Chapter Three
Wren
The chair Cage sat in was too small for him, and he didn't complain about it once, which Wren found more disarming than she wanted to admit.
She sat cross-legged on the bed with her back against the headboard, the lamp cord still wound loosely around one hand out of some instinct she hadn't quite managed to let go of yet, and watched him fold himself into the motel room's single armchair like a man determined to prove he'd meant what he said about not leaving.
He'd called Elias the second he'd gotten her settled, voice low and clipped, relaying the partial plate number he'd caught before the sedan vanished into the dark.
She'd listened to that conversation with a strange, disconnected calm, the same calm that used to come over her in college exam rooms when the material was hard enough that panic simply wasn't an efficient use of the time available.
It was only now, with the call finished and the room gone quiet except for the tick of a window unit that couldn't decide whether it was heating or cooling, that the calm was starting to crack.
"You're shaking," Cage said. Not a question. He said it the way he seemed to say most things, plain and unhurried, like stating a fact was its own kind of kindness.
"I'm aware."
"You don't have to pretend you're not."
"I'm not pretending." She uncurled her hand from the lamp cord, finally, and set it down on the bedspread, and watched her own fingers tremble with a kind of clinical interest, like they belonged to someone else's case file. "I'm assessing. There's a difference."
Something moved at the corner of his mouth, not quite a smile, too tired and too careful for that, but close. "Your father used to say something almost exactly like that."
"He said a lot of things almost exactly like that.
It's apparently genetic." She pulled the room's one spare blanket around her shoulders, more for something to do with her hands than because the room was cold.
"You said you'd tell me everything. In the office you told me half of it: who talked to who, who felt guilty about what.
That's not everything. That's the emotional weather report. "
Cage was quiet for a moment, studying her in the low lamp light with an attention that made her skin feel oddly warm despite the blanket, despite the adrenaline still working its slow way out of her blood. "What do you want to know?"
"Who else knew what my father found. Before he died. Not guesses. Names."
"As far as I know: Elias. Me. Your father, obviously.
That's it, on our side." He rubbed a hand over his jaw, the same weary gesture she'd already started, in the space of one evening, to recognize as his tell for a subject he didn't want to talk about but was going to anyway.
"On the company side, I don't know for certain.
Bitterroot Timbers had the same ownership structure for thirty years on paper: a man named Harlan Voss has run the county liaison office that handles their permits and audits that whole time, and he's been suspiciously helpful every time the club's ever needed anything from the county, which in my experience means a man who's either genuinely decent or covering for something so thoroughly that decency is the easiest disguise available. "
"Harlan Voss." She turned the name over, testing it against eight-year-old memory, and found nothing, no recognition, no snag. "Elias's family?"
"No relation, best anyone's ever been able to tell.
Coincidence of surname is apparently one of Cedar Bend's few genuine mysteries.
" Something almost like humor in his voice, brief and rusty from disuse.
"I don't have proof it's him. I want to be clear about that.
I have eight years of a bad feeling and a man who's been a little too helpful a little too consistently, and neither of those things is evidence, and your father taught me that the hard way, so I'm not going to hand you a name and call it a solved case. "
"That's the most reassuring thing you've said all night."
"I'd rather be careful and slow than fast and wrong about who killed him."
The word landed between them heavier than either of them had used it yet: killed, not an accident, not a tragedy, but a thing done to a man by another man's choice, and Wren felt something in her chest crack open the way it hadn't quite let itself do since she'd read Cage's letter standing at her own kitchen counter two states away.
She had spent eight years being careful not to say the word out loud, even to herself, because saying it made it real in a way that grief alone never quite managed.
"Say it again," she said, before she'd fully decided to ask.
Cage looked at her, and understood, she thought, exactly what she was asking for.
"Somebody killed your father," he said, steady, unflinching, no hedge in it at all.
"It wasn't an accident. It wasn't bad luck on a road he'd driven ten thousand times.
