Chapter 30
KAEDRIN
The last storehouse comes up empty.
I lean on the doorframe, taking in the swept floor, the bare walls, the absence of anything that shouldn't be there, and accept that tonight isn't ending with Fenwood in custody.
I've covered the market district twice, the caravan camp perimeter, the two storage buildings connected to his remaining contacts, and the loading yard behind the cloth merchant's row.
Nothing. No residue trace, no fresh prints, no signs of doubling back.
He's still here. He has to be. The cache is here and he hasn't left without it.
I'll find him tomorrow in the light, or he'll make a move tonight that tells me where he is. Either way, there's nothing more I can do with the dark and an empty storehouse.
I pull the door shut and head for the bakery.
The lamp in the kitchen window is lit. Maris is at the worktable, Elin on her stool, the ordinary shape of an evening meal. It’s a pleasant view, even from outside on the street. I knock twice and the familiar sound of the latch follows.
Maris opens the door and reads my face before I say anything. "Nothing?"
"Nothing yet." I step inside. The kitchen is warm, the soup smell cutting through the cold I've been moving through for the last two hours. "He's still in town."
"How do you know?"
"Because he came back for something he values more than a clean exit," I say low enough Elin can’t hear. "And it's still here."
Elin turns on her stool and sees me. Her face rearranges itself into the open, uncomplicated delight she doesn't bother containing.
"You're here for dinner," she announces. Not a question.
"I—" I look at Maris.
She's already moving to the pot. "Sit down," she says, and lifts another bowl from the shelf.
There's no useful argument against this. Elin is watching me with the patient certainty of someone who knows the outcome and is just waiting for the adult to catch up. I pull out the chair across from her stool and sit.
She tells me about the drawings while Maris dishes up the soup.
All of them, in sequence, including the hats.
She retrieves the most recent one from the counter and holds it up for my inspection — four figures, all with large triangular hats, one significantly taller than the rest with straight lines for hair.
"That's you," she says, pointing at the tall figure. "Yours is the biggest hat."
"I see that."
"Because you're the tallest." She sets the drawing back with the careful placement of someone managing an archive. "Pip wanted a hat too but I ran out of paper."
Maris sets the bowl in front of me and takes her seat.
Elin picks up her spoon and begins eating with concentrated efficiency and strong opinions about the temperature window for soup.
The kitchen is warm and close and smells like carrots and woodsmoke, and I eat and listen to Elin explain the organizational system of her pebble collection and feel something settle in my chest that has nothing to do with the investigation.
I catch Maris's eye across the table. She tips her head slightly toward Elin and then raises her brows — her signal that she's heard the concern in what I said at the door and hasn't forgotten it.
I nod once. Later.
She refills Elin's bowl without being asked. Elin thanks her with the automatic gratitude of a toddler who has been taught manners and means them, then redirects her attention to me.
"Do you like soup?" she asks.
"I do."
She considers this. "Mama makes good soup."
"She does," I agree.
Maris makes a sound over her bowl that might be a suppressed laugh.
After the dishes are cleared, Elin produces the charcoal and fresh papers with the purposeful energy of someone resuming important work. Maris catches my eye and tilts her head toward the stairs — a question. I nod.
"Time to get ready for bed," Maris says.
The protest is standard and brief. Elin negotiates for five more minutes, is granted two, uses them to add a complicated element to the drawing she's started, and then gathers Pip from the counter with the resigned acceptance of a child who knows when the outcome is settled.
She nods at me before she gets down from the stool. "Are you going to be here tomorrow?"
The question is simple and direct, which is the only way she asks things.
"I'll be outside," I tell her. "Like always."
She nods, satisfied, and slides off the stool.
Maris takes her upstairs. I clear the remaining bowls to the basin and stand at the kitchen window, watching the dark lane outside, running through every building I covered tonight and looking for the gap I missed.
When the footsteps on the stairs come back down, I turn.
"She wants you to say goodnight," Maris says. Her voice is even, but there's something careful underneath it — watching to see what I do with that.
I go upstairs.
