Page 59 of Forbidden Protector

"Didn't ask you to."

"Then where?"

"Riverview. Give me twenty minutes."

"Nineteen, if you don't hit the cattle guard slow." She hangs up before either of us has to decide what to do with the fact that she's already three steps ahead of a plan I hadn't finished making.

The drive takes eighteen. I don't remember most of it.

She's standing in the doorway of Room 1 when I pull in, badge clipped to her waistband over sweatpants, hair loose, sidearm within reach on the nightstand behind her. Some habits don't quit just because a woman's furious at a man.

She doesn't step back to let me in and instead makes me stand there a second in the cold, on purpose, same as she made a deputy stand there a week ago while she decided how much he'd earned. Her arms are crossed tight over her ribs, hands tucked out of sight, which is how she stands when she doesn't trust them not to reach for something they shouldn't.

"You look like hell," she says.

"You look like you haven't slept."

"I haven't." She steps back. Not an invitation. A tactical concession. The kind you make when the mission outweighs the grudge. She keeps three feet of open floor between us the whole way to the desk, more space than this room has to spare. I let her have every inch of it. "This isn't us being fine."

"Didn't drive over here to pretend it was." My jaw's already tight from eighteen minutes of gripping a wheel. I don't loosen it.

The room's exactly as small as I remember it. Two beds' worth of space and one bed in it, her laptop open with a spreadsheet still running, a paper cup she quit drinking from hours ago.

I set Knox's printouts on the desk next to her keyboard, careful, like they might go off, and pull my hand back fast enough that it looks deliberate even though it isn't.

She reads standing up, arms crossed, not touching the pages, same as she does with everything that actually matters to her.

Two minutes. Three.

I watch her jaw tense when a number lands wrong, and somewhere in the second minute her weight rocks back onto her heels. Small, involuntary, the kind of thing I'd have missed a week ago and can't stop noticing now.

"Jacob wasn't talking about product." She looks up, and I catch the breath she takes before she says the next part. Slow and measured through her nose, the same one I watched her use on Gideon in his own study the first week. The one that keeps her voice level when the facts she's delivering aren't level at all.

"He said it himself, on camera, before he ever went up that mountain. Whatever he found in the old records, it's older than McKenna, and somebody's been circling it since before either of us was born. Your mother knew part of it."

"That's what the video says."

"Then the money's not the whole case. The money's just how they're funding the part that isn't about money at all." She sets the transcript down carefully, like it might still be recording. "But the leak underneath it, the schedule, Room 6. That's not history. That's happening right now, and it means somebody close enough to your breakfast table to know what time it starts is feeding it."

"I know."

"And my numbers." She spins the laptop toward me, hard, so the glow catches my face instead of hers. "Three payments, structured under reporting thresholds, timed to three events only a short list of people had advance knowledge of. The funeral. The line-shack storm. Room 6."

"Cross the list."

"I started that list three nights ago, lying awake in your guest room, and I've been finding reasons not to finish it ever since." Her mouth goes thin, and her hand comes up to push hair back that isn't in her face, giving itself somewhere to be besides shaking. "You want to know why I actually left today, Blackwater? It wasn't the fight. It was sitting in your study with my grandfather's death in my hands, realizing I don't know who in that house has known things about me since before I ever landed in Great Falls."

"You think it's someone in my family." My hand's flat on the desk before I decide to put it there, fingers spread wide over Knox's printouts, like weight alone could hold the idea down.

"I think it's someone close enough to both families that nobody's thought to suspect them. That's the only kind of person who could've known my flight number before I did."

Wet grass, six hours, breathing shallow enough that a man forgets he's breathing at all, waiting on one shot that has to count. I haven't needed that stillness since I came home.

"Say the names out loud," I tell her. "Not to accuse. To rule out."

"Fine." She starts ticking them off, one finger counting against her palm like she's back in an interview room instead of a motel at midnight.

"Aldridge, but he's too lazy to be bought and too incompetent to fake it. Ruby, but she doesn't leave that office long enough to matter. Deputy Young⁠—"