Page 78 of Claimed on the Ridge

The hatchet comes down. The cedar falls apart. My hands are steady on the handle. They're always steady.

Through the kitchen window, Kendall is at the table with her notepad and a second mug of coffee. One bare foot is tucked under her, the other flat on the pine. Her handwriting moves fastacross the page, certain. The hand that bent the notepad paper earlier is steady now. Steady on purpose.

She's building something.

The focus on her face is the same focus she wears when she's under me and deciding whether to let go. The wanting that hits me has nothing to do with the flannel or the thigh or the mark below her ear. It's her mind. The way it works. The speed of it. The fact that she's sitting in my lodge dismantling the man who put bruises on her ribs, and she's doing it with a pen and a phone and the kind of cold focus that makes my hands ache to be on her.

The hatchet bites deeper into the next piece than it needs to.

I carry an armload of kindling inside and rebuild the fire. Cedar over crumpled newspaper, two small logs on top. Match to paper. The flame catches. Burning pine pushes the ash smell out, and the lodge starts to warm.

Kendall appears in the doorway with her notepad in one hand and the satellite phone in the other. She leans against the doorframe and crosses one ankle over the other, and the casual stance is a weapon she deploys on purpose.

"The security firm dropped Gary six months ago," she says. "Morrow confirmed. The two men from the porch were freelance. Gary's institutional support is thinner than he wants anyone to believe."

She crosses to the leather chair and sits on the arm. Opens the notepad to a page covered in diagrams and connection lines, Morrow's intel annotated over her own work.

"The missing persons report is his strongest play. Everything else is eroding. If we make the report more expensive to pursue than to drop, his legal leverage collapses." She taps the notepad with her pen. "The report names me as Kendall Simmons. If I make a statement to troopers as Kendall Mitchell, using my own name, confirming I'm here voluntarily, the report contradictsitself. A woman who isn't missing can't be the subject of a missing persons case."

"He filed under your married name."

"He filed under the only name he thinks I have." She looks up, and the smile that crosses her face is sharp enough to draw blood. "And personally, Gary has never done his own work. He hires hands, and the hands already quit."

She's thought this through. While I was stacking wood and splitting kindling and running the playbook that doesn't work, she was sitting at my kitchen table building the one that does. The diagrams on that notepad aren't guesses. They're the product of a woman who spent four years inside an operation and walked out with the blueprints in her head.

"Bryan will brief you directly on perimeter status. Morning and afternoon."

She tilts her head. One degree.

"I didn't ask for that."

"You don't need to ask for information that affects your safety."

The words come out, and I hear them land. Close enough to last night to sting. She hears it too. Her chin lifts, and her gaze is direct and hot enough to make me shift my weight.

"Progress," she says. "Yesterday you'd have kept that to yourself."

"Yesterday was yesterday."

"That's not the ringing endorsement of personal growth you think it is, Sawyer."

"Wasn't trying for personal growth. I was trying for operational efficiency."

"Of course you were." She picks up the notepad and the phone and walks back to the kitchen. The flannel sways against the backs of her thighs, and she knows I'm watching. She doesn't look back. She doesn't need to.

The afternoon runs in parallel. Kendall at the table, building her map with Morrow's intel. I split wood, check the perimeter with Dash, take Bryan's report on road conditions.

Dash doesn't ask about last night. He doesn't ask about the keys on the table or the woman at his brother's kitchen table running an intelligence operation on a notepad. He asks about the south access trail and whether the melt has softened the ground enough to worry about. I tell him it hasn't. He nods and heads back to the tree line. Dash has always been the one who understands that the most useful thing you can do for a man carrying weight is stand next to him without mentioning it.

The cold sits in my knuckles when I come back inside, and sawdust clings to the front of my shirt. Kendall glances up when I pass through the kitchen. Her eyes drop to the sawdust on my chest, travel the length of my arms, and come back to my face with an expression that is absolutely not professional. Her writing slows for half a second before she looks back down.

I keep walking. If I stop, I'll put my hands on her, and she's not offering that right now.

At the sink I run water over my forearms, washing the sawdust and the cold out of the creases of my knuckles. Behind me, Kendall's pen moves across the notepad. The scratch of it against the paper is steady and deliberate, and the sound fills the kitchen the way conversation would if we were having one. We're not. The silence between us is doing its own work, and neither of us is willing to break it for anything less than something that matters.

Bryan shows up late afternoon. He stands in the kitchen doorway and delivers the patrol report to Kendall, professional and clipped. She listens, asks two questions, notes the answers. He looks at me. I nod. He leaves.

Kendall watches the door close.