Holt #2
I cross to the gun safe anyway, because rage doesn't make a man stupid, it just makes him move faster.
I get the sidearm out left-handed, work the mag free, check the load by feel the way I've done ten thousand times, and set it on the counter within reach of the door instead of putting it away.
If Voss wants to test how useless fifteen percent actually is, he can find out at close range instead of four hundred yards.
The phone rings before either of us can decide what happens next.
Knox, on speaker, because speaker's just easier these days, one hand answering to me instead of two. His voice comes through too bright for the room I'm standing in.
"She said yes."
"Who said yes to what?"
"Maren." A beat, and I can hear him grinning six miles away, which under any other circumstance would be a sentence I'd want to hear. "I asked her yesterday. She said yes before I finished the question."
For half a second I'm glad, all the way through, and then the rest of tonight closes back over it.
"Congratulations," I say, and mean it, and it comes out flatter than I want it to. Too thin, one line and nothing behind it, because there isn't room in me tonight for somebody else's good news. "Buy the ring with cash. Don't let Dad's accountant anywhere near it."
Knox laughs like that's the funniest thing he's heard all week, tells me he'll swing by this weekend, hangs up before I can find another sentence, and the kitchen goes quiet enough that I can hear the trailer gate banging shut in the north pasture, Roy finishing the load without me.
Mackenzie hasn't moved from where she was standing. She's watching me like she watched Jacob's tracks in the snow, careful eyes, patient, waiting on the part that matters.
"Say it," she says.
"Say what?"
"Whatever's underneath the ring joke. I've spent three weeks watching you not say things, and I'm done letting you get away with it."
"There's nothing underneath it."
"There's a man standing at a window watching his brother's whole life move forward while his own hand won't close, and you want me to believe there's nothing underneath that?"
Something in me finally gives, all at once, the way a fence line gives after a winter of ice finding every weak point in it.
I turn on her then, and I know before I open my mouth that whatever comes out is going to be the meanest thing I've said to her since a study with a dead man's folder open on the desk, and I say it anyway, because there's nowhere else in this house to put it.
"Why are you still here?"
"Excuse me."
"You heard me." My voice has gone somewhere low and dirty and entirely without permission.
I let it, because permission is one more thing that got taken from me on that hillside and I'm done asking for it back.
"You've got no case, no fucking badge, and a man who can't hold a rifle or sign his own name.
I keep waiting for you to figure out there's nothing left here worth staying for and you keep not figuring it out, and I can't decide if that makes you stubborn or if it makes you sorry for me, and I don't know which one I hate worse. "
The kitchen goes very quiet.
I watch her eyes blaze. I watch her take it, the whole nasty weight of it, and I wait for her to reach for her coat, for the door, for anything that proves the thing I just said out loud instead of only fearing it. At least then I'd know. At least then the not-knowing would be over.
She doesn't move for the coat.
"Pity doesn't stitch a man's arm in a line shack and then climb into that bed with him," she says, quiet, no heat in it, which is worse than heat, because heat I could match.
"Pity doesn't drive a truck with a man bleeding out in the passenger seat and radio it in on her own name, unbadged, because there wasn't a version of that night where she left you to somebody slower.
I've had a lot of feelings about you since a truck idled outside an airport, Holt Blackwater. Pity has never once been on the list."
"Then what's on the list?"
"Come find out."
She crosses the kitchen like she crossed a hospital room. This time there's no bed rail and no monitor leads to work around. Just a man with a bad hand and a worse mouth standing at a window he's been hiding behind all night.
She doesn't wait for him to decide he's ready.
Her hand finds the front of my shirt, fists in it, and pulls. I go, because some part of me that's been standing at attention since a father's study three weeks ago has been waiting for somebody to give it a different order.
"I'm not made of glass," I tell her, all gravel, because I need her to know it before this goes any further. "Whatever you're about to do, don't do it careful."
"I wasn't planning on careful." She gets my shirt open one agonizing button at a time.
