CHAPTER FIVE
MAEVE
The call comes through the mounted team’s line, which should be my first warning.
A rescue horse loose near the Hanging Rock trailhead, spotted by a hiker who drove out of cell range before reporting it to the Sloans’ ranch manager, who passed it to us.
One of ours, possibly, a bay gelding from the loan pool.
I log it, check the roster, and drive out alone, because a loose horse at a trailhead is a routine recovery and I’ve done a hundred of them.
The Hanging Rock lot is empty when I get there. No hiker’s car. No horse. Just the trail winding up into the rocks and the evening going gold at the edges, and Harper Sloan leaning against my trailer fender with her arms crossed, waiting, casual as a woman expecting a valet.
Every alarm I own goes off at once. I’m reaching for the radio when she starts talking.
“You couldn’t leave it alone.” She pushes off the fender. “The horse story even worked on the great Maeve Valentine. My family has been supplying your little club for years. Did you really think I wouldn’t know how your calls come in?”
“There’s no horse.” I keep my hand on the radio. “You faked a rescue call to get me alone. Do you have any idea what that is?”
“What it is, is the only way to get you to listen.” She comes closer, and she’s not drunk, not hysterical.
That’s what scares me. She’s calm and certain and shining with it.
“Wade chose me the night of the fundraiser. Not the affair, before that. He saw what I did and he protected me anyway, over you, over his own wife, in his own station. That’s love.
Not lust. He just needed you broken enough to put away. ”
“Harper.” My voice comes out almost gentle, because I finally see the whole of it, the obscene logic she’s been living inside.
“Wade chose Wade. He always chooses Wade. If he’d chosen you, you wouldn’t be a secret he keeps in an interrogation room.
He’d have divorced me and married you and put you on the campaign stage.
” I shake my head. “He told you it was me standing in the way. It was never me. It’s the office.
You were only ever safe as long as you were hidden. ”
Her face does something then, and I understand too late that I just took a hammer to the one structurally sound wall in her life.
“I staged that night because he wouldn’t leave you.
” Her voice goes high and raw. “Everyone loved you. The perfect sheriff’s wife, the rescue hero.
I showed him you could fall, and he helped, and you still didn’t fall far enough.
Do you understand what he gave me? He destroyed his own wife in front of the whole county because I asked him to.
That’s the most anyone has ever loved me. ”
She expects me to see it as a love letter. She’s standing there bruised by her own waiting, and she wants me to understand that my handcuffs were her valentine. It’s the loneliest, most deformed thing I’ve ever heard, and for half a second I actually pity her.
Then she hits me.
No warning, a closed fist into my mouth that snaps my head around and fills it with copper, and then she’s on me, both hands in my hair, driving me backward into the side of my own truck hard enough to rock it on its springs.
My skull rings off the panel. She knees me in the thigh, goes for my eyes with her nails, and this is not a movie fight. There’s no choreography, it’s ugly and close and desperate, all elbows and grunting and gravel.
I don’t fight pretty. I fight like a rescuer, because that’s what I am.
I stop trying to hit her and start managing her body, drop my weight, turn into the grip exactly as we drill it in training, use her own momentum when she yanks my hair to roll her past me into the gravel.
She’s up faster than me, madder than me, and she claws a strip down my cheek that lights my whole face on fire. I taste blood and dirt.
Somewhere in the middle of it I realize she’s crying while she fights, sobbing curses at me between swings, and that almost costs me, because for one heartbeat I go soft, and soft gets you killed.
She grabs a fistful of my hair and smashes my face toward the tailgate, and I only get my hand up in time to keep my teeth. She gets behind me and her forearm comes across my throat, then both hands, and the world goes spotty at the edges while she hisses things in my ear I stop being able to hear.
I drive backward into the truck again, use it as a wall, get a foot behind hers and throw us both into the dirt.
The grip breaks. I roll, coughing, and come up with a mouthful of gravel and one clear thought: the beacon.
My gear bag is in the open truck bed, three yards away, and the emergency beacon is on the strap where it always is.
I get two fingers on it and thumb it live just as Harper swings the flashlight.
It’s my own heavy mag light, and I realize in the same frozen instant that she didn’t find it in the scramble. She brought it. It was waiting on the fender where she was leaning when I drove in, which means she planned this down to the weapon, and there’s no time to be afraid of what that means.
I get my shoulder up and it catches me glancing across the collarbone instead of the temple, white-hot, and her follow-through carries her, all that rage and none of it aimed, straight past me toward the edge where the trail drops off into the rocks.
She goes over.
I lunge and catch her wrist with both hands. Her whole body weight comes onto my ruined shoulder and my knees grind into the trail edge, and underneath us it’s a straight forty feet onto stone. She’s screaming, kicking, and I am holding Harper Sloan over the drop with everything I have left.
She framed me. She took my marriage, my name, my reputation, she tried to take my life just now, and I am going to save her anyway, because this is who I am and who she never was, and some stubborn part of me needs her alive to know it.
I haul her up one burning inch at a time until her elbow comes over the edge, then her shoulder, then she’s scrabbling onto the trail on her belly, and the second she’s safe, the very second, she twists around and swings at me again.
“Are you out of your mind?” I catch her wrist, pin it, and hold her down in the dirt, and that’s how Luke finds us.
I hear the helicopter first, then boots, a whole wave of them. The beacon did its job and Luke was already airborne on a training loop with half my duty crew.
Lights come on everywhere. Hands pull us apart. Somebody wraps me in a space blanket I’m too wired to feel the cold for, and Harper, muddy, bleeding from one scraped elbow, finds her voice with the speed of long practice.
“She attacked me. She called me out here and attacked me, she tried to push me off the edge, everyone saw, tell them-”
Nobody answers her. My crew is looking at my face, my throat, my lip, and Luke is standing very still in a way I’ve learned means he’s angry.
Carlos has my gear bag open and the beacon in his hand, showing it to Ramona, pointing at the timestamp, because Carlos knows my habits and knows that beacon went live before anyone screamed for help.
He doesn’t say anything yet. He just makes sure people see it.
Then the patrol SUV rolls in, and Wade gets out, and the whole trailhead goes quiet, because everyone here knows everyone’s business now.
He looks at me first. He takes in the blood on my face, the marks on my neck, my torn shirt, and I watch him see it, every mark, and understand exactly what it means.
“Wade.” Harper’s voice, small and hurt and perfected.
He walks past me. Past his bleeding wife, past eighteen years, past everything, and goes straight to Harper Sloan and puts his hands on her shoulders and asks her if she’s hurt.
Nobody says a word. The canyon holds its breath. And I stand in my space blanket with my split lip and watch the last living part of my marriage finish dying, not with a scream, not even with anger, just with Wade Valentine’s back turned to me in front of twelve witnesses.
Good, I think, distant and clear, over the sound of the helicopter winding down. Look at him. Everybody look at him.