Chapter 9
NINE
MAREN
I know whose bed I'm in before I open my eyes.
The mountains are holding the early pink light of dawn, the western faces catching it and reflecting it against his curtains. I've never been on Blackwater land before last night, never been inside any of their houses, and the light in this room is proof of both. A different sky. A different west.
I take stock of myself. His t-shirt. My panties. My hair wrecked.
My muscles ache in the most satisfying way I've ever experienced in my life, and I'm in Knox's bed, and those two facts are not unrelated.
I stretch into it, the ache, the warmth, the specific evidence of last night written into every part of my body.
Something low and liquid moves through me just from the memory of his hands. I press my thighs together. I am already wet and he isn't even in the room. I find this simultaneously thrilling and deeply inconvenient.
I had exactly one plan for Knox when this investigation started and it did not involve lying in his sheets thinking about what he sounds like when he loses control.
What he looks like. What he does with his mouth.
I pull his pillow over my face.
I am in so much trouble.
I smell coffee before I hear him.
Knox appears in the doorway with two mugs, a worn t-shirt and black gym shorts, barefoot on the hardwood. He looks at me in his bed the way he looks at most things, like he's confirming something he already knew. He crosses the room and sets one mug on the nightstand beside me.
"Shower's yours," he says. Then, after a beat: "Or it doesn't have to be."
I look at him over the rim of the mug.
"Give me a minute," I say.
The shower in Knox's bathroom is walk-in with slate tile and a rainfall head and water pressure that would make my contractor cry. I turn it hot and step in.
I am three seconds into it when the door opens.
I don't reach for anything. I don't cover anything. I turn and look at him standing in the doorway, pulling the t-shirt over his head, the gym shorts dropping after. He takes me in with a smoldering look of appreciation. My nipples harden. The water runs down my back.
He comes in.
There's no urgency to it. That's what's different about this morning, the absence of urgency.
No investigation pulling us back, no adrenaline driving the pace, no one coming through a door.
Just steam and hot water and Knox standing behind me with his hands in my wet hair, working the knots out with a patience I did not know he had.
I close my eyes, feel the weight of his thumbs at the base of my skull and think about absolutely nothing for the first time in days.
His mouth is at the curve of my neck. Unhurried. Like he has time to be thorough, which apparently he does.
That's when I smell it, cedar and something cleaner underneath. His body wash on both of us now. I hold onto this the way I hold onto everything worth keeping: another thing I know about him that I didn't know a couple days ago. Another thing I'm not sure what to do with.
My back goes against his chest and he lets me put it there. One arm comes around my waist. His hand flat against my stomach, just holding. I can feel every breath he takes.
"Good morning," he says, low against my ear. My body shivers involuntarily and he nips my ear lobe.
"It's getting there."
We stay there longer than is strictly necessary to get clean.
I don't move away from him and he doesn't move away from me.
The water is very hot and the bathroom is full of steam.
At some point I turn my head back and find his mouth.
He kisses me the slow way, the way that has nothing to prove, which I am finding more difficult to defend against than the other kind.
His hand moves, I inhale sharply, and his other arm tightens around me.
"Knox."
"I know, Maren."
He does. He uses that knowledge without mercy. I say his name once more, broken, and the rainfall head keeps running.
Afterward, I stand with my palms flat against the slate and my head dropped forward while he traces one hand up my spine to the back of my neck.
"Breakfast," he says.
"Give me a minute."
“Take your time.”
I hear the smile in it. He gets out.
He's back in the t-shirt and gym shorts when I come out. I’m in the red dress, my damp hair over one shoulder.
His kitchen is the elegance of a man who uses the space: heavy copper-bottomed pans, a knife block with good steel, a cast iron that's been seasoned so long it's nearly black.
He's at the stove with the same economy he brings to everything, no wasted motion, no checking anything twice.
Butter in the pan without measuring. Eggs cracked one-handed.
I sit on a barstool at the island and watch his hands.
That's a mistake, watching his hands. I know what those hands have done in the last twelve hours. I reach for the coffee he's already made, already the right temperature, already the right color. Splash of cream, half a sugar. He didn't ask. He didn't look up. He just knew.
A Sullivan sitting in a Blackwater kitchen drinking coffee made exactly the way she takes it. My father would not find this funny.
"Where did you learn to cook?" I ask.
He flips something in the pan without looking. "Steakhouse in Bozeman. Worked there four years while at MSU." He doesn't elaborate.
I think about Knox at twenty-one in a restaurant kitchen, learning someone else's craft, in a city where nobody knew his last name. Something behind my sternum goes quiet and warm.
"The chef?"
"Recognized that I was going to show up until I got it right." A pause. "Which was apparently all he needed."
"You kept it quiet."
He sets a plate in front of me. Eggs with diced ham and onions, sourdough toast, sliced avocados, tomatoes and fresh basil. He looks at me across the island with those grey eyes and says: "It was mine." Three words. Flat, certain and entirely clear.
