Page 58 of Forbidden Protector

Knox's screen is still lit when I leave his office, down the hall from a study where our father handed my brother a question turned back on him instead of an answer.

I drive home carrying Knox's account of it instead of the thing itself, and it doesn't matter. I've been reading that face since before I was old enough to enlist. Two years back on this ranch hasn't taken the fluency.

The house is mostly dark when I pull in, same as it was when I left it, except for the one lamp I always leave on in the living room for Gus.

He meets me at the door, tail going, then stops when he reads whatever's on my face and just leans into my leg instead.

She slammed that door before I ever got in the truck for Knox's, and I heard it again at every mile between here and the main house.

I walk through every room anyway. Kitchen. Living room. Guest room. Not because I think she's changed her mind. Because I was trained never to trust a conclusion I haven't confirmed with my own eyes, and two years off active duty hasn't cured me of that either.

She isn't in any of them.

The folder's still open on the desk in the study, Caleb Tatum's file exactly where she left it. Her notebook's gone. Of course it is. An FBI agent doesn't storm out of a house mid-fight and leave the one thing that's hers behind.

I stand in the guest room doorway for exactly four seconds. Then I make myself stop, because there's a name loose in this county that explains every leak we've been chasing since a room number went out over a pay phone, and a man doesn't get to stand in an empty doorway feeling sorry for himself while that name is still out there deciding what to do next.

I sit down at the island with what Knox handed me and don't touch my phone.

Twenty minutes. I give myself twenty minutes of not calling her, because being angry is a decision and being scared isn't, and if I'm honest with myself for once tonight, I'm the second one.

Knox's transcript sits on the counter next to three years of Bureau paperwork Mackenzie built before she ever set foot in Great Falls.

His half says something older than any of us is still circling this family. Hers says somebody standing close enough to touch has been handing it a schedule.

Same target. Different handwriting.

At twenty-two minutes I call her.

She picks up on the second ring. Her voice comes through even and clipped, the register she reserves for men who've earned it.

"Blackwater."

"I'm not calling to apologize."

"Good. I wasn't holding my breath." A beat longer than the line needs. "Why are you calling?"

"Knox showed me Jacob’s video."

A beat, silence stretched thin enough that I can hear her working it out. Nobody's told her about a courier, a flash drive delivered in a raging thunderstorm to a cabin in the woods, a video that's been sitting locked in Knox's office since August.

She doesn't waste time asking what I mean. She just takes it in fast and moves straight to the part that matters.

The silence that follows isn't empty. I hear her sit up. Hear the mattress give, then settle, and I know exactly which room she's sitting in because I picked it out for her myself a week ago.

Front unit. Two exterior walls. Sightline to the road.

"Tell me."

"Not on the phone."

"You called me to tell me you won't tell me anything?" Bedsprings again, faster this time. She's already on her feet.

"I called because your numbers and mine don't line up unless somebody inside both families has been feeding a schedule to somebody outside them. I need your files next to mine or I'm guessing, and I don't guess."

A shorter silence. A zipper, one hard pull.

"I'm not coming back to that house."