Chapter 7
CHAPTER SEVEN
The cabin disappeared one piece at a time.
First, the porch, swallowed by the curve in the road. Then the roof, sinking below the tree line like something being pulled under. Alyssa watched it go in the side mirror until there was nothing left but snow and pine and the long white ribbon of road behind them.
She turned forward and settled her hands on the sketchbook in her lap. Her whole body shook under Mack’s coat. The sharp sting of tears burned the backs of her eyes.
You’re fine, Bennett. You made a decision. Now live with it.
It wasn’t that easy, though. It had been less than twenty-four hours and so much had happened in that cabin. Her whole life had changed.
A part of her didn’t want to face what was to come. It wanted to stay hidden away with Mack inside his home.
He drove with his attention divided between the road, the mirrors, and the tree line in a steady rotation that never broke rhythm.
His scarred left hand rested on the steering wheel, and she found herself watching it—the way the damaged skin pulled tight over his knuckles, the slight stiffness in his grip that he compensated for so seamlessly most people would never notice.
She noticed. She’d always noticed.
That scar was Blake’s doing. Shrapnel from the firefight that killed David Morrison and three civilians and ended Mack’s career as a Marine Scout Sniper.
Forty-seven stitches. She knew the number because she’d overheard Blake telling their father it was barely a scratch, and later, when she’d seen the wound herself, she’d understood exactly how much that lie had minimized the horrible incident.
She looked away before he caught her staring. Outside, Montana spread in every direction—mountains shouldering up against a sky so blue it looked manufactured, snow draped over everything like a clean sheet.
It was beautiful. The world didn’t care that her life had detonated overnight. It just kept being gorgeous.
She opened her sketchbook. Blake’s face stared up at her from the page she’d drawn at the kitchen table—the careful rendering of her brother’s features, every plane and angle precise enough to hold up in federal court.
She turned past it, his voice ringing in her ears, telling her not to make him choose.
She flipped to a blank page and started drawing the landscape. Her talent was with people, but occasionally, she liked to clean her palate with something else. The mountains, the road, the dark spears of lodgepole pine against the snow—it was comforting in a way nothing else could be.
Her hand moved in the quick, economical strokes she used when she was processing rather than producing—sketching to think, not to create. The charcoal was familiar between her fingers, grounding her when everything else felt like it was sliding sideways.
What had happened in the cabin sat between her and Mack, taking up space like a third passenger.
The almost-kiss, her decision to testify, the way he’d squeezed her hand as they walked to the SUV, and then let go as if it burned.
He’d called her sweetheart and rubbed her back when she broke down over Jenna.
He’d coached her through the uncomfortable conversation with Blake.
He’d given her the choice of whether to meet with the FBI now or tomorrow.
She kept sketching. A ridgeline. A fence post. The curve of the road ahead. This rugged place matched Mack. He was as steady as the mountains, as certain in his convictions as the seasons, as vast as the sky overhead.
Her mind circled back to Blake’s voice on the phone. Don’t make me choose between you and—
And what? What had he been about to say?
It didn’t matter. What mattered was the unfinished sentence itself—the fact that there was something, some loyalty or obligation or fear, that he’d weigh against his own sister and possibly find her wanting.
And in the background, she remembered how he’d forced her to choose between him and Mack.
She realized she was touching her scar. She pulled her hand away and pressed it flat against the sketchbook page.
Mack shifted, his gaze flicking to her. “You all right?”
“Not really, but I will be.”
He didn’t say anything else. He gave her space, patient and waiting if she wanted to talk. She was grateful and frustrated by it in equal measure. Part of her wanted him to push. Part of her wanted him to ask the questions she wasn’t brave enough to answer unprompted.
The rest of her knew that was the old pattern talking—waiting for someone else to pull the truth out of her because offering it voluntarily had never gone well.
That’s not who you are anymore. She set down the charcoal. “I need to tell you something.”
He glanced at her. Back to the road. “Okay.”
“Six months ago, I saw something on Blake’s phone.” She kept her voice level. “He left it on the kitchen counter at his place. A text came through while he was in the shower, and I looked. I shouldn’t have, but I did.”
