Chapter 29
SASHA
Clint went out the front, running, his boots gone across the porch and down the steps and away toward the corral.
And then it was just me, standing on the worn floor of a stranger's kitchen a thousand miles from anything that had ever been mine, in a silence so total I could hear the windmill turning somewhere outside and my own blood going in my ears.
Three days, I thought.
That was the thing that kept coming back.
Three days ago, I had stood behind a marble counter in a pressed pink blouse and watched a man with a canvas bag come through my doors, and now, I was here.
In West Texas. In his mother's kitchen. Left behind on purpose as a stranger's insurance while the man I loved ran down a trail on a half-wild horse to save the only mother he had left.
I should have been afraid. Some cold, working part of me noted that I was not afraid, not the way a person ought to be. I moved on—because there was no room for the fear. The fear would have taken up space I needed for other things.
I looked around the room instead.
I couldn't help it. It's what I do. I read a room the way other people breathe, and this room had a woman all through it, a woman I would now, in all likelihood, never meet.
Her kitchen. Her counter, chipped along the front edge where years of hips had leaned against it.
Her mugs in the cabinet Craine had known how to find.
A calendar on the wall three years out of date, left hanging because somebody couldn't bear to take it down.
A child's height marks pencilled up the doorframe, seven separate ladders of them, names gone faint beside the lines.
I found the one that said Clint without meaning to. My throat closed.
She'd marked her boys against a doorframe. She'd fed seven of them at this counter. And I would have liked to know her.
Maybe you still will, I told myself. Maybe he gets to her in time and this all comes out the other side and there's a table someday and you're at it.
I didn't believe it. The feeling didn't believe it either. But I let myself want it, standing in her kitchen, because wanting it was a way of promising her something. I had nothing else to give her yet.
Then I stopped, because there was something I could give.
The phone.
It was on the wall by the pantry door—an old one, cream-colored plastic gone yellow with age, a curl of cord hanging down from it.
The kind of phone my mother had, the kind that's bolted to a wall and doesn't go anywhere and doesn't need charging and doesn't care whether the towers are up.
A landline. In a house this old, this far out, of course, there was a landline.
It had probably hung on that wall since before Clint could reach it.
And I had a number.
Cash had made me learn it. Back at Dominion Hall, in the rush of it, he'd taken me aside for ten seconds and said it once, low, watching my face—if it all goes sideways and you can get to a phone, any phone, you call this—and made me say it back to him twice.
I'd thought at the time it was a courtesy, the kind of thing you do to make a frightened woman feel like she has a job.
I understood now it was not a courtesy. Cash didn't do courtesies.
He'd looked at me and seen the one person in the operation who'd be left standing somewhere with her hands empty, and he'd given her the number because he'd already war-gamed this exact moment.
I crossed the kitchen fast and took the phone off the wall and put it to my ear.
A dial tone. Steady and dumb and beautiful. My hand was shaking. I made it stop, the way I make my hands stop at the desk when everything's on fire. I dialed the number I'd said back to Cash, and it rang.
Once. Twice.
"Go." A man's voice. Not one I knew. Hard, and low, and completely calm.
"My name is Sasha Benning." I kept my own voice level, the built one, the one with no seam in it, because it was the only gift I had left and I was going to use it.
"I'm Izzy's friend. I'm at the ranch in Valentine.
Clint's mother's ranch. Craine sent Clint down a trail on a horse to save his mother and I need to talk to someone. Right now."
A half-second of silence. Then the voice changed—not softer, but sharper, focused, a blade turning to the light.
"Hold."
The line clicked. Not dead—held, the live hiss of an open connection. I stood in that kitchen with the cord stretched across the room and counted my own breaths. I didn’t let go of the phone.
"This is Ryker."
I knew that voice. I'd heard it across my own marble more than once, low and unbothered, a man used to the world arranging itself around him. It was not unbothered now. It was strung tight as a wire and moving fast.
"Ryker. It's Sasha. Sasha Benning, from the hotel, Izzy's—"
"I know who you are." Not unkind. Just fast. "Talk to me. Where's Clint?”
I told him.
I told it the way I tell things, clean and in order, no wasted word—the phone call on the plane, my name in Craine's mouth, the drive, the man at the fence with the rifle, the eyes on the rise, the kitchen.
I told him what Craine had said, all of it, as near to word for word as I could give it, because I'd stood there and listened and I have a memory built for exactly this.
The files. The assets. The allies at every altitude.
Friends want you to be good, allies want you to win.
The bluff that wasn't a bluff, or that Craine swore wasn't. The ten minutes.
