Page 80 of Claimed on the Ridge

The irony of using his own methods against him isn't lost on me.

I just don't care.

This handles Gary's institutional power. The social standing and business connections that let him weaponize the legal system. The dead man's switch makes all of that a liability instead of an asset. If anything happens to me—if I disappear, if I'm removed from this ridge, if I stop checking in—the information goes public and Gary's world catches fire.

But it doesn't stop a truck on the access road. If Gary sends men, or comes himself, emails don't hold a perimeter. I need the Sawyers for that. Alex's strength and his brothers' presence handle the physical threat my intelligence can't touch. Neither of us is sufficient alone.

The recognition settles in my chest like a weight I've been trying to set down. I need Alex Sawyer. Not in the way Gary needed me—as a performance piece, a woman-shaped decoration for his dining room table. I need Alex the way a strategy needs enforcement. The way a plan needs someone willing to stand behind it.

And the wanting underneath the needing—the heat that runs through my stomach when he passes through a doorway, the ache in my hands when his shoulder brushes mine—that's a separate question.

One I'm not ready to answer.

But I'm done pretending it doesn't exist.

I pick up the satellite phone and call Amberly.

She answers almost immediately. The clinic has internet — prescriptions, insurance billing, the digital infrastructure that keeps a medical practice running even in remote Alaska. She has what I need.

"I'm going to dictate," I tell her. "You type. Pre-addressed emails to the recipients I specify. You hold them. If I miss a check-in, you send them."

Amberly doesn't ask why. Something in the pause before she speaks tells me she's been expecting this call — or one like it — for longer than I've been on this ridge.

"How often do you check in?" she asks.

"Every morning. If I miss one, you send everything."

"Define everything."

"Financial records. Names. Transaction details. The kind of information that starts IRS inquiries and ends business relationships." I flip to the next page of the notepad. "Gary built his power on respectability. These emails turn that respectability into evidence."

Silence on the line. I can hear the clinic behind her — the hum of the heating system, the faint click of a keyboard. She's already at her computer.

"And if it works?" she asks.

"Then I check in every morning and the emails never go out and Gary Simmons spends the rest of his life knowing that a woman he treated like furniture has a finger on the detonator."

"You sound like you've been planning this for a while."

"Four years. I just didn't have a phone and a woman I trusted on the other end of it."

The silence that follows has weight. Amberly doesn't do sentimentality. Neither do I. But the trust is real, and I wonder what it cost her to learn to give it, growing up the way she did.

"Where do you want the warning shot?" she asks.

I give her the name. One of Gary's associates, someone whose involvement in a particular real estate transaction would not survive daylight. I dictate the email line by line. It doesn't contain threats. It contains facts — dates, dollar amounts, the name of a company that exists on paper and nowhere else. Thefact that it comes from outside Gary's control, from a woman who was never supposed to know any of this, is the threat.

Amberly reads it back to me. Word for word, precise, the calm professionalism of a woman who examines bruised ribs and keeps her mouth shut until the patient is ready to talk.

"I'll have it sent by end of day," she says. "The rest I hold until you miss a check-in or tell me otherwise."

"Amberly."

"Yes."

"Thank you."

"Don't thank me. Just call every morning." A pause. "And Kendall — my brother is not my father. He's close enough to scare me sometimes, but he's not. I need you to know that I believe that, because the woman holding these emails needs to believe it too."