Chapter 3 #2
She stared at it for a moment, then took it without a word and pulled it on. It swallowed her—she was much shorter than he was, and the sleeves hung past her fingers. She didn’t roll them up. He pretended the sight of her in his jacket didn’t do something complicated to his chest.
“Let’s go.”
He took back roads rather than the direct route from Miller Road to the highway. That was too predictable, too exposed, too many stretches of open road where a trailing vehicle could maintain visual contact without being spotted.
Instead, he cut through the old mining roads east of town, routes he’d driven a dozen times in daylight when he needed a distraction. Sebastian didn’t live anywhere without knowing how to leave it in a hurry.
Sutton sat in the passenger seat with her hands in her lap and his jacket pulled tight around her.
She’d stopped shaking. That wasn’t necessarily a good sign—sometimes the shaking stopped because the body had moved past shock into the flat, gray country on the other side.
She was staring through the windshield at the dark road, seeing something that wasn’t there.
He checked the mirrors again. Clear.
“You’re taking a weird route,” she said. The first words she’d spoken since they left the farmhouse.
“Yes.”
“Because you think someone might follow us?”
“Caution dictates it.”
She turned her head and looked at him. In the glow of the dashboard instruments, her face was all angles and shadows—sharp collarbones, the small rose gold stud in her nose, the dark smudges under her eyes that predated tonight by months.
She looked exhausted in a way that went deeper than one terrible evening.
She looked like someone who’d been tired for years.
“You knew her,” she said. Not a question. “Ginger.”
“Yes.”
“I read a lot about her after the—” Sutton stopped. Recalibrated. “She called you Bastian.”
The name hit him in a place he thought he’d armored. Ginger’s nickname for him—half affection, half provocation, deployed with the confidence of a teenager who knew she could get under his skin and considered it a public service. He hadn’t heard anyone say it in six years.
His hands tightened on the wheel. “She used to call me that to get a reaction,” he said. “Worked every time.”
Silence settled between them—heavy, complicated, full of things neither of them was equipped to say. He’d saved Ginger’s life. Her brother had tried to end it. And now Ginger was dead on a sidewalk in Blackridge because she’d gotten too close to something connected to Penn.
He glanced at Sutton’s reflection in the passenger window. She was watching the dark roll by, her fingers curled inside the too-long sleeves of his jacket, and he realized he’d stopped seeing Penn Crenshaw’s sister. He just saw…Sutton.
Somewhere between the sob she’d fought back and the way she’d sat in that chair and held herself together through sheer, stubborn will, he’d realized she was so much more than Penn’s younger sister.
She wasn’t a symbol or a ghost or the other side of his worst day.
She was a woman who’d watched someone die and run two miles in the dark to the one person who could help.
That took something.
The compound was lit up when they arrived, which meant Garrett had put the word out. Floodlights were on along the perimeter. Vehicles repositioned to block the main approach. The gate rolled open before Sebastian flashed his credentials.
Garrett met them at the main entrance. He was dressed like a man who’d been pulled from bed but didn’t resent it—jeans, a flannel shirt, boots laced tight, his sidearm on his hip. Claire was on speakerphone, her voice brisk and professional on the other end, FBI mode fully engaged.
Other team members materialized in a steady trickle that suggested they’d each left their homes the moment Garrett’s call came through.
Mack appeared from the kitchen with two mugs of coffee, his face unreadable.
CB came down the hall on his phone, assuring his wife, Regan, that he’d be home for breakfast with her and her mother.
Jasper, who lived at the compound, was no doubt at the monitoring station, headphones around his neck, three screens alive with feeds from the compound’s perimeter cameras.
Even Dr. Vivi Montgomery, who ran the place, was pulling on a robe as she came to greet them. Her hair was falling out of a braid. Her husband, Ian, was walking beside her, on high alert.
Sutton stood in the middle of it all like a woman watching a machine spin up around her. Sebastian could see her processing all of it under the too-bright lights. She was out of her depth in strange territory, and she knew it.
But she was standing.
“This is Sutton Crenshaw,” Sebastian said, addressing the room. He quickly introduced her to Vivi and the team. “She’s the witness and now our principal. Nobody gets near her without going through me.”
Garrett’s gaze moved from Sebastian to Sutton. He extended a hand to her. “Garrett Cross. You’re safe here.”
Sutton reluctantly took his hand. “Is that something you can actually promise, or is it just something you people say?”
A flicker of something—respect, maybe—crossed Garrett’s face. “It’s a promise.”
“Why don’t we move to a more comfortable spot?” Vivi said, smiling at Sutton. “Let’s talk in the conference room.”
