Chapter 29
Decker
I wake with Grace asleep half on top of me, one leg over mine, her cheek on my chest, her hand curled loose beside it.
Her breathing is deep and even. Nothing in her is braced.
It took days for that last guard to leave her body, and now that it’s gone, I can feel it under my hands.
She’s heavier asleep than she used to be. She trusts the ground she’s lying on.
The rut has thinned since yesterday. It still turns over when she moves against me, but the constant drive is gone, and what’s left underneath isn’t hunger. The bear lies low and warm in me, fed, wanting nothing. I keep waiting for him to want something.
He doesn’t.
Neither do I. That’s the strange part. Twenty years of waking up already halfway into the day’s problem, and this morning the only plan I have is not waking her. No route out of here. No fallback. Just her heartbeat against my ribs and the water trickling in the pool passage.
I lie there and soak it in.
She wakes the way she’s learned to wake in this cave—slow, without checking anything first.
“Morning, bear.” She presses her mouth to my chest, once, and slides off me into the cold. I move to sit.
“Don’t get up,” she says. “Your side of the fur is the warm side.”
She pulls my shirt over her head. It reaches her thighs. She crosses the den in it, bare-legged on cold stone, and lights the stove without swearing at it, which is new. She takes the two cups off the shelf and puts a teabag into both.
I watch her do it. There’s nothing to the moment. Water heating, a woman in my shirt, my scent all over her and hers all over me. I’ve holed up in this cave for years, and it was never anything but a place to lay low. She’s been in it days, and I can’t remember what it was for before.
She brings the cups back and tucks herself into my side, and we drink tea in the gray light without a word that matters.
“I think the stove has accepted me.”
I chuckle. “It took longer with me. You have a gift.”
Her laugh ripples through my ribs where she’s leaning, and the bear soaks it up.
Her wrist turns as she drinks, and the old raised lines inside her elbow show. What I know about her blood shifts once in my chest. I leave it where it lies.
The phone buzzes on the ledge.
I’m looking at it before the second buzz. Viktor’s call isn’t due.
Grace has gone quiet against me.
“Stay warm,” I tell her, and I’m up—jeans, boots, the phone in my fist. I push the boulder aside, step onto the slope, and answer with the entrance still open behind me.
“You’re early.”
“Jericho ran an operation last night.” Viktor’s voice is flat in the way it only gets when something has gone wrong in a useful direction. “You need to hear how it ended.”
“Go.”
“Once Faine’s corridor firmed up, Jericho started building a net for the supply convoys that feed it.
He picked his ground—a bridge crossing on a county road the convoys have used every run.
Two teams, one night, everything drawn up inside the restricted wing.
” A pause. “The convoy never reached the bridge. It broke into cars twenty miles out and went around on ranch tracks it has never touched. Hours before the net would have closed.”
I walk a few steps down the slope, out of the wind. “Convoys reroute.”
“They didn’t avoid the corridor. They avoided the bridge.
The one crossing Jericho chose, out of a dozen he could have.
That choice was made in a closed room and never left it.
” He lets that sit. “And here’s the part that affects you.
The plan didn’t exist until after Grace was up there with you.
She could not have sold it. Nobody can argue otherwise now, and I mean nobody. ”
The mole is moving. And they just moved while she was asleep on my chest.
“They don’t realize we have her.”
“And they’ve grown complacent. They think we’re focused on her, so they’re still active. But the night that convoy turned, the evidence stopped pointing at Grace.” His voice doesn’t lift.
“So you can clear her now.”
“And tell them I know? No. I need them thinking they can keep going.” He’s silent a moment.
“Grace ran against these people for months. She’s heard the handler’s voice.
She knows how the drops were timed, what got asked for, what never did.
Vanya can process that against the fresh information, but not from notes.
She needs the source across a table, answering all the questions she still has.
” A beat. “Bring her in, Decker. Today.”
“No.” It’s out the same way it was in his office. Faster than the reasons. “She’s not safe in there. I told you that across your desk. It’s truer this morning than it was then. They’re not lying still anymore. They’re working.”
“They’ve been working the whole time. The difference is that now I know where to look, and the one tool that shortens the hunt is up a mountain.
” He doesn’t raise his voice. Viktor never has to.
“It’s only a matter of time before the Syndicate finds you there, Decker.
The mountain isn’t a plan. It’s a pause.
The safest place she will ever be is here with us. ”
Under the talk, low in me, something drags backward. Not at Viktor. At everything he’s proposing: walls, corridors, other people’s ground, her inside all of it. The bear resists the idea with his full weight.
