Chapter 8
ALEX
The lodge is quiet. Kendall went upstairs after dinner and hasn't come back down. The third step creaked under her weight, then nothing. Her door closed.
I'm behind the bar wiping down the surface when headlights sweep across the front windows. An engine cuts. Boots on the porch steps.
Amberly comes in through the kitchen door and stamps snow off her boots. She shrugs out of her coat and hangs it on the hook. She pulls off her gloves and pours herself coffee without asking. Normal.
My sister doesn't lie. She also doesn't break confidence. The distinction between those two things is written all over her face. The way she holds the mug against her sternum with both hands and watches my face before she speaks is not normal.
"Kendall came in today," she says.
"Cameron mentioned."
Amberly nods. She drinks. She doesn't say anything else about the visit, and the silence is louder than a diagnosis.
My sister has our mother's face and our mother's hands, but the spine is entirely her own. She built that clinic from nothing and serves a town that doesn't have enough people to justify a full-time medical provider. The word bruise never leaves her mouth. It doesn't need to.
"Is she okay?" I ask.
Amberly sets the mug down. She looks at me for a long moment, and what she doesn't say fills every corner of the kitchen.
"I like her, Alex."
"Yeah."
"Be careful with that."
She pulls her coat on, tucks her scarf into the collar, and zips it to her chin. She heads back out into the cold. The drive to town takes longer in the dark, but Amberly has never minded the drive.
The door closes behind her. The place is quiet again and the quiet has a different shape now.
I've been carrying the bruise since the kitchen. My thumb found the ridge under Kendall's ribs and her body flinched away from me with a speed that only comes from practice. Amberly's silence just confirmed what I already suspected.
Now the suspicion has weight. Now it needs a response.
I pull on my coat and cross the yard to the workshop. Bryan is cleaning a rifle he cleaned yesterday. Bryan cleans rifles the way other men pace. The repetition is mechanical, and the focus keeps him steady. The fact that he's doing it at all tells me he's thinking about the same thing I am.
"Someone hurt her," I say. "You called it."
He doesn't look up from the bolt he's wiping down. The cloth keeps moving in the same measured strokes.
"I know," he says.
No satisfaction in it. He flagged it days ago, standing in the hallway calling her a liability while she was somewhere in the lodge close enough to hear. Fake name, flinches, favors her ribs, someone coming to look. He was right about all of.
"Kendall went to the clinic today," I say. "Amberly didn't say a word about it. Her face said enough."
Bryan sets the rifle down. Stock aligned parallel to the workbench edge. His eyes come up, and the shift from maintenance to operational is immediate.
"The flinch at the pan. The way she watches hands before she watches faces. The ribs." I lay it out the way Bryan laid it out days ago, except now Amberly's silence sits behind every item. "She's running from someone. When the pass opens, that someone might come looking."
"So we're moving on it," he says. Not a question.
"I want the access road watched. Anyone coming up that road who isn't local, I want to know about it before they reach the property."
"I'll take mornings," Bryan says. "South overlook has a clean line on the switchbacks. You can see headlights long before they reach the property."
"Cameron can cover the road between the lodge and town. He's back and forth enough to spot anything that doesn't belong."
Bryan nods. Economy and agreement.
I find Cameron in the workshop after Bryan clears out. He's underneath the snowmobile with a wrench and a trouble light, knees on a piece of cardboard spread over the concrete.
"Storm's breaking up," he says from under the chassis. "Give it two days and the pass opens."
"When it does, I want to know who's on the road. You're running between the lodge and town more than anyone. Keep your eyes open. Anything that doesn't fit, any vehicle you don't recognize, I hear about it."
Cameron slides out and sits up, wiping his hands on his jeans. He doesn't ask why.
"I can run the road twice a day when conditions allow," he says. "Morning and late afternoon."
"Do that."
He taps the wrench against the chassis once and slides back under the snowmobile. The wrench starts again before I reach the door.
I find Dash on the back porch splitting kindling. He stops when I tell him. He doesn't ask questions either. He just sets the hatchet down, looks at me, and says, "What do you need me to do?"
"Stay sharp. Watch the road when you're outside. Anything off, you come to me or Bryan."
He picks the hatchet back up and gets back to work.
Nobody asks about Kendall by name. Nobody needs to.
