4. Razor
FOUR
RAZOR
The bar was loud on a Friday. Locals, truckers passing through, a group of college kids who'd found Angel's Rest on some road-trip app and were taking up two tables by the window.
Bree was behind the bar in a kind of controlled chaos that meant the register was happy.
It was all normal. The whole room was looking normal.
Except for the two men at the table against the back wall.
I came through the lodge door and saw them immediately.
They looked like half the men in Forsaken.
Jeans, boots, jackets from a farm supply store.
One was mid-forties, stocky, thinning hair.
The other was younger, leaner, forgettable.
They could've been ranch hands or truck drivers or fathers at a Little League game.
Nothing about them would've made a civilian look twice.
But I wasn't a civilian, not in the true sense. My military training had taught me to spot threats. And these two felt like they should be in that category.
They had beers in front of them that had barely been touched.
The foam had settled, the condensation was running down the sides, and it looked like neither of them had picked up the glass in a while.
One was scanning the room, left to right, almost methodical, the way you sweep a space when you're assessing it.
The other was watching the door I'd just come through.
The door to the lodge. The door that led to the back of the compound, and down a hallway, and to a room where a woman was sitting on a bed waiting for me to tell her everything was fine.
Bree caught my eye from behind the bar. The look was enough. These two.
I wanted to walk over there. Every muscle in my body wanted to pull a chair to that table, sit down uninvited, and make it very clear what would happen to any man who came through that door looking for her.
The image was vivid. My forearms on the table, my hands where they could see them, the conversation short and final.
The shape of it was in my jaw, in my fists, and the voltage was running up my spine.
I didn't. Because walking up to them would tell them we knew, and right now them not knowing was the only advantage we had.
I turned to Bree and kept my voice low. "How long?"
"Hour, maybe. Came in, sat down, ordered beers, barely touched them. The older one's been watching the room. The younger one hasn't taken his eyes off that door."
"Get Angel."
I stayed at the bar. And watched them in the mirror behind the top shelf, the angle giving me their table without turning my head. Every second I sat there and didn't walk over to that table cost me something, and I paid it because the alternative was worse.
They left on their own twenty minutes later.
Stood up, buttoned their jackets, walked to the door.
No rush. They'd seen what they came to see.
Through the window I watched a truck pull out, dark, the kind that blends into every dirt road in Montana.
They'd drive back to wherever the operation ran from and they'd make a phone call and I guessed that the next men who came wouldn't be sitting in a bar pretending to drink beer.
Angel was suddenly behind me. I hadn't heard him come in.
“Did Bree tell you what’s going on? How fast can you find out what we're dealing with?" I asked.
"Rook's already working it."
I nodded without another word. I needed to tell Melissa what was going on.
I knocked on her door. She was sitting on the bed, and the look on her face said she already knew.
“There were a couple of guys in the bar. They've been sitting there for an hour watching the door to the lodge, like they were hoping to see something. ”
Her face changed. The color went out of it.
“I’m assuming they are looking for you," I said.
"You've been here four days and they're sitting in our bar, they’ve found you very quickly.” The thought was building while I spoke, the pieces assembling.
Four days. A ranch in the hills. A woman who ran on foot in the dark.
There was no way to track someone on foot across open country at night. Or was there?
"Where's your bag?"
"My bag?"
"The one you had with you on the road that night. Where is it?"
“It’s…it’s in the closet." She started to ask why and I cut her off.
"Just get it for me, Melissa. Please, this is important.”
She found it and brought it to me. The canvas duffel she'd told me that she’d packed for a weekend away two months ago.
I turned it over, running my fingers along the seams, the stitching, the lining.
I wasn't sure what I was looking for until I found it.
A ridge in the bottom panel. Something small and hard sewn into the fabric with stitches that didn't match the rest.
I ripped the lining open. She started to protest and stopped in her tracks when I held up what I’d found.
