Page 32 of Claimed on the Ridge

"She's a stranger with a fake name who flinches at loud noises and favors her ribs. Whoever she's running from is going to come looking, and when they do, they're going to find all of us standing in front of her."

The conversation continues, but I've stopped hearing it. The word repeats in my head, a frequency I know by heart.

'Liability.'

I'm upstairs before the word finishes echoing. The bag is under the bed where I left it.

The motions are automatic, drilled in by years of knowing that the time between deciding to leave and actually leaving is the most dangerous window.

I put clothes in the bag, count the cash, plan the route. Kendall Jackson's emergency evacuation protocol runs itselfwith the efficiency of a woman who has had way too much practice.

My hands are shaking. The tremor is back, the one that disappeared at the kitchen counter the night I came downstairs for coffee, and the return of it is its own kind of grief.

I fold the last shirt, zip the bag, and set it on the bed.

Then I stop.

The bag sits on the quilt, packed and ready, and I look at it the way I've looked at packed bags in every apartment and hotel room Gary chased me out of. The bag is muscle memory. The bag is the last years of my life in a single gesture.

The familiarity of it, the practiced ease with which I can reduce my existence to what fits in a duffel, is the thing that finally makes me angry enough to sit down.

Bryan called me a liability. Bryan is also the man who hasn't looked at me directly since I arrived, who communicates in loaded silences and ammunition inventory, and whose opinion of my presence should carry exactly the weight I give it.

Alex called me something else. Alex stood in this lodge and told me he wanted every detail and a name. Alex crossed a kitchen this morning and held my jaw in his hand and read me like terrain, and when he let go the decision not to push was written in every line of him. Not patience. Choice. The choice of a man who could take what he wanted and decided to wait for me to give it.

His mouth brushing mine at the bar. The grip in my hair. His voice saying'what comes after that won't be a test.'The place on my hip where his fingers closed over the bone is still warm, a handprint I can feel through the fabric.

Gary gave flowers and apologies. Alex gives me the door and doesn't follow me through it, and the difference between those two things is the difference between a man who controls you and a man who controls himself.

I put the bag on the floor. I do not unpack it.

The quilt is cool against my back. I press my face into the pillow and the flannel case smells like the lodge, cedar and cold air and the faint warmth of a home that belongs to someone else.

His grip is still in my hair. His breath is still on my lips. The promise he made with his mouth half an inch from mine is still running through my body, settling low, gathering heat in the places where his weight would have pinned me if he'd stopped waiting.

The bruise aches where Amberly's fingers pressed during the exam. The wanting aches underneath everything else, low and persistent, settling between my thighs where it has no intention of being ignored.

The cover story expires in the morning. Tonight, I say the word.

8

ALEX

The lodge is quiet. Kendall went upstairs after dinner and hasn't come back down. The third step creaked under her weight, then nothing. Her door closed.

I'm behind the bar wiping down the surface when headlights sweep across the front windows. An engine cuts. Boots on the porch steps.

Amberly comes in through the kitchen door and stamps snow off her boots. She shrugs out of her coat and hangs it on the hook. She pulls off her gloves and pours herself coffee without asking. Normal.

My sister doesn't lie. She also doesn't break confidence. The distinction between those two things is written all over her face. The way she holds the mug against her sternum with both hands and watches my face before she speaks is not normal.

"Kendall came in today," she says.

"Cameron mentioned."

Amberly nods. She drinks. She doesn't say anything else about the visit, and the silence is louder than a diagnosis.

My sister has our mother's face and our mother's hands, but the spine is entirely her own. She built that clinic from nothing and serves a town that doesn't have enough people to justifya full-time medical provider. The word bruise never leaves her mouth. It doesn't need to.