Chapter 18

I awoke to the low drone of Ranger's voice. I reached for him across the bed before my brain registered that the sound was coming from far away. I reluctantly dragged my eyelids open, but was greeted by darkness. Ranger's tone, hushed but urgent, prompted me to roll over and seek out the source.

A sliver of light shone from under the bathroom door. Shadows moved intermittently through the light as he paced back and forth.

The clock on the bedside table told me it was a little past three in the morning. Most business calls didn't take place at this hour; but then again, most businesses weren't Rangeman. Still, I was worried. I listened to another minute or so worth of Ranger's phone call. He was doing most of the talking at that point, interspersed with moments of silence.

The bathroom light turned off a second before the door opened. Ranger paused when he saw me sitting up, then made his way over and perched at the edge of the bed. "Sorry to wake you."

"What's up?"

I could make out enough of his features in the dark to see that his mouth was set in a tight line. "I just spoke with Margeaux. Kirsch is dead."

Something turned icy in the pit of my stomach, and a jolt of adrenaline shot through me. "What? What happened?"

"Margeaux has some locals in her pocket, who serve as eyes and ears when we need them. Informants. They just reported back with word that Los Reyes had found a mole in the organization and made an example out of him."

That couldn't be good. "What kind of example?"

"The dead kind. Suffice it to say it was messy, and it was public."

I wanted to chase away the shadows in Ranger's eyes and make this better. But I also knew that things wouldn't be any better until we got to the bottom of this and found the traitor. I settled for resting a hand on his arm.

"I asked Margeaux to have her people retrieve Gabriella's sister. I can't imagine that Valdez doesn't know the story behind Gabriella's capture by now. I don't know why he hasn't already gone after the sister, but we'll try to get to her before he does."

"What do we do now?"

He expelled a breath. "We go back to sleep. I'll reconnect with Cordero in the morning and figure out a new path."

"What does this mean for the Palmira op, and Valdez's capture?"

"There probably won't be a capture at this point," Ranger admitted. "Kirsch was one of our last options for coming up with an alternate plan. We'll scrap Palmira, for obvious reasons, and we'll have to wait for a new opening."

"When do you think that will be?"

Ranger swung his legs up and laid back on he bed, pulling me down with him. "The only thing I can say with certainty is that it won't be in the next four hours. So we may as well get some more sleep."

He tucked me into his body and pressed his lips to my hair while he pulled the covers back over us. I closed my eyes and waited for the Sandman to pull me back under, but no such luck. Even long after Ranger's breathing had grown slow and steady, sleep evaded me. Counting sheep didn't work, either.

Eventually I conceded that sleep wasn't going to happen for me. It would only be another two to three hours until sunrise. Slowly, gingerly, I lifted Ranger's arm and rolled out from under it. He must've been more keyed up than he let on, because his eyes snapped open at the same time that his hand went for the gun resting on the bedside table.

"Sorry," I whispered. "Can't sleep."

He relaxed at he sound of my voice and laid back down, gun back in its resting place. "Babe."

A man like Ranger must have had plenty of experience forcing his body to sleep under a variety of conditions. Or maybe he was just good at faking it. Either way, his eyes were closed and his breathing was steady again within seconds.

I crept over to the desk in the corner of the room and took a seat, booting up the iPad Ranger had given me earlier. My brain was going to fixate over the traitor no matter what, so I may as well put it to use by going back over the personnel files.

I started with Dante. Dante Mercado, aka Josue Adame, aka Hector Ruelas, aka The Executioner. Thirty four years old. Grew up in Riverside, California until he moved to Fort Lauderdale when he was seventeen. He joined the Army right out of high school.

My concentration when I'd reviewed the files earlier had been on the men's military histories. But it occurred to me that maybe we were looking in the wrong place. We'd identified the men who had had the most opportunity to commit the acts, but we couldn't narrow it down further until we could identify why they would want to. So with that in mind, I dove into the records of Dante's early life.

I started with his arrest record. Maybe we'd get lucky and find out that he'd been caught buying drugs from a certain Colombian cartel. Unlikely, since Los Reyes would have been in its infancy at the time, and as Ranger told it, not necessarily distributing in the US quite yet. Still, it was worth a look.

