Page 71 of DFF: Delicate Freakin' Flower

“She did it to protect us, but she’s not alone anymore. I promise we’re gonna get her back.”

The screen door creaked open behind me, its familiar sound breaking the quiet. I turned to see my dad, Wyatt, standing in the doorway, arms crossed, and brow furrowed, watching me closely. He looked worn, as if sleep had been a stranger for days, but he still maintained that steady presence—solid, grounded, and calm, just like he always had.

“All right,” he ground out. “Which one of my sons said I wasn't allowed to get involved?”

“None of them,” I shrugged. “It was Grandad.”

Dad's jaw dropped. “Hurst?”

“Yep.”

He gave a short laugh, muttered something under his breath, and stepped inside with me. I tapped my grandfather’s contact and put the call on speaker.

It rang once before he answered. “Tell me what kind of mess you’ve got brewing this time.”

“You’ve had people snooping around your place the past couple of days—that’s not a coincidence,” I said, my voice steady. “Gabby’s been taken by Colin Maddox. He was threatening all of us, and she gave herself up to protect us. She didn’t run, she made a choice to keep us safe.”

There was a long pause before Grandad replied, “I had to get the sheriff involved again. I’m too damn old for this, Webb. I’ve got livestock, a bad hip, and no patience left for armed trespassers. I just want to sit in peace with my dogs and my porch beer.”

He was so full of shit. “Believe me, I get it, but she saw something big. We're talking blackmail and buried bodies, and now Colin Maddox wants her gone, and he’s got the resources to make that happen. We’re trying to stop him.”

There was another pause, followed by the creak of a chair and a quiet sigh on the other end of the line.

“You know,” Grandpa mused, “I just had a woman named Sayla and her boyfriend’s kids go through something like this. It's thesame shit, just with different names. I'm tired of it, son. Tired of the kidnappings, the gunmen, the secret files, and the endless string of people who believed the only way to settle a problem is to make someone disappear.

“Agreed.” Wyatt stood beside me with his arms folded tight. “We’re all sick of it.”

“I just want one normal family fight,” Grandpa muttered. "Maybe some yelling in the driveway, a thrown lawn chair, the usual kind of chaos—but not tactical extractions and police reports."

I couldn’t help the half-laugh that escaped. He wasn't joking either, my family was capable of calling that a normal family night. “You’re preaching to the choir.”

“Well,” he sighed again, “Gabby’s Sasha’s cousin, that makes her mine by extension. So yeah, I’ll make some calls. I know someone who used to work with Maddox. I don’t know if he’s still in the inner circle, but I’ll see what I can shake loose.”

“Thanks, Gramps. I really appreciate it.” My shoulders tightened with a mix of gratitude and urgency that hadn’t left me since she'd vanished.

“Don’t thank me yet,” he warned. “If Maddox has her, this isn’t going to end with a polite negotiation. He’s not the kind of man who hands anything back.”

I glanced from the map to the faces around me. “We’re gonna make him.”

Matty’s voice broke through the low buzz of conversation from the kitchen. “Got something,” he called out.

I crossed the living room in three strides, leaving Dad to talk to Grandpa, with Jesse and Elijah trailing behind me. Matty didn’t look up from his laptop—his focus was locked in like a sniper’s, fingers tapping fast as he scrolled through an email.

“The guy from the electronics shop finally got back to me. He's just sent through a full inventory list of what Gabby bought.”

He turned the screen so I could see. The receipt had the timestamp we expected, just after she arrived in Orlando. There were micro-cams, audio recorders, a burner phone… and then something that made the knot in my chest tighten.

“Tracker.” Matty tapped the line. “The model’s unfamiliar, so it might be one of the newer private-use types.”

“Can you trace it?” I asked, stepping in closer.

“Not directly,” Matty hedged. “That model doesn’t ping to any open GPS databases I have access to. I asked the guy if he had any internal tools or access codes. He said no, but he’d reach out to the manufacturer and call me back.”

“Could be encrypted,” Remy added from the corner, his voice calm but edged with focus. “Some of those trackers are subscription-based. The data is routed through cloud services, which require credentials to access. Unless Gabby linked it to something we can hack into, we’ll have to wait.”

That was the issue—the waiting was killing me. I hated the word now.

Remy’s fingers flew across his keyboard, windows, and tabs blinking across his screen like a Vegas light show. “I ran those faces Matty pulled from the hotel footage. I've got three hits, but something’s off.”

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