Chapter 4 #2
Sutton braced herself. Here it came—the gentle probing, the concerned head-tilt, the suggestion that she talk to someone about her feelings as if her feelings were a leaky faucet that could be fixed with the right wrench. “No, thanks. I’m fine.”
“What you witnessed last night was violent, sudden, and personal,” Vivi continued, as if Sutton hadn’t said anything.
Her voice didn’t shift into a therapeutic register—it stayed conversational, direct.
“And it’s layered on top of a loss you’ve been carrying for six years.
The public nature of that took a great toll on you and your family.
I suspect it’s redefined your identity without your consent. And now this.”
Sutton’s throat tightened. She hadn’t expected such specificity.
The campus counselor she’d seen twice before dropping out of Corcoran had spoken in generalities—processing grief, healthy coping mechanisms, giving yourself permission to feel.
Vivi Montgomery had walked into the room and named the exact shape of Sutton’s wound in a few sentences.
Sutton was going to need more coffee.
“I’d like to talk with you when you’re ready,” Vivi said. “No pressure. No timeline. Just a conversation.”
“I’m fine,” Sutton gritted out.
Vivi’s expression didn’t change; she’d probably heard that line a thousand times.
“The offer stands. I’m in the building most days.
” She glanced at the untouched second half of Sutton’s breakfast. “Finish the toast, at least. Low blood sugar makes everything worse, including arguments with stubborn men.”
She left.
Sutton picked up the toast, mostly because she needed something to do. She caught Sebastian watching her and glared at him until he looked away.
The quiet stretched. The fight had burned itself out, leaving the discomfort of two people who’d said too much and not enough at the same time.
“I could show you the compound, if you want,” Sebastian said. He was staring at the coffee machine. “We can walk the interior. See the layout. It’s better than sitting in that room.”
How long would she have to stay here? She wanted to ask, but figured she wouldn’t like the answer. Every instinct she had said, don’t accept anything from him, don’t let him be kind because kind is harder to fight than anger.
But sitting alone in that sterile room was impossible.
The inside of her own head was a carousel of Ginger’s face on the sidewalk, and Penn’s face the last time she’d seen him alive—three weeks before the shooting, standing in the doorway of his apartment in Adams Morgan, telling her he’d call her later.
He hadn’t called. She’d been annoyed about it and texted him a rude gesture. And then he was dead. The annoyance had curdled into the kind of guilt that lived in her chest like a stone she couldn’t cough up.
Sebastian was right—she needed to move. Motion was the only thing that kept the carousel from spinning.
“All right,” she said. “We can walk. But no talking about feelings, okay?”
Sebastian picked up the plates, rinsed and slid them into the dishwasher. “Bring your coffee if you want.” He grabbed his own.
October in Montana made everything look like a photograph someone had adjusted for maximum drama—the sky too blue, the mountains too sharp, the aspens along the tree line burning gold against the dark mass of the pines.
The compound sprawled across a cleared hillside—the main building flanked by two smaller structures, a motor pool, and a gravel lot where four trucks and an SUV were parked. Beyond the perimeter fence, the land rolled out toward the mountains in waves of brown grass and dark timber.
Sebastian walked beside her down the corridors at a respectful distance. “The main building is operations, residential quarters, kitchen, and the briefing room,” he said. “The west wing is Vivi’s domain—her office, which she calls the decompression suite, and our medical wing.”
“Decompression suite. Fancy.”
“The couch is from Costco. The sound machine plays four options, all of which sound like static. But she’ll fight you for that room.”
It was the most he’d said at once that wasn’t operational, and the normalcy of it caught her off guard. She’d built him into a fixed shape in her mind—the man from the news, the man from the parlor, the man with the gun—and that shape didn’t have room for dry humor about Costco furniture.
“Why don’t you live here?” she asked. “There are clearly rooms.”
Sebastian was quiet for a few steps. “I like being alone.”
She felt that in her bones. “You? Mr. Most Eligible Bachelor in D.C.? I thought you’d be married, divorced, and have three kids by now.”
He paused. “Living on-site means being on all the time. Accessible. Part of the organism. The farmhouse gives me a boundary. Twenty minutes of road between here and there. It’s enough.”
“Enough for what?”
“Enough to pretend I’m a person and not just an operator. I prefer to work as much as possible, but sometimes, I do need my space.”
The honesty startled her. She’d expected deflection, or a polished non-answer. Instead, he’d handed her something real.
