Page 3 of Tormented Hearts

Hawk stiffened. “Winthrop?” The name was familiar.

Really familiar.

He combed through his mind for where he’d heard that name. It wasn’t a name from his years growing up in small-town Wyoming, and he hadn’t served with any Winthrops.

Then it hit him.

“From the Legend of the Three Prospectors?” He’d grown up in these parts, hearing the tale around campfires and in bars.

Denver and Ayla stared at him.

Ayla shook her head. “Never heard of the legend, but you can tell us another time, Hawk. Right now, you’ve got an assignment.”

He pushed away from the table and strode to the door. “Sounds like there’s an old money, pampered princess out of her element in the woods.”

Ayla hurried after him. “She sounds calm and in control, but she wouldn’t call us if she weren’t scared.”

He continued to the door. “A deer probably spooked her. Send me her coordinates. I’ll be back in twenty minutes.”

He threw a look at Denver and referenced the thread of their conversation from earlier, about women and children.

He held up five fingers. “Five assignments with Black Heart Security. Zero entrapments.” He formed a zero with his thumb and fingers and walked out to meet his next ward.

* * * * *

The woods were thick here—the thickest spot Sinead could find, which was exactly why she’d chosen it.

She’d been to fourteen countries. She’d bribed a customs officer in Manila with a carton of cigarettes and a smile, and talked her way out of a checkpoint in a place she still couldn’t name on a map without looking twice.

She’d gotten herself into—and out of—more than one questionable situation.

But that didn’t stop her heart from slamming against her ribs the second she saw the two men moving through the trees half an acre out, mirroring her pace exactly.

She pressed her back against a pine and went still. Listened.

The birds had gone quiet a minute before—now they started up again, which meant the men had gone still too.

They were waiting, same as her.

You’re being ridiculous, she told herself. You’ve been on edge for weeks. This is grief talking, not instinct.

Her father’s instructions had been simple enough on paper. A property in the Wyoming backcountry the family had held quietly for over a century—untouched, unlisted, unmentioned in any conversation Sinead could remember growing up.

He’d left her coordinates, a hand-drawn map with an X that could have meant anything, and a note in his study that said only “Look where the ridge bends,” like it was a treasure map.

Only instead of actual treasure, she assumed she’d find a cache of old deeds. Maybe some mineral rights nobody bothered updating since the Eisenhower administration. The kind of paperwork problem a good lawyer could untangle in an afternoon.

Instead of hiring that lawyer, her father left Sinead a shovel and a riddle.

And six weeks of grief with nowhere to put it.

It was barely seven in the morning and cold enough that her breath fogged and the light through the pines was thin and gray. She was pretty sure her coat was stuck to the frost on the tree she’d pinned herself against.

And she’d told herself twenty times that the feeling of being followed was nothing. Just nerves. She hadn’t slept right since the funeral, and the lack of sleep would make anyone see ghosts in the trees.

Except ghosts didn’t move in formation.

At dawn, she’d been out here with a metal detector, waving it in slow arcs over the ground, telling herself she was being paranoid right up until she caught something a second time through the trunks.