Chapter 16
ALEX
The fire burns low twice before dawn comes. Each time I cross to the hearth, rebuild it, and go back to the couch where the rifle is leaning by the armrest.
Kendall writes in the chair across from me. The scratch of her pen against paper is the only sound in the lodge besides the fire and the wind outside.
She hasn't slept. I haven't either. The difference between us is that she's using the hours and I'm spending them, watching the door and listening for an engine on the access road. No engine comes.
The satellite phone sits on the counter in the kitchen where I left it. Bryan called a while ago. Cameron is fine. The word "fine" hit like a fist unclenching.
Bryan found his truck on the lower switchback with the cab empty.
Cameron heard the SUV coming, pulled off the road, and tracked the vehicle on foot through the tree line instead of breaking cover to answer the phone.
He got the plate number from behind while the SUV climbed past his position.
The same number Bryan pulled from the overlook.
My brother improvised a surveillance position in the dark while I was standing in the doorway lying to the men he was tracking. That's why I put him on the road.
"Cameron?" Kendall asks without looking up from her notepad.
"Bryan found him. He's fine."
She nods. Her pen doesn't stop moving. She heard the calls I made last night, the phone ringing out, the silence where Cameron's voice should have been. She doesn't ask for details because the tone told her what she needed to know.
The relief I feel is the kind I bury. My brothers are alive.
The perimeter held. The men came and left and learned nothing useful.
I stood in the doorway of my father's lodge and lied to them.
The ease of it tells me more about myself than I want to examine.
I've been lying about what happens on this mountain since I was old enough to understand what the truth would cost.
Kendall turns a page. The sound pulls my attention from the door to her face.
She's sitting cross-legged in the leather chair with the notepad balanced on one knee, the pen moving with the focus of a woman building a plan rather than recording one.
The firelight catches the line of her jaw, the set of her mouth, the way her hair falls across the side of her face and she doesn't push it back because she's occupied.
She's wearing one of my flannels over the clothes she pulled on hours ago. The collar sits wide on her shoulder, exposing the skin I had my mouth on before the world narrowed down to an engine on the access road.
She's not writing a list. She's mapping.
I can see the structure from here, the lines and arrows connecting boxes on the page, charting Gary's network, his resources, his patterns.
She's building a diagram of the man who broke her ribs, using the intelligence she gathered from years of standing in his kitchen while he talked on speakerphone and forgot she was listening.
The woman in that chair is not someone I need to protect from the storm. She's someone I need to stand next to in it.
The thought hits like a truth I should have seen from the start.
She gave my brothers actionable intel. She briefed me on the photo before the knock came.
She stayed in the dark kitchen with her back against the wall and kept her breathing controlled while two men described her to the man who'd had her underneath him hours earlier.
She did all of that without being asked, without being managed, without waiting for my permission.
I've been treating her like a woman to be managed. She's been operating like a partner I'm too stubborn to recognize.
The first light of dawn reaches through the kitchen window and puts a gray line across the floor. The lodge is shifting from night watch to planning. Outside, the ridge is a dark mass against a sky that's just starting to separate from the horizon.
The snow will catch the light soon. The road will be visible. Whatever comes next will come up that road, and the woman in the chair across from me has spent the night building the map that tells me what shape it will take when it arrives.
"Stop staring at me," she says without looking up. "It's distracting."
"You're mapping his operation."
"I'm mapping what I know of his operation. There are gaps." She looks up. The firelight puts gold in her hair and shadow under her eyes. "Some of those gaps are things you haven't told me."
She's right. The card on the side table is a thread I haven't pulled yet. The number on it connects to someone who connects to Gary, and the structure of that connection is something Kendall can read faster than I can. She lived inside it for years.
I cross the room and sit on the arm of her chair. She doesn't move, doesn't adjust, doesn't make space. She lets me take up the room I take up and keeps writing.
