Me: Thanks.
I dropped my phone as it vibrated again, this time an incoming call, not a text. I recognized the vibration pattern.
Shit.
“Yeah?” I answered before the call went to voicemail.
“Checking on your project,” Sharp said into my ear.
I dragged my tongue across the front of my teeth and flipped open the file. “Working on it.”
“He has a soft spot for loose men and liquor,” Sharp said. “Right up your alley.”
“I know.”
“Someone got close over the weekend. Rosetti is in hiding now. Makes your job a lot harder.”
Did it now?
“I’m good at finding people,” I told him. “You know this.”
“I do,” he agreed. “So do it.”
The call disconnected and I let out a tired breath, turning off my phone and throwing it back onto my nightstand. I didn’t want to deal with Sharp. I didn’t want to deal with anyone. I especially didn’t want to deal with Sage, but that didn’t stop me from dragging the papers on him onto my lap and flipping through them yet again.
He’d said he had an idea of who wanted him dead, but he’d never elaborated on his guess. I was personally pretty sure if anyone ever took a hit out on me, it would be Sharp behind it. No one else knew about what I did, so there was no one else to come after me.
Sage, on the other hand, worked for his father at the vineyard…a likely story…and his father had enough enemies it was a wonder the man had room to breathe. Coming after Sage would have made sense. If there was someone I cared about, getting to them would have been the easiest way to get to me.
The back of the file had pictures, clearly taken by someone doing recon. Sage at a bar. Sage at another bar. Sage eating dinner with his family at a restaurant. Sage and his father and some barely legal kid who looked too self-important for his own good. Sage at another bar. Sage at…
Shit.
Sage at a cabin in the mountains with snow on the ground, a front door that looked entirely too familiar. With shaking fingers, I flipped the picture over, the time stamp four days after the new year.
The breath I let out tasted like a relief I’d never known, but why had Sage gone back to the cabin after I’d left? What had he been looking for?
Even as I asked the question, my brain supplied the answer.
He was looking for you.
Chapter Twelve
Sage
“Ineed your phone.” I leaned against the sliding glass door and studied the back of Golden’s head. His brown hair was disheveled like he’d been running his fingers through it for hours.
“Are you asking?”
“I’m telling.”
He made a derisive sound in the back of his throat and got up without another word. Golden stalked past me, into the house and down the hallway, returning after a minute of banging around in a room I couldn’t see. He slammed a burner phone against my chest and sat back in his chair.
I cracked the new SIM card out of the plastic it came in and slipped it into the phone, then waited for it to power up. Golden drank his coffee quietly, staring as always out to the fence. He cleared his throat and tilted his head toward the empty chair. My gaze flickered in that direction, heart stalling when I registered a cup of coffee sitting on the arm of the chair.
He didn’t say another word and the phone powered on, so I made the call I’d been putting off for days. I didn’t worry about hiding it from him. He already knew more about me than I would have liked, owing to the file on his dining room table detailing my likes, habits, and vices.
“Hello?” My mama’s voice filled my ear and settled around me like a warm blanket. I sighed, my entire body relaxing.
