Chapter 18
ALEX
Ididn't sleep. I spent most of the night on the other side of the wall from a woman deciding whether to walk out my door.
I sat in my father's office chair with the door cracked open, my boots flat on the floor, listening to her take me apart talking to my sister over the satellite phone.
The chair is the same one my father used. Every word carried through the opening.
'Hearing isn't changing.'
I only caught Kendall's side. I know what ‘hearing isn't changing’ means, and I know who she was talking about.
'I could leave tonight.'
The fire burned down to ash while I sat with that. The lodge went cold around us, and I let it.
I push back from the desk when the gray light shifts across the office windows. The room is cold enough that my breath ghosts in front of me. I pull the door open the rest of the way and step into the main room.
Kendall is in the leather chair. Curled into the corner, legs tucked beneath her, the flannel she took from my hook pulled to her chin.
The chair smells like both of us—pine soap and her hair worked into leather that's been absorbing Sawyers longer than I've been alive.
The collar hangs wide on her shoulder, and the skin beneath it is pale, smooth where my mouth was yesterday.
Even now, even after the worst night I've had since my mother died, I want to take her upstairs to my bed.
The line of her jaw rests against the armrest. Her hair falls across her face.
The inventory runs whether I want it to or not.
Her breathing. The shape of her knee beneath the flannel. The bare curve of her ankle where the hem catches. I've been running this count since the night she walked through my door, and it doesn't shut off because she told me I'm turning into my father.
She's not upstairs in my bed. She's downstairs, next to the front door, next to the kitchen and the mudroom where her boots are lined up and her coat hangs on the peg, zipped and ready to go.
I cross the kitchen and fill the coffeepot. The machine starts. I move through the doorway without looking at her again. If I look at her, I'm going to cross the room. If I cross the room, I'm going to touch her, and if I touch her I'll do it like I own her. That's the only way my hands know how.
So I don't look. Instead, I make my way outside.
The woodpile is low. Days of cold have burned through the reserve, and the covered stack along the south wall of the porch needs to come forward.
I haul split logs by the armload, stacking the rack bark-side out.
The cold bites into my forearms hard enough to take the edge off.
Every part of me wants to be back inside with Kendall.
The woodpile gives it somewhere else to go.
I'm several loads in when the satellite phone rings inside. It’s far sooner than I expected. I reach for the phone and a notepad and begin taking notes.
Coffee is done. I pour two mugs and set one on her side of the table.
I reach for my belt. The key ring comes off the clip. Master set. Every door in the lodge, the storage shed, the equipment barn. I've carried them since my father died. The absence against my hip registers before the metal hits the table.
I set the keys on the pine between the two mugs and take my hand away.
Bare feet on wood.
I look up.
Kendall is standing in the doorway. Her weight is on her back foot, the shirt hanging to mid-thigh, hair pressed flat on one side from the chair arm, bare feet against the floor. How long she's been standing there, I don't know.
She looks at the keys. The coffee. Me.
"There's intel."
“Tell me.”
"Just so you know,” I say, nodding to the keys, “every lock in this lodge opens with those keys."
Her eyes lock on mine. The rawness is still there, in the bruised look around her eyes and the set of her shoulders, but underneath it the edge is already working. She's reading this the way she reads everything I do. Fast, and missing nothing.
"I spoke with my father’s contact," I say. "This is it—all of it."
I push the notepad across the table.
She crosses the kitchen, pulls out the chair, and sits.
The flannel rides up when she draws her legs beneath her, and the pale inside of her thigh catches the gray light before the fabric settles.
My jaw locks. I shift my weight back against the counter, gripping the edge behind me because I need something solid between my body and the impulse to close the distance between us.
She reads. Her finger tracks my handwriting line by line. At the missing persons report, the muscle along her jaw flexes and holds. Silence.
Her focus goes somewhere behind her eyes. Her hand grips the edge of the notepad until the paper bends.
"I know them." Her voice is flat and professional as she scans the data, but her knuckles are white.
"Gary hired them for a fundraiser at the Dena'ina Center.
