Chapter 6
SIMONE
The cabin is not the same.
That's the thing nobody tells you about coming back to a place after a man who wanted to hurt you walked through it.
The walls are the same. The couch is the same.
But the air knows. The rug in the living room has a boot print I didn't leave.
The fridge door is cracked an inch. The rifle cabinet in the office is still locked because Gray locks everything, but there's a drawer open beside the desk that I watched him close last night.
I stand in the kitchen with my arms wrapped around myself and I try to feel safe and I mostly feel like I want to burn the cabin down and buy a different one.
Gray is on the porch talking to two men in dark jackets. Quiet voices. Short sentences. One of them has a tablet and keeps showing him something. The other is older and keeps nodding.
I can see the shape of him through the window. Shoulders set. Hand on his hip like his hip is doing something. He's a man who goes still when he's thinking and stiller when he's angry, and right now he's the second one.
Good.
I'm angry too.
I go upstairs and I take the longest shower of my adult life.
Hot enough to turn my skin pink. I wash my hair in two phases because braids don't come out on a mountain timeline and my hair doesn’t take a break because a man with a gun felt entitled to her day.
I condition. I oil. I wrap a towel around my head and another around my body and I stand in the bedroom a long time, just breathing.
Then I put on leggings and a real bra and a long soft cardigan over a tank, and I braid my hair again in two neat rows because my hands need a job.
When I come downstairs the men are gone.
Gray is in the living room with a fresh pot of coffee and his laptop closed and a fire going that wasn't there an hour ago.
He looks up when I come in.
"Hey."
"Hey."
He pours me a cup without asking. I take it. We stand in the kitchen like we don't know how to start.
"Marcus is on his way."
I blink.
"From Toronto?"
"From Vancouver. He was already in country."
"Of course he was."
"He lands in Kelowna at three. Driver will have him up here by six."
"So he's going to stand in this cabin and tell me I'm going into some apartment with bars on the windows in a city I hate."
"Something like that."
I put the coffee down. Rub my hands over my face.
"I'm not going into witness protection, Gray."
"Nobody said witness protection. They said safe."
"Safe is a verb in my line of work. It's what I do for my sources. It's not what's done to me."
"It is today."
I look at him.
He holds my eyes and does not back down.
That's the thing about this man. He doesn't perform power. He just has it and he keeps it on a tight leash and it shows up when it matters, and every time it shows up I get a little more in trouble with myself.
I cross to the fireplace because I need to move. Stand with my back to him, hands out to the heat. He does not follow.
"What did they find."
"Tremblay had a go-bag in the truck. Zip ties. Duct tape. A handgun. A sedative I don't want to tell you the name of."
My stomach drops.
"Okay."
"He was coming in to take you, not to kill you on site. They want you somewhere they can make you talk about your sources first."
"Okay."
"Simone."
"I heard you."
He crosses the room then. Stops about two feet behind me. I can feel him there the way you feel a body of water you haven't turned around to look at yet.
"We got him."
"I know."
"The people he works for are getting rolled up by the paper and the Mounties as we speak. Your editor has the story. It's going to be ugly and it's going to be huge and it's going to take about seventy-two more hours for everyone named in your notes to be in a box."
"And in the meantime I sit in a safe apartment."
"In the meantime you sit somewhere safe."
I turn.
He's closer than I thought.
"Define safe."
"Somewhere I can watch the door."
Something in my chest does a tight little flip.
"You."
"Me."
"Marcus asked you."
"Marcus asked me to keep you alive for a weekend. I'm telling him the weekend got extended."
"He's not going to like that."
"He's going to live."
I look up at him. All that storm in his eyes. The gray at his temples. The beard. The flannel rolled up to his elbows again because he rolled it up this morning before he came to my door, and he hasn't rolled it back down since.
"Why," I say.
"Why what."
"Why extend the weekend."
He doesn't answer right away.
He looks at me in a way I felt before, in the office last night, in the shack at dawn, in the kitchen while I ate eggs across from him like a woman who refused to be hunted.
"You know why."
My mouth goes dry.
"Say it anyway."
"Simone."
"Say it."
His eyes drop to my mouth. Half a second. Back up.
"Because I walked this cabin two hours ago and saw his boot print on your rug and I have not been able to get my pulse under a hundred since.
Because I slept three hours in twenty four and all three of them I dreamed about the text on your phone.
Because when you said yes sir last night I felt it in my teeth and I haven't felt anything in my teeth in six years.
Because you're going to get on a plane Sunday night or Monday morning or whenever Marcus lets you, and the thought of not watching the road you take to the airport is doing something to me I didn't plan for. "
I don't move.
He doesn't either.
The fire cracks.
"Okay," I say.
"Okay?"
"Okay."
"Okay what."
"Okay I'm not leaving Monday."
Something in his face shifts.
"Simone."
"I'll stay in the cabin with you until the story runs and the names are in custody. However long that takes. I'll call my editor. I'll tell Marcus. I'll do the whole thing. But I'm not doing it in some apartment with bars on the window and a stranger on the couch."
"That's not a small ask."
"I'm not a small person."
The edge of his mouth does a thing.
"I noticed."
He doesn't touch me.
I want him to touch me.
He doesn't because he's standing in the place where professional ends and something else begins, and he is a man who does not cross that line unless it's been drawn for him in a way he can't misread.
I draw it.
I step forward. One step. Close enough that the front of my cardigan brushes his chest and I have to tilt my head back to keep his eyes.
"I'm not your assignment, Mercer."
"No."
"And I'm not your favor."
"No."
"Then what am I."
He looks at me a long second.
Lifts his hand. Slow. Cups my jaw the way you cup something you already know is going to break if you hold it wrong. His thumb brushes the corner of my mouth. Doesn't press. Just rests there.
"A problem I'm going to fail."
"Fail how."
"By not keeping my distance."
"Good."
His thumb moves. Soft. Traces my lower lip. I feel the callus at the base of his thumb exactly the way I felt the weight of his voice last night when he said contingency, and my body answers the memory before my brain has time.
A small sound escapes me. Half a breath.
His eyes go darker.
"Not here," he says. Quiet. "Not yet. Marcus is going to walk through that door in three hours, and when he does you and I are going to be two adults having a civil conversation about logistics."
"And after he leaves."
"After he leaves we're going to have a different conversation."
"About what."
He holds my jaw a second longer.
"About what you want. And what I can give you. And whether you know what you're asking for."
"I know exactly what I'm asking for."
"Then you'll say it."
"I'll say it."
He lets go.
Steps back.
I feel the space where his hand was like a brand.
"Eat," he says, rough. "You haven't eaten."
He turns and walks into the kitchen and puts a pan on the stove and the whole thing should feel like a whiplash, but it doesn't.
It feels like a man who's going to stand between me and every wrong thing in the world while also, eventually, taking me apart on purpose.
I sit at the counter.
I eat the eggs he makes me.
My hands are steady.
My pulse is not.
Three hours until Marcus.
I'm going to survive three hours.
I don't know about what comes after.