I took the same approach with Alex's file. Bravo Six, Alex Mascarenas, aka Reyes Guevara, aka Jorge Coronado. Twenty-eight years old; practically a baby. He had the lightest Special Forces record out of any of the men, but then he was also the youngest. Born and raised in Queens, then went to Florida State for his undergrad, where he was by all accounts a star student and athlete.

Determined to leave no stone unturned, I also checked out the personal histories and records of all of the other men on the team. Pedro Juarez, Xander Crowley, and Emilio Posado. Even Commander Timothy Cordero.

Predawn sunlight was seeping into the room by the time I'd finished, and I still felt none the wiser. There hadn't been any bright neon, flashing signs that shouted 'Clue! Look over here, it's a clue!'

Ranger moved like a shadow, and I didn't realize he was standing behind me until he rested his hands on my shoulders. I also hadn't realized that my head was laying on top of my arms, which were folded over the desk. To the untrained eye, it might appear that I was sleeping, but Ranger knew better.

"Anything?" he asked. Although his careful conservation of words was annoying as heck sometimes, I also sort of loved how he always seemed to know exactly what I was thinking and we could cut straight to the chase without preamble.

"Most of the men have pretty clean pasts before they enlisted," I recapped. "You and Dante are the only ones with notable brushes with the law. The rest only had minor dalliances."

"The Army generally has a pretty high moral standard," Ranger confirmed.

"Since we didn't find anything glaring in anyone's military records prior to Bravo team that would link them to Valdez or Los Reyes, I figured I'd go back through all the non-military stuff with a fine-toothed comb."

"Makes sense," he agreed.

"Yeah, that's what I thought, but it's been hours and I barely got through school and criminal records. And that's just a tiny sliver of these men's lives." I rubbed my fingers over my eyes and then pushed my hair out of my face. "It's great that we have a treasure trove of information at our fingertips, but it also feels like looking for a needle in a haystack."

Ranger took a seat at the foot of the bed and swiveled my desk chair to face him. I valiantly fought to ignore the fact that he was only wearing underwear. My eyes only spent two seconds taking in the expanse of skin and muscle on display. Okay, three, tops. Probably I deserved some sort of medal.

"What do you propose?" he asked.

"Let's go back to the beginning."

"How so?"

"Focus on the motive," I suggested. "We're beating our heads against the wall trying to figure out who sold out to Valdez. Once we figure that part out, then there's the whole other issue of why. Instead of focusing on the who, let's focus on the why first - the motive will lead us to the traitor, rather than the other way around."

"So all we have to do is understand why a US military operative would want to abandon their mission and morals in favor of throwing in with a Colombian drug kingpin."

"Yes. Exactly."

Ranger rolled his neck, stretching. "It's a good thought, Babe. But if you'd asked me three days ago, I'd have told you there was no fucking chance any of these guys would throw all that away."

"People all tend to be wired pretty much the same, right? What are the most common motives for committing crimes or doing stupid things?"

"Vengeance. Money. Love."

"We know these guys are badasses, but let's assume they're not really all that different from other humans when it comes to baser instincts."

He nodded. "Okay. You're right. We'll start there."

"We can go back through the files again, filtering for anything that would give any of the men an incentive to want to either help Valdez, or hurt Bravo team. Or hurt the military as a whole."

"We didn't dive into familial connections yesterday. We'll probably need to throw that in."

I rubbed my eyes again, contemplating the work we had cut out for us. "Okay. But first, I need coffee and pancakes before I can so much as look at that iPad again."

"That, we can do," Ranger promised.

As much as I was pissed at the traitor and determined to get to the bottom of this, I also knew that my brain wasn't going to be any good to anyone until Ranger put a shirt on. I reluctantly told him so, and he responded by walking away without a word. That was pretty much the Ranger-equivalent of an eye roll.

I ordered room service while Ranger showered, and then we switched places. By the time I emerged from the shower, breakfast had arrived. I'd gone a little overboard by ordering both pancakes and waffles, knowing full well that Ranger would eat neither. I'd gotten him an egg white omelet.

By my second cup of coffee, I was able to proceed past the same sentence that I'd read a dozen times. Words were starting to have meaning again. By my third cup of coffee, I'd made it through the basic bios of half of the men's immediate family members, and by my fourth, I hit my stride.

Unfortunately for us, Alex, Pedro, and Xander all had pretty large families. Nevertheless, we managed to slog through the bios over the next hour and a half. I'd asked Ranger whether we should split them up to cover more ground, but he asked for me to go over everything, insisting that I had an eye for detail that he simply didn't possess.

