Chapter 3 #3
Canada. The word lands somewhere behind my ribs. The border I was driving toward before the storm caught me. The imaginary line where Kendall Jackson stops existing and whatever comes next begins. It's out there, past this ridge, past this man, past this borrowed coat that smells like cedar.
"How far?" I ask, and the question is too honest. I hear it as soon as it leaves.
Alex hears it too. A recalculation passes behind his face, something I can't read. "Far enough that you'd need more than what you drove in with."
The statement is factual. It's also the first time he's acknowledged, even indirectly, that he knows I'm going somewhere that isn't back the way I came.
The acknowledgment hangs between us, and neither of us reaches for it.
"The storm's coming back," he says after a silence that lasts longer than comfortable.
I can feel it too. The wind is shifting, a new pressure building against the side of the lodge. The brief clarity is closing like a curtain, the ridge disappearing behind a veil of fresh cloud.
I turn toward the door. He's still at the railing. The doorway forces single file, and he doesn't step back to make room.
I have to turn sideways to pass, and as I do, my shoulder drags across his chest. Not a brush. A press. The contact runs from my shoulder through my breast and along my ribs, and the heat of him comes through every layer of fabric as if the layers aren't there.
His body is hard and solid against my smaller frame, and the friction of the contact is slow enough to feel deliberate even though neither of us chose it.
I stop breathing. For one step, maybe two, my lungs forget their job.
His chest is right there, broad and warm, and the current it sends through me gathers low and stays.
His breath catches. Not imagined this time. The sharp, short inhale of control taking a hit. I hear it clearly. The sound settles in my hips like a low note held too long.
Five. The count updates itself without permission. Five times, and this last one wasn't a brush. This last one was a conversation, and my body said things my mouth would never allow.
The rest of the day passes in the compressed time of a storm. More fire. More coffee. Dash tells another story. Cameron cooks something that fills the lodge with the smell of onions and thyme. Bryan reads.
Alex moves through the edges of every room I'm in, never quite arriving, never quite leaving, and the orbit of it is tight enough that I can feel him even when I'm not looking.
At dinner I sit between Cameron and Dash, and the ease of it is disorienting. Cameron asks if I want more stew in a tone so casual it makes my ribs ache. As if I'm not a stranger. As if this is just Tuesday.
Dash steals a piece of bread off my plate with a grin that dares me to object, and the boldness of it is so brotherly that my throat tightens.
Across the table, Alex eats without speaking. His attention is on his food, on the conversation his brothers generate, on the fire. Everywhere but on me.
Except that's not true.
I catch him twice. Brief, direct glances that land and hold.
He doesn't look away. That's the part that sends the current running along the underside of my skin.
The second time, his gaze drops to my mouth for a fraction of a second before it comes back up, and the trajectory of that glance is so deliberate I feel it like a touch.
My lips part. I close them. I watch him watch me do it.
Gary watched me too. Constantly. But Gary's watching was designed to be invisible, surveillance conducted from behind a newspaper or a wine glass or a smile aimed at the dinner guests. The watching was the point. The point was control. The invisibility was what made it effective.
Alex watches like he wants me to see him doing it. The directness is deliberate. There is no pretense, no hidden angle, no performance of not-looking. He looks at me. I look back. The contact holds for a beat that runs longer than casual.
Every alarm I own goes off. The full system, wired over four years by someone who made surveillance an art form, lights up like a switchboard.
But underneath the alarms, underneath the fear response that has kept me alive for four years, a different signal is running. The distinction between watching to control and watching because the pull is too strong to resist.
I know the distinction matters. I just can't afford to trust it yet.
I go upstairs after dinner. Close the door with the practiced quiet that has become second nature. Press my back against it and listen to the lodge settle around me.
Through the wall, I hear him. The creak of his door. Boots on the floor. The routine of a man winding down a day spent holding a building and everyone in it together.
My hand goes to my wrist. I catch it. Force my fingers apart. Wrap them around the doorknob instead.
The alarms are still ringing. So is the signal underneath them. And the part that scares me most isn't that Alex Sawyer is watching me.
It's that when he does, I stop running the math on the exits and start running it on the distance between his mouth and mine.