Page 65 of Coyote

"Yes."

He gave me a hard look before he stepped away from the door. "Then she comes."

My hand loosened around the rail.

Coyote still wanted to stop her. He tracked Sarah across the porch, and his hand curled each time she touched me. The wanting hadn't changed. He'd just set my answer above it, and he stood there holding both. Something under my sternum let go a notch. I wasn't ready to forgive him yet, but for the first time since the cave, I pulled a full breath all the way down.

Sarah sealed her phone into the pouch Winston handed her and watched him lock it in the safe. Then she came back to my side.

Coyote waited at the bottom of the porch steps. Sarah moved to my injured side and put one hand beneath my elbow, and I let her help me down the steps.

Linc was waiting in the ranch truck at the edge of the lot. Winston opened the rear door of his cruiser, but Sarah reached it first.

"You're riding with me," she said.

I looked back at Coyote.

He stood beside the truck with Nimue lifting her head from his shoulder. He had promised nothing about distance, and I knew he would follow us all the way to Pae Saco. I wanted him to.

That was the part I couldn't set down with the anger. I wanted his hand under my arm instead of Sarah's. I wanted him close enough to smell the blood on his skin. Furious as I still was about what he'd done to keep me, I would have taken "mine" whispered against my ear.

"Go on," he said. "I'll be right behind you in Linc's truck."

I climbed into Winston's cruiser. Sarah climbed in beside me and helped move my injured thigh before she shut the door.

Linc's truck pulled out behind us. I found its headlights in the side mirror before we reached the first intersection. They stayed there through every turn.

Sarah took my hand. Her fingers fit between mine, sharper in the knuckles than when we were children crossing streets. The seat on the other side of me stayed empty. He could've taken it. He'd put a whole truck between us instead, and I knew what holding that distance cost him.

"Everything's going to be all right now," she said, and squeezed my hand.

I looked back at the headlights holding steady behind us and hoped she was right.

I was splitting wood nobody had asked for when Sarah put her hands on my man.

Through the kitchen window she rolled John's sleeve back from the wrapping on his forearm, and I put the ax through a round of juniper hard enough to bury the head in the block. The halves jumped off and landed in the dirt. Nimue cinched tight at my throat and held on.

Five days she'd been at Pae Saco. Six since John had let me touch him.

That was the third time since sunup. She'd touched his wrist at the coffee pot and his shoulder at the table, and now she had his arm turned over in the morning light, checking Sierra's wrapping, her fingers on skin I hadn't touched in days, and John sat there and let her.

Meanwhile, he hadn't let me touch him since the cave.

I rocked the ax loose from the block. My knuckles had gone white around the handle. I stacked the split halves on the pile with the rest, enough kindling now for a winter nobody was expecting, and there was still nothing to do with my hands that helped.

There was nobody to stab over it, either. She was his sister. He'd wanted her here, and I'd stood on Winston's porch and let her come. My teeth ached anyway. They didn't care about the difference between taking and borrowing. I wanted to walk into that kitchen and put my body between them, and I stood at the block and split wood instead, because the last time I'd decided what John could have, he'd looked at me like I was a stranger.

Sierra leaned out the screen door. "Percy. Food!"

I buried the ax in the block and went.

The kitchen smelled like chorizo and lemon. The chorizo was Sierra's. The lemon was hers, some lotion out of her bag, and it had rubbed off onto the coffee pot handle, the back of John's chair, and John.

I took the seat across from him, back to the wall, where I could see the door, both windows, and every place her hands went.

Pearl lay under Sarah's chair with her chin resting on the woman's shoe.

Traitor.