I sit at this scarred metal desk in the Steel Mountain US Marshals field office and stare at a stack of paperwork that never seems to get any shorter. The mountains rise outside the window like they're keeping half an eye on me the way they always have. Snow clings to the peaks even this late in the afternoon. My boots are still damp from the trail I walked this morning. My shoulders ache from the vest I wore during last week's raid. None of that matters much. Not when my mind keeps drifting back to the cabin. To Nora.
My woman's safe now. Curled up somewhere in one of my flannel shirts with paint on her fingers, probably humming something off key at her easel while she turns these mountains into color on canvas. The thought settles something warm and steady in my chest that used to just be quiet in here instead. The Levon case is closed. He's rotting exactly where he belongs. Nora testified. I stood beside her the whole time. The rest of the teambacked us up without a single gap. Done. Finished. The kind of ending I used to think only happened in other people's lives.
I'm not the kind of man who used to believe in easy endings. Still don't, most days. But I believe in this one, because I watched us build it with our own hands out of a wrecked car and a blizzard and a woman who wouldn't stop fighting even when fighting looked impossible.
The office door opens, and Brock Savage walks in.
He fills the frame the same way I do, tall, hard, ex Special Forces who traded the battlefield for these mountains and never once looked back at what he left behind. Savage. That's what the men call him, half respect and half warning, and it fits him the way it's fit since long before I knew the real reason behind the quiet he carries. He patrols the deepest, least forgiving parts of the Steel Mountain wilderness out of a remote ranger outpost that makes my cabin look like a five star hotel by comparison. One room. One bed. No neighbors for fifty miles in any direction. Exactly the kind of place a man goes when he's decided solitude is safer than anything else on offer, and I know better than most men alive why he might have decided that.
He drops a file on my desk without asking. “Heard you closed the Levon thing. Good work.”
I lean back, arms crossed. “It's done. Nora's clear.”
Brock grunts, the closest thing to a smile he tends to manage most days. We understand each other, the two of us. Both seen too much. Both learned the hard way what it costs to protect something and still lose it anyway, though I got lucky enough that mine came out the other side of that particular lesson still breathing.
“Got a new one for you. Well. For me, technically, but you'll want to hear it.” His voice comes out rough, like gravel settling under boots. “Journalist. Hazel Lowe. She spent the better part of a year embedded with a smuggling operation running out of the backcountry before she broke the story wide open. Guns. People. A supply chain that runs straight through three counties and up into Canada if the intel's right. The men running it are not the kind who let a loose end walk around free after she's already cost them this much money and this much exposure.”
I pick up the file and flip it open. Hazel Lowe looks back at me from the photo clipped inside, sharp featured, dark haired, the particular look of somebody who's spent a career walking straight at the story everybody else was smart enough to avoid. Feisty, Brock called her, and I can already see it in the set of her jaw even in a still photograph.
“She needs protection.” Not a question.
“Deep protection. They already made one attempt on her outside her own apartment. She's lucky the only thing she lost was a very expensive laptop and about six hours of sleep.” Brock leans against the edge of my desk, arms crossing over his chest, and for just a second something moves behind his eyes that I recognize, the particular calculation of a man deciding whether a job is simply dangerous or dangerous in a way that's going to cost him something personal too. “I'm taking her up to the outpost. Remote enough that finding it requires either a very good map or somebody willing to walk in blind for three days. No cell service. No distractions. She stays breathing while the task force works on dismantling the rest of the operation from the ground up.”
I raise an eyebrow at him. “You sure about that, Savage? One bed, remote as hell, nobody around for miles. Sound familiar to you at all?”
He meets my eyes, and something flickers there I recognize immediately, because it's the same thing that flickered in mine the night I found Nora half conscious in a wrecked car in a blizzard I had no business being out in either. “She needs a protector who won't blink and won't get distracted. I'm that man. Nothing more complicated than that.”
I think about Nora, about the exact moment my careful, quiet life stopped being either of those things the second she crashed into it, and I decide Brock deserves the warning even if he's not going to listen to a word of it. “Watch yourself out there. These feisty ones, the reporters, the fighters, the ones who look at you like they see straight past the badge to whatever you've actually got left underneath it, they've got a way of getting under a man's skin before he even notices it happening. Next thing you know you're rigging traps around an outpost that used to just be a place you slept, and calling somebody yours before you've fully worked out when exactly that started being true.”
Brock's mouth twitches, almost a real smile, which for him is nearly a speech. “Sounds like you're speaking from experience, Rivers.”
“Damn right I am.”
“I appreciate the concern.” He straightens off the desk, already all business again, already somewhere else in his head, planning routes and contingencies the way the rest of us plan dinner. “But I've got a job to do and a head that still works fine for thinking instead of anything else. I'm not built for the rest of it. Not the way you and Jax and Kane apparently are.”
“Famous last words, Savage.”
He doesn't smile at that one. Just nods, once, sharp, like he's closing a door on the subject entirely. “Focus on your own woman. I heard she's painting again. That's good. That's real good, actually, for both of you.”
There's something underneath that last part I don't push on, some private weight he's carrying that none of us talk about outright, the particular date every winter when he goes further into himself than usual and the rest of the team just makes sure somebody's nearby without turning it into a conversation he hasn't asked for. Maybe this case is exactly the wrong thing for a man carrying that kind of quiet. Maybe it's exactly the right one. I don't know which yet, and neither does he, and that's probably the honest truth of most things worth doing.
“She is,” I tell him, standing and stretching out shoulders that ache a little less than they did an hour ago. “Go get your journalist up that mountain safe, Brock. Call if the ring sends more men after her once they realize she's gone quiet. You'll have every one of us behind you inside a day.”
“I know.” He picks up the file, tucking it under one arm. “Try not to worry about me too much, Rivers. I've survived worse odds than one stubborn reporter.”
“That's not actually what worries me.”
He gives me that almost smile one more time on his way out, the closest thing to acknowledging the joke that Brock Savage is ever going to manage, and then the door closes behind him and the office feels quieter than it did a minute ago, the particular quiet of a man walking toward something he doesn't know yet is going to change him completely.
I check the clock. Almost time to head home. Home to Nora, to the cabin, to the one bed that smells like woodsmoke and both of us now instead of just me and a long, unbroken quiet I used to mistake for peace.
I shove the last of the Levon paperwork into a drawer, grab my jacket, and step outside into the cold. My truck sits alone in the lot, and the drive home takes forty minutes I spend thinking about nothing except the particular sound of her laugh and how many hours it's actually been since I last heard it in person, which feels like far too many even though it's been exactly one workday.
The radio crackles with chatter from the other marshals. I turn it down without really listening to any of it.
My phone buzzes on the seat beside me halfway up the mountain road. Nora's name lights up the screen, and I answer through the truck's speaker without slowing down.
“Hey, darlin'.” My voice comes out low, already warmer than it was ten seconds ago. “On my way home. You still in my shirt?”