Elin is in her bed with Pip tucked beside her, the blanket up to her chin, her eyes tracking me as I come through the door.
The lamp on her nightstand throws warm light across her curls, and the grey at her temples catches it differently than the dark strands do.
I've noticed that before. I'll keep noticing it.
I crouch beside the bed so we're at the same level.
"Goodnight," I say.
She reaches up and pats my cheek twice with her small hand. Her palm is warm and deliberate. Then she pulls it back, closes her eyes, and settles deeper into the pillow.
I stay crouched for a moment longer than necessary.
I've been keeping her safe — watching the doors, intercepting threats, staying between her and whatever the town or Fenwood might direct her way.
That felt like enough because it was what I knew how to do.
But crouching beside her bed in the lamplight, watching her settle toward sleep with Pip tucked under her chin, I understand that safety and fatherhood are not the same thing.
One is the floor. The other is everything built on top of it.
I've only just found the floor.
I want to build the rest.
I stand quietly and go back into the little house above the bakery.
Maris is already in the sitting room when I come back down, two cups of tea on the table, her legs tucked under her on the chair. She watches me take the seat across from her and waits.
"He circled back," I say. "He didn't take the valley road.
He's somewhere in this town, looking for a cache he left behind — something he wouldn't abandon even when everything else was burning.
" I wrap my hands around the cup. "I covered the market district twice.
The storage yards, the caravan haunts, the loading areas. Nothing."
"But you think he'll come here."
"I think he's desperate and cornered." I set the cup down. "Desperate men look for leverage. You and Elin are the most visible people connected to this case. Witnesses, a target, or a way to get to me — any of those reasons is enough for a man with nothing left to lose."
She doesn’t respond immediately. "How sure are you?"
"Sure enough that I'm not leaving tonight."
She looks at her cup. Her hands are wrapped around it the same way mine are — something to hold onto while thinking. "You said a way to get to you. Why would he bother?"
"Because I've been spending time here." I fix her with a pointed look. "He's been watching his own exits. He'll have noticed mine."
Her hazel eyes come up to meet mine.
I reach across the table and take her hands. They're warm from the cup, a little rough at the knuckles from years of dough and hot ovens. I turn them over and press my mouth to her fingertips, one hand and then the other.
"I let my personal feelings pull me toward this house more than the investigation required," I say. "If that drew his attention here, that's on me."
"Kaedrin." She squeezes my hands before I can pull them back.
"We were already targets. Before you started staying close, before any of this — Elin's ears, her skin, the way she looks.
This town was primed to fear us." She says it without self-pity, just with flat honesty.
"Fenwood didn't create that. He used what was already there. "
I look at her hands in mine.
She's right. I know she's right. The fear in Brindle Hollow was years in the making, the kind that builds in a closed community with no outlet, and Fenwood only struck the match. She and Elin would have been the fire regardless.
It doesn't quiet the part of me that wants to have done better.
"Maris," I say, and then I don't have the rest of it.
She reads what I don't finish. She always does.
I pull her toward me and she comes without resistance, her arms going around my neck, her face turning into my shoulder.
I hold her with both arms, my chin at the top of her head, and feel the tension in her back — the months of it, the held breath of a woman who has been bracing for impact for so long she's forgotten what standing straight feels like.
I brush my lips against her forehead.
She tips her face up.
I kiss her mouth, soft at first, and she melts against me with the exhale of someone finally putting down a weight.
My hand moves to the back of her head and she pulls herself closer by my collar, and the softness shifts quickly into something with more heat behind it, her mouth opening under mine, her fingers curling in the fabric at my chest.
We don't say anything else. There isn't anything else that needs saying tonight.
The bedroom is dark except for the low lamp on the nightstand.
We shed clothes quickly, no patience for anything deliberate — her laces, my belt, the shirt pulled over my head and dropped.
She's half-dressed when I pull her against me, her bare skin warm against my chest, and I gasp at the firmness of her nipples on my skin.
I'm already hard, pressing insistently against the fabric still between us, every point of contact with her making it worse.