Page 95 of Forbidden Protector

"Here's what wasn't in that memo, because there was no box on the form for it. Somewhere back in February, I stopped hunting your family. I don't know the exact night. I didn't notice it happening until it was already done, the way you don't notice a fence line's stopped being a fence and started being a place you actually want to stand."

I hold his eyes, because he taught me that. Not looking away first, not even now.

"You were never the asset, Holt. If I'd known back in September what was waiting for me at the end of that posting, I'd have walked to Rimrock. No badge. No file. On foot, if that's what it took."

He goes very still, the good kind, the same total stillness I watched him hold over Jacob's tracks in the snow the first week I knew him, except this time there's nothing to read in it but me.

"Say that again," he says, quiet.

"Which part?"

"You know which part."

I do. I've always known which part, since a truck idled outside an airport terminal and a man gave me four words in five different orders and made me want more of him anyway.

"I'd have come for you," I say. "Not the case. You."

He closes the last of the distance himself, his good hand coming up to my jaw like it did in a frozen parking lot the first time this town tried to kill me.

He puts his mouth against my ear instead of mine, and what comes out of him is deep and rough with no flatness left in it at all.

I feel the heat of him and my body hums, leaning into his hand.

"Good."

THIRTY

HOLT

Coltrane's on low, needle worn soft on a groove I've played enough times that my body knows where the horn breaks before it breaks.

I flex my bad hand open on my knee. No pins in it now, nothing left of six weeks of hardware but a scar going pale instead of pink and a grip that still hitches on cold mornings.

I killed a man not long ago. I don't think about that most days. Today I do, because the window's open and the air coming through it smells like wet earth and things climbing back up out of the ground, and warm air always did put me back on worse ground than this one.

Voss went down clean. One shot, two hundred yards, and I gave the calls and she broke the trigger and he never got up again.

It's the quiet after that gets me, not the guilt. I don't carry guilt for a man who put a round through my hand and had another one lined up for her throat. A man spends ten years learning how to end something, and nobody prepares him for what's left once there's nothing left to end.

Below me, through the open rail where the loft looks down into the living room, her voice carries up clean.

"I appreciate it, Tom. I do." Flat, the register she uses when she's already decided and is only being polite about the deciding. "Deputy director of a new financial crimes division sounds like a hell of a consolation prize from the man who sat on my referral for five months and got caught selling me out the other side of it."

I don't move. She didn't take the call in the study or out on the porch, and she knows the loft carries sound as well as I do. If she wanted this conversation private, she'd have found a door to put between us. She didn't.

"No, I heard you. Salt Lake, corner office, a title with clout behind it." A pause. Then, dry as August ground: "I've spent the last three months getting shot at, poisoned, and lied to by two crime families and my own supervisor, and somehow the mountain air agreed with me more than your building ever did."

I've heard her turn things down before. Gideon's check. This loft, the night I told her to stay up while I cleared Voss's body and she was already past me before I finished the sentence.

This is different. This is a woman closing a door on the exact life she spent nine years building, and she's doing it in my living room in a voice that doesn't shake once.

"Resident agency. One-woman office, rural Montana, half the caseload and twice the driving." A laugh, short, real. "Yeah. That one. Send the paperwork."

She hangs up. I hear the phone hit the counter, and hear her exhale like she does after she's set something down she's been carrying a while. Then her feet are on the stairs, easy, climbing toward me same as she's climbed toward me every day since the hospital. Like it's the only direction that ever made sense to her.

She stops at the top of the stairs. Hair loose, gold and amber all mixed together and catching the afternoon light coming off the window behind me, soft and shining. It undoes me every single time.

She's got on that skirt she wore into town this morning, the dark one that clings to her hips when she walks. A look on her face is of a woman who just took something back from the people who thought they owned it.