Chapter 6
ALEX
The perimeter takes forty minutes when I'm not stalling.
I haven't slept. The taste of her is still on my mouth and my hands haven't stopped remembering the shape of her ribs, and I've been out here since before dawn because the alternative is lying in the dark in a room that shares a wall with hers.
Dawn is a suggestion behind the ridge, gray light leaking into a sky that hasn't committed to color yet.
The snow crunches under my boots in the particular way it does at this temperature, dry and compressed, squeaking when weight hits it.
My breath comes in clouds that dissolve before they reach arm's length.
The storm left the world clean. Drifts have piled against the north side of the lodge. Fresh powder covers the outbuildings. The tree line stands sharp against the sky.
I check the generator shed, the fuel stores, the snowmobile shelter. I check the sight lines from the access road. I check the tree line where it runs close to the east wall.
None of this needs checking. The generator is Cameron's territory and he runs it better than I do. The fuel stores were topped off before the storm. The sight lines haven't changed since my father cleared those trees when I was a kid.
I'm not out here because the perimeter needs walking. I'm out here because last night I kissed a woman whose body flinched away from my hands, and the violence that implies has me circling this lodge like a dog on a chain.
My right hand flexes, closes, and opens.
I knew before the kiss. I'd already seen the flinch at the pan, the wrist she covers, how she tracks hands in a room before she tracks faces.
I've been reading the evidence since her first morning here, noting it the way my father taught me to read terrain: identify the feature, assess the risk, file it.
The point is I knew. I kissed her anyway.
My thumb found something under her ribs that made her flinch so hard her shoulders came up.
The sound she made will be in my head until I'm dead.
I stop at the northeast corner where the tree line runs close to the lodge. I lean against a spruce trunk. The cold comes through my jacket and I let it.
My mother flinched. She didn't flinch at pans or doorways. My mother flinched at the sound of my father's truck on the gravel, a full-body contraction that she'd smooth into a smile by the time he walked in.
I was young enough that the smoothing worked for years. By the time I understood what the flinch meant, she was gone and understanding didn't matter.
Kendall's flinch is different from my mother's. Hers was anticipation. Kendall's is reflex, trained into the muscle by repetition.
Whatever is under her ribs, the hand that put it there did it more than once, in more than one place, over more than a few months. The body doesn't learn to protect itself that fast.
My hand closes again. I hold the fist this time. The knuckles ache against the cold.
I should have asked last night, in the kitchen, with her pressed against the counter and the taste of her still on my mouth. I should have asked who. I should have asked when. I should have asked where he is now so I could find him.
I didn't ask because asking would have made it about me. My need to know, to fix it, to put myself between her and whatever left that mark.
She said 'I'm fine' and the lie was so practiced it came out smooth.
Contesting it would have been one more man deciding he knew her body better than she did.
So I let her go. I sat by the fire and did nothing. I didn't follow her upstairs. The restraint tasted like ash.
The sun clears the ridge, pale gold on fresh snow. I push off the tree and head back.
The kitchen smells like coffee when I come through the back door. Cameron is at the stove, scrambling eggs. Dash is at the table with a mug, scrolling his phone.
Bryan is absent, which means he's either in the workshop or running his own version of a perimeter check, the one that involves fewer feelings and more ammunition inventory.
"You look like hell," Dash says without looking up.
"Thanks."
"Rough night?"
Cameron glances over his shoulder. The glance is brief and measured and it tells me Cameron heard something at two in the morning and drew his own conclusions. Cameron draws conclusions the way other people breathe. He keeps most of them to himself.
"Storm kept me up," I say.
"Storm ended at midnight," Dash says.
"Dash." Cameron's voice is mild. Dash shuts up. The hierarchy holds even over eggs.
I pour coffee and drink it standing at the counter where, a few hours ago, I had Kendall pinned against this surface with my mouth on her throat and my hand in her hair and every good intention I've ever had burning down around me.
The shape of her body is still imprinted against mine, how she arched into me, the sound she made when my teeth found her pulse.
