Chapter 4
SIMONE
Ican't sleep.
Not really a surprise. The last time I slept well was two weeks ago in my own bed, before a dead sparrow showed up on my welcome mat with its little neck turned the wrong way. I've been running on caffeine and spite since.
The cabin is quiet in a way I'm not used to. My apartment in Toronto has the low hum of traffic and the upstairs neighbor's boyfriend arguing with his mother on speaker. Here it's just the creak of the logs settling and the occasional thing I choose not to identify moving through the trees.
And one more thing.
His footsteps.
Gray has been pacing. Not constantly. But every so often, downstairs, I hear him do a slow walk from the front door to the back, pause, then go up to the office. He hasn't slept either.
I roll onto my back and stare at the ceiling beams and try to figure out what I feel about a man who would tie me to a chair to keep me alive.
The honest answer is something I'm going to take up with my therapist when I get home.
I've been down this road before, in a softer version.
Three years ago, a thing with a photographer named Deon who knew his way around a knot.
We weren't serious. He was patient and he was skilled and he taught me what the word subspace meant in a way a textbook can't. Then he took a gig in Berlin and I took a promotion and we faded out the way those things do.
I haven't let anyone near that part of me since. Not because I didn't want to. Because most men who think they know what they're doing are one bad conversation away from being a disaster. I can smell an inexperienced top from across a bar, and every one of them thinks he's the exception.
Gray isn't inexperienced. Gray has never even said the word out loud to me and I know it in my teeth.
It's the way he said contingency.
Flat. Uninterested. Like he was telling me where the generator was.
A man who's done it. Not a man who's read about it.
I flip onto my side and groan into the pillow.
This is the absolute worst time for my body to decide it has opinions.
At two in the morning I give up.
I pull on a cardigan over my tee, leave the leggings, and pad down the hall in bare feet. The office door is open. A strip of yellow lamplight cuts across the floorboards.
I stop in the doorway.
He's at the desk. Laptop open. Two phones beside it. A notebook with handwriting so clean it looks like engineering.
He doesn't look up.
"You should be sleeping."
"You should be sleeping."
"I'm working."
"I'm thinking."
He glances up then, and whatever's on his face goes still when he sees me. Just a flicker. A man catching himself.
I come in anyway and sit on the edge of the little leather chair by the bookshelf. Tuck my feet under me.
"Tell me what you've got."
"Confidential."
"Mercer."
"Simone."
I wait.
He sighs.
"Tremblay."
"Luc Tremblay?"
"You know him."
"I know of him. Enforcer out of Montreal. Hennessy Jr. kept him on retainer off the books. I've got two sources who put him at a meeting I'm not supposed to know about. Why."
"Because he's probably who sent the text."
My stomach does a slow tilt.
"He's here."
"He's somewhere between Revelstoke and us. Possibly here by now. Possibly waiting."
"Waiting for what."
"A clean opportunity. He's not sloppy. He won't come up a single road in daylight."
"So what do we do."
"We don't leave the cabin. We don't give him a clean line. Marcus is pulling in a team that can move on him first."
"How long."
"Thirty six hours, give or take."
I laugh. It comes out rough.
"Thirty six hours of being trapped with you. Awesome."
"You were going to be trapped with me anyway."
"With an exit ramp, Gray. Now there's no exit ramp."
He looks at me a second. Sets his pen down.
"You're scared."
"I'm annoyed."
"Scared."
"Annoyed is what I do with scared."
He studies me. The kind of look I felt on the porch this afternoon. X-ray vision and no apology for it.
"What."
"You handle it different than most people I've protected."
"How."
"They cry. Or they go quiet. You cook eggs."
"I haven't had the luxury of crying in a long time, Mercer."
That lands. I watch it land. Something moves behind his eyes.
He leans back in the chair. Runs a hand down his beard. His sleeves are still pushed up and I can see the inside of his left forearm where the veins sit under the skin and a small scar runs across the muscle in a clean line.
I look away.
"Tell me about the scar."
"Which one."
"Forearm. Left."
"Knife."
"You were supposed to stop me before it got there, I'm guessing."
"Yeah."
"Did you."
"Not fast enough."
Silence. The lamp hums. Outside somewhere an owl does the thing owls do. I watch his hand on the desk. He's got these long fingers with a callous at the base of the thumb and a dusting of dark hair above the knuckle.
I'm staring.
I know I'm staring.
"Simone."
"Yeah."
"You need to go to bed."
"I'm not tired."
"You're exhausted. You just can't feel it yet."
"Is that a professional assessment."
"It's an observation."
He stands up.
I stand up.
He's close. Closer than he was an hour ago when he leaned on the doorframe. The office is small and the desk is between us, but he's come around it and now the only thing between us is about two feet of floorboards and the air we're both trying to pretend isn't doing what it's doing.
"You keep looking at me like that," he says, voice low, "and this weekend's going to get complicated."
"Like what."
"Like you know something you didn't know three hours ago."
I swallow.
I could deny it. The smart thing is to deny it. Laugh it off, walk out, close the door, pretend the text from Tremblay reset the board.
I'm not the smart thing.
"I know what you are, Gray."
"Yeah."
"And I'm not scared of it."
"I know."
"And I'm not going to do anything about it because my brother would kill you."
"No, he wouldn't."
"Okay, he'd try."
A ghost of a smile crosses his mouth.
"I know what he'd try."
"Cocky."
"Accurate."
He takes a step back. Deliberate. Gives me room I didn't ask for and didn't refuse.
"Bed."
"Yes, sir."
It slips out. Habit from another life. The flush I feel is immediate and enormous and entirely on my face.
He goes very still.
Something in his eyes changes shape.
Then, quiet, with absolutely no heat and all the heat in the world at once, he says, "Go to bed, Simone."
I go.
I don't look back.
I make it to the hallway and down it and into my room and I close the door and I lean against it because my knees are not fully operational.
Thirty-six hours.
I'm not going to survive thirty-six hours.
I wake up at six to the sound of a vehicle on the road below the cabin.
Not close. Not yet.
But closer than it should be.
I sit up in bed and I'm listening so hard I can feel my pulse in my teeth when Gray appears in my doorway without knocking, already dressed, sidearm at his hip, and says one word.
"Up."
I'm already up.