15. Ember
EMBER
Rhys finds me on the back porch after dark, which is fair, because I've been waiting for him to.
I knew it would be him. Knox opened the gun cabinet and the house turned into a place that cleans rifles and counts rounds and marks sightlines, and in all of that Rhys went quiet in the particular way of a man carrying something he's decided it's finally time to set down.
He's been carrying it since the ravine. I've known there was a weight on him since the first night, since Malek, said through the floor like a name he'd held in his own mouth before.
So I wait, and he comes, and he stands at the rail a careful arm's length off, the same distance Knox kept, like they all know exactly how much room a cornered thing needs.
"You wanted to know how a pack in the middle of nowhere knows your father's first name," he says. No preamble. "I told you I'd crossed paths with Marlowe interests. Different life. I let you think that was the whole of it."
"It wasn't."
"No."
The pine and gunsmoke of him drifts over on the cold air, and even now, even braced for whatever this is, some part of me leans toward it. I lock that part down and wait.
"I was a tracker for hire," he says. "Best on the coast, for a while, and I wasn't particular about who paid.
Missing persons, mostly. Some of them wanted found.
Some of them didn't." He looks out at the black treeline instead of at me.
"Six years ago a man named Sutter came to me with a contract.
His employer's daughter had run off the night before her packmating.
Eighteen years old. Vanished clean. They wanted her located. Quietly. Returned."
The cold that goes through me has nothing to do with the weather.
"Say his name," I tell him. "The employer. Say it."
"Malek Marlowe." He says it steady, like a man taking a blade out where it can be seen. "Your father hired me to find you, Ember. Six years ago. I took the job. I took his money."
There it is. The thing I've been circling since the first night, since the word through the floor, the thing my body knew before my brain would let me name it.
The man who carried me out of that ravine, who held my face in his hands while I tried to open his throat, is the same man my father sent to drag me home.
I should reach for the knife. Six years of instinct says reach for the knife. I don't, and I don't fully know why, except that he's telling me this with the gun cabinet standing open in the house behind us, when he could have let it stay buried forever and I'd never have known.
"How close did you get," I say.
"Close." His jaw works. "I'm good, Ember.
I tracked you to Portland. Then to a beta pharmacist there who didn't ask questions.
Then north. I lost you in the Olympics the first winter, picked you up again in the spring, lost you for good the second year.
" He finally looks at me. "You were better than the job.
You built a life out of pure refusal to be found and it beat the best tracker your father's money could buy.
So after two years I did the thing I'd never done on a contract. "
"What."
"I went back to Sutter, and I told him you were dead.
" The words come quiet and even and absolute.
"Told him you'd gone into the Olympics in October with no supplies and the math said exposure inside a month, and I'd found enough sign to call it.
I took my final payment for confirming a death that never happened, and I closed the file, and I made sure your father stopped looking.
He thinks you've been bones on a mountain for four years. Because I told him so."
The porch is very quiet.
He didn't find me and turn me in. He found me, decided I'd earned the running, and buried me on paper so the man who made me would stop hunting.
Four years of my father not looking. All this time I thought I'd won by being good, and some of it, maybe most of it, was a stranger who'd already let me go.
"Why," I manage.
"Because I'd been tracking you for two years and I'd seen what you did to survive, and I decided your father had no right to the thing he'd find at the end of my work.
" Simple. Flat. True. "And because somewhere in those two years it stopped being a job and started being the one piece of work I was proud of. Losing you on purpose."
I open my mouth. I don't know what's going to come out of it.
And that's when the phone rings.
Not rings. Buzzes. A hard mechanical rattle against wood, from inside the house, from the kitchen table where Cass set the dead man's phone next to his wallet hours ago and none of us touched it again.
We both go still. Through the window I can see it lit up, face glowing in the dark kitchen, juddering across the table.
Rhys is inside before I've turned, and I'm after him, the bad leg be damned, and we crowd over the table and look at the screen without touching it.
A text. From a number with no name.
Check in. Boss is asking. You good?
Underneath it, the contact the phone has saved for the number it came from. One word.
Sutter.
The same name Rhys set down on this porch ninety seconds back.
My father's right hand, texting a dead man, waiting on an answer that's never coming, and the not-coming is its own answer.
A man went silent in Forks today. Sutter's already noticed.
And when a Marlowe enforcer stops checking in, the next thing that happens is more of them.
"How long," I say. "Before silence on this means they send someone."
"Day." Rhys is staring at the screen, the tracker in him already running it. "Two if we're lucky. Sutter's careful. He'll want confirmation before he moves, and confirmation means a man, and a man means a clock just started."
Rhys picks the phone up, pries the back plate off with his thumbnail, and pulls the battery, and the screen dies for good. The tracker, closing a door we should have closed in town.
And I turn and look at Rhys in the dark kitchen, at the man who lost me on purpose to a father who'd have caged me, who carried me up a mountain and let me bite him and said not from me with his hand in my hair, and the wanting and the gratitude and the awful narrowing of the clock all braid into one thing I no longer have any interest in fighting.
I close the distance.
Pine and gunsmoke, all of it, up close where it's been pulling at me since the ravine.
I kiss him.
And behind us, on the table, the dead man's phone sits dark and gutted, and somewhere out in the dark Sutter waits for a check-in that will never come, and I kiss Rhys harder for the clock running under us both.