Chapter 2 #2
Mack’s injured hand, the worn quarters beside it. She’d drawn the scar exactly right—the white line from the base of his thumb across his skin to his knuckles.
She’d drawn him and his capable hands dozens of times over the four years he’d been deployed, keeping him close the only way she knew how.
She looked up and found him watching her. She closed the sketchbook. “I’m still processing,” she said. “I know I’ve asked a lot of questions, some of whose answers were apparent, but my brain couldn’t wrap around it all. Seeing you, the cartel stuff. Blake.”
He glanced at the drawing, sipped his coffee. “There’s more you need to know.”
Her breath seemed stuck in her chest. “About Blake?”
He leaned back, and she recognized this too—the debrief posture, information organized and controlled, delivered on his terms. “Mateo Vega has put out a bounty on you,” he said.
She absorbed this. “Vega…he’s one of the cartel leaders?”
A nod. “He’s negotiating with Rafael Guerrero to create a partnership for running drugs and weapons from the Gulf to Canada.”
“They put a bounty on me because I saw their faces?”
“Because you can reproduce their faces.” His eyes were steady on hers.
“Accurately from memory. Even with Blake covering for you, they must have figured out who you are and what you do. Sketch artists provide evidence that holds up in federal court.” He paused.
“You’re not just a witness, Lyss. You’re a liability. ”
She hadn’t thought of that. She should have.
She was a forensic sketch artist who’d been doing small stuff for local PDs.
The work was intermittent, so she’d also taken on parties to pay the rent.
Since moving here, she’d been trying to get on at the FBI, and she had a consultation in two weeks in Billings.
It would be her first federal contract work, the thing she’d been building toward.
Could that be in jeopardy now? She mentally swore. “Blake didn’t tell them.” She hesitated. “Right?”
Mack went still. The silence that meant the answer was worse than she was imagining filled the room
“Tell me.”
He held her eyes. “I don’t know, Lyss.”
“He wouldn’t.”
“I don’t think he would, but he’s involved in something illegal.”
“Mack—”
“Look,” he said, “I don’t have the answers you want.” His tone wasn’t cruel or dismissive, just…tired. “Some things will have to keep until morning.”
He knew more than he was telling her. She should push. Wanted to. The new version of herself, the one she’d been painstakingly assembling in therapy and solitary mornings and deliberate choices, would push.
But she looked at his face and saw something she hadn’t expected. He was protecting her. He thought the information would break something in her.
The terrible thing was that he might be right. She might not be ready. And she was tired and scared enough to let herself have a few more hours of not knowing.
Tomorrow, she told herself. You can fall apart tomorrow.
She pressed her fingers to her temple—the scar, the familiar pressure point—and counted the hours mentally until morning.
He saw it. She saw him clock it the way he used to, the silent cataloguing of her physical state that she’d found endearing and infuriating when they were together. Mack Callan had memorized her migraine tells.
She dropped her hand. “I’m fine.”
He said nothing.
“I said I’m fine.”
“I heard you.” And then he went to her bag, grabbed her pill bottle, and set it on the table in front of her.
She gritted her teeth, picked up her coffee, and decided this was not a battle worth fighting with a ticking migraine and a cartel bounty on her head. Without another word, she downed a pill.
“Take the bedroom,” he said.
She opened her mouth to argue that she could sleep on the couch perfectly well. She didn’t need to be managed. She was a grown woman who had been taking care of herself since she’d moved here just fine, thank you—
“Lyss.”
Just her name. Nothing else.
She closed her mouth.
The thing was, she knew what it meant, him giving her the bedroom.
This was his home—sparse and controlled and carefully arranged to reveal nothing about the man living in it.
The bedroom was the most private room in this small cabin, the one place where a person could close a door and be unreachable.
He was giving that to her. Not because he was being chivalrous, though he was. Because he knew her. Still knew her, in the way of people who had once been each other’s entire world. He knew she needed a door to close. Needed the illusion of her own space, even borrowed space, even temporary space.
