Chapter 16 #3
She breaks with a sound that echoes off the timber ceiling.
The clench of her body around me pulls the release out of me like a tide I've been holding back all night.
It starts at the base of my spine and tears through me, white and blinding, every muscle in my body locking while I bury myself as deep as I can get.
I let go with my face pressed into her hair and her pulse hammering against my lips.
The fire has burned to a steady low flame. The lodge is still. She's still in my arms, legs unwrapped, feet on the floor, forehead against my chest. Her breathing hasn't steadied yet. Neither has mine.
My hand is still in her hair. I tighten my grip and tilt her face up to mine.
She is here, in my lodge, breathing my air, wearing my marks on her hips where my fingers gripped too hard.
She is alive and unbroken and mine. The possessive certainty of that thought runs through me with the force of an instinct I inherited, one I have spent years trying not to become.
She pulls back. Her eyes find mine. What she sees there makes her study me for a long moment.
"You're thinking," she says.
"I'm always thinking."
"You're thinking loud enough that I can hear it without a notepad." She bends and picks up the notepad and the flannel from the floor, pulls the flannel back on. "What are you planning?"
"Breakfast."
The lie is smooth. She catches it anyway. Her mouth tightens a fraction, the micro-expression I've learned to read in the days she's been at the lodge. She lets it go, and I let her let it go, because what I'm planning is simpler than she thinks and more dangerous than I'm willing to admit.
She takes the chair again. I rebuild the fire. The routine of it feels earned, and the steadiness of my hands on the kindling contradicts the calculation running underneath.
Dash comes off the east side and is working on tracing the name on the card. Bryan is back on the overlook. Cameron is back on the road with a full charge on the satellite phone and orders to check in every hour. The perimeter is staffed and operational.
But the perimeter is reactive, built to wait for them to come to me.
The woman in the chair just mapped the network of a man who doesn't wait.
Gary sends confirmation teams and follows them with photographs.
He will escalate until he finds what he's looking for or until someone makes the cost too high to justify.
She has a plan. I can see it taking shape on her notepad, the boxes filling in, the arrows connecting. She's building something methodical and smart, and given time, it will work. The problem is time. Gary doesn't give time. Gary takes it.
I wait until Kendall goes upstairs to shower. I listen to her footsteps on the stairs, the bedroom door opening and closing, the water starting through the pipes. The sounds of a woman who trusts me enough to leave the room.
Then I cross to the kitchen, pick up the satellite phone, and dial a number I haven't called in years.
The man who answers was my father's contact in Anchorage.
He works the gray spaces between legitimate security and the kind of work that doesn't have letterhead.
My father used him twice that I know of.
Once for a property dispute with a mining company that wouldn't take no from a man who owned his land outright.
Once for something I never asked about and my father never explained.
"It's Alex Sawyer," I say. "Jack's son."
The pause on the other end is the pause of a man recalibrating. Then: "Didn't think I'd hear from a Sawyer again. What do you need?"
"A name. Corporate security consulting, based out of Anchorage. Gary Simmons. I need to know who he is, what he has, and what it would take to make him stop looking for something he lost."
"That's not a small ask."
"I'm not asking small."
Another pause. "Your father's credit still carries weight up here. Give me some time."
I end the call. The phone goes back on the counter. The kitchen is quiet. Upstairs, I can hear the water running through the pipes. She'll be in the shower for another few minutes. Long enough for the decision I just made to settle into the foundation of a choice I can't undo.
She didn't ask me to do this. She didn't want me to do this.
The map on her notepad is her operation, her intelligence, her plan.
It's taking shape on paper with the precision of a woman who survived years inside a predator's house by being smarter than the man who thought she wasn't paying attention.
She told me not to lock her in a room. I heard her.
I understood her. Then I picked up the phone and made a call that moves her situation forward faster than her notepad can.
The problem isn't the call. The problem is that when she finds out, it will feel like a cage closing around her.
I need to find a way to make it feel like a door opening instead.
The certainty is right. It is necessary. It is the only call I could make and still call myself the man who stands between her and whatever is coming up that road.
Upstairs, the water shuts off.