Page 91 of Sergeant's Christmas Siege

Like everybody else, as far as she knew, except the woman standing across from her.

“Mom,” Kate said softly, without the usual irony she usually threw into that word. “I appreciate you coming all this way. I do. Thank you for looking me up after all this time.”

Because she could, too, be the bigger person, she assured herself.

For a moment, Tracy didn’t do anything but continue to stare at the ground, her phone in one hand. Kate wondered if she might actually see her mother get emotional about something that wasn’t Samuel Lee—

But Tracy didn’t look the slightest bit lost when her gaze lifted to meet Kate’s. Or when she smiled. She didn’t look sad or soft. She looked... smug.

Every instinct Kate had screamed at her that something was wrong. Very wrong.

Tracy hit something on her phone, and her smile got smugger.

And that was when the night split in half and the harbor caught fire.

Twenty-two

The explosion went off, the blast loud enough to rock the windows of all the houses along the street but not enough to shatter them.

Templeton registered that, but he was already moving from his position on the stairs that sat up high and looked out over the harbor. Running like he was daring the ice to try him.

People were pouring out into the street, staring at the bright column of fire down on the beach. Or running toward it, like Templeton. Like Jonas, who appeared out of nowhere from wherever he’d been keeping watch, barreling down the hillside.

A seaplane was on fire. Fumes and flames burned, and there was confusion already, the way there always was, as the volunteer firefighters—some official, some not—appeared and did their thing.

“Bethan.” Templeton gritted out her name into the comm unit as he ran back up the hill toward the café. “Report.”

Because everyone in town was coming outside, clustering together on the hill or lending a hand to the effort to put out the fire below. But Templeton didn’t see his trooper.

And he didn’t need that extra kick in his gut to make it clear to him that there was no way Kate would fail to react to something like this. No way in hell.

His worst fears were confirmed when Bethan met him outside the Fairweather, a wary look on her face.

“Kate stepped outside with her mother,” she said. “I haven’t seen her since the explosion.”

And somehow, he’d expected that.

Something in Templeton had known this would happen the minute he’d gotten the call that Tracy Holiday had appeared.

“Does anyone have eyes on Kate?” he clipped out into his comm unit, already moving. Fading back from the crowd, his eyes scanning the darkness. “The explosion is a decoy.”

He repeated that, in case he wasn’t clear the first time.

Templeton didn’t go back up into town, because Bethan and Jonas had that covered. He headed down to the beach instead, past the docks and out toward the rocky point that marked the end of Grizzly Harbor. The farther away he got from the fire, the more his heart kicked at him.

It was like clockwork. All he had to do was feel something, and sure enough—

Lock it up, dumbass,he growled at himself.You can wallow after you find her.

“I have it,” came Jonas’s voice over the comm. “Chris Tanaka and his bottle of whiskey saw a dinghy headed out right around the time of the blast.”

“A dinghy.” Templeton managed to get the words out past the cold, gnawing fury that had him in its grip. Somehow. “In the dark at this time of year.”

“It looked to be headed out to sea,” Jonas confirmed, with zero inflection. “No running lights.”

And Templeton was breathless.

There was silence on the comm because everyone knew what that meant. In even the most experiencedhands, a little boat was hard to handle out where the harbor gave way to the swells of the open water of the cold Pacific.

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