5. Home

Dawn bloomed into roses on the horizon, and Sarah curved the steering wheel to turn onto the gravel driveway to her house.

Cornstalks higher than the roof of the car trundled backward as she drove slowly, lest the gravel spray and ding the car's glossy paint. The tires crunched on pea-sized rocks even though she was going barely ten miles an hour.

The corner leading to her house was just up ahead, and fear skidded over her nerves for a moment.

Benny and those other jerks might have returned and burned down her house. She couldn't bear to imagine the flames and smoke and Muffintop locked inside, the blazing heat and destruction eating the kitchen table and the couch and the braided rag rug and encroaching on her cat.

If those horrible people had returned, they surely would have gone hunting for Charlie. He was such a trusting, gentle horse, and he probably would've walked over to them and their guns.

When she turned the corner, she would know.

As Sarah turned the steering wheel again, she reached across the car's console for Blaze's hand, and his strong fingers gripped hers even though he was asleep.

The car followed the road around the cornfield's corner toward her house—

—which stood unharmed in the early morning hours, the windows reflecting the rosy light of dawn.

The terror coiling Sarah's shoulders released, and her shoulders dropped with relief. She parked the car near the kitchen door and pushed the ignition button to turn it off.

Blaze mumbled from where he had been dozing, "You okay?"

"I'm fine. We're home."

Blaze straightened in his seat and rubbed his eyes with his other hand, tightening his fingers around hers. "Yes."

Remi, the white and fluffy livestock guardian dog the size of a sheep, warily stalked around the corner of the house and glared at the car, his front paws planted wide.

She stepped out of the car. "Remi! Come here, boy!"

At the sound of her voice, excitement wiggled through Remi, and he bounded over to her, wagging his tail so hard that his back half danced. He rubbed himself over her legs and sniffed her shoes, dragging the cool morning air over her ankles.

She laughed. "Good morning, Remi. I'm glad to see you, too, boy. Who's my good boy? Who's the best puppers in the world?" she asked the dog bouncing at her feet. "How are the chickens? Did anything happen I should know about?"

Blaze emerged from the other side of the car and stretched, raising his fists toward the sky. He glanced over and said, "Let me go into the house first."

Sarah dug her fingers into Remi's thick fur, scratching his back until one of his hind legs reached up to help her. "I'm surprised you didn't have me park in the cornfield so you could sneak in."

He shrugged. "I texted Rogue Security last night. They've been keeping an eye on the place. No one's been here except your neighbors for the last two days, but still, I should clear the house before you go in."

Sarah spun on her heel, drilling her boot into the gravel and peering into the crowded rows of corn around the house. "Those Rogue guys are here?"

Blaze shook his head and retrieved one of the handguns from the trunk, slapping a magazine of ammunition into the stock and racking a round into the chamber. "I assume they bought satellite time. Or maybe Rogue has its own surveillance satellite. I wouldn't be surprised. That org has nation-state-level financial resources. Do you have a house key?"

She retrieved the spare from under a rock in the garden for him.

While he walked into the house, holding his gun low and pointed in front of his toes as he stalked in, she led Remi around the other side of his car. She crouched in case bullets flew and gave the dog another good scratching that culminated in him lying on his back with his tongue hanging out of his snout for her last vigorous rub of his fluffy tummy. "Who's a good boy? Who's a good-good boy?"

From the house, Blaze's voice called out, "All clear. Sarah? Sarah?"

"Here!" She waved her hand over the top of his car while Remi struggled to his feet and indulged in a hard shake to resettle his fur. "I thought I should take cover."

Blaze nodded as he walked over and opened the trunk. "Smart. Go inside and lock the doors. I'm going to surveil the property."

Yes, he'd gotten pretty good at sneaking around her property undetected.

As Sarah went in the door to the kitchen, Remi toddled off to his chicken coop.

The first thing that she checked was the kitchen table, but the fifteen thousand dollars in neatly bound bills was gone.

Of course, it was. She shouldn't have hoped for anything else.

A spiderweb strand of hope floated through her mind that perhaps Blaze had picked up the money when he'd walked through the house just moments before.

Sarah pressed her hands to the table where she'd eaten most breakfasts and suppers of her life until just a few days ago, where her parents had eaten their last meals before they'd slipped away, and she tried not to mourn what that money would have meant for the farm.

To keep herself from getting all wound up, she whistled and called out, "Here kitty-kitty!" into the silent house before she remembered that her cat was over at Abigail's, sitting on Daniel's lap and purring up a storm if the report was correct.

At least Muffintop would have been okay if those terrible men had returned.

She sucked in a deep breath through her nose and blew it out, and then she shoved the window over the kitchen sink open. It was June, and the house was overly warm. The upstairs windows should definitely be opened while the morning was still cool.

She could at least rustle up some breakfast for the two of them. They needed something fresh after all that fast food on the road for the last few days.

But first, her own dang clothes and brushing her teeth.

Sarah sprinted up the stairs and changed into jeans and a button-down shirt that actually fit instead of the sweatsuit that had hung on her like she was a toddler playing in her older sib's closet, and she scrubbed the daylights out of her teeth with her own toothbrush, not the flimsy one from the travel kit.

Back in the kitchen, the potato bin inside the cabinet held new potatoes from the spring harvest, and she scooped up a bowlful of those and an onion and set to chopping everything up for home fries.

When Blaze walked in half an hour later, the potatoes were sizzling in butter, and the toast popped just as he walked in the door. "The property is clear, and there's no sign the hit squad returned after they chased us toward the highway. My God, that smells good. What are you making?"

"Home fries, toast," she said. "I was going to go to the garden for berries. The June-bearing strawberries should have a crop unless Abigail harvested them all. The milk went bad while we were gone, so the coffee is black this morning, I'm afraid. Raw milk is only good for a few days. I should empty the cooler out by the road this morning, too. I don't want anybody getting sick off last week's milk."

Blaze picked up her garden basket from the kitchen counter. "Should I pick anything other than the strawberries?"

Well, that was nice. "I'll need to see what's ready to harvest. The June-bearing bushes are along the back edge of the garden. Thanks for, um, doing that?"

One side of his mouth curved up slightly. "I'll be right back."

The door flapped shut softly behind him.

Sarah stared at the screen door tapping in its frame, the morning air cooling the kitchen and sucking out the stale old-house scent that had accumulated with the house being closed up over the last couple of days.

The jiggle of unease at a guest in her home harvesting garden produce like a hired man smoothed away with the relief of one fewer thing to do around the farm.

Not that she was thinking about putting Blaze to work on the farm or anything, but he could also competently milk a cow.

But he wouldn't be staying long.

Something would come to a head over the next few days.

Maybe a détente with her homicidal crime-boss aunt would be reached, and thus Blaze's protection wouldn't be needed anymore. He could return to his oversized glass house in Chicago and live his life there, probably rolling around in a whirlpool-sized tub filled with gold cryptocurrency or however rich people killed time.

The other possibility was that Benny, Igor, and the rest of those bratva hit men would show up and kill her, Blaze, and every other living thing on her farm.