23. Nora
Nora
I sit across from Levon, fingers pressed flat against the leather arms of the chair instead of digging in, because digging in would show him exactly how close to the edge I'm standing, and showing him that is the one thing I can't afford right now.
My heart's hammering hard enough that I'm half sure he can hear it across that ridiculous desk, but I keep my spine straight and my eyes on his.
Fear's a live wire under my skin. I'm not going to let it win.
Not when Colt's out there somewhere setting every trap he owns to bring me home, and not when I've got maybe one real shot at making this room work in my favor instead of his.
Levon watches me the way a cat watches something that hasn't noticed the cage door's already shut.
Everything about him is sharp edges and quiet threat, patient in a way that scares me more than shouting would.
I swallow past the dryness in my throat and remind myself I survived a car crash in a blizzard.
I survived three days learning to read a mountain and a man who doesn't waste words.
I can survive one conversation with a man who thinks a nice suit makes him less of a monster.
“Levon.” My voice only shakes a little, and I hate that it shakes at all.
“We both know why I'm here. I saw what happened to Richard.
But we don't have to let it ruin both our lives.
I can fix this for both of us, actually, if you're willing to listen instead of just deciding I'm a problem to solve.”
He leans back, fingers steepled, the picture of a man with all the time in the world.
“You're the witness the marshals want, Nora Caldwell.
My men tell me you've been with one of them. The trapper. Rivers.” He says Colt's name like it's something distasteful.
“You've seen too much. I need reassurances I won't go down for this.”
I take a slow breath and let my brain do what it's actually good at, working the angle the way I'd work a panel that isn't landing yet, looking for the one detail that fixes the whole composition.
“I can give you those reassurances. I'll tell the marshals it was somebody else.
One of your rivals. I saw the whole thing happen, which means I get to decide what I say I saw, and right now nobody else has a competing account to check mine against. I can describe the scene so it points away from you completely.
Richard was arguing with them, not with you.
I'll even give it details only a real witness would know, so it holds up. You walk. No one comes after you.”
Levon's quiet a long moment, studying me like he's deciding whether I'm worth the trouble or whether a bullet would simply be tidier.
My stomach twists, but I don't look away, and I don't fill the silence either.
Let him do the work of deciding. I've said my piece.
Filling dead air just tells him I'm nervous, and he already knows that. No sense confirming it twice.
“And what do you want,” he says finally, “in return for this story you'll tell?”
Here it is. The offer I've been building since the guards dragged me into that van, turning it over the same way I'd storyboard an ending, working backward from what I actually need to happen.
I keep my voice even despite every nerve in my body screaming.
“I want to be left alone. I want a long, boring, unremarkable life with the man I love, up in those mountains where nobody from your world has any reason to look twice.
You let us disappear. No more men following me.
No more threats. That's the whole deal. You get to keep your business running exactly the way it was before Richard Rogers became a problem.
I get my life back. Everybody wins except the people you're about to let take the blame instead of you.”
A cold smile touches his mouth. It doesn't reach his eyes. “What's keeping me from killing you right now, little witness? One word to my men and the problem simply vanishes. No testimony. No loose ends to manage.”
The fear spikes sharp enough that I taste metal, palms damp against the leather, but I don't flinch and I don't beg.
I think about the woman who stood in a blizzard and told a six foot four mountain man she wasn't afraid of him, mostly because she genuinely couldn't afford to be.
I channel her instead of the part of me that wants to fold up small and cry.
I'm afraid, God, I'm afraid, but I'm also furious, and done letting other people write the ending to my own story without my input.
“You need me,” I say, and it comes out stronger than I actually feel, which might be the whole trick to bravery in the first place.
“I'm the only witness who can change how this case goes.
Without me, the marshals keep digging on their own, and Colt Rivers is not a man who stops looking once he's decided something's his to find.
He'll tear these mountains apart. But if I tell them I saw your rivals do this, and I make it detailed enough to survive questioning, the whole case points somewhere else entirely.
You walk. I walk. Everyone wins except the people you'd rather see take the fall anyway.
Kill me and you lose the only person who can actually sell that story convincingly.
I'm worth more to you alive and cooperative than I'd be as one more body nobody can explain.”
Levon rises slowly, the way a man moves when he's never once had to hurry for anybody.
He comes around the desk and stops close enough that I have to tilt my chin up to hold his gaze, but I stay seated.
I'm not giving him the satisfaction of making me stand like I'm asking permission for something.
My heart's trying to claw its way out of my chest, but my chin stays level and my shoulders stay square.
Badass mode. Terrified and still swinging, which, if I'm being honest with myself, might be the only kind of badass that's ever actually real.
“You've got more spine than most people I deal with,” he says quietly, something almost like respect underneath it, which frightens me worse than open anger would have. “Most people in your position cry. Beg. Promise anything at all. You offer me a clean story and a clean break instead.”
“I've got something worth bargaining with,” I answer, voice softer now but not shaking.
“A man who won't stop looking for me, a story that protects your operation better than silence ever could, and absolutely nothing to gain from lying to you about any of it.
Killing me solves one small problem today and creates a much bigger one the second Colt Rivers works out who's responsible.
I don't think that's the trade you actually want to make.”
Levon's silent again, and I use the quiet to do something more useful than sitting there being afraid.
I let my eyes move, careful, unhurried, cataloguing the room the way I'd catalogue a reference photo I only get to study once.
