Chapter 2
HARLOW
My Bureau credentials are at the bottom of the last box.
I find them underneath a stack of tactical assessment templates and a broken stapler I should have thrown away in Quantico.
The leather case falls open in my hands, and my own face stares back at me from the laminated ID.
Younger. Harder. Hair pulled so tight it gave me migraines I treated with ibuprofen and refused to acknowledge.
Special Agent Harlow Kane. Crisis Negotiation Unit. Federal Bureau of Investigation.
I close the case and put it in the bottom drawer of the filing cabinet. The drawer sticks. I force it shut with my foot and leave it there, underneath everything else. Old credentials don't expire. They just stop being useful. Sort of like guilt, except guilt doesn't fit in a drawer.
The office is a rented space above the old freight office on the south end of Main Street. Small enough that my desk, two client chairs, and a bookshelf fill it to capacity. The window faces the street, and the light is decent in the mornings.
The stairs creak on every other step, and the heating is a wood-burning stove that requires more attention than a newborn. I've set up operations in worse. The Bureau field office in Tulsa had a rat problem and a ceiling tile that fell on my desk during a briefing. This is an upgrade.
Kane Security Consulting. The sign isn't up yet. The business cards are still at the printer in Palmer. The laptop works when the internet cooperates, which is roughly sixty percent of the time, and the landline works when the weather cooperates, which is less.
I am building a private security consulting firm in a town with limited cell service, one road, and a population that handles most of its problems with a phone call and a truck.
Baker would have laughed. He'd have leaned against the doorframe with that specific grin he saved for moments when I was being stubborn about something obviously impractical. 'Kane, you picked the one place on earth where nobody needs what you're selling.'
He'd have been wrong. This town needs exactly what I'm selling. They just don't know it yet.
A truck backfires on the street outside, and my right hand drops to my hip before my brain registers the sound. Muscle memory.
Baker has been dead long enough that I've stopped counting the months, and my body still reaches for a weapon every time something sounds like a gunshot.
I pull my hand back and press it flat on the desk. The wood is cool. The street is quiet. Nobody saw. Training that doesn't come with an off switch. I stopped apologizing for it the same week I stopped flinching.
I lock up and walk to the Ridgeline for a late breakfast. The morning rush is over, and the café has settled into the quieter rhythm of the mid-morning gap.
Paula is restocking cups. She glances at me, sets a mug on the counter, and goes back to what she was doing. No greeting. No small talk. Paula communicates through efficiency. She decided I was acceptable weeks ago, and further confirmation would insult both our intelligence.
Marc and Sela are in the corner booth with Rhys. He's got his back to the wall, coffee untouched, off-duty in posture and on-duty in everything else.
His gaze locks on me the second I walk in.
The kind of focused attention that used to make me reach for my sidearm when it came from the wrong man.
From Rhys, it makes me reach for something else entirely.
The fact that I can feel the heat of his attention across a crowded café at nine in the morning is a problem I have decided to stop pretending is a problem.
Marc waves me over. I slide in next to Rhys, and his hand settles on my thigh under the table. Warm. Possessive. Automatic. His thumb presses into the inside seam of my jeans, and my train of thought derails so completely that I have to reconstruct it from wreckage before I can form a sentence.
Sela is eating eggs with the focused speed of someone whose break ends in twelve minutes.
"How's the office?" Marc asks.
"The filing cabinet sticks. The internet dropped twice this morning. The stove needs feeding every hour." I wrap my hands around the mug. "So. Progress."
Sela smiles. Marc doesn't. Marc shows approval the same way Paula shows acceptance—by not saying anything negative and moving on to the next subject.
"Carl's already planning another fundraiser for fall," Sela says. "Apparently last night only covered half the roof."
"Of course he is. Carl plans fundraisers the way other people plan military operations."
"Speaking of military operations." Marc leans back, arms crossed. "Got a call from the FBI field office in Anchorage yesterday. They want access to the department's case files from the Marshal investigation. Again."
Rhys's jaw tightens. The hand on my thigh goes still.
Sela's fork pauses. I set my mug down.
"They've had access for months," I say.
