Page 43 of Montana Justice

Every nerve in my body screamed against what I was about to do, but I forced myself to move. Survival had always meant doing things that made me sick. This was just one more.

My bare feet found each safe spot on the floor—muscle memory from weeks of midnight feedings. The third stair from the top groaned if you stepped dead center. The hallway runner muffled footsteps but bunched up near the bathroom if you weren’t careful. Those details mattered when you were trying to be invisible.

The house smelled different at night. Lachlan’s cologne lingered in the air, mixing with the lemon wood polish and something indefinable that was justhome. During the day, withsunlight streaming through windows and Caleb’s baby sounds filling the spaces, I could almost pretend we belonged here. But now, shadows transformed familiar corners into accusations.

I paused at the bottom of the stairs. The refrigerator hummed its mechanical lullaby. The old radiator ticked like a countdown. Somewhere in the walls, pipes settled with tiny groans. No footsteps. No movement from above.

Lachlan’s office door stood partially open, a slice of deeper darkness beyond. I’d studied those cameras until I could draw their coverage maps from memory. The hallway camera watched at chest height—drop below that, and you became invisible. The living room camera’s blind spot started eighteen inches from the office door.

I sank to my knees, rug burn threatening through my sleep pants. The crawl to his office made me feel like the criminal I was, skulking through the home of a man who’d offered nothing but protection.

Inside, I pushed the door nearly closed. Just enough gap to hear disaster coming.

The computer power button glowed blue in the darkness, innocent as a land mine. When I pressed it, the start-up chime might as well have been a fire alarm. I froze, counting heartbeats. Five. Ten. Twenty.

Nothing from upstairs.

While the computer wheezed to life, I used the monitor’s glow to rifle through physical files. Papers whispered against each other: incident reports, duty rosters, supply requisitions. Small-town sheriff problems that seemed quaint compared to what I knew lurked in the shadows.

My fingers found a folder tucked beneath budget reports like a guilty secret. “Warrior Security – Confidential” marked in Lachlan’s neat handwriting.

Inside were preliminary reports about suspected trafficking in the area. Notes from meetings with Beckett and Hunter Everett. A few grainy surveillance photos of trucks at odd hours. One location I recognized—the old Mitchell barn that sat abandoned off Route 89. Ray had mentioned it once in passing.

They were sniffing around the edges, but they didn’t have much yet. A dozen pages of suspicions and theories, but no solid connections. No names that mattered. Still, it was more than Ray knew they had.

My hands trembled as I photographed the pages showing the Mitchell barn and notes about increased truck traffic on back roads. Just enough to give Ray a warning without revealing how little Lachlan actually knew.

The computer finally loaded. Lachlan’s password flowed from my fingers—his badge number plus Caleb’s birthdate. He’d added that part after learning about his son, updating all his passwords with proud-father enthusiasm that had made me want to weep.

His desktop was exactly what I’d expect—organized folders with clear labels, a photo of the Montana mountains as wallpaper, shortcuts arranged by frequency of use. Order and control in digital form.

Email first. I clicked through threads about overtime disputes and parking complaints until I found one from Beckett. The subject line read: “Follow-up on our discussion.”

Lach - Touched base with my contact in Billings. Still hearing chatter about weapons movement, but nothing concrete. Might be worth increasing patrols on the back roads we discussed. Let me know if you want to set up another checkpoint. - B

That was it. They were fishing, throwing out nets and hoping to catch something. But even fishing expeditions could get lucky.

A floorboard creaked overhead.

My entire body locked up, suddenly aware of every sound I was making. The whisper of my breathing. The rustle of papers. The hammering of my heart that surely he could hear through the ceiling.

Another creak. Then footsteps, purposeful and direct.

Panic flooded my system with chemical urgency. I closed the email, cleared the browser history with practiced efficiency, dropped the phone into my pocket, and shoved the folder back under the budget reports. No time to shut down properly—the computer would have to stay on.

By the time his footsteps hit the stairs, I was on my knees beside the desk, running my hands along the baseboards like a desperate mother searching for her baby’s comfort object.

“Piper?”

The hallway light backlit him in the doorway, turning him into something out of a dream. Or a nightmare, depending on which part of me was in charge. Bare chest catching shadows and light, those ridiculous pajama pants riding low on his hips, hair sticking up in ways that should have been comical but just made him more human.

“I’m sorry,” I said, putting frustrated exhaustion into my voice. Years of lying to survive made the performance easy. “I didn’t mean to wake you. Caleb lost his pacifier somewhere, and I thought maybe it rolled under your desk when I was in here earlier.”

He moved into the room, bringing warmth and that scent that made rational thought stutter. This close, I could see the pattern of chest hair, the faint scar near his ribs from some long-ago injury. “You could have turned on the light.”

“I–I didn’t want to disturb you.” I made a show of checking along the wall, hyperaware of how my sleep shirt rode up when I stretched. “I know how early you have to get up.”

“Hey.” His voice dropped to that gentle tone that undid me every time. He crouched beside me, close enough that his body heat soaked through my thin clothes. “It’s okay. Let me help.”

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