The horse. The trail. Elaine cuffed to a gift at the end of it.
Ryker didn’t interrupt. I could hear him breathing, and I could hear, under his breath, other things—movement, low voices, a chair going back hard, a machine coming up to speed. The whole of Dominion Hall listening through one man's ear.
"He said it's already done," I finished.
"He said your family's been helping him this whole time.
He said you have friends in Washington and he has allies, and that the difference is going to cost you everything.
He was—Ryker, he wasn't bluffing about being calm.
Whatever else is a bluff, that part wasn't. He is not a man who thinks he's losing. "
"Okay." Ryker's voice was flat and total. "Okay. Sasha. You did exactly right. You hear me? Exactly right. Now, listen to me very carefully—"
And that was when I heard it.
Far off, out past the back door, out over all that gold, a sound came in under the windmill's turning. Low at first, and I thought it was the blood in my ears again. Then, it climbed and thickened and became a thing I knew: the deep, chopping beat of rotors.
"Ryker," I said. "There's a helicopter."
"Where?” Instant. "Sasha, where? How far."
I moved to the window with the phone cord stretched to its limit, up on my toes.
I looked out over the yard and the fence and the low gold rise, and I found it—a dark shape settling down out of that enormous sky maybe half a mile out, past the equipment shed, kicking up a pale storm of caliche dust that hung in the dead air and glowed.
"Half a mile. Out past the buildings. It's landing—it's down, it's on the ground."
Craine came into the frame from the left, unhurried even now, even running—except he wasn't running, that was the thing, that was the thing that put ice all the way through me.
He was strolling. A man in a good suit walking across his own back forty toward his own helicopter with all the time in the world, one hand raised to keep the dust off his face, his jacket flat and clean in all that wind.
He climbed up into the dark shape of it the way you climb into a car you've parked a hundred times.
"He's getting on," I said. My voice had gone somewhere far away. "Ryker. He's getting on it. There's nothing—I can't—"
"I know. I know you can't. Don't you move. Do not go out there."
The rotors climbed to a scream. The dust storm bloomed and flattened.
And the dark shape came up off the ground, nose down, sliding sideways and then forward, rising, tilting away over the gold country toward the rim of the world, getting smaller, its beat softening from a pounding to a thudding to a pulse to a whisper.
And then it was a speck. And then it was nothing. And then there was only the windmill, turning, and the dust settling slow out of the air where he'd been, and the enormous silence coming back down over everything.
He was gone.
He'd walked into that house and washed the mug of a woman he'd stolen out of her own bed and told us of the war and set a clock running on a man he'd sent down a trail on a wild horse.
Then, he had strolled out the back and gotten in a helicopter and flown away, and there was not one single thing anybody could do about it.
He'd known that when he did it. He'd known it the whole time.
He was never in that kitchen because he had to be.
He was in that kitchen because he wanted to be, because he'd wanted to stand at that woman's counter—at the counter where she'd fed her seven boys—and let a Dane watch him be unhurried, and then leave clean.
"Sasha." Ryker's voice, in my ear, steady, pulling me back. "Are you still with me? Talk to me."
"I'm here." I was still up on my toes at the window, looking at the empty sky. "He's gone. The helicopter's gone. I can't see it anymore."
"All right. That's all right. We'll find where he went, that's not your job, that's ours." A breath. "Where's Clint? Can you see Clint, or his mother, anything, the trail—"
I turned from the window and looked out the front, through the wavy old glass, toward the corral and the country past it where Clint had gone. Dust hung out there, too, a thinner plume, moving—something moving, fast, a long way off, too far to make out.
And that was when I heard the other thing.
Not the helicopter. The helicopter was gone. This was closer. This was in the yard.
Footsteps on the porch.
Slow. Deliberate. Boots on old boards, coming toward the front door I'd watched Clint run out of, and I stood frozen in the middle of that kitchen with the phone cord stretched across the room and that missing woman's calendar on the wall, and I understood in one cold rush that Craine leaving did not mean Craine had left me alone.
He'd had men at the fence. He'd had eyes on the rise.
And a man who thinks of everything, a man who wanted a little insurance in the room, does not fly off and leave his insurance standing unwatched in a kitchen.
"Ryker," I whispered. "Someone's coming."
"Sasha—"
The doorknob turned.
I did the only thing there was to do. I set the phone down on the counter, gently, without hanging it up, the line still open, still live, Ryker's voice going small and urgent out of the receiver—Sasha, Sasha, talk to me—and I turned to face the door with my chin up.
The door opened.