Page 98 of Forbidden Protector
"What's this for?"
"For you to stop knocking." Morning light comes through the kitchen window and catches the gold as she holds it. "It's yours. Same as the house is. Same as I am."
She doesn't ask what it means. She already knows, the way she's known most things about me before I've said them out loud.
"The lock sticks," I tell her, the only warning I've got left in me. "In January. Cold snaps it tight and you have to lift the handle while you turn."
She looks at the key a long moment. Her eyes go bright and her throat works once before she gets it under control, somewhere between a laugh and the start of tears she isn't going to let fall.
"Noted," she says, soft, and puts it on her own ring, next to the badge she doesn't carry the same way anymore and the sidearm she still does.
I go through the Calgary paper again after she's asleep, because a man doesn't stop reading a ledger just because the case closed under it.
Three pages in I find the same hand I've passed over twice already without letting it land.
A signature. Young, careful, the kind of hand that hasn't had time to go careless yet, threaded through eighteen months of Hartigan's structure like a seam nobody bothered stitching straight.
It's on every transfer that matters and it isn't on a single photograph the Bureau ever pulled. Whoever this is learned patience from somebody, and patience like that doesn't come from nowhere in this county.
I sit with it a long while, the house quiet, her breathing even in the bedroom, and I don't wake her to show her.
Not yet.
She's got one of her own still sitting unpaid. The harder half my father handed her in a hospital corridor, the one she promised me when I was stronger. She hasn't brought it up since. Neither have I.
Maybe that's the real shape of this house now. Not a place with no secrets left in it. A place where both of us are still deciding when it's safe to hand the other one the rest.
THIRTY-ONE
MACKENZIE
I don't recognize the woman in Holt's bathroom mirror, and I paid four figures, mostly on the heels alone, to make sure of it.
Dark blue silk that moves like water, a slit that runs to mid-thigh and spaghetti straps that leave my whole back bare to the evening air. Heels that put me at six feet even and cost more than the dress.
Contoured cheekbones. Smoky eyes gone dark at the corners. A red on my mouth that isn't the lipstick I keep in my badge case for court appearances, the kind that says something instead of just covering chapped skin. My hair's up in a twist that took the stylist in Great Falls forty minutes and three bobby pin casualties, gold tendrils left loose around my face on purpose.
Under all of it, dark purple lace. I bought it three weeks ago and it's been tucked under my jeans in a drawer since, waiting for this night.
Tonight's the reason.
"You almost ready?" Holt's voice comes through the door, and something in it has gone tight in a way that has nothing to do with impatience.
"Almost." I smooth the dress one more time over my hip and open the door.
He's leaning against the doorframe in a black dress shirt with the sleeves rolled to the elbow, no jacket yet, hair down and shining, jaw shaved close and clean, which is how he keeps it most days now instead of the three-day neglect he wore the whole first week I knew him.
He doesn't say anything for a second. That's how I know it landed.
"Problem?" I ask, even though I already know there isn't one.
"Give me a minute." His eyes go from my face down the length of the dress and back up, lingering, and I watch heat come up under his collar like it did in a truck from the airport a lifetime ago. "I had a whole plan for tonight. Somewhere around the second the door opened, most of it left the building."
"Which parts survived?"
"The part where I get you into the truck before I do something that gets us both arrested for public indecency."
"Bold talk from a man who hasn't even seen the full effect yet." I turn, deliberate, and catch him tracking the slit as the fabric shifts. "You're staring, Blackwater."