Mack handed Sutton a cup of coffee. “This will take the chill off.”
Sutton worried her bottom lip. “Got any sugar for it?”
Vivi started leading the way to the room, her robe flaring out from her legs. “Mack, get her a sandwich and a soda. Sugar is good after shock.”
“Yes, ma’am,” he said, disappearing toward the kitchen.
Claire’s voice came through the phone as they followed Vivi.
“Blackridge PD confirmed a body at the intersection of Calder and Eighth. Female, early twenties, multiple gunshot wounds. No identification on the body, but the description matches Virginia Galbraith. I’m dispatching agents from the Missoula field office tonight. ”
Sebastian heard the words, clinical, efficient, each fact filed. But beneath the professional surface, in the place he didn’t let anyone see, something cracked. Ginger was dead. The girl he’d saved was dead.
He sealed the crack and kept moving.
“I need to debrief the witness while the details are fresh,” Claire said.
Sebastian took the phone from Garrett, surprising both of them. “She’s been through a significant trauma in the past hour,” he said. “I want her settled first. Food, water, a room with a lock on the inside.” He looked at Sutton. “We’ll go through everything tomorrow.”
“Sebastian,” Claire started. “That’s not how this works and you know it.”
Sutton’s chin lifted. The defiance was a reflex—he could see that. A woman who’d been making her own decisions in hard places for years, suddenly surrounded by people making decisions for her. “I can handle it.”
Sebastian ground his teeth but nodded. In the conference room, Garrett set his phone on the table. Sebastian pulled out a chair for Sutton.
Over the next few minutes, she answered all of Claire’s questions. A few of Vivi’s, too. She drank the soda but ignored the sandwich, although Sebastian heard her stomach growl.
When they were done, he showed her to a room down the residential corridor. “You did good. The FBI will start searching for the killer.”
At the door, she paused and looked up at him. “Thank you.”
Before he could respond, the door closed behind her. Sebastian exhaled.
Garrett materialized beside him a few seconds later. “You good?”
Sebastian made a noise in his throat.
“That wasn’t a yes.”
He pinched the bridge of his nose. “It’s the only answer I’ve got right now.”
Garrett studied him for a long moment, then nodded. “We’ll set the watch rotation. You’re not on it tonight.”
“I’m on it tonight.”
“Sebastian—”
“I’m on it.”
Another long look. Then Garrett clapped him once on the shoulder—brief, firm, the wordless language of men who’d chosen a life where touch meant trust—and walked away.
Sebastian sat on the floor outside Sutton’s door with his back against the wall and his sidearm on his right knee.
The compound settled into its nighttime hum—the low drone of the HVAC, the distant murmur of the monitoring station, the occasional creak of the building as it adjusted to the cold.
Familiar sounds. The sounds of a life he’d built in here.
He gave himself thirty seconds to process the emotions.
That was the deal he’d made with himself back in the hospital after the shooting, when the grief and the shock and the bone-deep wrongness of being called a hero for killing a man had threatened to swallow him whole.
Thirty seconds. He could feel anything for thirty seconds. He could break, rage, weep, stare into the void. But when the thirty seconds were up, he sealed it and functioned. That was the price of being the person other people depended on.
He closed his eyes.
Images swept through his mind. Ginger at sixteen, rolling her eyes at the security briefing, calling him Bastian for the first time, and watching with delight as his jaw tightened.
Ginger at the fundraiser, in the blue dress her mother had picked out, complaining about the shoes.
Ginger on the floor, his blood on her hands, screaming his name in a voice he still heard in his sleep years afterward.
Ginger on a sidewalk in Blackridge, Montana. Alone. Checking her phone under a streetlight, waiting for a conversation that would never happen.
Why? Because of this so-called investigation about a tattoo? What had she gotten herself into?
He’d saved her life. He’d taken a bullet and killed a man and spent three weeks in a hospital bed, and in the end, it hadn’t mattered. Someone had finished the job. Not the same person—Penn Crenshaw was dead by Sebastian’s hand—but someone connected to whatever Penn had been part of?
Thirty seconds ran by too quickly.
He opened his eyes. Breathed. Sealed it.
On the other side of the door, there was no sound. Sutton was either sleeping or doing what he was doing—lying in the dark, staring at the ceiling, replaying a night that had rewritten the terms of her existence.
They were two people on opposite sides of a door. Enemies by circumstance, allies by necessity, connected by a dead man and a dead girl and a possible conspiracy neither of them understood yet.
He’d killed her brother. She’d run to him anyway. And now he was sitting in the dark outside her room with a gun on his knee, guarding the sister of the man he’d shot.
He settled his back against the wall and waited for a dawn that felt very far away.