Chapter 15
KENDALL
The office door swings closed but doesn't latch. Alex leaves doors cracked the way other men leave lights on, an old habit worn into instinct. I've learned this about him in the space of days, and I don't want to think about what that says about me.
His blanket still holds his warmth. I pull it tighter around my shoulders and stare at the embers in the hearth.
The fire has burned low. Nobody has fed it since before the brothers arrived, before the kitchen table became a tactical briefing where I pulled up a chair nobody offered and gave four men everything I knew about the man who broke my ribs.
From the office, I hear metal on metal, muffled by the wall. I catch the click of a mechanism, then something heavy swinging open. Whatever he's doing in there, he didn't want an audience for it.
I sit up. The blanket slips to my waist and the cold air raises goosebumps across my bare skin.
My clothes are scattered between the leather chair and the hearth, a trail that starts with a flannel and ends with denim kicked toward the fire.
I get dressed in the low light, pulling on clothes in the order I find them.
The kitchen is dark. The light from the main room reaches the edge of the counter but not the table.
My notepad is where I left it, the pen clipped to the spine. I flip to the second page, the one I filled during the meeting while I briefed the brothers on Gary's patterns, his resources, the way he operates.
I pour coffee. It's been sitting since before the meeting, bitter and cold, but my hands need something to hold.
The office door opens. His footsteps come down the hallway, heavy and deliberate.
Alex appears in the kitchen doorway wearing jeans and nothing else.
He flips the light on. When he turns to reach for a mug, I already know what's on his back.
The marks are mine, and the possessive satisfaction of knowing they're on his skin runs hotter than it should.
"You could put a shirt on," I say.
"Could." He doesn't.
He pours coffee without speaking. His hands were on me less than an hour ago. Now we're standing in his kitchen, and neither of us has decided what to say about it.
"The call," I say. "The one you needed to make."
"Made it."
"Who?"
He drinks the coffee before he answers.
"Amberly. She's staying in town. If the men come back to the clinic, she'll call me."
"That's not what kept you in there."
His jaw shifts. I've been reading jaws since early in my marriage, and this one says I've hit on something he isn't ready to discuss.
"What's in the office, Alex?"
"Equipment."
"What kind?"
"The kind that keeps people alive."
"That's not an answer."
"It's the only answer you're getting tonight."
Gary used to talk like that, the same tone and the same finality.
"The deadline on 'For now' is getting shorter."
"I'm aware."
"Then don't make me circle. Are you managing me?"
"Yes."
He gives me just the word, flat and certain, delivered with steady eye contact.
"I'm managing the tactical situation," he says. "You're inside it. The two aren't separable right now."
"They are from where I'm standing."
"I know."
Through the kitchen window, the ridge is a dark shape against a sky full of stars, and the road below it is invisible in the blackness.
A sound cuts through the quiet, low and distant, carried on the wind. It's an engine. We both hear it at the same time. Alex's head turns toward the window. I go still.
The engine noise is wrong for Cameron's truck. I've been listening to Cameron's truck pass the lodge for days, the diesel rattle and the grind of his transmission as he shifts on the grade. This engine is smoother, quieter, the kind of hum that says rental, not local.
Alex is already moving. He crosses to the window and stands to the side, not in front of it, trained positioning rather than instinct.
"Kill the light," he says.
I reach for the switch above the counter. The kitchen goes dark. The main room is lit only by the dying fire in the hearth.
Outside the glass, headlights appear at the bottom of the access road, two pale points moving through the trees. They disappear behind the tree line on the first switchback, then reappear higher on the grade, taking the turns at a crawl. The driver knows where he's going.
"That's not Cameron." My grip tightens on the mug.
"No."
Alex disappears down the hallway. I hear the office door open. When he comes back, he's carrying a rifle in one hand and the satellite phone in the other. He handles the rifle with casual competence, balanced in his grip like an extension of his arm.
He's shirtless and barefoot, armed before he bothered to dress. My pulse kicks hard enough that I feel it in my throat.
The headlights climb the grade, deliberate and patient. The pace reminds me of Gary. He never rushed when he was closing in. He let the approach do the work, let the target's imagination fill in the details he hadn't supplied yet.
