Page 16 of The Last Promise You Made

I didn’t have the time or energy for a woman who couldn’t be trusted.

I liked my moments with a woman to be sweet, brief, and full of satisfaction before we both went our separate ways. This woman…there was nothing sweet about her.

“What the hell is she doing here?” I growled out. Rather than my comment angering her, her lips twitched ever so slightly, and that only pissed me off more.

“Gia isn’t an agricultural journalist, Ryder.” Maddox’s tone was smooth and gentle, as if he was trying to calm a spooked horse.

I tore my gaze from Gia to my brother. Concern was written all over his face, and I realized, with a sudden swoop of my stomach, it was for me, but damned if I could figure out why.

“No shit,” I said, eyes flipping between the two of them again.

“She works for the NSA.”

That did surprise me. I’d highly suspected her job was a front. I just hadn’t been sure if it was for a con she’d hoped to play on the hick ranch family or something more sinister. I definitely hadn’t pegged her as a fed.

“What’s the NSA doing in Willow Creek?” I addressed the question to her, but it was my brother who answered.

“Working a multi-agency case against the Lovatos.”

Fuck. If that asshole, Chainsaw, wasn’t already dead, I’d want to shoot him all over again. Our little town, our little county, had the normal petty crimes of most small communities, but we hadn’t been in the line of fire for anything serious until the idiot had tried to tie the local biker club with the cartel.

I crossed my arms over my chest, widened my stance, and shot Gia a look with narrowed eyes. “And you thought, what? Our ranch was involved? That’s why I caught you snooping through our shit?”

“Yes,” she finally spoke. A clipped, single syllable, but the sound of her voice went straight to my dick. My body craved hearing that word on repeat as she chanted it over and over with me pummeling into her.

My jaw tightened. I pulled my gaze from hers, determined to not look at her again as I focused on my brother. “So she thinks she’s got some type of goddamn proof? If there’s anything at the ranch tying us to the Lovatos, she planted it there.”

Maddox ran a hand through his wavy hair.

“I don’t even know where to start, Ryder.” He glanced down at a folded piece of paper and then looked back up at me with eyes that were hurting. My brother was in pain, and that caused some of the heat inside me to simmer down.

“Mads,” I said, stepping toward the desk. “Just lay it out. Whatever it is, we’ll figure it out together. All of us. As a family. Like we always have.”

His throat bobbed, and then he said, “This is about Ravyn.”

Her name knifed through me, tearing at scars that were healed, but just barely. Maddox would never bring her up. Never. Not unless he had to. My skin broke out in goosebumps. Dread. Premonition. Something hitting me so strong I knew, somehow, the woman who’d once altered my entire world was going to do it again.

“What’d she do now?” I growled out. “And why the fuck do we care?”

“She’s dead,” he said softly.

For several long beats, I couldn’t quite comprehend what he’d said. Any of the times I’d let myself think of my ex-fiancée, I’d imagined throwing in her face how little she’d affected us after she’d gone. How the trauma she’d tried to aim had missed its mark. How my life was so much fucking better without her in it than with a lying, cheating, stealing con artist at my side. But never once had I imagined her dead.

I forced myself to speak. Forced my voice to be bland and cold as I repeated, “Again, why would we care?”

“She was working for the Lovatos,” Gia said from off to the side. I didn’t turn my head. I ignored her, eyes locked on my brother instead. “But she did something to piss them off, because they slaughtered her. Tore her open from throat to belly button, multiple times. And her hands—”

“I’ll say it for a third time—why do we care?” I cut her off as images I didn’t want flew through me. Ravyn with her dark curly hair swirling about her and flashing brown eyes smiling. Her luscious curves moving over me, skin glowing in the moonlight. The feel of her thighs around me as my hand settled over her lower abdomen where she’d told me our child was growing.

Everything had been heightened the night she’d told me about the baby. The smells. The sounds. The feel of our bodies. The wool of the blanket beneath me. The stars spread out like their own canvas above her. She’d blended in with the night sky and yet stood out like a glowing apparition. A ghost who had stolen my heart and then left with it in her pocket, along with a ring that had been in our family for generations and the money we’d borrowed to build the cabins.

That image of her, sexily moving above me, dissolved into one that contained blood and long slashes against smooth skin.

Bile hit the back of my throat. My fists tightened, nails biting into skin.

Maddox picked up the paper he’d been eyeing a moment before. “She left this letter for you. I guess it was tucked away in case something bad happened to her.”

He slid it across his desk at me, and I took a step back.

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