Page 9 of Love for Thea

She had spent a decade studying predators: the lean efficiency of wolves, the brute power of grizzlies. But they hunted for survival. The men above were hunting for silence. It was a tier of predation she hadn’t accounted for in her journals.

Data point: I am terrified.

She pushed that thought into a dark corner. Terror was a variable she couldn’t control. She pulled out her mechanical pencil and her notebook. Her hands shook, but she forced the lead onto the paper. She didn’t write a letter; she drew a map. She sketched the hangar, the skeletal tower, and the symbols she’d seen that indicated Corrosive.

Then she paused. If she didn’t make it, someone had to find the trail. She remembered Ben in the yard and the way he counted heads, the way he looked for the smallest details.

She reached into a side pocket and pulled out a small, bright yellow ribbon, the kind she used to mark elk bedding sites. She didn’t tie it to a branch. Instead, she reached out of the crevice and tucked it deep under a specific overhang of granite: a spot that looked exactly like a bird’s nest.

If you’re as good as you used to be, Benji, you’ll look where the birds are.

FOUR

GRIZZLY

The Wyoming wind felt different than it had an hour ago. Back at the ranch, it had tasted like woodsmoke and family. Here, as the mud-caked F-350 bounced over the rutted access road, it tasted like ozone and impending violence.

Grizzly kept his hands tight on the 10-and-2 position, his eyes scanning the tree line. Beside him, Reef had already ditched the laid-back surfer persona. He was checking the action on his personal Glock, his movements fluid and clinical. The men were in flannel shirts and work boots, carrying only what they’d managed to grab from the ranch’s mudroom and gun safe.

“The air changed,” Reef said quietly, looking out the window. “About two miles back. It’s too warm, Grizzly. It’s fifty degrees in the valley, but it feels like eighty up here. There’s an odor, too.” Reef pauses searching for a way to describe it, “Like old eggs and hot metal.”

Grizzly nodded, his jaw set. “The birds are quiet. Too quiet for a spring night.”

To a civilian, it was a peaceful evening. To a man who had survived three tours in hostile territory, the silence was a scream. Nature didn’t go quiet unless something was dominating the environment.

As they rounded the final bend, the forestry cabin came into view. Grizzly didn’t need to see the splintered door to know they were late. He could see the ghosts of the intrusion: the way the shadows under the porch looked too jagged, the way the gravel was sprayed in a pattern that suggested a rapid approach.

“Kill the lights,” Grizzly commanded.

He rolled the heavy pickup to a stop fifty yards out, letting the engine idle for a second before cutting it. They exited in total silence, catching the clicks of the heavy truck doors with their palms so they wouldn’t echo. Grizzly didn’t head for the front door. He moved in a low crouch, circling to the flank.

He stopped three feet from the porch, his eyes narrowing at the carbon scoring on the frame.

“Grizzly,” Reef whispered from the shadows of a woodpile. He pointed a gloved finger. “Linear breaching charge. Low-yield, high-pressure. This isn’t local trouble.”

“Pros,” Grizzly muttered. A cold, professional fury settled over him. “Private Military. You don’t use this kind of kit to scare a researcher.”

He stepped onto the porch, his boots finding the exact spots that wouldn’t creak: a skill he’d learned sneaking out of the ranch house as a teenager, now perfected by a decade of Tier 1 operations. He looked at the door. It hung on a single hinge, the wood around the lock turned to grey dust.

He stepped inside. The cabin smelled of stale coffee and the sharp, metallic tang of ozone. He didn’t have his military-grade NVGs, so he relied on off-axis vision, letting his eyes pick up the shapes in the dark. The laptop was gone. The desk was cleared. But his eyes snagged on a tiny, translucent plastic cap on the windowsill.

“She was here,” Grizzly said, picking it up. He could almost see her. Thea, with her brow furrowed and her hair in a messy knot, obsessing over her data. She’d been working right up until that door popped.

Grizzly’s boots stirred up dry pine needles as he moved through the quiet cabin. His eyes caught a faded apron hanging near the stove, faintly dusted with flour. Pinned beside it was a crumpled recipe card, the biscuit recipe that Marjorie had taught him long ago.

He picked it up, the familiar handwriting pulling him back.

He was fifteen that summer, sweaty in the kitchen and awkwardly wearing his mother’s oversized apron. Baking was his quiet refuge, a secret place he shared with Ma. But Carole and Thea, both ten then, had found it hilarious. Carole danced around, teasing him with flour-covered hands, “Look at the big tough guy in a little apron!” Thea had not teased, only giggled softly at Carole’s antics with eyes twinkling with quiet amusement.

A flush rose in Grizzly’s cheeks at the memory, a grin struggling to break through the tension.

Carefully folding the card, he slipped it into the pocket of his jacket.

Fingertips brushed the faded apron hanging nearby, the rough cotton softened by years of use. A faint scent of vanilla and butter seemed to hang in the air, drawing him back to those awkward afternoons. Warmth crept into his face as Carole’s teasing surfaced in his mind, yet beneath it all lay an unspoken bond, a piece of home amid a world gone sideways.

Grizzly whispered to the fading light, “The teasing sucked, but I wouldn’t trade those kitchen days for anything.”

Reef glanced over, noticing the slight smile. “Did you say something?”