Page 15 of Forbidden Protector

Down the slope, near the gate, Sage Blackwater is watching her brother.

Not the grave. Not me. Him.

She's been running him the way I've been running the crowd. She saw the step, saw the hand, and she saw it not land.

Then she catches me catching her, and she smiles, warm and unhurried, a woman who's just been handed something she intends to keep.

They lower Jacob.

The wind takes the priest's last word off the top of the hill and gives it to no one.

The crowd breaks and I go for Wyatt Mercer.

I get four steps before Holt Blackwater turns and speaks to me on purpose for the first time since a motel parking lot.

"You need to leave Montana."

Five words. Nobody asked him for a single one of them.

I look up at that bare jaw with the drone finishing its last lane over his shoulder, and I think: that is a threat, or that is a warning, and the difference between them is the entire case.

"Your family first."

SIX

HOLT

Wyatt Mercer is sitting on my porch steps with an empty bottle beside him. He has been there long enough that the snow has stopped melting where he set it down.

I put the truck in park and leave the headlights on him.

Everybody's gone home.

The light is the flat grey that comes an hour after a burial, and the wind has quit, which is worse, because now every word carries the whole hundred feet from the drive to the steps.

"You watch everything." He doesn't get up. "How did you not watch him?"

There is no answer to that one, so I don't build him a bad one.

His breath comes up white and ragged in the frozen air and takes too long to go.

"You were at the barn?"

"Every morning since I came home."

"Six-thirty. You want to tell me what you did at six-thirty?"

"Water. Grain. Checked the heater in the north trough because it froze Tuesday."

"That's it?"

"That's it."

"Say the rest of it."

I could give him the truth. The truth is a feed sack behind my seat and a name in a dead man's handwriting I haven't cracked. But the second I hand Wyatt that, he goes up the mountain alone and I bury the second Mercer this month.

So I give him the part that's his.