Page 85 of Montana Mystery

I shoved down the visceral, overwhelming fear. This was so much worse than my own pain. It was like hearing Jude being tortured all over again. Your own pain, you could control. Could regulate. When someone you cared about was in danger and there was nothing you could do to stop it?

The world took on a red tinge.

“Noah,” Jude said. “We’re going to find her.”

“How?” My voice exploded in the abandoned quiet. “How the fuck are we going to do that?”

His face was grim. “We’re going to do it,” he said again. “We’re going to get her back.”

“You should know by now,” Lucas said. “We protect the women we love.”

Those words sent me reeling. Did I love Kate? The urge to say it had been popping up, but I’d held back because it was so fast. And a couple of years ago when Resting Warrior started, I would have said there was no way love happened that fast. But then I’d seen Lucas fall in love with Evelyn faster than I’d thought possible.

And the others who’d found what they needed.

True, shining resonance settled in my chest. There was no way it was anything less than that. I loved Kate.

I loved her.

Something small broke the silence, like a cry. They heard it too.

“What was that?” Grant asked.

The floor was the same kind as in the other barns. Close inspection revealed the outlines of boards to be removed. “Here,” I said. “There’s a pit underneath.”

All of us heaved the pieces of wood off the pit, and I retched. This wasn’t like the pit that I’d fought in. That one had been clean. Just a fighting pit. This one was more than that. The entire surface was stained with old blood. Maybe from hundreds of Brandons. He’d said this was where they’d beaten him.

So this wasn’t only a fighting pit. It was a place of punishment. Possibly execution.

The sound came again. From the shadows where the boards came apart, where there was just enough space to crawl under the floor. A dog.

“Oh, fuck.” I wasn’t sure which of us said it.

And my heart dropped when I got close enough. It was the dog that we’d gotten a tip about. Animal control had said the dog was fine. He wasn’t.

Alive, but that was about it. “We need to get him to Cori.”

We’d called him Velcro when he was on the ranch because he’d shadowed whatever person was taking care of the dogs like he was stuck to their leg.

He’d been in a fight. That much was obvious. His fur was matted from his wounds, but it didn’t look like he was bleeding anymore. Small favors.

Grant stepped forward. “I’ll take him.” Cori, his fiancée and the Garnet Bend vet, would have the best chance of saving him. The dog was a sweetheart. The fact that someone had made him fight for his life only added to the rage that was building inside me like a furnace.

I glanced at Lucas. “We checked on him. Right? Velcro was the one someone reported?”

“Yeah,” he confirmed. “Animal control did a wellness check...”

It clicked in all of our heads at the same time. Animals came to Resting Warrior in all kinds of ways. From bad home environments where the owner had died or been arrested. From shelters that were full and saw potential in an animal to become a therapeutic companion. And even from animal control.

But someone who worked for animal control could easily funnel animals to a place like this with the right paperwork. They could falsify documents saying the dogs had been euthanized for being dangerous. On top of that, if they had people posing as adopters at local shelters and there were reports like the one that we’d gotten, it would be easy to give the all clear that the animal was fine even if it wasn’t. Fuck.

“If someone in animal control—”

Lucas cut me off. “This wasn’t just them. We’ll figure that out. But we gave Velcro to the shelter. He was adopted. There was an application.”

Of course there was. Troubled animals like Velcro needed patient owners to deal with potential triggers. And assholes like Max wanted them because they could be riled into violence more quickly than other dogs.

“If they had a fake ID, we can find out,” Jude said. “But we don’t have time for the shelter to pull the records, and I can’t do that kind of digging here. I’ll call Jenna.”

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