"Well…" I dropped my iPad onto the mattress and stretched my arms over my head. "I feel like that got us a whole lot of nothing and nowhere."

"Not true," Ranger argued. "What did you see?"

"You know what I saw. Dante's fiance was killed in a military training accident, and Alex's dad died in the North Tower on 9/11."

"And?"

I blew out a breath, annoyed that he was making me spell it out. "That gives Dante a whole lot of reason to have beef with the US military. And possibly the same for Alex, if he was unsatisfied with the US response to the attacks."

Ranger kept looking at me, as if waiting for more. He was going to be sorely disappointed, because I had nothing.

"Did you know Dante's fiance?" I asked.

He shook his head. "I didn't even know about her. He's never mentioned her."

Huh. I hadn't necessarily expected Ranger to have known her, since she died before he joined Bravo team. But it was strange that he didn't know she ever existed. "Does that seem weird or suspicious to you?"

He shrugged. "Not necessarily. Like I said, I wouldn't consider us to be close in that way. We don't always share things about our lives. But if you think it seems suspicious, go with your gut. That's why I had to ask for your help on this. You see things differently than I do."

I wasn't sure if I should count it as suspicious or not. Maybe all of these guys were like Ranger, and they were just as stingy with personal information. I was still shocked at some of the conversations we'd had over the past couple of days, and I was sort of waiting for Ranger to turn to me and say 'Psych!' and retreat back into the reticent persona I was used to.

Ranger's phone buzzed, and he stood from the desk to answer it. "Manoso."

It must not be one of his employees, because that wasn't his standard phone greeting. The conversation was brief. All I heard from Ranger's end was two Yeses, a No, and 13:00 hours. When he hung up, I looked at him expectantly.

"Cordero," he explained. "He got the news about Kirsch this morning. We're going to meet this afternoon to make a plan for where to go from here."

"What do you think are the options?"

"Not many." He took a seat beside me on the bed instead of heading back to the desk. "We'll need to come up with a plausible excuse to share with the team about why we're scrapping Palmira. And I'm assuming Cordero has sent this up the chain by now, so we'll see what JSOC wants to do about the mole."

"Where are we meeting?"

"We're not. You're staying here."

I had no sooner opened my mouth to protest than Ranger shut me down with a stern look. "Stephanie. I mean it."

Oh shit. He'd pulled out the full name. A wiser woman may have let it go at that point, but I couldn't think of a time when anyone had accused me of being wise. 'Too smart for my own good' seemed like a different thing.

"I can do more than just sit in bed and read files," I argued. Although truth be told, I wasn't sure exactly what else I could do. Seemed that the situation would need to be handled by the military, and by people with far more training than me. But I needed to do something valuable. Something, anything, that would get us one step closer to solving this and taking that weight off Ranger's shoulders.

He squeezed my thigh, since that was where his hand happened to be resting. "Reading files is where I need you right now. Do me a favor and solve the case while I'm gone."

I rolled my eyes, but resigned myself to my fate. Ranger took a break from the files to respond to some Rangeman emails and messages, and around noon I ordered us more room service. I was finishing up my sandwich while Ranger suited up for his meeting. My plan was to finish up my review of the men's financial records. I hadn't run across anything so far that would indicate that money was a motivating factor, but I wanted to finish ruling that out before I spent time diving into personal email records. Those hadn't come with the personnel files, but Silvio had provided them at Ranger's request.

"I should be back by 2:30 or 3," Ranger told me. "Be good."

He must've known that he deserved the middle-finger salute he got for that comment, because he treated me to a smile on his way out the door.

My abhorrently early wake-up call was starting to wear on me, so I moved from the bed to the desk lest my brain get any funny ideas that it was nap time rather than reading time. I had two more men's financial records to review. If only I could get the numbers to stop swimming in front of my eyes. I did some jumping jacks while I brewed another cup of coffee from the little Keurig in our room. Once my blood was pumping and I was more confident that I wouldn't faceplant into the iPad, I got back down to it.

Ranger hadn't been kidding about military salaries not being all that glamorous. The men's financial histories painted a picture that was pretty average for middle-class America - they had mortgage and car loan debt, and low to moderate credit card debt. Cordero looked like the one who had struggled the most with his finances, having been significantly indebted for several years. He'd managed to start digging himself out of the hole a few years ago, and his debt-to-income ratio was back in the normal range.

