Page 48 of Outlaw Ridge: Ryker
Ryker clenched the wheel tighter and pushed the accelerator harder as they cut across town. He knew the place. The old Ross house. He’d spent enough time there with Ethan over the years, barbecues, beers on the porch, late-night war stories, and lies and plans they’d never followed through on.
The house was on the east side, tucked into one of the older neighborhoods where the trees were tall and the yards were wide. Quiet. Familiar.
And now, maybe the center of everything.
Ryker eased off the gas as they turned onto the quiet street, the cruiser gliding past dark driveways and frosted lawns. The neighborhood still looked like it had decades ago, wider streets, tall trees arching overhead, branches bare and rattling in the cold wind. Most of the houses were brick or wood-paneled ranch styles, built in the seventies, solid and nondescript.
Then he spotted it.
The Ross house.
It was at the end of the block, slightly set back with a wraparound porch and faded gray shutters. The lawn was overgrown, the flower beds stripped bare for winter, but it still had a kind of sturdy dignity to it. Ryker’s gaze swept across the front windows, curtains drawn, no movement behind the glass.
Charlotte was pacing on the porch, arms wrapped around herself, her coat clearly too thin for the biting cold. She looked like a live wire, jittery, scanning the shadows, her breath fogging in quick bursts.
As soon as she saw the cruiser, she stopped and turned toward them, eyes wide and full of something between panic and relief.
Ryker rolled to a stop at the curb and threw it into park. “Let’s move,” he said, already opening his door.
He didn’t know what, or who, they were about to find inside.
Charlotte met them at the base of the porch steps, her arms still crossed tightly, shoulders hunched. “I silenced my phone,” she said before Ryker could ask. “I didn’t want whoever it was hearing it ring if they were upstairs or in the attic.”
Ryker nodded, eyes scanning the windows again. “Do you think they’re still inside?”
“I don’t know,” she whispered. “I didn’t actually hear anyone. I only saw the items that had been moved or were missing.”
Emma was already stepping past her, calm and focused, gun drawn low at her side. Ryker mirrored her, pulling his Glock from the holster, the weight familiar, centering.
The front door was unlocked.
Emma pushed it open first, and they slipped inside together, and he noticed that while Emma was keeping watch around them, she was also watching their backs. So was he. Because, after all, Charlotte was very much a suspect.
The scent of the house hit Ryker first, dust, dry wood, and the faintest trace of something floral, probably a long-forgotten air freshener plugged into the hallway outlet. The lights were off, but the sun filtered in through the thin curtains.
The living room was exactly how he remembered it. Mismatched furniture, a battered coffee table, a framed high school football photo of Ethan that still sat on the mantle. But something was off. A couch pillow on the floor. The hallway rug bunched at one end. Subtle shifts, but enough to raise every internal alarm.
Emma moved ahead of him, clearing the corners, her steps nearly silent across the worn floorboards.
Ryker’s hand tightened on the grip of his weapon.
Upstairs was where the danger might be. And if someone was still inside, watching them, they were about to find out.
Charlotte followed them inside, hovering just behind as Ryker and Emma swept the living room and adjoining hallway. Her voice was thin but urgent.
“That picture used to be right there,” she said, pointing to a space on the wall between two sconces. A faint outline of a frame was still visible in the dust. “I don’t let strangers rent this place. Just friends of friends. Everything’s always been left exactly as it was. That photo’s been there for years.”
Ryker remembered it. Ethan and Emma, young, smiling, arms slung around each other like the world made perfect sense. It had been taken at some post-academy barbecue, maybe the only time Ryker had ever seen Ethan genuinely happy. Before everything got twisted.
Now the space where that memory had lived was just an empty patch of faded paint.
They continued sweeping through the downstairs, kitchen, guest bath, den. Nothing obvious had been taken. No drawers yanked open, no cabinets rifled through.
But Ryker saw the back door ajar.
He stepped closer, nudging it open with the toe of his boot. A gust of cold air slipped in. Beyond the porch, the grass was flattened in places, footprints heading toward the back gate.
He turned to Charlotte. “Anything else missing?”
