She lifts her head. “This is more complicated than it seems.”
“I think the person with the wallet is not worried about who they ruin on the way to getting what they want,” I say. “That person has resources and enough patience to turn reach into pressure. The only way to beat that is to deny them clean lines. We deny them location. We deny them schedule. We deny them confidence. We force them to spend money to chase ghosts and then we catch the man who collects.”
“And then what,” she asks. The question is steady and not rhetorical.
“Then we pull on the line he is holding,” I say. “And we see what moves.”
She studies me for a long second. There is no softness in it. There is assessment and a cold kind of alignment that has nothing to do with romance and everything to do with staying alive.
“You are going to hate how close I keep you,” I tell her.
“Probably,” she says, the word a thin edge between defiance and reluctant agreement, spoken like she already knows what it will cost her. Her mouth tips, not into a smile, because that would be wrong here. Something smaller. A movement that acknowledges a reality neither of us likes. “But I am not stupid.”
“No,” I say. “You’re not.”
I make coffee because heat matters and because the act of boiling water slows my hands. Steam curls against the windowpane that looks out over the dark clearing. The forest looks back the way it always does out here, with the patient attention of something that has been here longer than I have and will stay after I am gone. I watch the tree line the way I always do when there is trouble under it, measuring angles and sight lines, thinking about what can move where and how fast.
“Tell me what you saw in his eyes,” Wren says. “When he looked at me.”
I turn from the window. “He thought you were leverage. That is good news. If you were only a target to him, he would have kept his eyes dead. Men who run on contract learn where not to look.”
She absorbs that without flinching. “But if the contract is real.”
“It is real,” I say.
“What would you do if it were you,” she asks. “If you were me.”
“Exactly this,” I say. “I would move into a hard point with someone who knows how to build a perimeter and I would pick the ground for the next fight.”
She nods. The kettle clicks off and I pour the water. We drink without speaking for a minute, and my body uses the heat the way a cold engine uses fuel.
“You are shaking,” I say after a while. Not accusation. Not pity. Observation.
“I am angry,” she says.
“Both can be true,” I say.
She sets the mug down carefully. “I am not used to handing over control.”
“I know,” I say. “You do not have to hand it over. You only have to share it.”
“That is worse,” she mutters. But her tone has changed. Less serrated, more tired around the edges. She blows out a slow breath and looks past me to the window. “How long do you think we have.”
“Until sunrise,” I say. “If they don’t know we moved him, they may try again before daylight. If they do, they’ll wait and look for a pattern.”
“So no sleep,” she says.
“Not for me. You take the bed. I’ll keep watch.”
She pauses at the doorway and says, “There was a GoFundMe after Mason died. It raised more than anyone expected.” The words scratch my throat. “His in-laws had money before that, old timber money from the Lower 48, and there was money from the life insurance. I guess I never thought about what money can do when the people who have it are hurt and angry.”
I kill the overhead light, leave the lamp on the lowest setting, and stand where I can see both the front door and the window without being seen from the outside. I run through the list in my head. Motion sensor. Back latch. Secondary lock at the mudroom. Trip line across the woodpile. Angles to the shed. Zeke will be back in Glacier Hollow in under an hour and the prisoner will be inside a box that even men with knives in theirsocks cannot open. Good. Not enough. I draw in a slow breath and let it out, and when the edges of the room stop whispering I know I have set the shape of the night.
When I finally lower into the chair, the wood creaks and then remembers me. The heater ticks. The wind carries a few grains of ice against the window and they whisper down the glass on the outside. Somewhere beyond the line of spruce, a branch cracks and then drops snow. I wait for the echo that means weight on the ground. It does not come. The night settles to its work.
Behind the half-closed door, Wren turns over once. The sound is small and it hits me harder than the rotor wash did. I sit there with my hands loose and my brain hot and think about the milk crate in the shed and the way the prisoner’s eyes slid toward Wren like gravity. I think about who paid him to point those eyes in our direction. I think about what it costs to put that much money into motion and how much more it will cost to stop it.
It is a fight I understand. Money against distance. Patience against pride. Reach against terrain. The first move landed here, in our clearing, because they thought we were soft. They were wrong.
