Page 5 of Catalyst

My brain automatically calculates the gravel-to-speed ratio and the likelihood of a concussion. Spend a career assessing risk, and you can't turn it off, even when the risk is a ten-year-old on a Schwinn.

I notice things Rhys doesn't. The training never shuts off. What it shows me is a town with one road in and one road out, a bridge that carries every supply run, and a sheriff's department covering a jurisdiction larger than most eastern states with a handful of deputies. I love this place. I can also map every vulnerability it has in under thirty seconds, and that dual awareness is either my greatest asset or the thing that will make me insufferable at town meetings.

Agnes Croft is on the bench outside the post office, sitting in the sun with the patient stillness of a woman who considers waiting a productive activity. She raises one hand when I pass.

"Ms. Kane."

"Agnes."

"Still setting up that office of yours?"

"Getting there. The stove hasn't killed me yet, so I'm calling that a win."

She studies me with eyes that miss nothing and forgive selectively. "I remember every outsider who stayed in this town," she says. "Not many. The ones who do tend to be the ones we needed most."

I stop walking. That sentence carries more weight than small talk, and Agnes knows it.

"People born here stay out of habit," she continues. "People who choose it stay for reasons that matter more." Agnes folds her hands in her lap. "The mountain picks the people who belong to it, Harlow. Don't argue with it."

I don't argue with it. Not out loud. Internally, the crisis negotiator files the statement under things that sound beautiful and mean nothing actionable. But the woman who chose to stay in a town she could have left six months ago files it somewhere quieter. Somewhere I don't examine too often, because examining it would require admitting that I made the decision before I had a reason for it.

I nod once. Agnes goes back to watching the street with the quiet authority of a woman who has been the memory of this community longer than most of its residents have been alive.

The rest of the day goes to the office. Inventory lists. Vendor calls that drop twice because the cell coverage on the south end of Main Street is a suggestion rather than a service. A security assessment draft for a fishing lodge outside Palmer that might become my first real contract if the owner stops changing his mind about the scope.

By late afternoon my eyes are crossing, and I lock up and drive north toward the cabin with the window down and the cold air doing the work that caffeine stopped doing an hour ago.

Our cabin sits at the end of a dirt road that climbs through spruce forest before it opens into a clearing with a view of the valley. Solid construction. Clean lines. The kind of building that was framed by men who measured twice and apologized for nothing.

I've been living here for months, and every morning I still register the silence. Not the peaceful kind. The tactical kind. No engine noise. No foot traffic. No ambient sound that would mask an approach from any direction. The fact that I find this comforting says more about my psychology than any therapist ever managed to.

I'm on the couch with case files spread across my lap, and I am reading exactly none of them. My mind keeps circling back to the café. Rhys's hand on my thigh. The slow deliberate pressure of his thumb through denim while he drank coffee and discussed federal case files like nothing was happening underneath the table.

The man is a menace. Badge-wearing, coffee-drinking, and completely aware of what he does to me. He deploys it with the tactical precision of someone who spent three years hunting a killer and never lost the instinct for patience.

I hear his truck on the road before I see the headlights. The engine cuts. The door closes. His boots on the porch.

He walks through the door, and his stance in the frame tells me everything. The day is over. Whatever he carried through it, he's setting down. What he's picking up is me.

His eyes lock on mine across the room, and every nerve ending I own fires at once.

"You did that on purpose," I say. "At the café."

He crosses the room without answering. One hand closes around the case files, lifts them off my lap, drops them on the floor beside the couch.

The other goes to the side of my neck, thumb tilting my jaw up. Rough fingers. Callused palms. Every ridge of hardened skin registers where it meets mine like a current finding ground.

"The thumb thing," I clarify, because apparently I need to keep talking while his hand is on my throat. "With the jeans. In front of Marc and Sela. You⁠—"

"Stand up."

I stand. His grip slides from my jaw to the back of my neck, tightening until the pressure makes the decision for both of us about where this goes next.

I've negotiated with armed men in barricade situations. I've talked down suspects in burning buildings. My voice has been the only thing standing between a bullet and a bystander more times than I can count.

Rhys Blackwater makes every shred of that training go quiet with his hand on the back of my neck.

He walks me backward until my shoulder blades hit the bedroom doorframe. His mouth drops to the spot below my ear that unravels me fastest, and my hands grip his shirt at the ribs hard enough that the fabric twists in my fists.