The lodge is shifting into a posture I recognize from hunting seasons when the weather turns wrong and the elk move into avalanche corridors.
Quiet adjustments. Sight lines checked. Locks verified.
The mountain doesn't announce when it's paying attention. It just starts watching.
Sleep doesn't come. I lie in the dark and listen to the lodge settle, timber contracting in the cold. The same calculation keeps running. Who. When. How close.
By morning I haven't slept and I don't have answers. Gray light through the kitchen windows. The coffeepot is already half empty, which means Cameron has been through. The mug on the drying rack is his.
Kendall comes down the stairs and sidesteps the third step. She's wearing the flannel, sleeves rolled to her wrists, her hair down and tucked behind one ear. The mark I left below the other ear has faded to a pink shadow that catches light when she turns her head.
She moves to the coffeepot. The reach is guarded, left arm tucked close while the right does the work. She pours two cups without asking if I want one.
"Morning," she says, and sets mine on the counter between us.
"Morning."
She leans against the opposite counter and drinks. For once the quiet between us isn't loaded. The fire in the main room has burned low. The clock ticks above the stove. Outside, Cameron's boots crunch past the window on his way to his truck.
"Your brother was up before dawn," she says. "I heard the engine."
"Cameron doesn't sleep. He just finds things to fix until the sun comes up."
"That explains the oil stains on everything he owns."
"Those are permanent. We've tried."
"Have you tried soap?"
"Cameron considers soap a suggestion, not a requirement."
The corner of her mouth lifts. She lets it. This morning she isn't fighting the smile, and the unguarded version of it does more damage than anything she's aimed at me on purpose.
She wraps both hands around the mug. "Amberly gave me a breathing device. Plastic thing with a tube. I'm supposed to use it ten times an hour."
"Are you?"
"I'm averaging six. Don't tell her."
"Amberly finds out everything. She doesn't need my help."
"She's terrifying in a very calm way."
"That's the Sawyer women. Calm until they're not, and then you're already in trouble."
She laughs. The sound is low, unguarded, and it strips three layers of armor off her face at once. The wariness behind her eyes goes quiet and I'm looking at a woman I haven't met yet. The real one. The one underneath the flinches, the false name, the bag packed by the bed.
That laugh is going to be a problem. The version of her that produces it, unguarded and unplanned, makes me want to lock every door in this lodge and keep her on this side of them.
"Storm system's moving east," I say instead. "Pass should open in a day or two. I talked to Bryan about road conditions. When it clears, we'll make sure the route's safe before anyone drives it."
The laugh dies. The guard comes back sharp, and the woman standing across from me isn't the one who was here ten seconds ago.
"Before anyone drives it," she repeats. "Meaning before I drive it."
"Meaning the roads are dangerous after a storm like this. Avalanche risk on the switchbacks. Black ice through the pass."
"Meaning you've decided I'm not leaving until you say so."
The guardedness is gone. The managed exposure, the controlled distance. All of it burns off in a reaction that's pointed and aimed directly at my head.
"The roads are dangerous," I say again. "That's a fact."
"Funny thing about cages, Alex. They always start with concern." She steps toward me instead of away. Closing distance to fight, not to flee. "You talked to Bryan. You made a plan. You decided when I can and can't leave, and you did it without asking me."
She sets her mug on the counter hard enough that coffee splashes over the rim. Her hands are shaking, and the tremor isn't fear. This is anger, pure and directed, and the force of it brings color up her throat and across her jaw.
"I've been managed before." Her voice drops low, stripped of the banter, the warmth, every layer of armor she wears. "I've had a man tell me the roads aren't safe. The weather's bad. The timing isn't right. There's always a reason I can't leave. The reason always sounds like concern. It never is."
The distance between us has collapsed to nothing.
She's close enough that I can smell her skin under the flannel, warm and specific.
I register the flush on her jaw, her breathing coming shallow and fast. She is furious and an arm's length away, and the fury makes me want her so badly my hands ache.
"I'm not him," I say. Low. Flat.
"Then stop acting like him."
The sentence lands where she aimed it. I fold my arms and lean back against the counter. If my hands are free right now, they're going to end up on her. Putting my hands on her in the middle of this argument would prove every point she just made.
"I don't give people information and let them decide," I say through my teeth. "I decide. That's how I run this lodge, this family, this mountain. That's how I'm built."