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She had left her husband for a reason. The details she had divulged had been far from the sum toll, but they had created a clear enough picture for Hanna, and none of the rest of it had mattered when Grace had finally asked for help, not Ralston, or Iverson’s bad deals, or any of the other tangled messes they were hiding below the surface. All that had mattered had been getting Grace to safety. Helping her to start a new life.

And Hanna hadn’t even been able to do that.

“There is one other thing,” Royal said. He had the gentle tenor of a doctor used to delivering bad news, and there might be a time in the future when Hanna could appreciate it, but for the moment all she could do was nod.

“Under her fingernails, I found an unusual material. It’s a synthetic mixture of some kind. I’m still waiting on the official chemical analysis, but I did a preliminary one before you arrived. The mixture is cement and sand, which isn’t unusual, but it also contained wood fibers. Spruce and pine trees to be exact.”

His words dulled to the background, and he spoke quietly to Nicco and Ash, but Hanna’s thoughts were spinning at top speed. She knew that combination. She knew it, she just had to remember where she knew it from.

“Those materials…” She ground her teeth together, suddenly pacing the room, her feet echoingly loud in the quiet lab. “They go to something, what do they go to?”

She looked to her men, and maybe she could worry about why it felt so right to call them her men later, but right now she could feel herself standing at the edge, the answer just out of reach. It was there, on the tip of her tongue, a trivia fact buried deep because who would ever need it? Except she needed it now, and she wracked her brain, thinking of any reason she might have had for learning that strange combination. Obviously, it was building materials, which made sense as to why it would be under Grace’s nails.

But there was more to it than that, and she felt like she had the key in her hand, she just had to turn the lock.

The key.

The key to a house. But which house?

Hanna could picture it, a red wood front door, black hardware, a biometric scanner, the soft sound of birds and the trickle of a river.

It wasn’t in town, but higher up, in the mountains where the snow fell nine months out of the year and…

And where the wildfire had carved a path of destruction through the trees two years earlier.

She reached for her phone, her fingers steady and calm now, her head on straight for the first time in a week, and she called Jinx.

Hanna didn’t bother with pleasantries. “Does Bryce Iverson have a house in the Winsome Canyon?”

Chapter Thirty

“This is circumstantial at best,” Ash muttered, as they gathered around the table in Royal’s office.

“I actually don’t think it is…” Jinx shot him an apologetic look. “When the houses in the Winsome Canyon were destroyed by that fire, the state started a pilot program to rebuild, specifically using fire-resistant materials that weren’t on the market yet. This combination of materials isn’t entirely new, but the specific makeup won’t be found anywhere else. The program is in its testing phase for two more years.”

“Which means…” Hanna said, pacing around the small office, “that Grace is in the Canyon.”

“We don’t know that for sure,” Nicco replied. “There are more than half-a-dozen houses up there, and none of them tie back to Iverson or Ralston.”

Jinx tapped away at his keyboard. “I can keep working on that. It looks like three of the houses are completely rebuilt, and I’ve verified ownership on two of them. The other five are at different stages of completion, but I do have verified ownership on three of them.”

Hanna stopped pacing. “Three houses. We can search three houses.”

“In the Canyon?” Ash muttered. “That’s three houses and acres of land, Hanna. We need a plan and we need more evidence.”

“We don’t have time.” Her voice was rough, ragged like she was being torn apart at the seams, and all Ash wanted to do was scoop her into his arms and squeeze her tight. He wanted to keep her safe, to keep Nic safe, to keep anything bad from ever touching them again. But part of the reason he’d fallen for Hanna all those years before, and part of the reason he’d never been able to ignore the draw between them, was her passion and her fire and her fearlessness. Protecting her couldn’t mean locking her in a cage.

That said, they very much did need a plan.

“You need a break,” Ash said. “Just to clear your head.”

She shot him a truly withering stare, but he’d never back down from one of their battles and he wasn’t about to start now. “I say we go back to the safe house. We’ll take some time to do recon, and we can go up tomorrow.”

Hanna sighed. “Fine. Maybe you’re right. I can’t trust my team right now, so it’s just us.”

She stopped in front of the window, which was barely a foot wide and crisscrossed through with safety wire. “Hey, have you guys had any extra attention lately? I could have sworn I just heard a motorcycle pull out.”

Gray gave a sharp nod. “We’ve had some company from the Iron Daggers as of last night. They obviously know who you are and want to make sure you’re paying attention.”