Page 87 of The Scout

The realization struck me with the force of a freight train, knocking the breath from my lungs.

I loved him.

Fiercely. Desperately. Without logic or hesitation.

I loved Ryker Dane.

And if he didn’t make it out of this alive—if neither of them did—I wasn’t sure how I would survive it.

“I love Ryker Dane,” I said out loud, as if proclaiming it made it true. Maybe it did.

This wasn’t the love I had known before.

Not the steady, grounding love I had for my dad—the kind that wrapped around me like a warm coat. Not the fierce, unshakable love I had for Will, built on shared childhood memories, on late-night talks, on the kind of bond that only came from surviving loss together.

This was different.

This was consuming.

It was raw and unrelenting, something that had taken root inside me without my permission, spreading through my veins, wrapping around my ribs like it had always been there, waiting for me to notice.

It was the kind of love that made me ache. That made my pulse stutter when I thought of him, that made every touch feel electric.

It was the kind of love that terrified me.

Because it meant if I lost him, I wouldn’t just grieve him. I would break.

The two men Ryker had assigned to watch me sat up front, their focus split between the road ahead and the steady stream of radio chatter murmuring through their earpieces. They barely spoke, only exchanging the occasional low, clipped update.

“Scout’s made it to the pier.”

I blinked, tearing my gaze from the window. “Who’s Scout?”

The driver glanced at me in the rearview mirror. “Ryker.”

Something in my chest tightened. “That’s his call sign?”

A curt nod. “Has been for years.”

Of course, it was.

It suited him. A scout went in first. Assessed the danger. Paved the way for the others. Took the risks no one else wanted to.

A leader. A protector.

The weight of it settled deep in my bones. He was out there alone, walking into God knows what, and I was stuck in this SUV, useless, waiting.

I could barely hear the transmissions crackling in their earpieces, but I caught snippets—codes,coordinates, quick confirmations spoken in the kind of practiced shorthand that only men like them understood.

The pit in my stomach grew.

This must be how people feel when they’re trapped in a car that’s skidding toward a cliff, powerless to stop the inevitable drop. When they’re standing in the ocean, watching a massive wave crest on the horizon, knowing there’s nowhere to run. When they’re strapped into a plummeting plane, the world tilting out of their control.

It was a specific kind of terror—the kind that seized your chest in an iron grip and refused to let go. The kind that made your body want to run, even when there was nowhere to go, no action to take. The kind that left you frozen in the space between hope and horror, waiting for impact.

And right now, that impact had a name.

Ryker.

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