Her face was different in sleep. The awareness was gone, the constant assessment that lived behind her eyes even when she was smiling. She looked unguarded. Like the woman she’d been before a federal program turned her into someone else.
I’d known I was in love with her before yesterday. Before I knew her real name, before the bed, before any of it. I’d known the way you know something you refuse to look at directly,navigating around furniture in a dark room because your body has memorized what your mind won’t admit.
It wasn’t the sex that made me certain. It was every Tuesday before it. Every second Tuesday, walking into her shop for a reason I’d stopped pretending was about the cemetery. I went because she hummed while she worked and the sound of it settled something in me that nothing else could reach. I went because she’d asked me once about my week and actually listened to the answer and I’d spent the ride home turning that over like a coin, the novelty of someone paying attention to the content instead of the cut. I went because the first time she’d laughed at something I said, really laughed, surprised by it, the sound had rearranged my priorities in a way I hadn’t been able to reverse.
I’d been in love with her for months. Every visit to the shop had added weight to it. I’d just stopped pretending yesterday.
She stirred. Her fingers flexed against my skin and her eyes opened, and for a second she looked at me with the unguarded confusion of someone waking in an unfamiliar place. Then it all came back. Her eyes changed, the openness narrowing into something guarded.
“Morning,” I said.
“Morning.” Her voice sounded rough with sleep. She didn’t move her hand from my chest. “How’s your shoulder?”
“Stiff. I’ll probably live.”
“You’d better.”
She said it lightly, almost a joke, but the undertone was real. I heard it. She meant it.
We lay there for a few minutes. I didn’t push for conversation. She didn’t offer any. Just her hand on my chest and the light coming through the window and the lodge coming to life around us, boots and voices filtering through the walls. It was the most natural thing I’d felt in longer than I couldmeasure, lying in bed with a woman and a silence that didn’t need filling.
She got up first. Found her clothes, and when she turned around she was composed again. She was still halfway between her old identity and the woman who’d slept beside me. She was a woman figuring out who she was in this new space where the mask was off but the danger wasn’t.
“I need coffee,” she said.
The common room was half-full.Hawk at the counter, pouring coffee from a pot that had been going since five. Duke on the couch, boots up, scrolling his phone. Doc at the far table with a book.
Mia walked in beside me. The room absorbed her without fuss, every man noting the new presence without making a show of it. Hawk glanced over, his eyes moving from her to me, taking in the fact that we’d come from the same direction at the same time. He didn’t say a word, but the corner of his mouth twitched. Just a fraction. A suppressed grin that said everything a man wasn’t going to say out loud. Then he turned back to his coffee and left it there.
Nobody commented. This was the club. They knew when to leave it alone.
I poured two cups and set them on the counter. Mia fixed hers, adding cream and sugar while I drank mine black. Her hands were steady. The trembling from yesterday was finally gone.
She caught me watching her over the rim of my cup.
“I can’t help feeling like you know more about me than you let on,” she said. An observation more than an accusation, delivered with the faintest edge of a smile.
“I pay attention, that’s all.”
I held her gaze and she held mine and for a second the lodge fell away and it was just the two of us, standing in a kitchen, being honest.
Her hand came up and rested on my forearm. Brief, light, the touch of someone testing whether contact was still allowed in daylight. I covered her hand with mine. She let out a breath she’d been carrying since she woke up.
Hawk was very deliberately focused on his coffee across the room. He said nothing, but noticed everything.
Rook foundme on the porch after lunch.
I was sitting on the rail, peeling back the old gauze on my shoulder and taping a fresh piece. Doc had offered to do it twice and I’d waved him off. Surface damage. I could handle it.
Rook sat down beside me. He had the look he wore when something had come back ugly. Flat, contained, a man who dealt in facts and didn’t enjoy the ones he’d found.
“Rawlings is dirty,” he said.
I put the gauze down.
“Angel’s contact confirmed this morning. The guy’s had whispers around him for a while. Other inspectors in the district have flagged concerns, things that didn’t add up. Witnesses in his caseload whose covers got blown at rates that didn’t track with normal exposure. Nothing anyone could prove, but the pattern’s there.” Rook leaned his forearms on the rail. “Angel’s contact dug deeper. Rawlings has been living above his paygrade for the past eight months. New truck, a condo in Boise he shouldn’t be able to afford. Nobody’s found a paper trail yet, but the contact is confident the money’s coming from Salieri’s outside network.”
“He sold her.”