"Cameron should have called in," Alex says. He checks the phone. There is no signal from Cameron and no missed calls.
"If Cameron hasn't called, he was at a different section of the road when they passed." My voice is level. The cold starts in my fingers, a tingle that works its way up my forearms and into my shoulders. Years with Gary taught me to metabolize fear into data. "Check Dash."
Alex dials. The phone rings twice. Dash picks up.
"Vehicle on the access road," Alex says. "Not Cameron. East side clear?"
Dash's voice comes through compressed and tinny. "Clear. Nothing on the logging road."
"Cameron's not checking in. Hold position, but keep your eyes open." Alex hangs up and dials again. It's Bryan this time. The answer is faster.
"I see them," Bryan says. "Single vehicle, SUV, dark colored. Moving slow on the switchbacks. About a mile out."
"Plate numbers?"
"Too far. Give me a few minutes."
"Cameron's not answering. When the vehicle clears, I need you on the road to find him."
"Copy."
Alex sets the phone down and looks at me across the dark kitchen. The version of him who was drinking coffee and deciding how much to tell me is gone. What's left is the operator who built a perimeter around this property and put his brothers on it.
"You need to go upstairs," he says.
"No."
"Kendall."
"I said no." I pick up my notepad from the table. "I know how Gary's people work, what they'll say and how they'll say it. I'm more useful down here than hiding in a bedroom."
"This isn't about useful."
"It is about useful. If those men come to this door, they're going to be polite.
They'll say they're looking for a friend or a family member in danger.
They'll have a cover story good enough to fool anyone who hasn't heard it before.
" I don't let my voice waver. "I've heard it before. I've watched Gary rehearse it."
He's weighing it. I can hear the conflict in his breathing, the pause before he decides.
"If they have a photo of you," Alex says, "what am I looking at?"
"A gala. My hair was past my shoulders and styled. I was wearing makeup and a dress that cost more than my truck. I don't look like that anymore."
Alex is quiet for a long moment. The vehicle is still climbing. Bryan estimated a mile, and on that grade, at that pace, it will take a few minutes.
"You stay in the kitchen," Alex says. "Out of the main room. If they come to the door, I open it. You don't speak, you don't show yourself, you don't exist unless I bring you in."
"Agreed."
"If it goes wrong, you go out through the mudroom. Your truck is in the shed. Keys are in the ignition. You drive south until you hit the highway."
"It won't go wrong."
"If it does."
I face him in the darkness. He's giving me an exit instead of locking me in a room. Gary never gave me an exit.
"I hear you," I say. He catches the difference between hearing and agreeing, and lets it stand.
The beams reach the top of the grade and level out as the road straightens for the last stretch to the lodge. Through the window, I can see the outline of the vehicle now. It's a dark SUV, just like Bryan said.
My hands aren't shaking. I stood in Gary's living room for years while his associates discussed things I wasn't supposed to hear. I memorized voices, phone numbers, the exact cadence of a conversation about locating someone who had run. That training is the only thing keeping my hands steady now.
The SUV slows. Headlights wash over the front of the lodge, illuminating the porch, the parked trucks, the sign that reads SAWYER'S LODGE in carved letters older than I am.
For a long second, the vehicle just sits there with the engine running and the lights on.
Whoever is inside is doing what I would do.
They're reading the building and counting vehicles, deciding whether to approach.
Alex stands beside the front window with the rifle held low against his thigh, barrel pointed at the floor, patient and still.
The SUV's engine cuts. The headlights die.
In the sudden darkness, the lodge feels smaller.
The embers in the hearth throw shadows across the walls, slow and alive.
I press my back against the wall beside the doorway, close enough to hear everything at the front door but out of sight from the porch.
My breathing is shallow and controlled, the way I learned to breathe in Gary's house when the wrong sound at the wrong moment could change the temperature of an entire room.
I flatten my palms against the wall behind me.
The wood is cold and rough under my fingers, and I let the texture anchor me to something solid while the rest of my body prepares to run.
Two doors open. Two doors close. I hear footsteps on the frozen ground, the crunch of boots on packed snow, then the wooden steps of the porch, one set heavier than the other. I count the steps. Two men. The heavier one leads.
Then someone knocks.