Mackenzie
Twice.
The word wakes me up the same way it put me to sleep, and my body hasn't stopped arguing about it since.
My thighs are raw from his jaw. Three days of stubble dragged up and down the insides of them while he took his time, agonizingly slow, patient as a man who'd said he would be and meant it.
Every time I shift in these sheets, I feel him there again and my hips roll before I can stop them. The muscles low in my stomach keep clenching around nothing, squeezing, and reaching for him.
The second time was supposed to prove the first was nothing and it did the exact opposite.
I lie in his guest room and listen. The house is empty.
He's been in the calving barn since midnight. Roy came for him, he pulled his boots on and went out without a word, because cows don't check the clock before they decide to labor, and calving season on a ranch this size means a man sleeps when the herd lets him and not a minute before.
Which means he's not here.
I go upstairs.
The loft stops me before the bedroom does.
The whole west wall is glass, floor to ceiling, and one mountain fills the center of it.
I have no name for it. It stands apart from the rest of the Front.
A single peak rising higher than everything around it, snow-loaded, its east face catching the first grey light while the wind tears snow off the summit in long white swirls that stream out against the dark sky behind it like smoke off a candle.
It is the most beautiful thing I have ever seen and it does not care that I am looking at it. A deep couch faces it, worn in the right places, and more books stacked on the floor beside it. This is where he sits. This is the view he built this house around.
His bedroom door is open. I don't know if he left it that way on purpose or if it's habit. I step through it before I can talk myself out of the crossing.
Sparse, clean, the bed made with military corners even though he left it at midnight.
I should not be here. My heart is slamming so hard I can feel it in my teeth, and I keep one ear on the mudroom door the whole time. If he walks in right now, I have no story that survives the telling.
The closet first. Shirts on hangers, all dark, the kind of order that says a man decided a long time ago to stop thinking about what he wears.
Then the bathroom. And that's where it gets me.
Ombré Leather. Dark glass bottle on the counter beside a straight razor and nothing else. Of course a man who says four words a day keeps a bathroom with two things in it.
I pick it up, bring it to my face, and breathe him in with my eyes closed and my back against his bathroom wall. It hits me so low and so hard that I have to press my thighs together just to stay upright.
This. This is what I've been smelling since the airport.
I put the bottle down. I put it back exactly where it was, because I am a federal agent and I know how to leave a scene undisturbed, and that is the most pathetic sentence I have ever thought.
"I am so in trouble."
I say it to his mirror. His mirror has no opinion.
I need to put my hands on something that is not him before I lose what's left of this.
I find the barn in the quiet with Gus at my heel. The Chinook blew itself out sometime before dawn and left the valley still. The kind of still that makes every sound carry.
The mare is in the third stall, a bay with a blaze and a calm eye. She turns her head and watches me pull the tack down like she's been expecting somebody with better posture than the last man who saddled her.
I check the girth twice because I haven't done this in four years and the muscle memory runs about half a second behind my hands.
Stirrups adjusted without looking, because that part you don't lose, any more than you lose the sound of your mother's voice or the smell of hay in July, even after the family that owns every acre of hay in the county has made it so you never stand in it again.
He finds me at the gate.
He's been there long enough to watch me bridle her, mount, and collect the reins. His face has the expression of a man who opened a drawer expecting a file and found a loaded weapon.
"You ride?"
"I'm from here, Blackwater." I turn the mare toward the north pasture and the trail that runs up behind it into the timber. "Your family just made it impossible to stay."
I don't wait for him to answer.
I put the mare into a trot and I'm half a mile up the trail before the sound of hooves behind me says he's caught up.
Gus is already ahead of both of us, working the trail like a dog who remembers what his job is. The black stallion comes alongside, big and easy, matching the mare's pace without being asked.
I keep my eyes on the trail because looking at Holt Blackwater on horseback right now is more than I can afford.
The lead is a name Roy mentioned while we stood in the calving barn: an old hand on the BLM allotment north of the Blackwater fence who winters up on the bench alone.
Earl Gunderson. Lives in a line camp you can't reach by road from November to May, and in March with the snow half-eaten by the Chinook and the roads turned to grease, you can't reach it by truck either.
But a man up on that bench has a sightline to every road between Rimrock and the reservation, and nobody has asked him what he saw the night Jacob died.
So we ride.
The trail climbs through timber still holding snow on the north faces, and the melt is everywhere, running in sheets across the path, pooling in every low spot. The mare picks her way through it. The air smells like pine, wet earth, and a winter finally letting go.
I grew up in Choteau. Thirty miles south on the same highway, same mountains, same light. I learned to ride on a bay mare not unlike this one, on BLM land that backs up against the same national forest, and I was good at it, and it was mine, and the Blackwaters made it so I never stood in it again.
Gunderson's camp sits on a bench at the edge of the tree line with nothing around it but sky and a view that runs sixty miles east to the plains.
I was right about the sightline. A man up here with a set of binoculars could watch every vehicle on every road in this valley, and from the wear on the chair outside his door, this man does.
