Page 83 of Claimed on the Ridge

"I'll be here."

He turns and walks into the main room. I hear the scratch of a match and the pop of kindling catching. The smell of burning pine pushes through the doorway, and the lodge starts to warm.

The afternoon light shifts across the kitchen table. The notepad is full. The satellite phone is within reach, and somewhere between Amberly's clinic and Anchorage, the warning shot is already on its way.

I push back from the table and stand. My shoulders ache from hours of writing. My coffee has gone cold, and the light through the windows is the deep amber of late afternoon on the ridge.

I pull on my coat and walk outside. The air is sharp and clean and the sky is wide open above the tree line. The shed sits at the edge of the yard, door half-open, and through the gap I can see the hood of the truck I drove here from Fairbanks. The truck that still has gas and still faces the access road and still represents the simplest version of the decision I've been carrying since I arrived.

Four years of being furniture. Four years of pouring wine and clearing plates and sleeping next to someone who thought I was too stupid to read upside down.

I walk past the truck without looking… the not-looking is the choice.

20

ALEX

Kendall stands at the kitchen table with the notepad flat beneath both hands and the satellite phone beside it, and the woman looking at me across the pine is not the same woman who arrived at this lodge in a storm with a fake name and a bag she wouldn't let me carry.

I was stacking wood. Splitting kindling. Running perimeter checks and briefing my brothers on a playbook built for threats I understand: men on the access road, boots on the ground, the physical defense of a physical position.

While I was doing that, she was sitting at my kitchen table building the weapon that makes my playbook secondary.

The dead man's switch handles Gary's institutional power, the social standing and business relationships that made him untouchable. My contribution is the porch, the brothers, the rifles. Hers is the intelligence that turns his empire into a liability.

Together it works.

Neither piece is sufficient alone.

"The freelancers from the porch are done," I tell her. "Morrow confirmed it. Gary's cascade is running. Nobody wants to work for a man whose empire is collapsing in real time."

"Good." The word is flat and satisfied.

Her chin lifts. Her gaze carries years of a woman who understands exactly what her husband becomes when his control starts bleeding away.

"Gary doesn't lose well," she says. "When the institutional power fails, he falls back on the version that works in private. The version that broke my ribs."

I hold her gaze. My hands close at my sides, slow, my knuckles whitening.

"If he comes here," I say, "he doesn't get past the porch."

"I know." She picks up the notepad and flips to a clean page. "That's why I'm still here."

The morning passes. Bryan's patrol report comes in clean. Dash checks the south trail and reports the ground firm. Cameron is in the equipment shed running maintenance on the snowmobile, and the sound of the wrench echoes across the yard in the cold air.

I'm replacing a hinge on the mudroom door when I hear it.

An engine on the access road.

Wrong pitch for any vehicle that belongs on this mountain. Too quiet, too smooth. The sound of a sedan on a road built for trucks with clearance and four-wheel drive.

My body goes still before the thought catches up. I set the screwdriver on the porch rail. My hand finds the rifle leaning against the wall by the door.

Bryan appears from the tree line. He moves to the left side of the porch without a word, rifle shouldered low. Cameron comes out of the equipment shed, wiping his hands on a rag, and takes position near the trucks. Dash materializes from wherever Dash goes when he's not visible, which is most of the time, and posts at the corner of the lodge.

The sedan comes around the last bend. A rental. Dark paint, Anchorage plates, leather seats visible through the windshield.Built for conference room parking lots, not switchbacks. It bottoms out on the first rut, and the scrape of metal on frozen ground reaches across the yard.

Gary Simmons parks at the edge of the gravel lot. He sits in the car for a long moment, hands on the wheel, face partially visible through the glass. Then he opens the door and steps out.