Page 77 of Forbidden Protector

Sage finds me first. She comes down the corridor at a near-run, hair still in the knot she must have slept in, and coat over pajama pants. She doesn't ask me a single question before she folds me into a hug hard enough to hurt.

"Tell me everything," she says, pulling back, hands still gripping my shoulders. "All of it. Don't soften it."

I give it to her straight, because softening it would be a lie, and I've had enough of those handed to me this month to know better than to hand one back.

Her jaw does the thing his does, the same hinge, the same warning. "He stepped into it."

"He put himself between the shot and me."

"Of course he did." She says it like a woman filing a complaint against a lifelong pattern. "That idiot. That absolute, beautiful idiot."

Josephine arrives without anyone hearing her come. She's dressed, fully, like a woman who does not own the concept of being caught unprepared. She takes the chair beside mine without asking permission and sits with her hands folded in her lap, watching the double doors like she's done this before and knows exactly how long the watching takes.

"He'll come out of it," she says. Not to comfort me, but to state a fact she's decided is true and intends to make true through sheer force of saying it. "Blackwater men are hard to kill and harder to keep down once they're hurt. It's the one mercy this family gets."

"That's not much of a mercy."

"No." Her eyes don't leave the doors. "But I've learned to take what's offered."

Knox comes in an hour later with mud to his knees and Maren half a step behind him. I understand without being told that he swung by the house for her before he came here at all.

"Nothing past the reservation line," he says, to the room, to nobody, dropping into a chair like his legs finally agreed to stop working. "He knows that country better than County knows their own jurisdiction. I had eyes on him for four minutes and then I didn't."

She comes straight for me instead of for Knox, which tells me more about this family than a week of interviews ever did.

She doesn't say she's sorry. She puts both hands around mine, over the dried blood, and just holds on.

By three, the waiting has stopped feeling like waiting. I keep running every version of tonight where I don't get him off that ridge in time, and each one finishes and starts again.

A nurse brings me a blanket I didn't ask for and drapes it over my shoulders without a word, the way you'd cover a woman who's stopped noticing she's cold.

It's enough to snap me out of the spiral. I'm done sitting inside my own head, waiting on a door that isn't going to open just because I'm staring at it.

I go to the nurses' station and cut straight to the only question that matters. "Blackwater. Gunshot, right hand, came in a little after two. I need a status, not a guess."

She checks the screen without making me wait for the lecture about family-only updates. "Still in surgery. That's all I've got."

"Then I need you to walk back out here the second that changes. Don't make me come find you."

"Yes, ma'am." She says it like she believes me, which she should.

I notice everything else. The squeak of the third chair from the door every time someone shifts weight in it. Sage pacing a track into the tile that a janitor is going to have to buff out by morning.

It's Tate who breaks the quiet around three-thirty. I've never spoken to him, but I know his face from the funeral, and I knew his name before that, from a file I built on every Sullivan before I ever set foot in Pondera County.

Tate Sullivan, twenty-six, international business degree, three years in Calgary running logistics for somebody else's company before he came home to run it for his own family instead. Calgary. I take that in flat, and I don't let it show, and I don't let it go.

Boots loud on tile that's swallowed every other sound in this hallway for an hour, he doesn't sit. He crosses to where Maren and Knox are standing together near the window and plants himself in front of both of them like a man reporting for a shift nobody scheduled him for.

"Heard on the scanner," he says, eyes moving between his sister and Knox like he isn't sure yet which one of them is actually in charge of receiving it. "Didn't figure anybody'd tell me straight, so I came and found out myself."

"Appreciate it," Knox says, and means it enough that he takes a step and grips Tate's shoulder, once, hard. A grip that isn't gratitude and isn't quite absolution either, for a family that doesn't always remember to call the people who'd come running.

"Dad know you're here?" Maren asks.

"Dad doesn't need to know everything the second it happens." Tate says it flat, no apology in it. Maren's mouth goes crooked, tired and grateful at once. "Figured this was the kind of thing you tell him after, not during."

Around three-forty, a deputy I don't recognize stops at the desk and murmurs something to the clerk. I catch two words off his mouth before he's gone again: inside help. Nothing else. Not a name, not a source, not a shred of anything that would hold up in front of a grand jury, but the two words land in the hallway like a dropped glass. I watch Sage's face close down and open again inside a second.