"The rental plates Bryan called in," I say. "Anchorage agency. Dash is running the card number through a contact at the borough office this morning."
"That'll give you a name. The name won't be Gary's."
"I know."
"But it'll probably be someone I recognize." She taps the pen on the page. "Gary doesn't hire strangers. He hires people who owe him. The name on that card is someone who did business with his consulting firm and came out the other side with a debt that doesn't show up on a balance sheet."
"How many people like that does he have?"
"Enough that two of them showed up at your door late last night." She looks at the diagram on the page. "Gary doesn't waste resources. If he sent two men to Sawyer's Ridge, he already knows I'm in the area. This wasn't a search. This was a confirmation."
"You said that last night."
"I'm saying it again because you're looking at me like you're about to lock me in a room for my own protection." She meets my gaze. "Don't."
I lean forward. The diagram on her notepad is more detailed than I expected.
She's drawn lines between names I don't recognize, annotated with dates and locations.
Some of the handwriting is from last night, the letters tight and controlled.
Some is from just now, looser, the pen moving faster as connections surface.
"What's the timeline on his next move?" I ask.
"Depends on what his men tell him. If they report a lodge with a family living in it and no sign of a woman matching my description, he moves on to the next lead.
He has resources, but he's not wasteful.
" She taps a node on the diagram. "If they report anything that makes him curious, a truck that shouldn't be there, a man who answered too smoothly, a number of vehicles that doesn't match a family operation, he'll send someone with the photo. Or he'll come himself."
"And if he comes himself?"
She stops writing. The pen rests on the page. When she looks up, her face carries the particular stillness of a woman who has already answered this question for herself and doesn't like what she found.
"Then we'll know, because Gary doesn't confirm from a distance. He walks in the front door."
The fire pops. A log shifts in the grate, sending a scatter of embers across the hearthstone.
She goes back to the diagram. Her pen moves across the page, and I watch her hand, the way her fingers wrap the pen, the ink-stain on the pad of her thumb.
The flannel has slipped off one shoulder again.
The skin underneath is marked from last night, a faint shadow along the collarbone where I gripped too hard on the couch.
She hasn't mentioned it. She hasn't covered it.
The adrenaline from last night hasn't burned off.
It's changed form, turned from the cold operational focus I needed at the door into something hotter, lower, harder to control.
Every time she looks up from the page, every time her eyes find mine with that sharp, tired, fearless focus, the tension at the base of my spine winds another turn.
She was in the dark kitchen while those men stood on my porch and described her.
She stayed silent, stayed hidden, and let me handle the door because she trusted me to hold the line.
The trust cracked a place open in me that I don't have a name for.
What I have a name for is the heat that moves through my body when a woman I want looks at me like she's already decided what she wants and is waiting for me to catch up.
"You're staring again," she says.
"I'm aware."
"It's still distracting."
"Good."
Her pen stops. She looks at me. The space between the chair and the arm where I'm sitting is the width of a fist. Neither of us has moved since I sat down. The air in that space has been getting heavier since the conversation stopped.
I reach for her face. My hand finds her jaw and tilts her head back. The notepad slides off her knee and lands on the floor.
"I'm done watching you from across the room," I say.
Her breath catches. The catch is small, barely there, and the fact that I hear it anyway tells me how quiet the lodge is and how close my mouth is to hers. She grips my wrist, not pulling me away, holding me where I am.
"Alex."
"I know."
I kiss her. My hand tightens in her hair.
My mouth takes hers like a man who spent the night watching the door with a rifle beside him, the woman he wants sitting across the room, alive and whole and fierce.
The sun is coming up. The door stayed closed.
Everything I was ready to kill for is sitting in my flannel shirt mapping the enemy's network with a notepad on the floor between us.
Her mouth opens under mine. Her hand tightens on my wrist and then releases, both hands coming up to the sides of my face, pulling me down into her. The angle from the arm of the chair is wrong, too high, too far, and I solve it by standing and pulling her up with me.