Page 91 of Forbidden Protector

Trane won't come to the fence. He stands off at the tree line with his ears pinned, working the ground with one front hoof like he's trying to dig something up out of it. When I whistle he tosses his head and doesn't move an inch closer.

I stand there five minutes telling myself it's weather coming, some pressure change a horse feels before a man does. I've told myself worse lies standing in worse weather. This one doesn't take.

I should have turned around right then and spent the rest of the morning finding out what had him spooked. I don't. Gideon doesn't ask twice, and I'd rather get whatever this is over with than let it sit on me all day, so I point the truck toward the main house instead.

I come in through the mudroom like I've come ten thousand times, and I stop in the hall. The study door isn't shut all the way and the voices coming through the gap aren't voices I was ever supposed to hear from this side of it.

I stop outside the door and listen, my bad hand curled against my ribs, and I don't walk in.

"...the financial crimes angle was never the real assignment." Gideon's voice, pitched for numbers instead of people. "That was cover for the posting itself. Somebody upstairs wanted a warm body inside Rimrock with a badge and a reason nobody would question, and Agent Tatum wrote the request herself. Fought for it. Five months of fighting, according to what I paid to find out."

A second voice. I don't know it, flat and clipped, a man reading off a page instead of speaking his own words. "Original threat assessment named three proximity assets. Knox Blackwater. Declan Sullivan. H. Blackwater." A pause, paper turning. "H. Blackwater ranked above the elder Blackwater on the initial list. Higher potential leverage. Military background, isolated, minimal outside attachments."

I don't move. I have held stiller than this in wetter grass with worse things happening around me, and none of it ever asked as much of me as standing still asks right now.

"Leverage," Gideon says, turning the word over like he's deciding whether he likes the taste of it. "That's the Bureau's word, not mine. Meaning a man they could use to get inside the family without the family knowing he was the door." A pen, squared, somewhere on the desk. "I suspected as much the week she submitted the request. Financial crimes doesn't fight five months for a county with four thousand people in it over cattle receipts. I sent him to that airport with my eyes wide open, and I've spent the last month and a half watching to see if I guessed right."

"The threat assessment confirms it," the flat voice says. "Four months old by the time she landed. Nothing after the initial posting. No follow-up contact, no second memo. Report closes there."

"Confirms," Gideon repeats, and there's nothing kind in the way he says it. "I don't generally need confirming. I like it anyway. A man who guesses right often enough starts to wonder if it was ever a guess at all."

Son. Brother. Weapon. I've answered to all three in this family, sometimes in the same breath, depending on which room I was standing in and who needed which version of me that day.

Nobody's ever said it out loud before, not like this, not with a page in front of them and no idea I was ten feet away.

She knew. Before the airport, before the sunglasses came off in my truck and I spent ninety miles finding reasons to check a mirror just so I could look at her again, some man in a Bureau office had already put my name on a ranking sheet above my own father's and called it leverage.

And some part of me knew too or should have. My father doesn't send the heir to fetch a stranger off a plane. He sends the tool, and I've spent two years telling myself I traded that job in when I left the Army. Standing in this hallway, I understand I only walked into a different room of the same house.

Gideon's voice again, quieter now, the kind of quiet that means he's aimed the next part on purpose. "I built a son out of usefulness because it was the only material I had on hand, and it worked. I'd do it again." No regret on that at all, a man stating a fact about the weather. "So no, I'm not surprised the woman he chose came to this county running the exact same math. Like recognizes like, Holt. It's the only lesson this family has ever taught its children with any consistency, and it seems neither of them ever learned how to operate without it."

He knows I'm out here.

Of course he does. He's known where I stand in every doorway of this house since before I could talk, and he said the last of it loud enough on purpose.

I don't go in. There is nothing in that room for me now that the hallway hasn't already given me for free.

I turn and walk back out through the mudroom into a sky gone the color of wet ash.

I get in the truck, and I don't point it toward home.

I can't yet. I'm not fit to walk into that house and put this in front of her, not like this. So I drive the ranch roads instead, fence line to fence line, sections I could walk blind, and let the grey morning burn off into afternoon and the afternoon bleed into evening without once checking the clock. Checking the clock means admitting how long I've been running from one kitchen table.

By the time I finally turn up my own drive, the porch light is on and the sky's gone the color of a healing bruise, and I can see her through the window before she can see me, still at it, still working.

I never texted her. She never texted me, not once, not all day, and I don't know what to do with that. Two people who've learned every tell the other one has, and neither of us reached for a phone. I wonder if she spent the day the way I did, circling the same ground over and over, unable to land anywhere close to home.

She's at the kitchen table when I come in. Same seat she's practically lived in for three weeks now, papers gone soft at the corners from handling, Gus asleep against her socked feet like nothing in this house is wrong yet.

She looks up. Whatever she sees in my face, she sets the pen down slow, careful, like you set something down when you've already decided it might be the last careful thing you get to do for a while.

"Holt."

"Financial crimes was never the real posting." My voice comes out flat, the register I haven't used on her since a truck idled outside an airport terminal a lifetime ago. "You fought five months for Rimrock. I want to know why."

She goes very still. Not the guilty kind of still. The kind a woman goes when she's watching a door she thought was open start to close and hasn't worked out yet which hinge failed.

"I fought for Rimrock because of my grandfather." She says it steady, no flinch in it, and that steadiness is an answer if I let myself hear it that way. "There's a photograph and a field notebook that have been sitting in a box since before I could drive, and a name in a coroner's supplement I've known since I was fifteen years old. That's the reason. That's the only reason that ever got me on the plane."