Page 48 of Faultline

I don't.

"Call Rhys," she says from the doorway. "I'll start mapping the survey coordinates against the property acquisitions. If the deposit boundaries match the purchase corridor, we'll have proof that Cascade is using the suppressed geological data to target their acquisitions."

"They'll accelerate when they find out we know."

She stops. Turns her head just enough for me to see the line of her jaw, the set of her mouth, the defiance that lives in her bones the way timber runs in mine.

"Let them," she says.

The door closes behind her. I stand on the porch with the folders pressed against my chest, the morning cold settling into the valley, and the phantom weight of her warmth still on my arm where she passed too close on purpose.

Agnes called her my girl. I didn't deny it. I told Agnes that admitting it would make Tosh a target, and that's true, and it's also the easier truth. The harder one is that what Tosh is to me doesn't fit in a word as small as mine. It fits in how the cabin sounds different when she's in it. In my hands knowing the geography of her body the same as they know the ridgeline. It fits in the certainty, quiet and absolute, that I'd dismantle anyone who touched her and I'd do it without regret.

My father spent his whole life on top of lithium worth more than every acre in this valley combined. Agnes said he never asked about what was underneath. He loved the forest, and that was enough for him.

I'm not my father. The forest isn't enough anymore. Not when knowing what's beneath it is the only thing that keeps us from losing it. Not when the woman inside my cabin is building a case that puts her squarely between Cascade and the thing they're willing to burn for.

I pull out my phone and call Rhys. He answers on the second ring. "Tell me."

"I found out what they're buying. Get Harlow. Come to the cabin. Bring everything you pulled from the state records."

A pause. One beat. "How bad?"

I look at the tree line. The spruce catch the morning light along their upper canopy, and the shadows below hold the dark that comes with dense timber and deep roots. The forest is doing what it always does. Growing. Holding ground. Indifferent to the fact that the ground it's holding just became the most valuable dirt in Alaska.

"Come to the cabin," I say. "I'll explain when you're here."

I hang up and lean against the porch rail. The tree line hasn't changed. Same spruce, same shadows, same ground my grandfather walked.

But I'm looking at it differently now. So is Cascade.

And the last company that wanted what's under this mountain only filed paperwork. Cascade already proved at the Anderson place that paperwork isn't their style.

14

TOSH

The glow wakes me before the sound does. Orange light where the bedroom window should show nothing but dark spruce and stars, flickering against the glass in a pattern that doesn't belong to the woodstove or the porch lamp or anything that has a right to be burning on this mountain in the dead of night.

Liam is already out of bed. He's standing at the window in nothing but jeans, pulled on fast enough that he's still barefoot, and the light from outside paints his bare shoulders in shades of amber and shadow. Rigid. Every tendon in his forearms stands visible against the skin, and his hands are flat on the window frame with the pressure of a man holding himself in place by force.

"North side," he says. His voice is stripped to wire. "That's the staging area. The equipment shed."

I'm on my feet. Thermals, boots, jacket. My hands do the work while my brain catalogues what I already know about the property layout: the staging area sits north of the cabin beyond a birch screen, the equipment shed beside it, the service road connecting both to the main access.

Liam mapped every defensive angle on this property and the fire is inside his perimeter.

He's already moving. Flannel over bare skin, the heavy canvas jacket off the hook, boots laced in the time it takes me to zip my coat.

He grabs the chainsaw from the porch on his way past, lifts it one-handed the way other men lift coffee, and he's down the steps before I've cleared the door.

"Call Carl," he says over his shoulder. "Then Rhys. Then stay here."

"Liam."

He stops. Turns. The firelight catches his face, and what I see there isn't panic. Flat, calculating focus. Training taking over, telling him to move toward the flames, not away.

"I'm not staying in this cabin while your property burns. You drive, I'll call Carl and Rhys on the way down. You can fight me about it or you can get in the truck."