Page 65 of Forbidden Protector

"I'm not going anywhere while you build it. That's the whole negotiation."

Her eyes come up and hold on mine a beat longer than the sentence needed, honey gone dark at the edges.

She's still got her hair pulled back from this morning, and it leaves that long stretch of neck bare for me to look at, which she knows, and doesn't fix.

She's running the same discipline on me. Both of us holding something back on purpose, and both of us watching the other one do it.

"Later," she says. Not a question.

"Later," I repeat, and watch her hear everything the word is carrying.

She goes back to the pad. I go back to my coffee. For a while the only sound in the kitchen is her pen and the creek running loud outside the screen.

The wanting doesn't go anywhere. It sits behind a dead man, a dirty handler, and whatever my father wants badly enough to send for us both before nine in the morning.

Gus lifts his head off the hearth rug at the sound of my phone going off on the counter before either of us has moved.

I don't have to check the screen.

"Now," is all he says, and the line goes dead before I can answer it.

Mackenzie's gone still at the table, pen down, pad forgotten, reading my face instead of the phone because she doesn't need to hear his voice to know whose it was.

"Holt."

"My father," I say, and the kitchen, warm and full of everything we were about to let ourselves start, goes cold at the edges the way it does right before the weather turns for real.

TWENTY

MACKENZIE

The study smells the same. Woodsmoke, money, and the flat quiet of a room where nobody has ever had to raise their voice to win an argument.

I come in without the folder this time.

No subpoena preview, no courtesy documents, nothing to slide across the desk at the speed of a woman whose hands still belong to her. I have one thing in my jacket pocket and I am not taking it out until I decide he's earned it.

Gideon doesn't stand. He never stands. He looks up from the blotter, takes one long inventory of my face, and I watch him clock the difference before I've said a word.

"Agent Tatum." He gestures at the chair with two fingers. "You look like a woman who stopped pretending this is about cattle."

"I stopped pretending a week ago. You've just been polite about not saying so."

"Sit anyway. I like the theater of it."

I sit because sitting is the move, the same as it was the first time, except the first time I was building a file and this time I already have one. It has a dead man's name at the top of it who happens to share half my blood.

Holt takes the wall.

North side, between the gun cabinet and the window over the drive. The exact seam in the room he found before I ever knew there was one to find.

He hasn't spoken since the truck. He hasn't looked at me either, which is its own kind of information. A discipline so total it reads louder than a hand on my back would.

"You asked us both here?" I ask. "Or you asked Holt, and he brought me, because apparently that's still the arrangement."

"I asked for you." Gideon squares the pen and doesn't look at his son. "I asked for him because a good tool doesn't get an opinion about where it's used, and it's past time somebody reminded him of that. Isn't that right, Holt?"

Nothing from the wall.