They walked in silence for a stretch, passing the weight room, the conference room where she’d given her statement last night. Stopping at a lounge area, Sebastian stared out the patio doors. A hawk circled over the tree line, riding a thermal.
“Why a lynx?” she asked.
He glanced at her with a raised brow.
“The tattoo. The sketch you left on my counter. Why a lynx?”
“It’s my callsign.”
“Your—” She blinked. “You have callsigns? Like fighter pilots? Is that why Jasper said to call him Bobcat?”
The corner of his mouth moved in the ghost of a smile. “Like the military. Garrett is Wolf. Mack is Hawk. CB is Grizzly. And yes, Jasper is—”
“Bobcat.”
“Correct.”
“Creative.”
“We get to pick what we want, as long as it’s an animal. Not very professional, if you ask me, but no one did. I didn’t actually come up with mine. Vivi suggested it with Garrett’s approval.”
She almost laughed. The sensation was so foreign that she caught it in her throat and held it there, afraid to let it out because laughing felt obscene when Ginger Galbraith was in a morgue and a professional killer was looking for Sutton.
But it was there—the involuntary twitch of something lighter trying to surface through the weight of everything else. “So they picked Lynx because…?”
“Vigilance. Spotting what other people miss. It’s a trait of the animal. They’re solitary, sharp-eyed, patient. I like it. It fit.”
“And you want it tattooed somewhere on you.”
“It’s mine, not the Service’s. Not the media’s. Something I chose.”
She understood the hunger for something self-determined, untouched by the identity other people had stamped onto you.
She’d felt it every time she sat down at her personal sketchbook and drew the things that had nothing to do with tattoo flash or client requests—the dragons, the enchanted forests, the warrior women.
Art that belonged to the version of herself that still existed underneath the wreckage.
“You’re an artist,” he said. “The work on the parlor wall. Those aren’t just tattoo designs.”
“They pay the bills.”
“More than that.”
She cut him a sideways look. He was watching the tree line, not her, which made it easier to answer.
“I was at Corcoran School of the Arts—illustration, with a focus on sequential art. I want to do comics, graphic novels. You know, visual storytelling.” The words felt like artifacts from a museum of someone else’s life. “Two and a half years.”
“What happened?”
“You know what happened.”
The silence that followed was different from the earlier ones. It had a different texture—an awareness that they’d stepped onto ground where the landmines were buried close to the surface.
“Penn’s arrest—his death—went through my life like a bomb,” she admitted quietly.
“My father left my mom within six months. Said he couldn’t handle the embarrassment.
My mother folded. I dropped out because I couldn’t afford tuition without my dad’s help, and also because every person on campus knew I was the sister of the guy who tried to assassinate the Vice President’s daughter.
Hard to focus on panel composition when your professors are googling your last name. ”
“That definitely sucks.”
“A friend brought me to Blackridge. She left. I stayed.” Sutton shrugged, a gesture she’d perfected—casual, dismissive, the kind of shrug designed to signal that the story was over and didn’t hurt. “Dom gave me a chair. Turns out fantasy art translates well to skin. So here I am.”
“You’re here,” he said.
She started walking, feeling that restlessness rearing its head again. “As are you. Apparently, I’m not the only one who ran from the aftermath of what Penn did.”
He remained quiet. They walked toward the residential wing. The walk had taken maybe twenty minutes. What the hell was she going to do now?
At her door, she stopped. “I can’t sit in that room with nothing to do,” she said. “I’ll lose my mind.”
“What do you need?”
The question was simple. The fact that he asked—instead of deciding for her—seemed like a step in the right direction. “A notebook. Pens. Pencils. Something to draw with.”
“I’ll find you some.”
“Can I…” The tightness in her chest at the thought of being alone was too suffocating. “Can I go with you? To find the supplies?”
His face brightened just a touch. Or maybe it was only the shadows from the overhead lights that made her think that.
“We can raid Vivi’s office.”
“Won’t she be mad?”
One side of his mouth quirked up. “Not if she doesn’t realize we did it.”
She didn’t want to think about why that tiny smile made her pulse skip. Why doing something secretive with this man held so much appeal that she nearly smiled back. “I’m game.”
The quirk almost turned into a full smile. “Can you follow my orders?”
That again. “Do I have to?”
“If you want your drawing supplies.”
She rolled her eyes. “Fine.”