It's the same scarred pine, the same knife grooves, the same ring stain from a mug someone set down wet. My body doesn't care what the counter looks like. My body remembers what it felt like.
I hear her on the stairs before I see her. The third step creaks under her weight.
She doesn't sidestep it. She's not sneaking this time. She's walking into a room she intends to occupy.
She appears in the kitchen doorway and the room goes briefly still. Dash looks up. Cameron's spatula pauses mid-scrape. I set my mug down with a precision that betrays exactly how much effort it takes to appear unaffected.
She's wearing the same flannel; sleeves rolled to her forearms. Her hair is pulled back.
The skin below her ear is pink, raw, and the sight of it does two things to me at once. The first is guilt, because I put that there, my stubble scraping her skin while my mouth worked her throat. The second is darker and more honest: satisfaction.
I marked her. The evidence is on her neck at breakfast and the possessive heat that thought sends through me is not something I'm willing to examine.
"Morning," she says. Her voice is even. Controlled. She's not looking at me.
"Morning," Cameron says.
"Coffee's on the counter," Dash says. He's helpful and oblivious, and God bless Dash Sawyer for both.
She crosses to the coffee pot. The distance she maintains is specific, not wide enough to be obvious, not close enough to risk contact. She's calculated the exact margin that reads as normal to a room full of people and abnormal only to the man who kissed her a few hours ago.
Her fingers brush mine on the counter as she reaches for the mug. The contact is brief, accidental, and the current it sends through my hand has no business being that strong from a brush of fingers. She pulls back. I don't.
The mug she takes is the one closest to my hand, and the reach that retrieves it is controlled and careful.
The effort shows in her wrist. She's favoring her injured side, a tightness in the way she reaches with one arm, the other staying close to her ribs. Stacking the firewood probably didn’t help.
She's protecting it the way she protects the wrist, by keeping the vulnerable place close to her body and managing the angles.
Amberly's clinic is a mile down the road. My sister would know what to do with an injury like that. But suggesting a doctor means admitting I know about it, and that admission belongs to her.
She sits at the table across from Dash, not next to me, not adjacent, but across. The table is between us like a negotiating line.
Breakfast is loud with Dash and quiet with Cameron.
The room is loaded with me and Kendall occupying the same space while pretending last night exists only in the dark.
She eats. She talks to Dash about his phone, which has intermittent signal at best, and the conversation is easy enough that anyone watching would think she's fine.
I'm watching. She isn't fine. The controlled voice, the calculated distances, the single accidental touch that sent voltage through both of us are all telling the same story.
Kendall Jackson is running the same containment protocol she ran the morning after she arrived: assess the threat, manage the exposure, give nothing away.
The difference is that this time, I'm the threat she's managing.
I finish my coffee and go to my office, the one room in the lodge that's entirely mine, holding the desk, the maps, the sat phone, the radio, supply logs, the gun safe. The door closes and the silence is a relief.
I sit in the chair my father sat in and think about a woman's ribs.
Every instinct I own says find the man who did it.
Fix the problem. Remove the threat. But the threat isn't here, and the woman in question hasn't asked me to fix anything, and the hardest part of sitting in this chair is accepting that the next move belongs to her.
The taste of her mouth keeps interrupting the waiting. Coffee and need, and underneath both, the memory of her hips moving against mine at the counter. I've had women. The memory of them doesn't ambush me at my desk and make my hands want things my head hasn't authorized.
The knock comes around mid-morning. It isn't Kendall's. The knock is heavy, spaced wide, delivered by a fist that's been knocking on this door since before I was born.
"It's open."
Walt Greer fills the doorway the way he's filled it since I was a kid running underfoot while he and my father planned hunting seasons.
He's shorter than he used to be, the years compressing his spine, but the shoulders are still broad under the canvas jacket.
His white beard could use a trim. His hands, wrapped around the brim of the hat he's holding, are knotted rope over bone.
He walks in with the hitch in his hip that he refuses to address because Walt Greer was born before admitting pain was invented.
"Coffee," he says.
"Kitchen."
"Had some. Came to see you."