I painstakingly reviewed all of the large credits to their accounts; the ones that weren't obviously normal income or paychecks. After I'd reviewed everyone's histories, I had a notepad page full of credits that I needed to look into further. Pedro had a single large influx of cash about two years ago. Alex had been receiving monthly payments of around $500 for the past several years. Tim Cordero had received fairly large amounts at seemingly random intervals from multiple different wire transfer accounts.

I called Silvio at the Rangeman office and read him the list of transactions and account numbers. He told me it might take a couple of hours to trace the sources of the transfers, so I turned my attention to the files containing Bravo team's personal online data. Everything from social media profiles, to personal emails, to ad preferences. If I wanted to, I could click a link in each man's file and see a list of every YouTube video he'd ever watched.

The sheer volume of data made me want to curl up under the desk and cry. Instead, I settled for a whimper and then I dove in.

I narrowed my search by time period. First I checked out Dante's social media profiles from around the time of his fiance's death, curious to see whether I would find any anti-military sentiments. When I came up empty there, I switched over to his emails. I wouldn't be surprised if he were hesitant to express his displeasure publicly for fear of limiting his own career, but maybe he would vent privately to friends. But I found nothing. There was no statement on social media - it didn't seem like he was very outspoken in the public eye. In a couple of private emails, he expressed that she had always been dedicated to serving and protecting others, and that he would always admire her integrity, her tenacity in pursuing her own professional goals, and serving our nation with pride.

Those sentiments didn't strike me as coming from a man who would sabotage a military operation and knowingly send his comrades to their death.

My phone buzzed its way across the desk. It had only been about forty-five minutes, so either Silvio had finished sooner than expected, or he was running into a brick wall. Welcome to the club.

"Pedro Juarez's deposit of $30k checks out," he told me. "It was an inheritance from his grandfather."

Not surprising. Pedro wasn't really anywhere near the top of our suspect list. "What about Alex?"

"Child support," he said. "The trace is clean."

That also checked out, based on what I knew of him. He had sole custody of a five-year-old son from a previous marriage.

"I'm a little disappointed," Silvio joked. "I was expecting to get to go chasing down offshore accounts and uncover an in-depth money laundering scheme."

Ranger and I had made the decision not to give Silvio many details about what we were working on. Until the mole, or moles, were identified, Ranger preferred to severely limit the dissemination of information. Luckily for me, the Rangemen all knew well enough to not ask many questions when they were given a task. They just assumed that Ranger would give them all of the information he wanted to, and nothing more. That had been my experience of Ranger too, until recently.

"Sorry to ruin your fun," I told him. "But I appreciate your help. What about the random deposits in Cordero's account history?"

"Those took the longest, but only because the transfers come from a variety of accounts. I actually traced them all back to the same company though, called Winsome. It's an online gambling app."

Made sense. Ranger did say that Cordero was impulsive - maybe he had a bit of a gambling problem. Although maybe you don't classify it as a problem if the gambler just keeps winning. It had worked pretty well for him as far as a get-out-of-debt strategy. "Does the account have debits to the same company? How does the money going out compare to what's coming in?"

"That's the strange thing. There are no debits. Cordero never made payments to the company, at least not through his account. Maybe he had a bookie who he paid in cash."

"Maybe." Although if he were paying his debts in cash, why not collect his winnings in cash, too? "Could you send me the details of the company?"

"You bet."

"Thanks for your help."

While I waited for Silvio to send me the company's information, I tried searching Winsome in the App Store from my phone. Any self-respecting gambling site should have an app, right? But I found nothing.

When the email came through with the company website, I shot off a quick reply to ask Silvio if he'd ever heard of Winsome before. I hadn't, but that didn't mean much, since my idea of gambling was going to Tasty Pastry without makeup and hoping I didn't run into anyone I knew.

I clicked the link for the website Silvio had sent me and poked around. Pretty straightforward, if a little unimpressive. I'd seen television ads for a couple of big-name gambling apps, and I wasn't sure how this one hoped to compare. There wasn't a whole lot to click around. The website was lackluster at best.

My phone buzzed again. Silvio calling back.

"Yeah?" I answered, distracted.

"To answer your question, no, I'm not familiar with Winsome," he said. "And the fact that you asked makes me think that something about it is rubbing you the wrong way."

