Everything about him changed. The stillness shattered. His shoulders squared, his jaw locked, and the energy in him snapping from rest to something urgent and focused. He was on his feet before Bree finished talking.
He looked at me. His face was different from the face of the man who'd been sitting on the bench thirty seconds ago.
"Go to your room. I need to check something. Don’t worry, it’s probably nothing."
He didn't wait for me to answer. He was through the door and gone, Bree glanced at me before going back through the door right behind him. Now the porch was empty and the cold was everywhere and I was sitting on a bench alone.
I went to my room and started panicking, was whatever Bree needed Razor for because of me? I sat on the edge of the bed and my hands started shaking.
It wasn’t nothing. I knew it by the sound of it, by the tone of his voice, by the speed of his body through that door. Whatever Bree had said had turned the man on the bench into something else, a protector.
The safety I’d been reaching toward cracked. I sat in my room, listened to the compound go dark, and waited.
FOUR
RAZOR
The bar was loud on a Friday. Locals, truckers passing through, a group of college kids who'd found Angel's Rest on some road-trip app and were taking up two tables by the window. Bree was behind the bar in a kind of controlled chaos that meant the register was happy. It was all normal. The whole room was looking normal.
Except for the two men at the table against the back wall.
I came through the lodge door and saw them immediately. They looked like half the men in Forsaken. Jeans, boots, jackets from a farm supply store. One was mid-forties, stocky, thinning hair. The other was younger, leaner, forgettable. They could've been ranch hands or truck drivers or fathers at a Little League game. Nothing about them would've made a civilian look twice.
But I wasn't a civilian, not in the true sense. My military training had taught me to spot threats. And these two felt like they should be in that category.
They had beers in front of them that had barely been touched. The foam had settled, the condensation was running down the sides, and it looked like neither of them had picked up the glass in a while. One was scanning the room, left to right, almost methodical, the way you sweep a space when you'reassessing it. The other was watching the door I'd just come through. The door to the lodge. The door that led to the back of the compound, and down a hallway, and to a room where a woman was sitting on a bed waiting for me to tell her everything was fine.
Bree caught my eye from behind the bar. The look was enough.These two.
I wanted to walk over there. Every muscle in my body wanted to pull a chair to that table, sit down uninvited, and make it very clear what would happen to any man who came through that door looking for her. The image was vivid. My forearms on the table, my hands where they could see them, the conversation short and final. The shape of it was in my jaw, in my fists, and the voltage was running up my spine.
I didn't. Because walking up to them would tell them we knew, and right now them not knowing was the only advantage we had.
I turned to Bree and kept my voice low. "How long?"
"Hour, maybe. Came in, sat down, ordered beers, barely touched them. The older one's been watching the room. The younger one hasn't taken his eyes off that door."
"Get Angel."
I stayed at the bar. And watched them in the mirror behind the top shelf, the angle giving me their table without turning my head. Every second I sat there and didn't walk over to that table cost me something, and I paid it because the alternative was worse.
They left on their own twenty minutes later. Stood up, buttoned their jackets, walked to the door. No rush. They'd seen what they came to see. Through the window I watched a truck pull out, dark, the kind that blends into every dirt road in Montana. They'd drive back to wherever the operation ran fromand they'd make a phone call and I guessed that the next men who came wouldn't be sitting in a bar pretending to drink beer.
Angel was suddenly behind me. I hadn't heard him come in.
“Did Bree tell you what’s going on? How fast can you find out what we're dealing with?" I asked.
"Rook's already working it."
I nodded without another word. I needed to tell Melissa what was going on.
I knocked on her door.She was sitting on the bed, and the look on her face said she already knew.
“There were a couple of guys in the bar. They've been sitting there for an hour watching the door to the lodge, like they were hoping to see something. ”
Her face changed. The color went out of it.
“I’m assuming they are looking for you," I said. "You've been here four days and they're sitting in our bar, they’ve found you very quickly.” The thought was building while I spoke, the pieces assembling. Four days. A ranch in the hills. A woman who ran on foot in the dark. There was no way to track someone on foot across open country at night. Or was there?
