Chapter Two #2
He thought about it lying awake past midnight, staring at a ceiling that didn't offer any answers.
Thought about the particular steadiness in Wren's voice when she'd said pointing the way isn't the same as driving the truck, like she'd reached across eight years of his own guilt and set it down somewhere he could finally see the shape of it instead of just feeling its weight.
Thought about the version of her he remembered from the funeral, twenty-six and dry-eyed and furious in a way that had scared the adults around her more than crying would have, and the version who'd walked into his office tonight, thirty-four and precise and still, underneath all that careful control, just as furious.
He thought, mostly, about the fact that he wanted to be the kind of man who deserved to stand next to that fury instead of flinching from it, and that wanting it, after eight years of believing he'd forfeited the right to want anything from Frank Sutter's family, felt less like hope and more like a debt coming due.
? ? ?
He called security detail on her motel before he let himself sleep, quiet, unofficial, nothing that would spook her if she noticed: just a prospect named Dale parked where he could watch the lot, told to call if anything moved that shouldn't.
It wasn't enough. Cage knew it wasn't enough, the same instinctive knowledge that had kept him alive and kept his club standing for going on two decades: whoever had buried the truth about Bitterroot Timber eight years ago hadn't survived this long by being careless, and the moment word got out that Frank Sutter's daughter was back in town with a forensic accountant's eye and her father's old instincts, careless was exactly what they'd stop being.
He was right to worry. He just didn't know yet how quickly he'd be proven right.
At 2:14 in the morning, his phone rang, Dale's name on the screen, and Cage was out of bed and reaching for his boots before the second ring finished.
"Somebody's at her door," Dale said, low and fast. "Not knocking. Working the lock."
"I'm four minutes out. Don't let them see you, don't engage, just watch and call it in if they get inside.
" Cage was already moving, keys in hand, adrenaline burning through eight years of careful guilt like it weighed nothing at all.
"And Dale, call Elias. Tell him to call Jonah. Tell them both to move."
He drove the four miles back into town faster than he had any business driving, county road black and empty under a sky gone thick with stars, and the whole way there he thought about a legal pad closed too late and a truck that went off this same stretch of road eight years ago, and promised himself, with a cold, focused clarity he hadn't felt in longer than he wanted to admit, that history was not going to repeat itself on his watch. Not this time. Not with her.
The motel's neon sign flickered against the dark as he came off the highway, half the letters burned out the same way they'd been burned out since he was a teenager sneaking cigarettes in this same parking lot, and for one disorienting second the familiarity of it nearly undid him: how could the world hold both that stupid, unchanged sign and the possibility that Frank Sutter's daughter was about to become the second Sutter this town swallowed.
He killed his headlights half a block out, the way Elias had trained every patched member to do on a run that mattered, and coasted the last stretch in near-silence.
Dale was crouched behind the ice machine at the corner of the building, phone still in his hand, when Cage came around the far side on foot.
He held up two fingers without being asked (two of them, not one) and pointed toward the shadowed side of room fourteen, where Cage could just make out a shape crouched at the door, something metal glinting once in what little light there was before it vanished back into a jacket pocket.
Cage didn't think. He moved.
The man at the door heard him coming across the gravel (there was no way not to, not at that speed, not with that much size bearing down) and bolted before Cage closed half the distance, sprinting for a dark sedan parked nose-out at the edge of the lot with the kind of practiced speed that told Cage this wasn't the first door this man had ever worked in the dark.
Cage got close enough to slap a palm against the trunk as it pulled away, close enough to catch three digits of a plate before the car fishtailed onto the county road and was gone, taillights shrinking fast into the same darkness that had swallowed a truck eight years before.
He stood there a moment, chest heaving, palm stinging, and then he was moving again, around to room fourteen, where the door was already cracking open on the chain, Wren's face pale and sharp-eyed in the gap, a lamp cord wound once around her fist like she'd meant to use it as a weapon if she'd needed to.
"Someone was at your door," Cage said, unnecessary, since she'd clearly already worked that out for herself.
"I heard the lock." Her voice was steadier than he had any right to expect at two in the morning with her heart still visibly hammering under a thin motel bathrobe.
"I called the front desk. Nobody answered.
I was about three seconds from finding out whether a lamp makes a decent weapon when I heard you outside instead. "
"Let me in," Cage said. "Please. I'm not leaving you alone in this room tonight, and I'd rather you let me in than make me sit in the parking lot like the world's least subtle bodyguard."
She looked at him for a long moment, something moving behind her eyes that he couldn't fully read: fear, maybe, or the particular calculation of a woman deciding how much trust to extend to a man she'd spent eight years being furious at without ever quite admitting it to herself. Then she slid the chain free.
"Fine," she said. "But you're sleeping in the chair, and you're telling me everything you didn't tell me tonight in that office. All of it. Starting now."
Cage stepped inside, and understood, with the same cold clarity that had carried him the whole drive over, that whatever careful distance he'd meant to keep between himself and Frank Sutter's daughter had just run out of road.