Page 85 of Claimed on the Ridge

My fist finds his ribs. Left side, below the chest. The exact place where he'd left the bruise I'd traced in the dark. He makes a sound that I don't process as language. My hand closes in his collar and I hit him again. The blood on his face spreads across the pine, marking the distance between the man he presented to the world and the man he was behind closed doors.

Underneath me, Gary's mouth moves. The concerned-husband tone starts to reassemble itself, the muscle memory of a performance so practiced it tries to run even now, with blood in his teeth and his face against the pine.

"We can?—"

My fist ends it.

The composure doesn't come back after that.

Bryan lets it go longer than he should. I know this because I can feel the time passing in the rhythm of my fists, and Bryan is still standing to my left with his rifle low and his mouth shut.When he finally steps in, his hand lands on my shoulder with a grip that says he knows what's happening on this porch is earned and also knows that another thirty seconds turns earned into a consequence neither of us can undo.

"Alex." Bryan's voice. Quiet. "Enough."

It isn't enough. It never will be, because the kind of damage Gary Simmons did cannot be repaid in blood on a porch.

"Alex."

Kendall's voice. Once. From the doorway.

My hands stop.

Not because of Bryan's grip on my shoulder. Because her voice cuts through the red in my head when nothing else on this ridge ever could, and the sound of my name on her lips is the only authority I've ever wanted to answer to.

I stand up. My knuckles are split and the blood on my hands isn't mine. Gary Simmons is down, his face opened up, swelling already distorting the features that smiled at charity galas and shook hands at business dinners. The man who controlled Kendall for four years with courtesy and bruises nobody would question is on his back in remote Alaska, and the woman he dismissed is standing in the doorway behind me.

Gary breathes. Shallow, wet. He doesn't try to speak again.

"Cameron," I say.

Cameron crosses the yard without rushing. He pulls Gary to his feet with the impersonal efficiency of a man handling cargo and walks him to the sedan. Gary's legs work, barely. Cameron opens the driver's side door and puts him in the seat.

Gary sits there for a long time. Hands on the wheel, blood dripping from his chin onto the coat that cost more than most people’s rent. The yard is quiet except for the wind in the tree line and the sound of a man trying to breathe through a face that has stopped working.

Bryan stands beside me on the porch.

"He trespassed," he says quietly. "He was told to leave. Kendall called the troopers yesterday on the satellite phone, gave her real name, confirmed she's here voluntarily. The missing persons report is dead. Any trooper taking his call asks why he drove to a remote lodge to confront a woman who says she isn't missing." Bryan looks at the sedan. "Nothing about today works in his favor, Alex."

The engine starts. The sedan pulls out of the lot, slow, one-handed. It bottoms out again on the same rut and the scrape reaches across the yard. Cameron watches until it rounds the bend. Then he picks up his rag, walks back to the equipment shed, and goes back to work on the snowmobile. The wrench starts up again as if the last hour didn't happen. That's Cameron.

The satellite phone is on the kitchen table where Kendall left it. I pick it up and call Morrow to get a progress report. He answers on the second ring, and the update is short. The cascade is speeding up. Attorneys are calling attorneys. The associate who got Kendall's warning shot didn't just panic. He forwarded the financial documentation to a forensic accountant. The accountant flagged enough irregularities that an IRS review is being initiated. Gary's business relationships aren't just cracking. They're done. The man who drove away from the ridge with a broken face is driving back to a life that's falling apart from the inside.

And the dead man's switch is still armed. Anything happens to Kendall, Amberly sends the rest. Pursuing her costs more than any version of Gary's pride can justify. Gary isn't finished. Men like Gary adapt. But the ground beneath him has shifted.

I hang up and find Kendall in the doorway, watching me. She heard my side of the call. She's smart enough to fill in the rest.

"The associate forwarded your documentation to a forensic accountant," I tell her. "IRS review. Gary's done."

The expression that crosses her face isn't triumph.

It's quieter than that.

And far more dangerous.

Years of sitting through business dinners where Gary introduced her asmy wifeand talked numbers as though she wasn't in the room. Years of being furniture with no ears.

The satisfaction belongs to a woman who proved that the thing her husband dismissed was the very thing that destroyed him.

She walks to me. She takes my right hand, turns it over, and examines the knuckles with the same focused attention she gave the notepad this morning. Her thumb traces the split skin along the first knuckle.