looking to me for a solution; I couldn’t focus on that right now.

  I was abandoned as a child, and this man walks into my life and claims he’s my brother? Did they really think I was just going to walk away from that? I needed to know. I needed to know who I was, why I was abandoned, and where he’d been all these years. He was the only one who could fill all these holes that had riddled my existence. Nothing had ever filled them, not my multiple foster families, not my career in the Army, not even the man I married or the child I bore or the ranch I ran because it was my daughter’s legacy. Her legacy, not mine.

  I would finally have answers, finally have something that was mine.

  I needed that.

  “We can’t give up Becks or Clint. So, what do you suggest we do?”

  Kirkland didn’t have an immediate answer. But Mina did.

  “You can’t just sit back and let Ash die!” She was already crying. I could hear it in her voice. “We have two children! They can’t grow up without a father.”

  “That’s not what she’s saying,” Mabel said in her soft, placating voice.

  “It’s not what I’m saying.” I turned to look at them, my heart ripping into a million pieces at the pain and the fear and the grief I could see on everyone’s faces, even Grainger and Hank. “I just…how do we play God? How do we chose between Ash, and a friend, and another human being? How do we hand these people over to monsters, and expect them to keep their end of the bargain? For all we know, the moment we allow them to take Becks and Clint, they’ll kill Ash. Or maybe they already have.”

  “Shut up!” Mina screamed before falling to her knees, sobs tearing through her body. Mabel immediately helped her to her feet and walked her upstairs, whispering in her ear as she shot dark looks in my direction.

  It was the truth and I was too exhausted, too stressed, had too much on my mind to be gentle about it.

  “You’re right,” Kirkland said softly as soon as Mina and Mabel were out of sight. “But Ash is my brother, and I’ll be God damned if I’ll sit back and let these people kill him.”

  He said it quietly, almost kindly, but there was fire in his eyes.

  I respected Kirkland. A lot. He’d come here to help me set up this office of Gray Wolf Security before he knew me, before he knew anything about my lifestyle or what kind of experience it would be for him, his wife, and his little boy. He did it because of Ash, because of his deep respect for Gray Wolf and all it stands for. And he pulled it together even whe
n it looked like I’d made the biggest mistake of my life. I respected that. But we couldn’t let passion get in the way of our decisions here. How we proceeded from this moment on could impact not only Ash and Gray Wolf, but everyone associated with the two of them.

  “I love Ash as much as you,” I said equally as calmly. “Ash was my husband’s best friend, he has always been here for Elizabeth and me. If not for him, I probably would have lost this place a month ago, when the balloon payment came due on the mortgage, and that means everything to me.” I stepped back slightly, raising a hand to wipe at the moisture on my face. “I want to bring Ash home. But I won’t give up Becks or Clint to do it. I won’t make an already bad situation worse.”

  “No one is suggesting we hand over Becky,” Hank said, coming over to join Kirkland and my little circle. “But we should consider giving them Clint.”

  I shook my head almost furiously. “Don’t you understand? They know he’s Homeland Security. That’s why they want him.”

  “We don’t know that.”

  “Why else would they want him?” I asked, my voice rising an octave. “Do you really, honestly think they’d want him if they thought he was just a Casper Police Department detective? Do you really think a cartel like the Mahoneys are afraid of a small city police detective?” I wanted to laugh, the idea seemed so preposterous to me. But they didn’t seem to believe it.

  “What if he’s lying about Homeland Security?” Grainger asked. “What if he’s one of them?”

  “You think Ryan would lie to us?” I turned and looked at him, saw the wariness in his eyes. He did believe that. I shook my head, so filled with frustration that I could hardly breathe.

  “Clint is not one of them! Y’all are so wrapped up in emotion that you’re not seeing what’s right in front of your faces!”

  “Maybe we’re the ones seeing things clearly.”

  I spun on my heel and glared at Kirkland, unkind words on the tip of my tongue and ready to blow forward. They were the ones not looking at this right. They were the ones who were clearly working on their emotional connection to Ash. Not me. I was not the emotional woman, not the one who couldn’t see what was right in front of my face.

  Ash was in danger. I understood that. But Ash understood it, too, and he didn’t want us to put anyone else in danger. I was only following his direction.

  “I won’t let you hand him over.”

  “We don’t want to do that, Sutherland,” Hank said. “But we might find ourselves in a position where we have no choice.”

  “There’s always a choice.”

  We’d entered something of a Mexican standoff, each of us stuck on our opinion and unbending. Military training taught them to do everything to keep from leaving a man behind. I had been, too. But I was also taught to follow the orders of my commanding officer.

  I opened my mouth to say just that, to remind them that Ash had managed to slip a coded message to us telling us not to hand Clint or Becky over. But as I did, the front door of my house burst open and my foreman, reeking of smoke, his face streaked with dark ashes, tumbled in.

  “Grass fire.”

  My first thought was: fuck! The second?

  When it rains, it pours.

  Chapter 2

  Ash

  They pushed me through the door.

  It would have been more dramatic if it had been some sort of dark, dank cell rather than a room in an impressive mansion that was more luxurious than a suite at a five-star hotel. I walked to the window and stared out, watching the guards walk the grounds, treating the place like the President of the United States was staying here instead of some criminal mastermind who had everyone fooled. Including me.