A tracker. Small, black, professional. Sewn into the lining with neat, careful stitches that said this wasn't improvised. Tagged. She'd been tagged for insurance. The way you'd label inventory so you could find it if it walked off the shelf.
She stared at it. I watched her face and saw the moment it landed. Every step she'd run in the dark. Every night in this room thinking she was safe. Every morning waking up and believing the distance meant something. She'd been a dot on someone's screen the whole time. She'd brought them here.
I dropped the tracker on the floor and stamped on it.
My boot came down hard, the plastic cracking, the circuit board splintering under my heel.
I did it again, grinding it into the floorboards, twisting, destroying every fragment.
It was pointless now. They had the coordinates.
They'd already been in the bar. But these men had tagged her like cargo and the rage in my blood needed somewhere to go so I crushed it until there was nothing left but dust and wiring pressed into the wood.
I was breathing hard. My hands were shaking.
I looked up. She was looking at me.
The rage was still there. Humming in my blood, running through my hands, filling the room with a voltage that had nowhere left to go.
The tracker was shattered plastic under my boot.
The men were gone for now at least. And this woman was standing three feet from me with her jaw set, her eyes locked on mine.
Want. Raw, certain, and aimed directly at me.
She stepped forward and put her hands on my chest.
Her palms flat against my shirt, her fingers spread over the fabric. She was shaking, but the gesture was certain. A woman who'd had every choice stripped from her, and she was making this one.
"Melissa."
“Don’t worry, I know exactly what I'm doing."
"Tell me you're sure."
Her eyes didn't waver. "I'm sure."
I looked at her hands on my chest. Looked at her face.
Dark eyes, dark hair, her jaw set in the way I was learning meant she'd decided and the rest of the world could catch up or get out of the way.
She wasn't fragile. She wasn't doing this because she was afraid.
She was angry and alive and choosing me in this moment with the broken tracker on the floor between us, and the choosing was everything.
I kissed her. My hand on the back of her neck, her mouth opening under mine.
She grabbed the front of my shirt with both fists and pulled me down, pulled me in, her body pressing up against mine, the heat of her through the layers of fabric, and the four days of holding back, careful distance, palm-up hands on tables, came apart.
Her hands went under my shirt, palms flat against my stomach, sliding up over my ribs, dragging the cotton up my chest. I pulled it over my head and her fingers were on my skin immediately, tracing the lines of ink across my chest, my shoulders, down my arms. Her touch was fast, greedy, exploring, and I stood there and let her take whatever she wanted because she'd spent two months having everything taken and this was hers.
She grabbed my belt. Undid the buckle, pulled the leather through the loops, dropped it on the floor.
Unzipped my jeans and pushed them down my hips, and I kicked them off.
She looked at me and I could see the want in her face, raw and real, and I put my hands on the hem of her shirt and looked at her and waited until she nodded.
I pulled her shirt off. She reached behind her back and unhooked her bra and dropped it. She was watching my face while she did it, watching what her body did to me, and there was power in the watching. She was reclaiming something. She was saying this is mine and I'm choosing what happens to it.
I put my hands on her waist. Her skin was warm and smooth and I could feel the muscles in her stomach tighten under my palms. I slid my hands up her sides, over her ribs, and cupped her breasts.
She inhaled sharply, her back arching, pressing herself into my hands.
I ran my thumbs over her nipples and she made a sound that went through me like a current, low, rough, wanting.
I put my mouth on her neck. Her collarbone.
She was pulling at me, her hands in my hair, on my shoulders, urgent and demanding.
I unzipped her jeans and she shoved them down and kicked them off.
I pulled her underwear down and she stepped out of them and then she was naked in front of me, dark hair across her shoulders, her chest rising and falling, and I wanted to slow down and I couldn't because she was already reaching for me, pulling my boxers down, wrapping her hand around me.
She stroked once, firm and sure, her eyes on mine.
"Don't be gentle," she said.