Page 69 of Claimed on the Ridge

What Comes Next.

16

ALEX

The fire burns low twice before dawn comes. Each time I cross to the hearth, rebuild it, and go back to the couch where the rifle is leaning by the armrest.

Kendall writes in the chair across from me. The scratch of her pen against paper is the only sound in the lodge besides the fire and the wind outside.

She hasn't slept. I haven't either. The difference between us is that she's using the hours and I'm spending them, watching the door and listening for an engine on the access road. No engine comes.

The satellite phone sits on the counter in the kitchen where I left it. Bryan called a while ago. Cameron is fine. The word "fine" hit like a fist unclenching.

Bryan found his truck on the lower switchback with the cab empty. Cameron heard the SUV coming, pulled off the road, and tracked the vehicle on foot through the tree line instead of breaking cover to answer the phone. He got the plate number from behind while the SUV climbed past his position. The same number Bryan pulled from the overlook.

My brother improvised a surveillance position in the dark while I was standing in the doorway lying to the men he was tracking. That's why I put him on the road.

"Cameron?" Kendall asks without looking up from her notepad.

"Bryan found him. He's fine."

She nods. Her pen doesn't stop moving. She heard the calls I made last night, the phone ringing out, the silence where Cameron's voice should have been. She doesn't ask for details because the tone told her what she needed to know.

The relief I feel is the kind I bury. My brothers are alive. The perimeter held. The men came and left and learned nothing useful. I stood in the doorway of my father's lodge and lied to them. The ease of it tells me more about myself than I want to examine. I've been lying about what happens on this mountain since I was old enough to understand what the truth would cost.

Kendall turns a page. The sound pulls my attention from the door to her face.

She's sitting cross-legged in the leather chair with the notepad balanced on one knee, the pen moving with the focus of a woman building a plan rather than recording one. The firelight catches the line of her jaw, the set of her mouth, the way her hair falls across the side of her face and she doesn't push it back because she's occupied.

She's wearing one of my flannels over the clothes she pulled on hours ago. The collar sits wide on her shoulder, exposing the skin I had my mouth on before the world narrowed down to an engine on the access road.

She's not writing a list. She's mapping. I can see the structure from here, the lines and arrows connecting boxes on the page, charting Gary's network, his resources, his patterns. She's building a diagram of the man who broke her ribs, using theintelligence she gathered from years of standing in his kitchen while he talked on speakerphone and forgot she was listening.

The woman in that chair is not someone I need to protect from the storm. She's someone I need to stand next to in it.

The thought hits like a truth I should have seen from the start. She gave my brothers actionable intel. She briefed me on the photo before the knock came. She stayed in the dark kitchen with her back against the wall and kept her breathing controlled while two men described her to the man who'd had her underneath him hours earlier. She did all of that without being asked, without being managed, without waiting for my permission.

I've been treating her like a woman to be managed. She's been operating like a partner I'm too stubborn to recognize.

The first light of dawn reaches through the kitchen window and puts a gray line across the floor. The lodge is shifting from night watch to planning. Outside, the ridge is a dark mass against a sky that's just starting to separate from the horizon.

The snow will catch the light soon. The road will be visible. Whatever comes next will come up that road, and the woman in the chair across from me has spent the night building the map that tells me what shape it will take when it arrives.

"Stop staring at me," she says without looking up. "It's distracting."

"You're mapping his operation."

"I'm mapping what I know of his operation. There are gaps." She looks up. The firelight puts gold in her hair and shadow under her eyes. "Some of those gaps are things you haven't told me."

She's right. The card on the side table is a thread I haven't pulled yet. The number on it connects to someone who connects to Gary, and the structure of that connection is something Kendall can read faster than I can. She lived inside it for years.

I cross the room and sit on the arm of her chair. She doesn't move, doesn't adjust, doesn't make space. She lets me take up the room I take up and keeps writing.

"The rental plates Bryan called in," I say. "Anchorage agency. Dash is running the card number through a contact at the borough office this morning."

"That'll give you a name. The name won't be Gary's."

"I know."