  I should have known. Why didn’t I know?

  What had I done to my family, my friends, my people? They all counted on me and I brought this darkness into their world without fully appreciating how desperately dark it really was. The lies, the secrets. And I’d allowed it to cover everyone I knew and loved.

  When they first took me into that office, I was convinced I was a dead man walking. I still wasn’t sure that I had much life left to live. But when I crossed that threshold and saw the face of my enemy for the first time—and then realized it wasn’t the first time I’d laid eyes on this man.

  I knew him.

  He was the last person I would have imagined could be the leader of a massive criminal organization. But we never truly know people, do we?

  You were supposed to move on, Ash. You were supposed to let it lie with the Bazarovs.

  That’s what he told me. Said I shouldn’t have continued researching what had happened to my operative, to my family, more than five years ago. I wasn’t supposed to worry that my son’s biological father was a criminal leader, that I wasn’t supposed to be proactive and make sure my wife’s past wasn’t going to sneak up and bite us all in the ass. He didn’t know me very well; the only regret I had was that I didn’t figure it out sooner.

  The Bazarovs were nothing compared to this Jack Mahoney—though I now knew that wasn’t his real name. The Bazarovs fancied themselves cowboys, rushing in to a situation without knowing everything. The night they went after Joss and the child she was protecting, they didn’t stop to wonder if she was armed, didn’t stop to realize she had intensive military training. They just saw a tiny woman and a child. They saw vulnerability where there really wasn’t any. Joss took them out without breaking a sweat. And Dimitri Avdonin wasn’t much harder to destroy. We just walked into his safe house and took out his entire crew. I got the impression, however, that Jack Mahoney and his crew weren’t going to be as easy to rid the world of.

  Either way, I wasn’t discouraged. I knew my team was working to find this location, that they were determined to make this right. Mahoney had no idea what my team could do, especially if he killed me. My death would only serve as stronger motivation. It was the worst thing he could do.

  Maybe he knew that. Maybe that was why I was still alive. And that was a mistake, too. He never should have taken me. He never should have revealed his identity to me. He had no idea what he was up against. He thought he did and that was a mistake, too. Never underestimate your enemy. Never go into a situation thinking you know everything. I was observing. I was learning things about the way he ran his organization. I could use that. We were going to survive this.

  I couldn’t say the same for Jack Mahoney.

  Chapter 3

  Sutherland

  The fire had already burned nearly two acres of free grazing land—five acres if it included the acreage that had burned a week or so ago—and it was spreading over the back acres of the ranch, headed toward the pasture where much of the herd was wintering. They had to stop it, but it was intimidating, this raging fire. And there was no major source of water here. It was almost as if the fire had been set intentionally away from a source of water.

  We had a truck with a water tank on the back, and Shelby had already brought it over. He was spraying the fire with the teeny house attached to the tank, but it was designed more to provide a trickle of water for the animals, not to put out a raging grass fire. Hank used a knife to cut the nozzle off the hose and we began filling buckets with water, throwing it over the fire as we’d done when the fire was near the stream. That seemed to create some progress, but the grass was so dry it just seemed like we were forcing the fire in a new direction, nothing else.

  We created a sort of chain, filling buckets, passing them forward, and tossing it onto the fire. There were two chains, one working from the back side of the fire, one working at the front. It was so slow going, not really making much progress. We were still at it as the sun came up high over the ranch, the horses we’d ridden up from the house growing restless being so close to the heat. I saw Becky looking over at them from time to time, clearly concerned about them. They would need water soon. They hated being tied up like this, hated being forced to stay in one place with such wonderful grazing land around them. And the smoke from the fir
e was making them nervous.

  My arms ached and my back was screaming. My mind was finally numb after all the thoughts that had been whirring around in there, no longer wrestling with all the decisions that had to be made. Now. I couldn’t think about Clint, couldn’t worry about Ash. I had to save this damn ranch or it would all be for nothing and I couldn’t have that.

  The more water we poured on the fire, the heavier the smoke got. I could feel it filling my pores, could feel it clogging up my lungs. A cough developed not long after we arrived and grew worse the longer we worked. Hank kept pushing me back, trying to keep me from the worst of it, but this was my ranch, damn it! I didn’t need him trying to protect me.

  “Trouble!”

  For a brief second, my exhausted brain wondered what new problem was about to descend on us as Becky cried out. But then I realized she was calling to the horse.

  Becky and Grainger rushed around the truck, running toward the massive horse that had broken free of its restraint and was running toward the far edge of the fire. Hank and I followed, but it was Becks who managed to grab the horse’s halter lead and tug his head back, force him to turn back from the small patch of fire that was burning just feet from where they were standing. But he was agitated, made more frightened by her touch than he’d been just from the fire itself. He tried to rear, but she held the lead too tightly. Grainger caught up to her, reached around to grab the lead, too. That just made the horse even more frightened. He bucked and reared almost simultaneously, breaking free from their hold so violently that Becks stumbled back and fell.

  Her jacket, a loose-fitting denim thing that she always wore, caught fire. I don’t think she noticed at first. She didn’t begin to scream until Hank lifted her up, standing her on her feet as he patted at the fire with his bare hands. I did the same, not even aware of the heat as I desperately worked to stop the flames from hurting my friend.