Page 25 of Growly Trapper Daddy
My stomach drops like something physical. I push past all of them into the diner, the bell jingling too loud and cheerful for what's happening. Greta looks up from behind the counter, eyeswide. “She left just a bit ago. Looked scared but determined. Real polite, though. Said thank you twice.”
I step back outside into the cold. An older man in a thick jacket approaches from the sidewalk, hands shoved in his pockets against the chill. “Saw a dark van peel out of here not long ago. Two big guys got out first, grabbed something, then everybody piled back in fast. Didn't think much of it till I saw all you folks pull up looking like the cavalry.”
The word explodes out of me low and vicious before I can stop it. They've got her. Those bastards have my Nora. My vision narrows down to nothing but the empty stretch of curb where that van must have idled, fresh tire tracks pressed deep into the snow, already starting to fill back in at the edges.
“We move now.” My voice carries that flat, commanding edge I haven't used since my last deployment, the one that doesn't leave room for discussion. “They can't have gone far on these roads tonight. Spread out. Check the main roads and the back trails both. I'm taking the north pass, it's the only route wide enough for a van that size to make good time in this snow.”
The others nod and fall into motion without a single wasted word, which is exactly why I trust this team with my life and now with hers. Engines roar to life around me, headlights cutting hard lines through the dark. I climb back into my truck, slam the door hard enough to rattle the frame, and peel out following the faint tracks still visible in the snow before the next flurry buries them for good. My heart hammers loud enough to drown out everything except the single, narrow need to find her before anything worse happens than what's already happened.
The truck bounces over ruts, wheel vibrating hard under my grip, and I scan every shadow and side road, headlightssweeping snow and tree trunks in restless arcs. Fear sits heavy in my gut like something solid, but it sharpens me instead of slowing me down, the way real fear always has out here, cutting everything down to exactly what matters. I think about her laugh. The way she looks at me over coffee. The sound of my own name in her mouth last night when neither of us was thinking about mountains or Marshals or Armenians at all. She is not dying tonight. Not any night, not while I'm still breathing hard enough to do something about it.
Radio chatter crackles low from the others checking in one by one. No sign yet, from any of them. I push the truck harder anyway, fishtailing around one more corner before I wrestle it straight, and the night stretches out ahead of me dark and full of every possible bad outcome, but I don't stop, because stopping isn't a real option tonight. Nora needs me out here doing something, and I will burn this entire mountain range down to the granite underneath it if that's what it actually takes to get her back in one piece.
23
Nora
I sit across from Levon, fingers pressed flat against the leather arms of the chair instead of digging in, because digging in would show him exactly how close to the edge I'm standing, and showing him that is the one thing I can't afford right now. My heart's hammering hard enough that I'm half sure he can hear it across that ridiculous desk, but I keep my spine straight and my eyes on his. Fear's a live wire under my skin. I'm not going to let it win. Not when Colt's out there somewhere setting every trap he owns to bring me home, and not when I've got maybe one real shot at making this room work in my favor instead of his.
Levon watches me the way a cat watches something that hasn't noticed the cage door's already shut. Everything about him is sharp edges and quiet threat, patient in a way that scares me more than shouting would. I swallow past the dryness in my throat and remind myself I survived a car crash in a blizzard. I survived three days learning to read a mountain and a man who doesn't waste words. I can survive one conversation with a man who thinks a nice suit makes him less of a monster.
“Levon.” My voice only shakes a little, and I hate that it shakes at all. “We both know why I'm here. I saw what happened to Richard. But we don't have to let it ruin both our lives. I can fix this for both of us, actually, if you're willing to listen instead of just deciding I'm a problem to solve.”
He leans back, fingers steepled, the picture of a man with all the time in the world. “You're the witness the marshals want, Nora Caldwell. My men tell me you've been with one of them. The trapper. Rivers.” He says Colt's name like it's something distasteful. “You've seen too much. I need reassurances I won't go down for this.”
I take a slow breath and let my brain do what it's actually good at, working the angle the way I'd work a panel that isn't landing yet, looking for the one detail that fixes the whole composition. “I can give you those reassurances. I'll tell the marshals it was somebody else. One of your rivals. I saw the whole thing happen, which means I get to decide what I say I saw, and right now nobody else has a competing account to check mine against. I can describe the scene so it points away from you completely. Richard was arguing with them, not with you. I'll even give it details only a real witness would know, so it holds up. You walk. No one comes after you.”
Levon's quiet a long moment, studying me like he's deciding whether I'm worth the trouble or whether a bullet would simply be tidier. My stomach twists, but I don't look away, and I don't fill the silence either. Let him do the work of deciding. I've said my piece. Filling dead air just tells him I'm nervous, and he already knows that. No sense confirming it twice.
“And what do you want,” he says finally, “in return for this story you'll tell?”
Here it is. The offer I've been building since the guards dragged me into that van, turning it over the same way I'd storyboard an ending, working backward from what I actually need to happen. I keep my voice even despite every nerve in my body screaming. “I want to be left alone. I want a long, boring, unremarkable life with the man I love, up in those mountains where nobody from your world has any reason to look twice. You let us disappear. No more men following me. No more threats. That's the whole deal. You get to keep your business running exactly the way it was before Richard Rogers became a problem. I get my life back. Everybody wins except the people you're about to let take the blame instead of you.”