"I find it strange that I can't even find the page on their website where I can sign up to place bets."

A moment of silence on the other end of the line. I could hear Silvio's fingers flying over his keyboard and the click of a mouse. "Oh, shit."

"What?"

"You're right." His tone was a mixture of embarrassment and disbelief. "Holy fuck. I'm the worst excuse for a hacker in the whole world. This website is a sham, and I didn't even notice. It seemed so routine, I didn't even bother looking into it."

The hair on the back of my neck was starting to stand on end. "So it's not really a gambling app?"

"Please don't tell Ranger I sent you this," he pleaded. "I'll never live this down."

"Hey, focus!" I snapped. "If it's not a gambling app, then what is it?"

"I'm not sure. I can trace it, but it'll take a bit."

"How long is 'a bit'?"

"Depends on how sophisticated their set-up is. Maybe half an hour, maybe a day."

"Faster is better," I told him. I added a hasty 'thanks' before I hung up, my mind spinning.

There wasn't a lot of reason to suspect that this meant anything to our investigation. But if it did mean something, then that meant Ranger was out there meeting with a back-stabbing traitor right at that very moment. To say that I was starting to worry would be an understatement.

I went back to the transaction history and looked more closely at the dates of the payments, hoping that they would prove - or preferably disprove - any connection to Los Reyes or Valdez. There had been over two dozen payments made over the past couple of years. The most recent payment had been around the beginning of the year.

The timing of that most recent payment could have lined up with the time period of Gabriella's capture. I decided to see if there were any payments made around the time of the attempted Saavedra op, and found that there had been one about a month afterward. There were also a few more sprinkled throughout the one and a half years between then and now, so maybe the timing was coincidental. Still, I scrolled further back to check the time period of the Esquivel mission, too.

There had been a payment about three weeks before the night that Esquivel died in Bravo team's custody. And once again, I couldn't be sure whether it was coincidental, since there were about a dozen other payments sprinkled over the time between Esquivel and Saavedra, too. But my heart was racing and my palms were sweaty and that told me something. I'd long since learned that it wasn't a good idea to ignore my Spidey senses.

The death of Frederico Esquivel was the first event that Ranger and I were fairly certain was attributable to the traitor. But that didn't necessarily mean that it was the first event. I wanted to find out when Cordero had received the first payment from Winsome, so I scrolled even further back, making a note of the dates of each payment. I counted six more before Esquivel, and then I kept searching through three more years before I was convinced that there were no earlier payments.

I looked at the date I'd jotted down for the last payment I'd noted. It had been July, five years ago. Something was niggling me about that month and year. Before I could fry my brain too much, my phone buzzed, and I lunged for it.

"Does Santiago de Cali mean anything to you?" Silvio asked.

The ball of worry in the pit of my stomach turned leaden. "As in Cali, Colombia?"

"That's the one. I've traced the website there. I'll work on pinpointing the location a little more accurately, but it'll take a lot more time."

"Thanks," I breathed, and I hung up abruptly. My heart was pounding in my chest and I felt like I couldn't catch my breath.

Could there a perfectly legitimate reason for Cordero to be receiving wire transfers from a fake company in Colombia? Possibly. Hell, the man was a Special Forces Commander in the US military. Even if he were the traitor, and turned out to be accepting monetary bribes from Los Reyes, he'd have to be either extremely confident or exceedingly stupid to allow there to be a record of the transactions. For all I knew, the transactions could be a part of some operation he was running.

But I wasn't feeling generous. I didn't want to give him the benefit of the doubt. Not with Ranger meeting with him, probably alone, at that very moment.

There was also the fact that Kirsch had showed up dead this morning. Presumably there was a limited pool of people who knew about the spy planted in Valdez's organization, and Cordero was one of them. Cordero also knew that we were planning on using Kirsch as a means to avoid the ambush that was planned for the Palmira op. If he were the traitor, that gave him some very serious motivation to get rid of Kirsch.

I snatched up my phone and called Ranger, but his phone went straight to voicemail. "Call me!"

I also sent him a text message that said the same thing, and added an 'ASAP' and an 'SOS'. He hated it when I sent 'SOS' over text when it wasn't a true, life-or-death emergency. He could be pissed at me all he wanted if this was a false alarm. And I really hoped it was.

Next I called Tank, who answered on the second ring. "Report."