I pick up my fork.
"That's the most honest thing you've said to me," I tell him.
He sits across from me with his own plate and his coffee and does not argue with this, which is its own kind of answer. We eat. It's delicious.
He looks up from his plate and catches me watching the yard.
"What?" he asks.
"Nothing." I drink my coffee. "Your ranch is beautiful."
"Sullivan land is prettier," he says, and the corner of his mouth moves. "Don't tell anyone I said that."
The silence that follows is not uncomfortable, which is its own problem.
He asks what I studied. Not about the investigation, not about McKenna, not about last night.
One of those easy morning questions. I answer without thinking and then watch him receive the answer.
Political science, communications. He nods once and doesn't ask why because he already knows.
He's a Blackwater. He understands learning power as a discipline, not an accident.
"You could have gone anywhere," he says. "Done it at scale."
"Scale isn't the point." I set down my mug. "Rimrock is where it matters."
He looks at me for a beat. Like I've confirmed something he'd already calculated. It should bother me, being calculated by this man. It doesn't. That is also a problem.
Before I can decide whether I want to give him more than that, footsteps come from the porch.
Josephine is dressed for the day when she knocks and opens the door: tailored shirt, riding boots, dark hair pinned back. She takes in the kitchen without appearing to take in anything at all. My damp hair. Two plates. Knox's coffee.
"Good morning," she says, to both of us equally, which means to neither of us specifically.
Knox stands. "Coffee?"
"Already had mine." She moves toward the island, sets her hand on the back of the stool beside me. A question that isn't a question. I gesture at it. She sits.
Knox finds somewhere to be at the far end of the kitchen. He is giving us room.
Josephine looks at me the way women who have held power for a long time look at other women. An assessment that is also something warmer, if you know how to read it. I know how to read it. My mother uses the same expression.
"You found McKenna," she says.
"Yes. It took longer than it should have." I hold her gaze. "The records disappear while you're reading them."
She nods. Not surprised.
"Josephine." I keep my voice even. "Your reaction last night when you saw that name. That wasn't the first time you'd seen it."
She is quiet for a moment.
Then she reaches out and touches my wrist. Her hand is warm. Careful. The gesture is so close to maternal that it takes me a half-second to hear the thing underneath it.
"Some questions protect the person who answers them," she says. "Some questions protect the person who asks." A pause. "These protect both. Stop asking."
I go very still.
She holds my gaze and doesn't look away.
I understand her completely, the way you understand someone when they're speaking a language you were raised in.
My mother has delivered this exact warning in this exact register.
The warmth that makes the steel inside it harder to locate until you've already been cut.
These women didn't marry the men they married by accident.
They didn't build what they built by accident.
"All right," I say.
Something moves in her face. Not relief. Recognition.
She stands, smooths her pants, and looks at Knox across the kitchen. Whatever passes between them happens in under a second. Then she looks back at me.
"My mother's people have a saying," she says. "The mountain holds what the valley can't carry." A pause. "I've been thinking about that saying for many years."
She goes. The door closes behind her.
Knox crosses the kitchen and stands beside me at the island.
He doesn't ask what she said. He read enough of it from across the room.
His arm brushes mine and neither of us moves away from it.
I look at the door she just walked through and feel the generations in the room with us, the weight of them, everything they imply about how long this has been coming.
"She sought you out," he says and picks up his coffee. "She doesn't usually do that."
I sit with that for a moment.
"Knox, what did your mother bury?"
He is quiet for a long moment. There is something in his stillness that reminds me he is not only the man who made me coffee and worked the knots from my hair.
He is also the man who knows how to search a house and read a blood pattern on a floor.
Both things are true at the same time. Right now, watching him decide what to tell me, I feel the full shape of it.
His phone rings.
He looks at the screen, picks up, and listens for four seconds.
Something shuts down behind his eyes. Flat and operational, the switch thrown.
"We're on our way," he says, hangs up, and looks at me.
"Vásquez's house," he says. "Someone broke in again." He's already moving. "By the time our guy got there—"
He stops.
"Knox."
"It's on fire, Maren."
I'm off the stool before he finishes the sentence. The question I was about to ask, the mountain and what it holds, all of it burns off in the space of three words, replaced by something sharper and colder.
We had been in that house. We had touched those walls, those maps, that smashed phone. Someone knows we were there, knows what we found, and is busy turning the rest of it to ash before we can get back to it.
I think about the camera light coming on while I worked. The records vanishing under my cursor. The manifest cleaned four days before anyone went looking. Every move we've made, someone has already been standing on the other side of, waiting.
We are not ahead of this.
We have never once been ahead of this.
Knox is already at the door with his keys in his hand. I grab my bag and follow him into the bright Montana morning.
The whole way to the truck I am doing the math on how far behind we are.
I do not like a single number it gives me.