I sat next to one of their operations managers for most of the evening while Gary worked the room.
The man talked too much. People do when they think the wife isn't smart enough to pay attention. "
"Good thing they were wrong about the wife."
Her eyes come up. The sharpness cuts through the rawness for half a second, and the look she gives me is the one I've been chasing since the first night she sat at my bar and lied to my face about her name.
Pointed. Alive. Dangerous in a way that has nothing to do with Gary and everything to do with the fact that this woman's mind may be the most lethal thing on the ridge.
"The wife had four years of practice," she says. "Hundreds of dinner parties, years of business calls from the next room, and one very good memory."
She picks up the coffee and drinks. Her eyes stay on mine over the rim, and the tension between us winds tighter until I can feel it at the base of my spine.
The fight didn't kill it. It didn't even dent it.
If anything, watching her dismantle me in this kitchen with the precision of a surgeon made it worse.
"Morrow's number is in the log." I pick up the satellite phone and hold it out. "Whatever you need from him, you can ask directly."
She stands and reaches across the table.
Her fingers close around the handset, brushing mine.
The contact lasts half a second. The heat from it runs straight through my arm and settles low in my gut.
Her breath catches, barely. I wouldn't hear it if I hadn't spent every night since she got here learning what every sound she makes means.
"Ask directly," she repeats. "Not through you."
"Not through me."
"That must have cost you."
I allow a slow grin to lift the corners of my mouth. "You have no idea."
The corner of her mouth twitches. Not a smile. Recognition.
She looks at the phone in her hand, then back at me, and whatever she finds in my face keeps her there a beat longer than she intended. Then she sits, pulls the notepad closer, and begins integrating Morrow's intel into the margins of her own diagrams.
I leave her at the table and make my way to the equipment barn. Bryan is running a chainsaw chain through the sharpener. He kills the motor when I come through the door.
I don't sit. I stay in the doorway because Bryan reads posture better than words, and what I'm about to tell him isn't a request.
"Jack’s contact called back. Kendall has the details. You'll be briefing her directly on patrol status. Morning and afternoon. Anything off, she hears it the same time I do."
Bryan sets the chain down. He doesn't reach for the next one.
"Reporting to her."
"Briefing. Her and me. There's a difference, and you know it."
"Is there?"
"The physical perimeter doesn't hold against law enforcement. Gary can and will send people. Kendall has intelligence on his network Morrow couldn't pull in a day. She's an operational asset, and I've been wasting her. Morning and afternoon, Bryan. Direct to her."
He watches me, weighing whether this is tactical or whether last night broke something that's making calls it shouldn't.
"Tactical," I say. The word carries the same weight I use when I tell a client where to aim. Final.
"Then why do you look like you haven't slept?"
"Because I haven't slept. Do we have a problem?"
He studies me another second. Then one hard nod.
"Morning and afternoon."
The cold hits me when I step out of the barn.
The sky has opened up since dawn, pale blue above the ridge line, and the snow on the south-facing slopes is starting to soften in the light.
On a different morning I'd stand here and read the weather the way my father taught me.
Wind direction from the tree line. Cloud weight from the color of the light on the peaks.
Temperature from how fast the melt is running off the equipment barn roof.
This morning I'm reading the lodge. Kendall is visible through the kitchen window, bent over the table, the satellite phone within reach.
She hasn't picked up the keys. She hasn't left.
The truck is still in the shed and her coat is still on the hook, and the distance between the barn and the kitchen window is close enough to see her but too far to hear whether she's talking to Morrow or talking to herself.
I cross to the kindling block on the back porch. The hatchet is buried in the stump where Dash left it. I pull it free and set the first piece of cedar on the block, line the grain, and swing. The cedar splits, and I stack the halves and set a new piece.
The cold works into my forearms. The rhythm takes over. My father stood at this block. The blade marks in the wood go back further than I do.
The thought about my mother arrives on the fifth swing.
It doesn't matter whether Catherine chose the icy road. The conditions were the answer.
The hatchet comes down. The cedar falls apart. My hands are steady on the handle. They're always steady.