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"I know what time it is."

"Do you ever sleep?"

"Took a nap this afternoon. Hector's going to tell everybody I'm getting soft." I walk over to the bottom of the steps and lean a shoulder against the post. "Somebody has to watch your door. I'd rather it was me."

Her eyes come back to my face. Her throat flushes red, and her jaw sets. She's figured out what I did to her just now, and she doesn't like it any better than I do.

"You used that voice on me," she says. "The one you used on those two men in the ring."

"I did."

"I didn't decide to listen to it. I just did." Her hands close into fists at her sides. "That's not the first time a man gave me an order and my body obeyed before I could stop it."

I don't ask who did it before. I already know enough to want every one of them dead.

"You weren't breathing," I tell her. "Your lips were going pale. Nothing else I said was getting through to you."

"You gave me an order."

"Yeah." I hold her eyes. "I'm not going to stand here and tell you I'm sorry I did it. You'd be on these boards right now if I hadn't. But I know I didn't ask you first. Next time, I'll ask if I can. Unless you're turning blue on me, and then I won't."

"Where'd you learn to talk like that?"

"Running fights." It's true. It's just not all of it. "You put a barn full of drunk ranch hands around two men bleeding in the middle of it, you learn to make yourself heard without shouting. Shouting starts riots."

She studies me a beat too long with her eyes narrowed. She opens her mouth, then closes it again.

I let her look. I've had whole arenas full of people staring at me, and not one of them ever read me the way this woman does from across my rail.

She's quiet so long I think she's going to walk off my porch without another word.

"It was the bolt," she says.

I wait.

"The deadbolt you put on the guest house door. I got up to check it and locked it again. It sounds exactly like the one on the cellar door where they kept me. They'd go up the stairs and slide it shut, and I'd be alone down there in the dark." She swallows. "I've been listening to that sound every night since you put it on."

A cellar. Bolted from the outside, at the top of a flight of stairs.

I put that bolt on that door myself. I handed her both keys and told her it was hers. Every night since, I've been sending her to bed with the same sound she heard every time they locked her in.

There are rock cellars under half the old homesteads in the Hill Country. There are root cellars, storm cellars, cellars under the old German stone houses in Fredericksburg. It doesn't narrow anything down, and I'm not fool enough to think it does. But it's the first thing she's told me about where she was held that I didn't have to guess from her bruises, and I'm not going to forget it.

My family knows what a cellar under a man's property can be used for. My daddy had one dug under the old barn, poured concrete and soundproofed, and some of the men who went down those stairs never came back up alive. Jesse burned that barn to the ground.

Whoever held her had a cellar like my daddy's, with a bolt on the outside of the door. Wherever he is, he still has it. I want to know where. I told her I'd wait until she was ready to tell me, and I meant it.

"Come to the door." I say it in my everyday voice, so she can tell me no.

She steps back from the rail. I climb the steps, and she follows me to the back door. I point at the keypad under the little green light.

"You know what this is?"

"A magnetic lock." Her chin comes up. "I looked it over at first light. You left it off."

"I left it off so you could walk in without knocking." I tap the box at the top of the door frame. "A magnet holds this door shut. When the lock catches, it doesn't make a sound. No clack, no slide, nothing. The light goes from green to red, and that's all. The lock runs off the house, with a battery behind it, so it holds even if somebody cuts the power."

"There's a deadbolt on this door, too. I watched you turn it last night."