Chapter 3 #2
But Mack knew he did see. Mack had told him the whole story—Blake, the mission, the black mark on his record, Alyssa.
Nearly nine months ago, Garrett had shown up at his door with a bottle of whiskey and the specific expression of a man who wasn’t leaving until he understood what he’d gotten himself into by hiring Mack Callan.
Claire was consulting with SPS, and she’d wanted Garrett’s best operator for a possible UC assignment. She’d wanted Mack.
So now, Garrett knew exactly what Alyssa Bennett meant. So did Claire.
“Is she safe?” Garrett asked.
“For now.”
“The evaluation for your promotion is on the line.”
“I know.”
“I’m not pulling it. Yet.” A pause. “But going off-protocol for a personal connection is exactly the kind of judgment call that—”
“It wasn’t personal.” The words came out flat. Automatic. The kind of statement that would have been more convincing if the cutting edge in his voice hadn’t betrayed him.
Garrett let that sit for a moment with the patience of a man who’d heard a lot of soldiers say things they needed to believe.
“Keep her safe,” he said finally. “Check in every six hours. And Mack?” A beat. “Whatever this is—figure it out. One way or another.”
The line went quiet.
Mack stood with the phone in his hand for a moment. Figure it out. Garrett meant the tactical situation—the FBI relationship, the witness protection timeline, getting Alyssa to a safe house without anyone getting killed.
He also meant the rest, because Garrett Cross didn’t waste words, and he’d chosen those deliberately. Mack set the phone down and went back to watching the window.
Lynx, SPS’s tech guru, checked in shortly afterward.
The update was short and professional with no additional commentary, which was one of the things Mack valued about working with him.
“Cartel operatives confirmed in Missoula, grounded by the weather,” Lynx said.
“The apartment fire is being reported to the public as accidental, and the cause is under investigation. There are no credible leads on Alyssa’s location in any of the channels I’m monitoring.
Blake Bennett’s vehicle was spotted heading north out of Missoula twenty minutes ago. ”
Mack filed that after they disconnected.
Thought about it. The problem wasn’t physical danger from Blake.
The problem was that Blake might convince Alyssa that this was all a misunderstanding.
She’d been letting him get away with stuff their entire lives, and that pattern had roots deep enough that no single night of evidence was guaranteed to pull those roots out.
She’s different, the inner voice said again.
He made fresh coffee, and did his hand exercises at the kitchen counter with deliberate focus—full range of motion, working against the scar tissue’s resistance, stretching until it ached and then past it.
It was the one thing he’d never fully made peace with, the physical evidence of a day he couldn’t tactically optimize his way past, no matter how many times he’d tried.
The bedroom door creaked open. She stood there in his clothes, hair loose around her shoulders, with the expression of someone who’d been lying in the dark for hours trying to make sleep happen through sheer determination and had finally admitted defeat.
She glanced at his hand. He waited for a comment—the concern, the question, the careful navigation around the topic that people usually performed when they encountered it for the first time. He’d had that conversation more times than he wanted to count.
She glanced away, yawned, and then crossed to the coffee maker and poured herself a cup.
That was all.
The tight ball in his chest loosened.
She sat at the kitchen table—the same chair as before, like they’d established a seating arrangement now—and wrapped both hands around the mug.
Outside the window, the snow fell gently, flakes drifting instead of driving, and the gray beginning of dawn was barely distinguishable from the night at the eastern edge of the tree line.
He grabbed a cup, poured himself coffee, and sat across from her.
The silence was different from the previous one. The earlier silence had been structural—two years of history pressing down on them.
This was different, and he was aware in a way he hadn’t been prepared for that sitting across from Alyssa Bennett at this time of the morning felt dangerously close to familiar.
“What are you reading?” she asked.
He looked up. She was staring at the shelf, at the battered paperback with the broken spine.
“Steinbeck,” he said. “East of Eden.”
“Huh.” She peeked at him. “Never would have guessed that.”
“What would you have guessed?”
