Page 5 of Claimed on the Ridge

"Breakfast is at seven. If we lose power overnight, it'll be coffee and whatever Cameron can manage on the woodstove, but you won't go hungry."

He is standing in the doorway. Still taking up most of it.

His eyes move over my face one more time, and the quality of the attention is something I can't quite categorize. It's too careful to be casual. Too steady to be predatory. He is looking at me the way a man looks at a knot he intends to untie. The patience in it, the absolute, unhurried willingness to stand here until he's seen what he came to see, is more disarming than anything he's said.

"Get some sleep," he says. Then he turns and walks down the hall.

I shut the door behind me and turn the lock. The click of the deadbolt is the first sound I've trusted in four years.

The room is warm and clean. A queen bed with flannel sheets, a down comforter, and a handmade quilt folded across the top. Antique dresser and nightstand, the kind of furniture that probably came with the building and has outlasted everything else. A leather wingback chair angled toward the fireplace with a small side table beside it. A cedar chest at the foot of the bed.

A window facing the ridge, frosted over completely.

The fireplace Alex just lit is already pushing heat into the corners, and the whole room smells like cedar and clean linen and a kind of comfort that makes my throat tight for reasons I am not going to examine.

The kind of room that should feel safe, which is exactly the kind of thought I dismantle before it has time to settle.

My bag goes on the cedar chest at the foot of the bed, close enough to grab on the way to the door. The exits are the door and the window. The window is double-paned and heavy, but the latch is simple and the drop to the porch roof below is manageable. Two options. Better than the airport chair in Fairbanks and the truck cab at a pullout south of Delta Junction.

I sit on the edge of the bed and pull off my boots. The quiet of the room presses in, and for the first time since Sitka the world has stopped moving around me.

His footsteps retreat down the hallway and back down the stairs, each one landing with the deliberate weight of a man who is not finished with his night. Then the sounds fade into the floor below, and I am alone on the second floor of a lodge owned by a man I met twenty minutes ago in a town that has spray-painted over its own existence.

The lock is real. The fire is warm. The down comforter settles over me with a weight that feels like safety, and I am not sure which part of any of this is supposed to make me feel safe and which part should terrify me. And none of that matters as much as it should, because what I am listening to is the sound of Alex Sawyer moving around the lodge, and the way my pulse responds to the proximity is not fear.

It should be fear. Every pattern my body has learned over four years is telling me to categorize a large, quiet, observant man as a threat.

But the pattern is scrambled, crossed with something else. The way he looked at my face instead of my body. The way he handed me a key to a room with a lock that works. The way he stepped back from the doorway so I wouldn't have to brush against him walking through. The way he offered his hand for my bag and, when I said no, closed his fingers and moved on without a mark on his pride.

Gary would not have moved on. Gary would have taken the bag, because Gary does not recognize the word "no" as a complete sentence, and the taking would have been gentle and solicitous and wrapped in enough charm that anyone watching would have seen a thoughtful husband helping his wife.

The violence in Gary lives in the gentleness. The control is in the courtesy. Four years of learning that vocabulary has left me fluent in a language I never wanted to speak.

Alex Sawyer closed his hand and nodded, and the nod said: your bag, your call. And then he turned his back on me, which is either trust or indifference, and right now I'm not sure I can tell which.

The practical part of my brain takes over, the part that has kept me alive for four years. The distance remaining to the Canadian border. The hours until the pass might open. The hours until Gary calls the hospital in Sitka and learns I left days ago, and the specific, detailed things that happen after that phone call.

Then the lodge settles into silence, and I am alone in a warm bed in a locked room on a mountain I can't leave, and the man in this lodge is the most dangerous thing here. Not because of what he might do. Because of what I'm already starting to want him to.

2

ALEX

The whiskey sits untouched on the bar. Embers glow where the fire used to be, and the main room holds the heavy silence of a building that has finished the day's business and is waiting to see what kind of night it gets. Outside, the wind has shifted from a roar to a sustained pressure against the walls, the kind that doesn't let up but stops announcing itself, and the lodge absorbs it the way it absorbs everything. Creaking timber, settling stone, the low hum of a generator Cameron will check at dawn.

The woman upstairs said her name is Kendall Jackson, and the half-second gap between her first name and her last is still sitting in the center of my chest like a stone I swallowed wrong.

I should care about the lie. I should be turning it over, testing its edges, deciding what kind of threat a woman with a borrowed name brings into my lodge during a blizzard. That is the responsible calculation, and it's the one I keep starting and failing to finish.

Because the calculation keeps getting interrupted by the way she looked at me when she thought I was still behind the bar. Not the scan, which was thorough and clinical. The other look. The one underneath it, when her eyes held mine a beat longerthan the scan required and something in her expression shifted from reading me to seeing me. The seeing had nothing to do with whether I was dangerous.

That look is the problem. The lie I can work with. The look is going to be harder.

People lie in Sawyer's Ridge. Hunters lie about what they shot. Fishermen lie about what they caught. Contractors lie about when they'll finish. I note the lies, adjust for the discrepancy, and move on.

She isn't lying the way those people lie.

Her lie had a quality I can't name yet. Not grifting, not carelessness. The pause before her last name had weight to it, like she was selecting it rather than remembering it, and the selection was practiced enough that most people would miss the seam.