She hated that he still knew that. She hated more that she was grateful for it.
“Where are you sleeping?” she asked.
“I’m not.” He said it the way he might say the roads are closed or the storm is worsening—factually, a condition of their situation rather than a choice. “I’m keeping watch.”
“Mack—”
“It’s not a debate.” He picked up the satellite phone again, already moving on, already three steps ahead in whatever calculation was running behind his eyes. “There’s an extra blanket on the shelf in the closet. The lock on the bedroom door works.”
The lock on the bedroom door works.
He’d said it like the previous statements—informationally—but it landed unexpectedly.
He was telling her she could lock him out if she wanted to.
That he understood this was his space and she was a reluctant guest in it.
She didn’t have to trust him with her proximity any more than the circumstances demanded.
Two years ago, she’d slept beside this man without a second thought, and here he was telling her she would lock him out.
Don’t, she warned herself. “Thank you,” she said, and she took the damn bedroom.
She lay in his bed, in his clothes, staring at a ceiling she couldn’t see in the dark, and listened hard for any telltale signs of him moving through the cabin.
He’d always been almost supernaturally quiet—sniper training, she’d understood later, though when she first met him, she’d assumed he’d just been born without the gene that made normal people scuff their feet and announce their presence.
She heard the front door open briefly, then close. He was checking the perimeter, no doubt. He returned shortly, and then she heard the soft creak of the floorboards in the kitchen. The sound of the satellite phone being set on a hard surface.
Sleep felt impossible. Her body was running on fumes and crashing adrenaline, and the migraine medication was doing its job, dulling the sharp edge of the pain to something livable. She should close her eyes, let her nervous system recover, and be ready for whatever tomorrow might bring.
Instead, she lay in the dark and mentally drew him since she’d left her sketchbook on the kitchen table, and she wasn’t getting up to retrieve it.
When he was deployed, and she couldn’t sleep, she’d lie in bed, close her eyes, and keep him present the only way she could. She’d catalogue him piece by piece.
The line of his jaw, always sharper than she expected when she hadn’t seen him in a while. The way his mouth sat—serious at rest, transformed entirely when he was actually amused, which was rare enough that she’d always felt it like a small prize when she earned it.
The scar on his hand.
The two quarters on the counter that she should not have any feelings about whatsoever.
She was almost asleep—genuinely almost under, the medication pulling her down—when the satellite phone buzzed in the other room.
She heard him answer in a low, controlled voice.
She couldn’t make out the words, just the tone—the serious-information tone, the receiving-a-briefing tone.
She knew his vocal registers the way she knew her own.
She’d mapped them over years of paying close attention to a person she loved, and this one made her stomach tighten.
Then silence.
She waited for him to speak again. To say something, to end the call, to move.
The silence stretched.
One minute. Maybe more.
She heard him set the phone down. Heard him not move. He seemed to be holding still in the dark, absorbing something he hadn’t expected.
Something’s happened.
She knew it because of the quality of the silence. The length of it. The way he’d gone absolutely still in the way he only did when something had shifted, and he was deciding how to respond.
She should get up. Walk out there. Ask him what was wrong.
Was it Blake? Rob Thorne? Had one of them been hurt?
Why hadn’t Blake called her? Maybe she didn’t want to know.
She lay in the dark, unmoving. She wasn’t sure she was ready.
She wasn’t sure she could absorb one more thing tonight—one more revelation, one more dimension of the disaster her evening had become.
She couldn’t take even one more piece of evidence that the life she’d been carefully building was coming apart.
Tomorrow, she told herself. Ask him tomorrow.
Outside, the blizzard howled against the cabin walls, relentless.
Mack didn’t come to wake her up. Whatever it was, it could wait.
She told herself that meant she was safe.
She’d always been good at telling herself comfortable lies.