Page 44 of Forbidden Protector

She doesn't ask and doesn't need to.

She takes one long drink of coffee and looks at her brother again.

It is the look of a woman who has been watching a locked door and just heard the deadbolt slide back.

She smiles at me. Warm. Quiet.

I smile back before I can stop myself.

And then I think: everything Sage knows, Gideon knows. And Gideon uses everything.

THIRTEEN

HOLT

Sage catches me in my own mudroom before I get the first boot off.

"You called her Tatum four times last night." She leans against the door frame with a mug of coffee she has no plan to drink, holding it like a prop, settled in like she isn't leaving until she gets what she came for. "Four times, Holt, sitting right there at your own table. Nobody corrects themselves back to a surname that hard unless they've been saying the other one somewhere they shouldn't."

"I don't know what you're talking about."

"You always say that when you don't want to answer a question." She smiles, small and unbothered, and I hear our father's word come back at me out of my sister's mouth like a debt collector. "Want to try telling me it's containment again?"

I get the second boot off instead of answering, because a man who doesn't answer hasn't lied yet.

"That's what I thought." She pushes off the door frame. "For what it's worth, I like her. She's got that cat's whole pattern figured out faster than you did in two years." Then she pushes through the door and is gone, coffee still full, and I'm standing in my socks with nothing to argue and nobody left to argue it with.

I find the tabby's latest gift on the porch an hour later, headed out to the barn. A vole, again, laid out with the same ceremony as the first one, like the cat has a template it's working from and intends to see through to the end of the world.

Mackenzie crouches over it with her hands on her knees, studying the thing like it's evidence.

"That's the second one he's left you since I got here."

"Every week for two years, near enough." I step around the vole, same as always. "Long before you."

"He needs a name."

"He's a barn cat."

"He's a serial killer with a doorbell." She looks up at me, those liquid gold eyes narrowed against the afternoon light, dead serious.

Serious enough that I already know this is not a conversation I'm going to win.

"Hoover."

"No."

"That's a hard no, Blackwater," she says, throwing my own deadpan back at me so precisely it lands somewhere between an insult and a compliment.

My jaw almost gives up the fight before it starts, which it hasn't done in about two years.

"He's paranoid, he leaves bodies where people will find them, and he thinks he runs this place." She stands, dusting her palms off on her jeans. "Hoover."

"You can't name my cat after the head of the FBI."

"I can name your cat whatever I want. That's the whole privilege of not owning him." She crouches again and holds her hand out.

The cat, who has never once let me touch him in two years of dead things on my porch, walks straight into her palm like he's been waiting for the introduction.