"They want more. Different analyst, new request, same bureaucratic runaround.
" Marc's voice is level, but the effort shows.
"Every time they circle back, it feels less like follow-up and more like they're covering their tracks.
Three agencies missed what was happening north of here for years. Nobody wants that in a report."
The table goes quiet. Rhys picks up his coffee and drinks. The gesture is controlled, deliberate. Whatever he's swallowing, it isn't coffee.
Marc's expression is one I've worn. The fury of a professional whose institution failed the people it existed to protect.
He spent his career in Army CID believing the system worked.
Then a federal official used that system to run a trafficking operation through a mining camp north of town.
The system didn't just fail. It was weaponized.
I carry the same scar from a different agency.
"How much access are they asking for?" I ask.
"Everything from the mining camp forward. I told them to submit it in writing." Marc glances at Rhys. "Your call, boss."
Rhys sets the cup down. "Submit it in writing. I'll read it when I'm ready to read it."
That's all. We move on. Sela finishes her eggs and checks her watch. Marc reaches for the bill and I let him take it.
Rhys's hand hasn't left my thigh. His thumb has resumed that slow, maddening pressure through the denim, and the man has the audacity to look completely unbothered while he does it. I am going to make him pay for this later. He's counting on it.
Outside, the street carries the unhurried rhythm of a town that runs on its own timing. A woman is sweeping the porch of the community hall. Hank's truck is parked crooked outside the hardware store. Two kids on bicycles race past the post office, and neither one is wearing a helmet.
My brain automatically calculates the gravel-to-speed ratio and the likelihood of a concussion. Spend a career assessing risk, and you can't turn it off, even when the risk is a ten-year-old on a Schwinn.
I notice things Rhys doesn't. The training never shuts off.
What it shows me is a town with one road in and one road out, a bridge that carries every supply run, and a sheriff's department covering a jurisdiction larger than most eastern states with a handful of deputies.
I love this place. I can also map every vulnerability it has in under thirty seconds, and that dual awareness is either my greatest asset or the thing that will make me insufferable at town meetings.
Agnes Croft is on the bench outside the post office, sitting in the sun with the patient stillness of a woman who considers waiting a productive activity. She raises one hand when I pass.
"Ms. Kane."
"Agnes."
"Still setting up that office of yours?"
"Getting there. The stove hasn't killed me yet, so I'm calling that a win."
She studies me with eyes that miss nothing and forgive selectively. "I remember every outsider who stayed in this town," she says. "Not many. The ones who do tend to be the ones we needed most."
I stop walking. That sentence carries more weight than small talk, and Agnes knows it.
"People born here stay out of habit," she continues. "People who choose it stay for reasons that matter more." Agnes folds her hands in her lap. "The mountain picks the people who belong to it, Harlow. Don't argue with it."
I don't argue with it. Not out loud. Internally, the crisis negotiator files the statement under things that sound beautiful and mean nothing actionable.
But the woman who chose to stay in a town she could have left six months ago files it somewhere quieter.
Somewhere I don't examine too often, because examining it would require admitting that I made the decision before I had a reason for it.
I nod once. Agnes goes back to watching the street with the quiet authority of a woman who has been the memory of this community longer than most of its residents have been alive.
The rest of the day goes to the office. Inventory lists.
Vendor calls that drop twice because the cell coverage on the south end of Main Street is a suggestion rather than a service.
A security assessment draft for a fishing lodge outside Palmer that might become my first real contract if the owner stops changing his mind about the scope.
By late afternoon my eyes are crossing, and I lock up and drive north toward the cabin with the window down and the cold air doing the work that caffeine stopped doing an hour ago.
Our cabin sits at the end of a dirt road that climbs through spruce forest before it opens into a clearing with a view of the valley. Solid construction. Clean lines. The kind of building that was framed by men who measured twice and apologized for nothing.
I've been living here for months, and every morning I still register the silence.
Not the peaceful kind. The tactical kind.
No engine noise. No foot traffic. No ambient sound that would mask an approach from any direction.
The fact that I find this comforting says more about my psychology than any therapist ever managed to.