Somebody made a choice, and I am going to spend whatever it costs me finding out who, and I am not going to let it happen to you. "
She hadn't expected to cry. She'd spent eight years constructing a version of herself specifically built not to, a woman who reconciled her grief the way she reconciled a ledger, quietly, privately, with no messy remainder left over at the end of the process.
But something about hearing the plain shape of the truth out loud, after eight years of official reports that used words like undetermined and consistent with wildlife-related incidents, broke something loose in her chest that she hadn't fully known was still load-bearing.
Cage was out of the chair before she'd finished registering that she was crying, close enough that she could have reached for him and far enough that he clearly wasn't going to make that decision for her.
He crouched by the edge of the bed instead, close to her level, closer than strictly comfortable, and didn't touch her, just stayed there, steady, a wall she could lean on if she chose to.
"I'm not going to apologize for saying it," he said quietly. "You've earned the truth eight years late. I'm not going to make you wait on it a second longer than I have to."
"I don't want you to apologize." Her voice came out rougher than she meant it to. "I want to know why it took eight years for anyone to say it to me plainly."
"Because I was a coward about it," Cage said, without flinching, without softening it. "I told myself I was protecting you. Really I was protecting myself from watching you look at me the way you're looking at me right now, like I'm one of the men who let it happen."
"I don't think that." She was surprised to hear how certain it came out, even through the tears, even through eight years of careful distance suddenly gone thin as paper.
"I think you're a man who's spent eight years punishing himself for somebody else's crime.
That's not the same thing as guilt. That's just grief wearing guilt's clothes because grief didn't have anywhere else to go. "
Something moved across Cage's face then, raw and unguarded in a way she suspected he rarely let anyone see, and for a long moment neither of them said anything at all, the window unit ticking, the neon sign outside flickering its half-dead rhythm against the curtains.
"Get some sleep," he said finally, voice rough. "I'll be in the chair. Nobody gets through that door without going through me first."
"You don't have to..."
"I know I don't have to." He stood, putting careful distance back between them, though something in his eyes suggested the distance cost him more now than it had an hour ago. "I want to. There's a difference, and I think you, of all people, understand exactly what it is."
? ? ?
She didn't expect to sleep. She did, eventually, somewhere past four in the morning, worn down by adrenaline and grief in equal measure, and when she woke to gray early light coming through a gap in the curtains, Cage was still in the chair, awake, watching the door with the patient, unhurried focus of a man who'd meant every word he'd said the night before.
"You didn't sleep," she said, voice thick.
"I slept some." A lie, probably, but a kind one.
"Elias called an hour ago. Found the car: belongs to a rental agency out of Missoula, paid for in cash by somebody using a name that doesn't check out to any real address.
Whoever it was, they're not local, or they're local and smart enough not to look it. "
"So we don't know anything more than we did last night."
"We know somebody was scared enough by what you found in four minutes with those ledgers to send a man to your door inside of six hours.
That's not nothing, Wren. That's confirmation you're already close to something worth being afraid of.
" He stood, stretching out a night spent folded into a chair too small for him, and something in the plain, unglamorous exhaustion of the gesture made her chest go tight in a way she didn't have a tidy column to file it under.
"I want you at the clubhouse. Not the motel.
We've got rooms, we've got Jonah and half a dozen men who'd take a bullet before they let anything else happen on our watch, and I'd rather have you somewhere I know is secure than somewhere a stranger can walk up and work a lock at two in the morning. "
She should have argued. Some old, careful part of her (the part that had built a whole life in Denver specifically so she'd never again have to depend on people who could be taken from her) wanted to argue, wanted to insist on a locksmith and a deadbolt and her own capable hands.
Instead she found herself nodding, and understood, with the same clear-eyed honesty she brought to every ledger she'd ever reconciled, that some part of her had already decided, somewhere in the dark hours of the night before, that she was done being alone with this.