A cold smile touches his mouth. It doesn't reach his eyes. “What's keeping me from killing you right now, little witness? One word to my men and the problem simply vanishes. No testimony. No loose ends to manage.”
The fear spikes sharp enough that I taste metal, palms damp against the leather, but I don't flinch and I don't beg. I think about the woman who stood in a blizzard and told a six foot four mountain man she wasn't afraid of him, mostly because she genuinely couldn't afford to be. I channel her instead of the part of me that wants to fold up small and cry. I'm afraid, God, I'm afraid, but I'm also furious, and done letting other people write the ending to my own story without my input.
“You need me,” I say, and it comes out stronger than I actually feel, which might be the whole trick to bravery in the first place. “I'm the only witness who can change how this case goes. Without me, the marshals keep digging on their own, and Colt Rivers is not a man who stops looking once he's decided something's his to find. He'll tear these mountains apart. But if I tell them I saw your rivals do this, and I make it detailedenough to survive questioning, the whole case points somewhere else entirely. You walk. I walk. Everyone wins except the people you'd rather see take the fall anyway. Kill me and you lose the only person who can actually sell that story convincingly. I'm worth more to you alive and cooperative than I'd be as one more body nobody can explain.”
Levon rises slowly, the way a man moves when he's never once had to hurry for anybody. He comes around the desk and stops close enough that I have to tilt my chin up to hold his gaze, but I stay seated. I'm not giving him the satisfaction of making me stand like I'm asking permission for something. My heart's trying to claw its way out of my chest, but my chin stays level and my shoulders stay square. Badass mode. Terrified and still swinging, which, if I'm being honest with myself, might be the only kind of badass that's ever actually real.
“You've got more spine than most people I deal with,” he says quietly, something almost like respect underneath it, which frightens me worse than open anger would have. “Most people in your position cry. Beg. Promise anything at all. You offer me a clean story and a clean break instead.”
“I've got something worth bargaining with,” I answer, voice softer now but not shaking. “A man who won't stop looking for me, a story that protects your operation better than silence ever could, and absolutely nothing to gain from lying to you about any of it. Killing me solves one small problem today and creates a much bigger one the second Colt Rivers works out who's responsible. I don't think that's the trade you actually want to make.”
Levon's silent again, and I use the quiet to do something more useful than sitting there being afraid. I let my eyes move, careful, unhurried, cataloguing the room the way I'd cataloguea reference photo I only get to study once. Two guards by the door, not one, both armed, one clearly more relaxed than the other, which tells me something about rank or fatigue or both. A second door behind the bookshelves that doesn't match the room's symmetry, probably a servants' passage. A window behind Levon's desk that faces what looks like a motor court, two vehicles parked under a portico, headlights currently dark. My cartoonist's brain, the same one that's spent years learning to memorize a whole scene in the time it takes to glance at it, files every piece away without needing to look twice at any single detail. It's the only genuinely useful skill I've got in this room, and I intend to use every bit of it.
“I'll think about it,” Levon says at last, stepping back, gesturing toward the door. “Until I decide, you'll stay in the mansion. It's secure. Comfortable. Food, clothes, whatever you need. Except the freedom to leave.”
He leads me out himself, no guard between us, just his tall frame ahead of me and the certainty that armed men are never far in a house like this. I keep pace, and I keep watching, counting doors, noting which hallways have windows and which don't, which direction the kitchen smells are coming from, how far it is from this wing to whatever door they originally brought me through. Every hallway is a panel. Every panel gets filed for later, in case later ever comes.
We stop at a door near the end of the corridor. Levon opens it and steps aside. The room beyond is large and stupidly luxurious, a king sized bed with silk sheets the color of storm clouds, a fireplace already crackling with real wood, heavy curtains, a bathroom visible through an open archway that's bigger than my old apartment. It's built to make a prisoner forget she's a prisoner. I notice the lock on the outside of thedoor. I notice there's no phone. I notice the windows are high and the glass looks reinforced, though the latch mechanism itself, when I glance at it without making a show of glancing, looks older than the glass, the kind of hardware a house this size probably hasn't bothered updating since it was installed.
“Rest,” Levon says, almost polite. “Think about the details of your story. Make it good. If I agree to your terms, we do this cleanly. If I decide you're more trouble than you're worth,” he shrugs, small and terrifying, “we find another way.”
I can see the lie sitting behind his eyes. He has no intention of ever striking a deal with me. Fine. I didn't come in here actually expecting him to. I came in here to buy time, and time is exactly what I got, along with a mental map of this place that nobody handed me and nobody can take back out of my head.
I step inside because I've got no choice yet. The door closes behind me with a soft click that still feels like something heavier. For a moment I just stand there, letting the fear I've been holding back crash over me all at once, knees wobbling, breath coming too fast. I press a hand to my chest and count slowly, the way Colt taught me one howling night in the cabin when he held me through a panic attack instead of telling me to just calm down.
