Page 25 of Faultline

We leave the cabin before the sky has decided what color it plans to be. The porch light throws a rectangle of yellow across the gravel, and beyond it the tree line is a black wall broken only by the lighter trunks of birch scattered through the spruce.

The cold is immediate and total, the kind that bypasses clothing and settles directly into the joints. My breath fogs in front of me. Liam doesn't seem to register the temperature. He walks into the dark without hesitation, not checking what might be on the other side.

I follow. The trail is barely visible, a thread of compressed earth winding through brush that scrapes against my shins. Liam navigates it in the dark, his boots finding the packed dirt with the instinct of someone who could walk this ground blindfolded.

I'm three steps behind him, close enough that when a branch swings back after he pushes through, his hand catches it and holds it for me without turning around. His fingers wrap the branch the same way they wrapped my wrist two nights ago, and the recognition travels from my eyes to the pit of my stomach before my brain can intervene.

In the thin gray light I watch him read the forest while he moves. His head turns in small increments, scanning the canopy, the ground, the gaps between trunks. His hands stay loose at his sides, but his shoulders carry the particular tension of a person listening with his whole body.

He stops at the eastern fence line without announcing it.

The wire runs between wooden posts that have weathered to the color of ash, stretching into the trees in both directions. The cut section is exactly where he described it yesterday, the top strand folded back with the clean precision of a professional who treats fence wire the way a surgeon treats tissue: efficiently, without leaving more damage than the job requires.

"Two sets of prints came in from the south," he says, pointing. "Followed the fence to this point. Cut the wire. Continued uphill."

I crouch beside the gap and look at the ground as if it's a case file. Not for what it says, but for what it implies. The prints are distinct, pressed deep into the damp earth, the tread pattern identical on both sets. Same manufacturer, same size. Either two men with the same boots, or a supply chain that doesn't bother with variety.

"Those aren't civilian hiking boots," I say.

Liam glances at me. "What makes you say that?"

"The tread. I've seen this pattern before, on contractors who came through our facilities during the Marshal investigation. Identical lug design, identical sole profile. Tactical footwear. Issued, not purchased."

He's recalibrating. I've seen him do this exactly once before, at the Ridgeline when I laid out the corporate filing chain and watched him reconsider everything he'd assumed about the woman sitting across from him.

He's doing it again now. The attraction that's been running underneath every interaction since the café window is still there, but this is something else layered on top of it. Respect that has to be earned from a man who doesn't hand it out.

"Rhys said you were sharp," he says.

"Rhys is being polite. I'm thorough. There's a difference."

He almost smiles. The expression doesn't quite reach his mouth, but something shifts behind his eyes, and when he turns back to the trail, I can tell he's finished underestimating me in this particular category. I file that under wins I didn't know I was competing for.

We follow the boot prints uphill. The terrain steepens past the fence line, and the scrub thickens into a tangle of fallen spruce, devil's club, and alder that grabs at everything below the knee.

Liam moves through it with an ease that shouldn't be possible for a man his size. Watching the controlled roll of his shoulders through the brush sends a signal to every part of my body that remembers what his hands did to me. The muscles in his back move beneath his flannel, and I know precisely what those muscles feel like locked and shaking above me. The timing of this information is not useful.

I keep pace, but it costs me more than it costs him. By the time the slope levels off, my thighs are burning and my breath is coming faster than I'd like to explain.

He stops on a shelf of flat ground where the canopy opens enough to let the early light filter through. The boot prints converge here, both sets tracking to a section of dense undergrowth beside a massive fallen spruce that's been on the ground long enough for moss to colonize the bark.

"There," Liam says.

My eyes are already on it. A depression in the brush on the downhill side of the fallen trunk, the vegetation crushed flat in the shape of a body. The undergrowth is pressed deep enough that whoever lay here did it repeatedly, over days, building the impression the way water builds a channel through rock. Knee prints in the duff on either side.

A cleared line of sight through a gap in the canopy that frames, with deliberate precision, the cabin below.

The porch. The truck. The front door. The kitchen window where Liam drinks his coffee every morning and reads the tree line like other people read the news.

Someone has been lying here, watching him live.

I drop to my knees beside the depression and let the assessment run, the same assessment I run when I walk into a client's apartment and read the room before she tells me what happened. The crushed vegetation says repeated visits, hours at a time. The cleared sight line says purpose.

Then I see what Liam hasn't pointed out yet, because he's waiting for me to find it myself. Energy bar wrappers, folded neatly and tucked beneath the edge of the fallen trunk. Cigarette butts, field-stripped with trained discipline, the paper and tobacco scattered, the filters torn apart and pressed into the duff where only someone looking for them would notice.

Someone taught this person to police their brass, and they were good at it. The wrappers were a lapse. The cigarettes were habit.

"How long?" I ask.