“Your mole just told the Syndicate we’re watching their corridor,” I say. “The same corridor the towers went down.”
“I know exactly what last night cost, and where. But Vanya’s search is still completely under wraps.
Nobody knows we’re looking for the sister.
That search is still dark.” A pause, and his voice comes back a fraction harder.
“I told you to keep her buried. Now I’m telling you things have changed.
Sundown, Decker. Or I send someone up there, and we both know I know how to find you. ”
The call ends.
I stand on the slope with the phone in my fist and the valley going about its morning below, and the drag in me doesn’t ease.
Somewhere down there, a woman is being bled along a route that just got more dangerous, and the person who made it more dangerous is behind the walls I’ve been told to deliver Grace to.
When I turn, she’s standing in the open seam.
Boots on. My shirt still on over her jeans. Arms folded against the cold, hair loose, watching me like she’s been watching since I answered.
“You said later. You’d tell me later.” Her chin lifts. “It’s later.”
I stop two steps below her, which puts us almost level. “Inside.”
“No. Here. Where you take the calls.” She doesn’t move from the gap. “Something changed. Tell me.”
So I tell her what I can.
“Jericho set a trap on a Syndicate supply run. Planned after you disappeared, inside the restricted wing, nowhere else. The convoy dodged it, exactly, hours ahead.” I watch her take it in. “Somebody sold that plan, and it couldn’t have been you. Provably. You were here the whole time.”
She doesn’t move for a breath, and it isn’t fear. Her scent sharpens the way it does when her mind starts running hard.
“The mole was working,” she says. “While I was here.”
“Yes.”
“So it’s finished. Viktor knows it wasn’t me. Not believes. Knows.”
“Inside a small circle. On paper you’re still the suspect the council wants.”
“Why not?” Her voice is sharp.
“So they don’t disappear. Right now, they think they’re safe.”
“And Viktor wants me in the building.” She reads it straight off me. “That’s what the call was. And you told him no.”
“I told him no.”
“Why?”
“Because whoever framed you carries some kind of rank in that building. Sleeps behind those wards. You’d be close to someone with power who’s already tried to bury you.”
“Good,” she says.
“Grace—”
She steps out of the entrance and down onto the slope, into my space, and puts one finger against my chest. Her eyes have gone the clear sky-blue that tells me she means business.
“My mother trained me to be nobody. Don’t be seen, don’t be remembered.
I was so good at it that when somebody hung a murder on me, there wasn’t one person in the world who could stand up and say, that isn’t her.
That’s what disappearing bought me.” Her voice stays level, and her finger doesn’t.
It’s pressing hard enough to whiten at the nail.
“I have been vanishing my whole life, Decker, and someone is down there right now, sending people to die. If I can help stop them, that’s what I’m going to do.
” She pulls a breath in slowly. “You told me once I’d answer for what I did. I want to. Now.”
“You’d be safer—”
“Don’t.” One word, and my mouth snaps shut on what I was going to say. “You don’t get to bury me for my own good. That’s what they do.”
The wind moves between us. The bear is a dead weight in me, hauling back toward the dark behind her, toward the fur and the scent and what we’ve had these last few days. I stand there holding his leash and mine and hers. The last one is not mine to hold.
She’s right. That’s the whole problem.
“Pack,” I say. “We’re gone before midday.”
I go past her into the den and start shutting down.
The stove first. She washes the two cups in the pool passage while I break the gear off the pegs.
When she comes back, she dries them on my shirt tail and sets them on the shelf, close together, the way they’ve sat for years and never meant anything.
She looks at them a second longer than the job takes. Neither of us says anything.
The blanket gets rolled. The fur stays. The cot goes back to being a frame with nothing soft about it. Every warm thing we made in here comes apart in minutes, and the cold replaces it.
She shoulders the small pack. I take the big one, and the lantern goes dark on the shelf. The den is stone again. That’s all.
Outside, the morning is bright and the day is fine. The bear fights me every step downhill.
Grace moves ahead of me down the slope, sure-footed, chin forward, already halfway to the fight she’s chosen. Twice I catch myself standing on the trail with no memory of stopping, facing the cave.
The truck sits in the trees where I left it. She climbs in without looking back at the mountain.
I look back enough for both of us.
Then I start the engine and take her down toward the place that holds her answer and her enemy in the same set of rooms. And I sit with my secrets stuck in my chest, the bear leaning up the road the whole way.
I know what he’s fighting for. What he wants.
I just don’t know if it’s a battle we’re going to win.