He's in his sixties, lean as a fence rail, hands stained brown and cracked at the knuckles, and a beard he stopped maintaining since the Berlin Wall came down.
He looks at my badge, at Holt, and back at my badge like it's the less dangerous of the two.
"Evening of the eighteenth," he says, when I ask.
"Moon was full that night, bright enough to throw shadows.
Between seven and nine I heard an engine come up the timber road from the south, running no headlights.
Not a diesel. Gas motor, and quiet, like somebody'd paid for quiet.
" He shifts in his chair. "Got my glass on it from up here.
Half a mile, maybe less. Moon put enough light on it to tell me it was light-colored.
White, maybe silver. Crew cab, newer model.
Sat for a while in the flat below the switchback. Then it left the same way it came."
"You get a plate?"
"In moonlight, through binoculars, at that angle?" He spits. "I got a shape, a color, and an engine I didn't recognize. Running dark on a road nobody runs dark on unless they're poaching or worse. I figured poaching."
"Did you report it?"
"To who? Aldridge?" He drinks his coffee. "I've lived on this mountain thirty years. I've reported elk poachers, trespassers, and a man I watched set a fire in the Flathead in '09. Nothing's ever come back with a badge on it." He looks at mine again. "Until today."
I write it down. Light-colored truck, gas engine, crew cab, newer model, no headlights, south approach, between seven and nine on the night Jacob Mercer was laid out on a timber road and dressed as weather.
Not a Blackwater truck. All black, all diesel, all logoed.
Not the Ford from the highway either, which ran one headlight and hit us from behind.
Two vehicles now, two drivers. Or one driver and two trucks. Neither answer makes the math smaller.
We ride back with the mid-morning sun on our faces and our shadows trailing behind the horses.
The Chinook has blown itself out overnight and left the valley quiet, warm for March, the kind of still morning where you can hear the melt running under the snow from a hundred yards off.
Water braids across the path and the mare splashes through it, and I let her, because the sound of it and the smell of it and the light falling through the timber is the first thing in this county that has felt like mine instead of theirs.
The trail widens at the bottom, Holt pushes the stallion ahead of me, and I stop pretending I'm not looking.
He rides like he was born to it and refuses to be impressed by that. Fast and strong and fluid, all that black hair loose behind him, his back straight, his hands quiet, and the horse answering him like a conversation nobody else can hear.
A word starts in my chest and I hold it there the rest of the ride down.
We come into the barn together, reins in hand, and unsaddle without talking. He works one-handed, favoring the stitched arm without making a thing of it.
I hang the mare's bridle, brush her down, and pretend I'm not watching him do the same three feet away in a barn that smells like hay and sweat and the last of the Ombré Leather coming off his collar in the warmth.
"You're staring, Tatum."
"I'm assessing your range of motion."
"Uh-huh."
He turns the stallion out into the north pasture. I lean on the fence rail beside him, and that's when the black runs.
He runs the fence line in long rolling strides that eat the distance without effort, twelve hundred pounds of muscle and patience covering ground like it owes him something.
Mane and tail streaming, the sun catching the black of him and turning it almost blue, and the granite wall of the Front behind everything, and he runs like he is carrying the whole weight of this valley on his back and has decided it is not heavy.
I watch him and the word arrives without my permission.
"Trane."
Not a question. I say it looking at the fence line, not at Holt. It sits in the air between us with the sound of hooves on thawing ground underneath it.
One nod. That's the whole transaction.
He doesn't ask where it came from. He knows I found the vinyl. He knows I found the nickname in his kitchen, heard it leave his mouth easy and owned, a word that belonged to him before I ever touched it.
I just put it on the one thing he owns that he never bothered to name, and he let me.
"Brought huckleberry bread." Sage is leaning on the gate behind us with two mugs, and I have no idea how long she's been standing there. Long enough.
From the look on Holt's face, he didn't hear her come down either.
Nobody sneaks up on this man. Sage does.
"Grandmother's recipe," she adds, handing me a mug.
Coffee, with cream. Her eyes are light brown and miss nothing, a family trait distributed unevenly and landed hardest in this one.
"Nobody was at the house so I walked down. You two look like you've been riding."
"Followed a lead."
"On horseback?" She says it like she's tasting the shape of it. "Huh."
Holt whistles once, short, and the stallion turns at the far end of the fence line and comes back at a trot.
"Trane," he says. "Come on."
Three words, spoken to a horse ten feet from his sister, and Sage's coffee stops halfway to her mouth.
She looks at the horse, at her brother, and she looks at me, standing in the mid-morning light with mud on my boots and the name of an animal I had no right to give hanging in the air between us like evidence.
She doesn't ask and doesn't need to.
She takes one long drink of coffee and looks at her brother again.
It is the look of a woman who has been watching a locked door and just heard the deadbolt slide back.
She smiles at me. Warm. Quiet.
I smile back before I can stop myself.
And then I think: everything Sage knows, Gideon knows. And Gideon uses everything.