"Ranger might be meeting with our traitor as we speak," I blurted. I trusted that Tank would be one of the few people whom Ranger had kept apprised of the full story of what we were working on.

"Explain."

"Cordero has been receiving payments from various accounts masquerading as a gambling app. Silvio traced the company's webpage and said it originated in Cali."

Tank was quiet while he considered that. "Does the timing of the payments coincide with events that you've tied to the traitor?"

"Yes and no." I explained the possibly-inconclusive evidence, but tacked on my thoughts about Kirsch.

"When did you say the first payments started?" Tank asked.

I consulted my notes again to make sure I hadn't gotten it wrong. "Five years ago, in July."

Tank swore under his breath. "That was right after the team brought Jason Delgado home."

The truth washed over me in an icy wave. That was it, the proverbial smoking gun. Cordero had gone in alone to retrieve Delgado from Valdez, and that must have been when they presented him with an opportunity he couldn't refuse. He'd been up to his ears in debt, and they bought him off.

"Where is Ranger right now?" I demanded. "Do you have him on GPS?"

"Give me a minute," Tank mumbled, and I heard him tapping on his keyboard. Then he cursed again. That was not what I wanted to hear. "No. He doesn't have GPS turned on."

My breath left me in a rush. My fingertips were tingly and my chest felt like it was in a vice. "Why not? Is that normal? Did he turn it off, or did Cordero?"

"Let me check something…"

"You know what? Nevermind. They're probably at the same cafe as yesterday. I'll go get him." Proud of my stroke of genius, I stood abruptly and sent the desk chair rolling until it collided with the bed. I was a little dizzy, what with the lack of oxygen in this freaking room, so I steadied myself with a hand on the corner of the desk.

"Stephanie." Tank's voice was calm but very firm. "Sit. Down."

It spoke to my mental state that I obeyed without argument. I sat, but since my chair was no longer there, my butt landed hard on the floor. While I was down there, I may as well put my head between my knees, since my vision was going a little dark around the edges.

"Breathe," Tank instructed. "In. Two, three, four. Out, two, three, four, five."

After a minute or so of controlled breathing exercises, I lifted my head and nodded. "Yep. I'm okay now."

"I just checked the logs, and Ranger's GPS hasn't been on all week," Tank told me. "Which makes sense, since you've both been staying off the grid."

"Okay." I did some more nodding. That was good. Made me feel more hopeful that Cordero hadn't forcibly removed Ranger's tracker and disabled it himself. "Okay."

"You know Ranger's careful," Tank said. "He'll be watching his six. Don't worry."

Easy for him to say. He wasn't in love with the man. "What time is it?"

Tank started to answer, but caught himself before I yelled at him for using military time. "It's 2:48."

Ranger had said he'd be home between 2:30 and 3. We were still in a window of time where it was theoretically plausible that everything had gone as expected. Cordero didn't know that he was busted, so maybe he was still keeping up the act. Hopefully.

Probably not.

I staggered to my feet and headed for the safe in the closet. "I'm just going to go to the cafe. Maybe they're still there. Maybe I can -"

"Stop. They won't be there."

"How do you know?" My hands were shaking and I fumbled the combination the first time, so had to try again.

"They wouldn't meet at the same place twice," Tank said. "That's sloppy."

I finally got the safe open, but my hand was still shaking, which was making me terrified to even touch the gun. "I'll just have to go and look for him."

"Stephanie, I swear, if you step one foot outside that door, both our asses will be on the line."

"I won't tell him I talked to you," I promised. "But you can monitor me, right? Where is my tracker? I'll take it with me, and then you'll know where I am in case -"

I froze. The door to the hotel room was opening. Without another thought, I dropped the phone and grabbed the gun. Then I plastered myself against the wall of the closet and held my breath, listening. All I heard was the sharp sound of silence for a few agonizing heartbeats.

"Steph?"

I lowered the gun and sagged against the wall. A breath escaped me, and then Ranger appeared in the closet doorway. Luckily for both of us, I had the presence of mind to set the gun down before I threw my arms around him.

"What happened?" His tone was sharp, but his touch was gentle while he ran his hands over my back and arms. Once he was assured that I was in one piece, he tried to pull back to look at me, but I clung tighter. "Babe?"

"It's Cordero," I managed.

Ranger's shoulders stiffened under my fingers, but he didn't pull back. At least not right away.