Page 66 of Forbidden Protector

"Cat's got his tongue. Same as it's had it since he was nineteen years old and decided the Army would rather have his silence than I would." Gideon's eyes stay on me, but the words are aimed the other direction. A knife thrown backward without looking. "Tell me, Agent. In your professional opinion. Whose side is my son standing on this morning?"

"You'd have to ask him."

"I'm asking you. You're the one who reads people for a living."

"Fine." I don't blink. "He's standing exactly where he's always stood. Between you and whatever you're about to do to the person in this room you've decided is expendable."

Gideon's eyes narrow half a degree.

"Careful," he says, mild as weather. "You're describing my son like a piece of furniture with opinions."

"I'm describing him like a man who hasn't said a word since I walked in, which either means he agrees with everything you're about to do, or he's decided silence is the only answer that doesn't lose him one of us."

From the wall, flat, four words: "Ask me from cover."

It isn't for me. It's for his father, dry and worn smooth, the kind of line a man only has ready if he's used it before to shut a door somebody kept trying to open.

Gideon's mouth moves at one corner. "There he is."

"There he is," I agree, and don't look at the wall again, because I'm not spending a look on it.

Gideon opens the drawer at his left hand and takes out a checkbook that has clearly never needed anyone's signature but his own to move a number large enough to end careers.

"I'm going to make you an offer," he says, "and I want you to sit there and let me finish it before you decide to be insulted."

"You can try."

"A consulting contract. Private security advisory, six figures, based wherever you like. Salt Lake, if you're sentimental about it. You walk away from Rimrock with your reputation clean and your bank account considerably less clean, and this family never has to think about you again." He sets the pen on top of the checkbook, squared, precise. "Call it what you want. I'm calling it the last easy day left in your career."

"That's the exact same sentence money launderers have used on federal agents since before either of us was born."

"I didn't launder anything. I've never once had to. I simply have more of it than anyone can account for, which people mistake for the same crime." He waits. I don't move. I keep both hands loose in my lap. It’s the same stillness I'd use across a table from a suspect who thinks silence is a weapon he still has.

Something in Gideon's jaw tightens by a degree most people would miss.

"You're turning down a number that would let you retire in your thirties."

"I'm turning down a bribe from a man who thinks a number is the only language I speak." I keep my voice level, the register I used on him the first week. The one that doesn't give him anything to read. "Try the other lever, Mr. Blackwater. I know you've got one. Everybody in this valley tells me you're a two-lever man."

He closes the checkbook.

"All right," he says, and the room drops ten degrees without anyone touching the thermostat. "Let's try the other one."

He leans back and laces his fingers. Then he looks at me like a fence line he's already decided needs mending. Calm, unhurried, entirely certain of his own ground.

"Your grandfather was a careless old man who died of exposure in weather he had no business being caught out in."

Each word lands slow, deliberate, built to cut exactly where it's aimed.

"You've built a life around refusing to believe that, because the alternative is that he simply made a mistake and the mountain killed him the way it kills a dozen men a decade, and that is unbearable to you. You'd rather believe in a conspiracy that gives his death a shape. Meaning. A villain you can hate instead of grief you can't organize."

My hand doesn't move. I make it not move with the same discipline I've been running on this man since the first interview.

"That's a good line," I say. "You should charge admission."

"It's the truth, and you know it's the truth, which is why you're working so hard right now to sit there and not react to it."

"I'm sitting here fine."