Page 136 of Bought for Blood

“I considered it on the drive up.” He rubs his eyes. “There’s a price on your head. It came down through the trade a week after the quarry. Every dealer between here and the coast knows the number.”

“I’ll manage.”

“You won’t.”

“I’ve managed before.”

“You managed because you wanted to come home afterward.” He says it bluntly. “I’ve had thirty years of men sitting across a desk volunteering for work. I know what it sounds like when one of them doesn’t care how it ends.”

“That’s a confident reading.”

“I watched you walk into that compound after I told you four times not to.” He sits back. “You did that with something to lose. I’m not standing next to you while you do it with nothing.”

I don’t deny it.

“Say I’m wrong,” Crowe says.

I can’t.

He waits. He is better at it than anyone I have ever known. The answer I don’t give him tells him everything he needs to know.

Then I notice he hasn’t stood up to go.

“What are you not saying?”

A car door shuts at the bottom of the track.

I’m on my feet. “Crowe.”

“I know.”

“Tell me you didn’t.”

“I’ve been up here twenty minutes trying to work out how to say it.” He stands.

Her heartbeat comes up the path ahead of her, faster than a walk accounts for.

Then she’s in the doorway. She’s in an oversized coat and boots that aren’t hers. Her hair is pushed back off her face, and there’s a crease down one cheek from hours against a car window. She stops on the step with her hands at her sides and doesn’t come in.

She looks at Crowe first.

“You’ve had long enough.”

“I have.”

“I gave you twenty minutes. I counted them.”

“You did.” Crowe turns to me. “For the record, I told her not to come. Before we left, and in the car. She listened to all of it.”

Of course she did. And she ignored it.

“You brought her here.”

“She’d have found another way, and it would have been worse.” He picks his hat up off the table. “Faine’s people are on the road below. Nobody followed us, and she hasn’t been out of my sight since that mountain.”

“That is not the point.”

“It’s the part I can do something about.”