Page 57 of Untamed Hunter Daddy

And in the beam of the light, scratched into the concrete in jagged letters:

6 WOMEN. 4 GUARDS. 2 SHIFT. OFFICE FAR WALL. MOVE TO CANADA 11PM TOMORROW. ZOE IS HERE.

She left me a message. Intelligence delivered the only way she could.

“Zoe!” I call into the dark. The echo comes back distorted. “Zoe, where are you?”

From the far side of the warehouse, beyond the rows of shelving: a man’s voice.

“She’s right here, Marshal. She’s with me. And if your team takes another step, I’m going to have a problem I don’t want and you’re going to have a loss you can’t afford.”

I move toward the voice. Brock flanks right. Jax is coming through from the south. We converge on the open floor near the office door where the outside floodlights throw long shadows through the wall gaps.

Tyler is standing in the open with one arm around Zoe’s waist and a handgun pressed to her temple. She’s on her feet, not kneeling. Her hands are free. Her face is pale and completely focused, running calculations that have nothing to do with fear and everything to do with determination.

“Put the weapon down,” Jax says. Ice-cold professional. “This building is surrounded. We have a federal warrant. There’s nowhere to go. Put the weapon down and step away from her.”

Tyler doesn’t look at Jax. He looks at me.

“You’re the one from the cabin,” he says. “The one who found her in the mountains. She told me about you.” He smiles. White teeth. Charm deployed even now. “But you and I both know what this really is. She was alone and you were there and she attached to you the way a drowning person attaches to whatever’s floating. It’s not love, Marshal. It’s proximity. Circumstance. Take away the cabin and the storm and the noble rescue and you’ve got a scared girl who doesn’t know the difference between safety and desire.”

The words are designed to cut. They’re aimed at the exact place where doubt lives—the conversation with Mason about choice versus circumstance. Tyler reads people how I read terrain. He’s looking for the fault line.

“Zoe,” I say. Not to him. To her. “He’s wrong. You know he’s wrong. Not because I’m telling you, but because you’ve spent weeks building the evidence. Every unlocked door. Every choice I gave back. Every time I stepped away when stepping closer would have been easier. That’s not proximity. That’s not circumstance. That’s a man who loves you and needs you to know it right now, in this room, while you’ve got his gun at your head and my gun in my hand.”

Something changes in her face. A fraction. A micro-expression only someone who’s been studying her would catch. Her eyes flick down and to the right. Once. Fast.

She’s looking at his gun hand.

“He’s got his finger on the trigger guard, not the trigger,” she says. Her voice is steady. The same voice that ordered me to stop being careful when I was deep inside her. “His hand has been shaking for the last two minutes. He’s bluffing. He doesn’t want to shoot me because I’m still leverage. Dead leverage isn’t leverage.”

Tyler’s expression shifts. The charm flickers. Underneath it, for the first time, I see uncertainty. She’s right. His finger is on the guard. His hand is trembling—a fine oscillation visible even from twenty feet. She just told every federal officer in the building that the threat is empty, and the telling stripped it of power as cleanly as if she’d knocked the gun away.

“That’s the difference between you and me,” I say, walking forward slowly. “You see a scared girl who can’t tell safety from desire. I see a woman who just read your bluff and called it in front of a room full of federal officers. You’ve been underestimating her since the diner. You underestimated her when you left your laptop open. You underestimated her when she survived eight days in mountains you thought would kill her. And you’re underestimating her right now, standing here with a gun you won’t fire, because you still think she’s furniture. She was never the furniture, Tyler. She was the one paying attention.”

His arm tightens around her waist. Last reflex of a man whose control is collapsing. The gun presses harder against her temple, but the finger stays on the guard.

Zoe moves.

Not away from him. Into him. She drives her elbow backward into his solar plexus with force that comes from her legs and hips and every muscle she’s been rebuilding since the cabin. The strike isn’t trained. It doesn’t land with combat precision. But it lands nonetheless.

Tyler doubles. The gun drops slightly.

In the half-second gap she runs. Not toward me. Toward the enclosure. Toward the other women. She grabs Sara’s hand and pulls her toward the loading dock while Brock covers them and Jax closes from the south.

Tyler recovers, bringing the gun up, and points it at her retreating back.

I don’t think. There’s no space between the moment his arm rises and the moment I reach him. Only the system that was forged in Helmand and refined across a thousand miles of mountain: reach the threat before the threat reaches her.

I hit him with the cast.

The impact is enormous. Plaster connects with his forearm at the wrist and drives the gun hand sideways. The weapon fires into the ceiling—a thunderclap in the enclosed space. The bullet punches through the corrugated roof. His wrist breaks with a wet snap I hear over the echo. The gun clatters to the concrete.

We go down hard. Concrete instead of snow. Higher stakes. My left arm screams inside the cast as the impact reactivates every fracture the hospital set. I catalog the pain and dismiss it. I’ll deal with it later.

Tyler fights even with a broken wrist. Men like him don’t surrender. Surrender is an admission that the charm failed and the control is gone.

I pin him. One knee on his spine. Right hand on the back of his neck. The cast pressed against his broken wrist—I’m not proud of it and I’m not sorry for it either.