Chapter 20
twenty
Bear didn’t remember going through the door.
He remembered seeing Greta tear out of her driveway like her ass was on fire.
Remembered knowing deep in his gut that something was wrong and telling Logan to stay with King.
He remembered following her, pulling off to the shoulder of the road when he saw where she was headed.
He remembered seeing Atlas hit the Jeep window hard enough to rock it on the chassis…
And then he saw nothing but red.
Now his left hand had a fistful of Daniel Goodwin’s collar, and his right had the back of his waistband, and the man came off Greta with a strangled noise.
Bear threw him like he was nothing more than a haybale.
Daniel hit the display at the back wall—racks and hangers and a whole season’s worth of hunting jackets—and went down with it. The crash was enormous in the small shop. Canisters bounced. A rack folded. Half a dozen jackets settled over him in a heavy pile, and Bear turned his back on the sound.
Greta was against the wall between the elk mount and the door. On her feet. Hand at her throat. His flannel—the one she’d walked out of his house in three hours ago—was open at the collar, an angry red ring marring her skin where that fucker had put his hands.
He saw red again and spun toward the sound coming out of the hunting-jacket pile. Daniel shoved himself out, coughing like a kicked dog.
“Bear,” Greta said softly. “Don’t.”
Daniel got his feet under him. One hand on a shelf, bruised and awkward, the other holding his side where Bear knew he’d left a mark. His nostrils flared. “You fucking piece of shit.”
“You want more,” Bear said, “stand up.”
Daniel spat pink onto the white floor. “Goddamn ex-con trash,” he muttered, low and ugly. “She let you fuck her, didn’t she? What’s it like, knowing that she’s just slumming? Taking a pity fuck from a sideshow like you—”
Bear moved before the words were all the way out.
Daniel didn’t see it coming—not the way people never saw it coming with someone Bear’s size.
He crossed the room, wrapped a hand in the SOB’s shirt, and buried his fist in Daniel’s gut, once, exactly where it would hurt and not kill.
The noise that came out of Daniel wasn’t even a noise; it was the world losing power in his lungs.
Then Bear spun him around, careful—so fucking careful with the angle, with the velocity, with every pound of force—and shoved his face into the cinderblock wall by the fish-and-game calendar.
“You ever come near her again,” Bear said, “I will break you.”
Daniel twisted, tried to get a hand up.
Bear didn’t let him. He turned the wrist against the joint — not all the way, not enough to snap it, just enough to let the man understand with complete physical clarity that the leverage here was not in his favor, had never been in his favor, and was not going to change.
He walked him backward three steps with the grip on his wrist, got a hand on the back of his neck, and put him face down across the counter.
It should’ve been over. Daniel should’ve realized he was outmatched and given up, but the damned fool grabbed a hunting knife from the display stand.
It wasn’t a trained strike. It was desperate and wild, the move of a cornered animal. Bear saw it coming—the guy might as well have telegraphed his actions with a neon sign—and pulled back.
The blade caught nothing but air.
Enough.
Bear pulled back his fist. He measured it as he threw it— his whole body already locked into the precise calculation he’d been running in the back of his head since the moment he’d walked through the door: how hard was enough.
This wasn’t the bar. He was not drunk, not in a blind rage.
He was not in the place he’d been at twenty-six when Jason Miller had gone down and hadn’t gotten up.
He knew exactly where that line was. He’d spent twelve years learning exactly where it was.
He hit Daniel Goodwin exactly hard enough.
The man dropped.
The knife hit the floor.
The display stand tipped and followed it. Daniel slumped against the base of the counter with his chin on his chest and his legs folded under him, and he was still.
Bear stood there.
And waited.
Watched Daniel’s chest.
It moved. A shallow rise, a fall. Once. Twice. Three times.
He counted each breath, then knelt to check his pulse and caught a glimpse of his knuckles.
Red, but not split. He opened his fingers.
He looked at his palm, the lines of it, the old calluses and newer ones layered over each other from woodworking and construction and King’s leash, from the handles of shovels and framing hammers and the weight bar in the bunkhouse gym. He closed his hand. He opened it again.
He was thirty-nine years old and twelve years sober, and he’d walked into a hunting supply shop in Hamilton, Montana, and thrown a man into a camo display and hit him once and stopped.
He exhaled once, hard, through his nose.
Then he turned around.
Greta was still against the wall. The band of red across the front of her throat was already darkening.
Her left hand was at her throat, light, fingertips resting against the mark like she was taking her own pulse.
Her right hand hung at her side, the knuckles split— she must have hit him earlier, before Bear had gotten there, and the skin had opened across the second and third knuckle and dried dark.
He crossed to her.
She was watching him with an expression he hadn’t seen on her face before, and he tried to read it and couldn’t, which was not something that usually happened with her. Greta was an open book. She had an opinion about everything, and it was always visible on her face.
But not now.
“You okay?”
She didn’t answer.
Behind him, Atlas was still going. The barking had shifted to a higher pitch, the sound he made when he’d been at it long enough to start losing his mind about it.
“Greta.” He stopped an arm’s length away. He looked at the mark on her throat and made himself look away from it because he wasn’t going to be useful if he went back toward the man on the floor right now. “Are you okay?”
She nodded. Her fingers dropped from her throat.
“He grabbed me.” Her voice came out level, and she seemed faintly surprised by this, like she’d expected it not to be. “I knew he was going to, but I didn’t move fast enough.”
“You hit him first.”
“I hit him first.” The faintest twist crossed her face, more grimace than smile. “Should’ve hit him harder.” She looked past him at the man on the floor, at the knife on the tiles, at the general disaster of the shop.
Then she looked back at Bear.
“You stopped,” she said.
“Yeah.”
“You knew exactly how hard to hit him.”
“Yeah.”
She looked at him for a long moment. The rain was coming down harder against the front window.
Atlas had found a lower gear, the barking going from frantic to steady to the cadence of a dog that had committed to this and was going to see it through.
Somewhere out on the highway, a semi downshifted, the engine brake loud and mechanical in the gray morning.
Then she was across the room.
She stopped in front of him and put her hand flat on his chest. Right over his sternum, the same place it had been that morning in his bedroom.
He looked down at her face. At the mark on her throat and the blood on her hand and the rain-damp wisps of strawberry-blond hair at her temples, and her pale green eyes with the gold in them, looking up at him with an expression he could read now.
She wasn’t afraid of him.
He reached up and covered her hand with his. Her fingers were cold. He closed his palm over them and held them to his chest, over the place where his heart was doing something loud and unsteady, and he held them there.