Page 6 of Claimed on the Ridge

My hand finds the glass and lifts it and sets it back without drinking.

What I have: the way she held that bag. Strap across her body, hand on the buckle, weight distributed for speed. The grip was tight in a way that went past caution into something closer to habit.

Her boots, dropped on the floor upstairs loud enough to hear through the floorboards, are practical enough for an airport or a snowdrift. One pair for everything. A traveler's boots, or a runner's.

What I also have, and what sits less comfortably: the way she looked at me when she thought I was still behind the bar. Her eyes went to my hands first. Then my shoulders. Then the distance between us. The sequence was fast and automatic, a scan a person runs without deciding to, and it told me she has reasons for checking that I'm not going to learn tonight.

Embers shift in the fireplace. The lodge settles.

Upstairs, behind the door she locked with a deadbolt click I heard all the way down the staircase, Kendall Jackson, whose name isn't Kendall Jackson, is either sleeping or lying awake calculating exit routes. Based on the evidence, I'd bet on the second one.

The whiskey goes down the bar sink. Glasses washed, dried, and racked.

The routine is older than my claim on this lodge, inherited from a father who kept everything running through force and habit and the absolute unwillingness to let anything under his roof exist outside his control.

Front door. Locked. Side entrance off the kitchen. Locked. Windows on the ground floor latched and frosted solid, the storm piling snow against the porch steps in a drift that will need shoveling before anyone opens the front door tomorrow.

Building sealed. Everything in it accounted for.

The awareness that this includes the woman on the second-floor registers and doesn't leave.

I take the stairs the way I always do, weight on the outside edges where the treads don't talk. Third step gets the inside shift that puts pressure on the joist instead of the board, and the step stays quiet.

Her door is closed. The strip of light underneath is gone, either because she turned off the lamp or because she's lying in the dark with her eyes open, and I'm not going to stand in this hallway speculating about which one.

My room is eight feet away. The wall between us is old-growth timber, thick enough to muffle almost everything. Almost.

I sit on the edge of the bed and pull my boots off, and for the first time in years I'm aware of how much noise the gesture makes in a building this quiet.

Sleep comes in fragments, broken by wind shifts and the awareness of a building with someone new inside it. When the gray light finally pushes through the frost on my window, I've been awake long enough that getting up feels like a decision I already made hours ago.

Morning arrives gray and violent.

The storm hasn't improved. Through the kitchen window, the world has been reduced to a wall of white that starts three feet from the glass, and the ridge behind the lodge has disappeared entirely. Wind gusting past fifty, according to Cameron's weather station in the mudroom, and the temperature readout has stopped updating, which either means the sensor is frozen or the number was low enough that the display ran out of room.

Cameron is already at the stove when I come down. Coffee going, eggs and biscuits in progress, hands moving with the focused efficiency of a man who treats cooking the way he treats engine repair: a series of problems that respond well to the right tools applied in the right order.

"Storm's worse," he says without looking up. "Generator's running fine. Checked the fuel line at five."

"The pass?"

"Called the DOT relay. Closed indefinitely. They're pulling plows off the highway north of Fairbanks."

Indefinitely. The word lands in the space between the coffeepot and the window, and I do the math. Forty-eight hours minimum based on accumulation rate and wind speed. Longer if the system stalls over the range the way these storms sometimes do.

The woman upstairs is going to be here for a while.

"We have a guest," I say.

Cameron looks up from the eggs. "The truck that pulled in around midnight?"

"Kendall Jackson. Drove in from Fairbanks. The pass closed before she could get through."

"Solo?"

"Solo."

Cameron absorbs this the way he absorbs most information, which is with a nod and a return to whatever his hands were doing. Of the four of us, he's the least likely to ask a follow-up question and the most likely to have already formed an opinion he'll keep to himself until it becomes relevant.