Two guards by the door, not one, both armed, one clearly more relaxed than the other, which tells me something about rank or fatigue or both.
A second door behind the bookshelves that doesn't match the room's symmetry, probably a servants' passage.
A window behind Levon's desk that faces what looks like a motor court, two vehicles parked under a portico, headlights currently dark.
My cartoonist's brain, the same one that's spent years learning to memorize a whole scene in the time it takes to glance at it, files every piece away without needing to look twice at any single detail.
It's the only genuinely useful skill I've got in this room, and I intend to use every bit of it.
“I'll think about it,” Levon says at last, stepping back, gesturing toward the door. “Until I decide, you'll stay in the mansion. It's secure. Comfortable. Food, clothes, whatever you need. Except the freedom to leave.”
He leads me out himself, no guard between us, just his tall frame ahead of me and the certainty that armed men are never far in a house like this.
I keep pace, and I keep watching, counting doors, noting which hallways have windows and which don't, which direction the kitchen smells are coming from, how far it is from this wing to whatever door they originally brought me through.
Every hallway is a panel. Every panel gets filed for later, in case later ever comes.
We stop at a door near the end of the corridor.
Levon opens it and steps aside. The room beyond is large and stupidly luxurious, a king sized bed with silk sheets the color of storm clouds, a fireplace already crackling with real wood, heavy curtains, a bathroom visible through an open archway that's bigger than my old apartment.
It's built to make a prisoner forget she's a prisoner.
I notice the lock on the outside of the door.
I notice there's no phone. I notice the windows are high and the glass looks reinforced, though the latch mechanism itself, when I glance at it without making a show of glancing, looks older than the glass, the kind of hardware a house this size probably hasn't bothered updating since it was installed.
“Rest,” Levon says, almost polite. “Think about the details of your story. Make it good. If I agree to your terms, we do this cleanly. If I decide you're more trouble than you're worth,” he shrugs, small and terrifying, “we find another way.”
I can see the lie sitting behind his eyes.
He has no intention of ever striking a deal with me.
Fine. I didn't come in here actually expecting him to.
I came in here to buy time, and time is exactly what I got, along with a mental map of this place that nobody handed me and nobody can take back out of my head.
I step inside because I've got no choice yet.
The door closes behind me with a soft click that still feels like something heavier.
For a moment I just stand there, letting the fear I've been holding back crash over me all at once, knees wobbling, breath coming too fast. I press a hand to my chest and count slowly, the way Colt taught me one howling night in the cabin when he held me through a panic attack instead of telling me to just calm down.
“He's coming,” I whisper to the empty room, and for once it doesn't feel like a wish. It feels like a fact I'm choosing to operate on.
I cross to the bed and sit on the edge. The mattress is too soft.
The sheets smell like expensive detergent instead of woodsmoke and man.
I kick off my boots because my feet ache, but I keep the socks Colt gave me.
Small rebellions. I'm still wearing the sweater he pulled over my head this morning, and I pull the collar up to my nose and breathe him in.
It helps, a little, and then I make myself stop indulging it, because feeling sorry for myself isn't going to get me out of this room.
Instead I get up and walk the space properly, the way I'd walk a location before sketching it, cataloguing everything useful.
The window latch, up close now, is exactly the kind of old mechanism I've watched Colt work open on the cabin's own stubborn frames using nothing but a flathead and patience.
I don't have a flathead. I do have a hair pin, and twenty minutes of nothing but time on my hands, and absolutely no intention of spending tonight simply waiting to be rescued like I'm a prop in somebody else's story.
I press my forehead to the cold glass and look out at the dark shapes of the mountains beyond the motor court.
They're out there. Colt's out there, somewhere in those trees, looking for me with that quiet, deadly focus I've come to recognize as love wearing its most practical clothes.
“I'm bargaining with the devil for both of us,” I whisper to the glass.
“Don't make me regret it, Colt Rivers. And don't be too surprised if I've already let myself out by the time you get here.”
A soft knock makes me spin around. The door opens a crack and a woman in a simple uniform sets a tray on the small table near the fireplace, soup, bread, a glass of water, not meeting my eyes before the door closes again. I'm alone once more.
I don't touch the food yet. My stomach's too knotted, and I've got better uses for the next few minutes than eating.
I go back to the window, working the old latch slow and careful with the hair pin, testing the give in the mechanism, memorizing exactly how many turns it needs and how much noise it makes doing it.
Not tonight, maybe. Guards are still too close, the motor court too well lit, and I'm not reckless enough to bolt into unfamiliar mountains at night with no plan beyond adrenaline.
But I have options now that I didn't have an hour ago, and options are worth more to me right now than the illusion of safety this room is selling.
I curl up on top of the covers instead, pulling a blanket around me like armor, and go over everything in my head one more time, every guard, every hallway, every exit, filing it all next to what I told Levon so I don't lose a single detail to fear or exhaustion.
I was scared in that study. I still am. But I was also sharp, and I bought myself time, and I'm not spending that time being a woman in a tower waiting for someone else to climb up and get her.
Time for Colt to find me.
Time to make sure that when he does, I've already done half the work myself.
I smile against the pillow, small and fierce.
Fear's still there, sharp and cold. But so is something harder underneath it, something that's been there since I chose to crouch down in the snow instead of running from a murder scene, since I chose a boot print over pretending I hadn't seen it.
Levon can think whatever he wants about how this ends.
I'm already planning my half of the exit.