“Something military. Sun Tzu.” A pause. “Tom Clancy.”
“I’ve read both.” He flexed his left hand, full extension. “Steinbeck’s in a different class.”
She glanced at him over the rim of her mug. Something in her expression was doing a careful, complicated calculation—the same look she’d always gotten when she was sketching someone and finding more than she’d expected to. He’d been on the receiving end of it before. It never got easier.
“Why here?” she asked. “I always thought you’d stay in Billings. Go back to your hometown.”
“Too many people there know what happened.” He said it plainly, without bitterness. It was just a fact. “This place is clean, and my dad doesn’t use the cabin anymore.”
“I love Montana,” she said. “I kept telling myself it was because of the summers with my grandparents.” She glanced toward the window. “I think I needed somewhere that felt like it existed before everything went wrong.”
He didn’t say anything. There was nothing to say, and anything honest would open a door he wasn’t ready to open when he was running on no sleep and a fresh death notification.
He downed his coffee, got up, and refilled his cup.
He returned to the table, and she reached over and took it, tugging the mug to her. She didn’t ask, and it seemed to dawn on her suddenly. Hers had cooled; his was the perfect temp. She just took it, the way she’d always done, with the ease of someone who’d learned the habit so long ago.
“Sorry,” she said, sliding it back over to him. “Old habit.”
He got up, placed hers in the microwave for a reheat, then topped it off with some fresh coffee without a word.
When the cup landed in front of her, she peered up at him with a sheepish expression.
The kitchen was small, the table was smaller, and he hadn’t thought about the geometry of it until he was there, looking down at her with only mugs of coffee between them.
The dawn was coming in through the window, and that expression on her face was so… familiar.
His pulse did a jagged beat. He stepped back, sat, and put the table between them where it belonged.
Too late, said something in his chest. Entirely too late.
“Thank you,” she said quietly.
He nodded. Picked up his own mug and stared at table.
Silence descended again for a while, and it wasn’t comfortable, but it wasn’t the weighted silence of earlier. It was the tense quiet of two people who had once known how to be in a room together and still remembered the shape of it, even if everything else had changed.
The sat phone buzzed on the counter. Claire’s check-in was scheduled for oh-six-hundred. She was early, which meant she had information she hadn’t wanted to sit on.
Mack got up and answered, turning his back to the table as if that afforded him privacy in this tiny kitchen.
The update was largely what he’d expected.
The FBI safe house was confirmed, but it was still forty-eight hours out.
The roads were still a mess, and it was doubtful secondary access roads like the one they needed to get back to the highway would be passable before late afternoon.
That helped keep the cartel activity hampered but not deterred.
And Blake was still unaccounted for.
Then Claire’s voice changed. She used his SPS codename. “Hawk.” A pause with something in it. “Does Ms. Bennett know about her roommate?”
“No.”
“She needs to. She might try to contact her again.”
“I know.”
“Mack.” Quieter. His name this time. “I’m sorry. For what it’s worth, she couldn’t have known this would happen. You couldn’t have, either.”
He kept his eyes on the landscape outside the window. At least six inches, possibly more, had fallen. “I know.”
“You’re going to tell her this morning.”
It wasn’t a question.
“Yes.”
He ended the call and stood with his back to Alyssa long enough to organize the words. Long enough to decide he wasn’t going to do this standing up, wasn’t going to deliver this the way he’d delivered notifications in the field. He owed her more than that.
He turned and found her watching him. Her hands had tightened around the mug, and he recognized the expression on her face. She was bracing for something.
She’d always braced like that when she knew bad news was coming. Chin up, spine straight, like good posture was armor.
He crossed to the table and sat, meeting her eyes. “Lyss.” His voice came out rough.
Her chin lifted slightly, then fell almost as quickly. She was ready. She wasn’t ready.
Neither was he.
“I need to tell you something.” He held her gaze. Didn’t let himself look away. He wanted to take her hand. Squeeze it. He didn’t. “It’s about Jenna.”