Her fingers find the scroll over my chest first, tracing the shape of it, then the small line of numbers underneath that she's never once asked me to explain, before trailing slow down the dark ink on my good arm like she's re-memorizing ground she already owns.
"Careful is what everybody's been doing to you for three weeks. Careful is what's got you standing at a window hating your own hand. I'm done being careful with you, Blackwater. Sit down."
I sit, because there's no version of tonight where I don't do exactly what that voice tells me to.
She straddles my lap on the kitchen chair, both knees bracketing my hips, and gets her mouth on mine before I can say anything else stupid. It isn't gentle and it isn't an apology dressed up as a kiss. It's a woman staking a claim on something everybody else in this house has quietly written off.
My good hand finds her waist. The bad one comes up on instinct, tries to find those silky strands of gold and amber, and gets halfway there before the fingers lock, shake, and drop into my lap like something that isn't mine anymore.
I go still under her.
"Don't," she says, before the shame gets all the way up my throat. "Don't you dare apologize to me with your face right now."
"It doesn't work."
"I know it doesn't work. I'm not asking it to work." She takes my bad hand first, careful of the pins still sticking out along the back of it and sets it down gently on my own thigh instead of holding it, like she's putting something fragile somewhere safe before she does anything else.
Then she reaches for my good arm and runs her thumb along the old line where she stitched me herself in a line shack in a blizzard, the first scar she ever gave me before this one took the rest. "You're a mess, Holt Blackwater. Broken and scarred and too brave for your own good."
She comes back for the bad hand, lifts it careful of the hardware, and guides it to rest against her ribs, over her heart, palm flat, nothing asked of it. "This hand doesn't have to do a single thing tonight except be here."
I feel her heartbeat under my palm, quick and real and not slowing down for either of us. Something in my chest that's been locked comes apart at the seam.
She takes her time with the rest of me. Not fast, not the transactional pace of a woman proving a point the way she did once in a line shack at dawn.
She works my shirt the rest of the way off and looks at what's underneath it, the old ink.
Her mouth follows where her eyes go. My collarbone.
The scroll over my heart. The designs down the long muscle of my good arm, and then, careful, deliberate, the broken hand, her lips ghosting over the scars like she could kiss the damage smaller if she took long enough at it.
"Christ, don't stop."
"Wasn't planning on it." She doesn't lift her head.
She works my belt loose without asking, without slowing down for the question in my face, and gets me out of my jeans slow enough that I have to grip the edge of the chair, taking her sweet time about it.
She doesn't wait for me to reciprocate. She strips out of her own shirt one-handed, braced on my shoulder with the other.
I get my good hand on the clasp of her bra and she lets me have that, lets me fumble it one-handed like I've had to fumble everything for three weeks, patient, watching my face instead of my hand while I work it.
When it finally gives, she doesn't laugh at how long it took. She just leans in and puts her mouth against my ear.
"See?" she says, quiet. "Still works fine."
She steps back just far enough to work her jeans and underwear off in one motion, no rush to it even now, then climbs back onto my lap and straddles me again, nothing left between us at all.
I get both hands on her then, the good one flat against her spine and the bad one resting against her ribs where she wants it, not gripping, just there. She glances down between us, and her mouth goes wicked and satisfied, because whatever else three weeks has broken, my cock never got the memo.
She wraps her hand around the base of me and strokes my full erection, slow, deliberate, until a bead of pre-cum wells at the tip and I growl fuck through my teeth.
She lets go of me right before I lose it completely, and the cold air hits me where her hand was a second ago.
My hips thrust up into nothing on pure instinct. Fuck, I missed this.
She reaches past me to the counter without a word, comes back with foil between two fingers, and tears it open herself.
I go to take it from her out of old habit and she shakes her head, slow, and rolls it down over me herself instead.
Like handling the one thing my bad hand can't manage tonight is a claim she's staking.
Then she slides two fingers into her own mouth, wetting them slow, watching my face the whole time she does it, and reaches down between her own thighs to get herself ready, taking her time, like she's got all night to torture me with the sight of it.