“What did it say?”
“It was a message from a name I didn’t recognize, referencing shipments, timelines, and dollar amounts.
” She turned the charcoal over and over.
“Blake started wearing an expensive watch, easily five thousand dollars. He bought a new truck with cash.” She went on, letting all her doubts spill out.
The way he’d started locking his office door when she came over.
The paranoia, the secrecy, the phone calls he’d take in another room.
“I knew something was wrong,” she said. “I told myself it wasn’t my business. That he was an adult and working for Rob, so it had to be legitimate. I thought I was just overreacting.” She paused and drew a breath. “I wasn’t, was I?”
“His job with Thorne is legit. That’s how he used last night’s party to cover for his illegal activities.”
“Some part of me knew, and I—I chose not to ask him.” The admission tasted bitter.
“Questioning him has never ended well for me, and I wasn’t ready to—” She stopped, tried again.
“If I’d looked into it and found out he was involved in anything criminal, I would have had to do something.
Choose something.” Just like he’d said to her at the end of the call.
“It felt like betrayal, and I couldn’t do that to him. ”
She stared at the landscape blurring past the window. She felt hollow and scraped out, the way she always felt after saying something true that she’d been holding in too long.
“You think that makes you complicit,” Mack said.
“Doesn’t it? Jenna might be alive if I’d said something six months ago. If I’d told someone. If I’d been braver.”
“That’s not how it works.” His voice was steady, certain in that way she’d always both loved and resented—the way he stated things as fact rather than opinion.
“Blake made his choice. The cartel made theirs. You not telling anyone about a gut feeling regarding your brother’s spending habits didn’t get Jenna killed. ”
“But—”
“Does guilt feel productive right now? Sure. It feels like something you can do, something you can control. But it’s a lie, Lyssa. It’s your brain trying to make sense of something senseless by putting you at the center of it.”
She blinked. “How do you know that?”
“Because I did the same thing with Morrison.” A muscle jumped in his jaw.
“David died because Blake disobeyed a direct order. But I spent two years telling myself it was my fault—that I should have seen Blake’s instability, reported it to our CO, done something different.
And maybe that’s partly true. But the guilt was easier to carry than the truth. ”
“Which was?”
“That I trusted the wrong person and someone else paid for it.”
The words hung in the space between them. She understood what he was giving her—not just empathy, but a mirror. I trusted the wrong person, too. The same wrong person.
They drove in silence for another mile, maybe two. The mountains hadn’t changed, the sky was still that punishing blue, but something in the cab felt different. Lighter, or at least less suffocating. She’d said the ugly thing, and the world hadn’t ended.
She touched her scar again. This time, she didn’t pull her hand away. “You asked me once about this,” she said.
Mack’s gaze flicked to her hand, to the thin white line through her eyebrow. “You told me it was a climbing accident.”
“It was.” She turned the charcoal pencil over in her fingers again, watching it instead of him. “I just left out the part that matters.”
He waited. He was good at waiting—sniper patience, the ability to hold still for hours until the moment arrived.
She’d forgotten how much safety there was in that patience, how different it felt from Blake’s silences, which were always loaded, always a performance designed to make her fill the gap with apologies.
Mack’s silence was just…open. Space for her to get where she was going on her own terms.
“I was sixteen,” she said. “Blake was eighteen. It was the summer after his senior year, and we were at our grandparents’ place in Whitefish.
The same mountains.” She gestured toward the window.
“He wanted to hike to a ridge he’d heard about from local kids—off-trail, steep, the kind of scramble that required ropes and experience we didn’t have.
No way I was doing that. Blake called me a baby.
Told me to stop being such a buzzkill. He went off-trail anyway. ”
“And you followed.”
She nodded, still staring at the passing scenery. “That’s what I always did—protested, then capitulated. He’s my older brother, and I adored him. I was always in his shadow, trying to prove I was a good little sister.”
Mack reached over and squeezed her arm. It was brief—just an acknowledgment.