Chapter 43
KODIAK
The door shuts with a click that settles too hard in my chest. Footsteps fade. Then nothing. Just the fire and her.
Alice don’t speak. She watches, waits—like she knows what comes next could break either of us. She’s by the hearth, one hand gripping the mantle like she’s fixing herself there. She breaks the quiet first.
“You could still run. If…if you’d rather keep the life you have, then you’re free to. I won’t try to stop you.”
That pulls a string that snaps in me, hurting as it breaks. “You think I’d run from you after all this?”
“I want you to have a choice.”
“I do. I choose you. Always will. Just…” I start, trailing off. “Give me a minute.”
Since I was a boy I was running, stealing just to survive.
Associating with the likes of thieves and killers.
It’s all I know, except for that small piece of me.
That piece I use when convenient. The piece that remembers being proper.
Feels like a costume. Like a mask I slip on to fool some dumb bastard into letting me past the gate.
“So, what am I…an innkeeper now?” I ain’t mean to say it like the thought is a fate worse than death, but that’s damn sure how it sounds.
Alice don’t flinch at the question. Don’t smile either. “You’re whatever you decide to be,” she says. “That’s the point.”
“Slickest train robber in the country fluffin’ pillows and flippin’ mattresses.”
She lets out a soft laugh. “I’d never put a brute like you in charge of linens.
Or managing guests. I’m sure the first dissatisfied lodger would find himself under the inn.
” Her palms graze up, resting on the thick meat of my arms. “Though I would enjoy watching you unload a wagon or two.” She offers a smile I can’t return, the weight of this notion heavier than all hell.
The fire pops.
“You know I ain’t never stayed put,” I say. “Not anywhere.”
She nods. “I know.”
“Most I ever stayed in one place was a jail cell.”
“Would this be a prison to you?”
I imagine the way the sunlight hits her face in the morning before she wakes up. How after months of sleeping on dirt or stone, these sheets feel like swimming in butter. It’s nice. Maybe too nice. “No. It’s just that if a fella gets too comfortable he goes soft, and my luck’s never held long.”
“I’ve been thinking,” she says. “About the stars.”
“You’re always thinkin’ on stars.”
“Hush,” she says, but ain’t no bite in it. “I mean, on why the stars might have put us together. I think this is it, bear. I think…maybe it was to free each other. You helped me out of my cage, and now I help you stop running. You can finally rest. Let the hunters think they won, but live a life.”
I run a hand down my face. How is this not the easiest decision I ever made? I love Alice. I know I do, there ain’t a doubt in my mind. But…Archibald Kodiak Randolph—dead. Can’t wrap my head around it.
“You think we can trust Virgil?”
She nods. “Virgil isn’t sentimental. He never believed I was kidnapped. Still he went along with this because all he cares about is protecting his reputation.”
I watch the coals in the hearth sink in on themselves. “Don’t feel real,” I say. “Thinkin’ of myself buried in the ground while I’m still breathin’. Folks believin’ I’m rottin’ somewhere just so I can walk free.”
Alice kneels beside me. Her hand finds my knee. “You’ve been buried your whole life. Under the burden of being orphaned. Under wanted posters and aliases. This is the first time you get to come up for air.”
I breathe deep, lungs stretched against my ribs. “You really think I can be someone else?”
Her voice don’t falter. “I think you already are someone else. You’ve just only ever showed him to me.”
Silence stretches long between us. I listen to the wind outside, the boards in the wall shifting in the cold. My old life’s out there somewhere, waiting to catch up. But here—in this room, with this woman—it’s warm.
I nod. “All right. Guess I’m…Dead Man goddamn Collier. What’s his name?”
She jerks back, and her face puzzles. “I don’t rightly know.”
I bark a laugh at how stupid this whole thing is. “Well he’s probably got somethin’ in here with his name on it.”
She goes rifling through the desk drawers, the firelight catching her hair like copper. Papers, bills, a cracked pipe, a few coins. Then she stops. Fingers pinch something small between them—a card, frayed at the edges.
She steps closer, the card in her hand, eyes bright. “Merrick.”
“Huh,” I say. I take the card from her, study the faded print. Merrick Collier. Plain as any man’s name, but it hums somehow, like a thing already mine.
“Merrick,” I repeat. “Guess I can live with that.” I glance at her, half a grin twitching. “Suppose you wouldn’t mind bein’ Mrs. Collier, then?”
Her lip curls before she can catch it.
“Damn. That’s how you respond to a man’s marriage proposal?”
Alice’s eyes widen a touch, then she huffs out a laugh, kneeling on the floor before me. “It’s not you, bear. It’s him. Collier. He courted me brutally. The idea of belonging to that man—” She shudders. “It made my skin crawl.”
I lean forward. “You wouldn’t be his. You’d be mine,” I say.
That stops her. Her gaze softens, all the fight slipping out of her shoulders. Like she’s seeing the promise beneath the words. “Yours,” she repeats, almost whispering.
“Mine,” I say again.
She rubs her hands on my thighs, and the tingle of her touch paired with seeing her on her knees looking up at me makes my root twitch.
“So it seems you’ve made your decision,” she says. “Virgil gets the reward and plays the hero, but you get a life, you get me.”
“You’re the sweetest part of this deal,” I say with a smile.
“Collier was a wealthy man. Suppose he probably has his account ledgers around here somewhere.”
I nod. Ain’t bad news, but it does remind me of something important. I sit back, scrub a hand over my jaw. “I ain’t been completely honest with you, Alice.”
Her hands still where they rest on my legs. “What do you mean?”
“Well, when your husband and that dandy brother of his ambushed me, I was comin’ off a job.
One of the jobs that pissed a lot of them railroad men off.
Now, they think they got it all. Between what they found on me then, and the haul they recovered off that ship in Galveston, I reckon they thought they got everything I hadn’t spent. But they ain’t. Not by a long shot.”
She stares, wary now. “What are you saying?”
“I’m sayin’ that was the biggest job I ever pulled—L&N line outta Kentucky carryin’ payroll for half the state. I hit that train clean and split the take before the smoke even cleared. Stashed it where no one’d ever find. Gonna take some travel to get it, but it’s there. Enough to start a life on.”
“Merrick and Alice Collier,” she says, testing the sound.
“Has a ring to it.”
Outside, the wind scrapes at the shutters. Inside, the fire keeps on burning, and for the first time in a long damn while, I start thinking maybe my best days ain’t behind me.