Everything She Did Not Say

She did not run.

She wanted to. Every instinct she had spent the past two weeks sharpening told her to move, to be gone before that conversation in the parking lot ended, to be back in the truck and down the road before Colt came inside with whatever that man had told him about who she really was.

She stood in the hallway beside the supply closet and breathed.

Think. If that man worked for Garrett, this was already over. He would not have needed to show Colt her photograph. He would have simply told Colt to hand her over, and the question was whether Colt would, which she could not answer because she had known him for four days and four days was not enough to know what someone did when it cost them something.

But if that man did not work for Garrett.

She thought about what Cross had told her: the cartel had been pressuring the Iron Vow MC for eighteen months. She thought about suits that did not belong in mountain towns. She thought about Garrett's firm being the legal nerve center of that same cartel.

The man outside was not here for her.

He was here for Colt. And she happened to be a useful piece of information he had brought along, maybe as leverage, maybe as a test, maybe as something she could not quite see the shape of yet.

The back door opened.

She was still standing in the hallway when Colt came in. He stopped when he saw her. A long pause, the kind where you can hear someone deciding something.

"How long have you been standing there?" he said.

"Long enough."

He looked at her with those dark, careful eyes. "Come sit down."

"I'd rather stand."

"Sloane." Not Rae. Her real name, quiet and flat, like he was setting something down on a table between them. "Come sit down."

* * *

They sat at the table nearest the fireplace. The one with the wobbling leg. The bar was empty now, Pearl gone home, the chairs still up on the tables except for the two they were sitting in. Colt had poured two glasses of water, which felt oddly formal.

He put both hands flat on the table and looked at her.

"The man outside works for a group of people who have been trying to buy their way into Iron Vow territory for a year and a half," he said. "He shows up every few months with a new reason why we should reconsider. Tonight he brought something new." A pause. "You."

"What did he say about me?"

"That you're the former fiancée of an attorney named Garrett Hale. That Garrett is very concerned about your wellbeing. That Garrett would consider it a significant gesture of goodwill if we helped locate you."

Sloane stared at the water glass. "And what did you say?"

"I told him to get off my property."

She looked up.

"I also told him that if I saw him in this town again I would consider it an act of aggression and respond accordingly, which in his world means something specific." Colt's expression did not change. "He left."

The fire popped. Outside, the wind moved through the pines.

"You don't know who I am," she said. "You don't know what I did. You just told a man with cartel backing to walk away, and you don't know if I'm worth the trouble."

"I know you're not," he said. She blinked, and he continued: "I know you're not whatever he was implying you are. Scared women running from dangerous men don't look like you look. They look smaller. They look like they're always waiting for something to happen." He paused. "You look like you're waiting for your chance to fight back."

She had not cried since she left Chicago. She had been very deliberate about that. She was not going to cry now, in a bar at midnight, in front of a man she had known for four days, over the fact that he had just described her with more accuracy than anyone had managed in four years.

"My name is Sloane," she said. "Sloane Vega. I'm a witness in a federal case against the man you just turned away from. The same man whose lawyers are apparently the financial engine of the people who have been pressuring you."

Colt said nothing. But she saw something change in his face, something that moved beneath the stillness.

"We are in the same problem from different sides," she said. "I found out by accident. I didn't come here knowing any of this. I came here because I closed my eyes and pointed at a map."

"And your truck broke down."

"And my truck broke down."

He looked at her for a long time. The fire settled. The wind outside picked up and dropped again.

"You're staying," he said. It was not a question.

"I made an arrangement with the federal agent who found me. I'm staying here while the case moves forward."

"Good."

She frowned. "You're not going to ask me anything else?"

"I have questions," he said. "I'll ask them when you're ready to answer them." He stood up, picked up both water glasses, and carried them to the bar. "Go get some sleep. The brothers are going to need someone to tell them what they can and can't order tomorrow morning and apparently that's you now."

She stood up. She was almost to the stairs when she stopped.

"Colt."

He looked over his shoulder.

"Why did you pay for my truck?"

The corner of his mouth moved. Just barely. "Because you were going to argue about it."

"That is not a reason."

"It's the only one you're getting tonight," he said. Exactly what he had said the first night. Like a door that opened onto the same room no matter how many different ways you tried to enter it.

She went upstairs.

She lay on the bed in the dark and listened to the sounds of the building settling around her, the creak of old wood and the distant murmur of the wind, and she thought about a man who had sent away someone with cartel backing without flinching and then offered her water and did not ask her for anything.

She thought: I am in serious trouble.

She thought: the problem is that I am not sure it is the bad kind.

She thought about the way he had said her name. Not Rae. Sloane. Like he had been waiting for the real thing and was simply relieved that it had finally arrived.

She closed her eyes.

Her phone buzzed on the nightstand. The burner. The number that only three people had. But this was not Mira's number. It was not Cross's number. It was a number she did not recognize at all, and the text said only five words: I know where you are. And underneath those five words, as if to make certain she understood what she was dealing with, a photograph: the view from outside her window. Taken from the street below. Less than an hour ago. While she had been sitting downstairs telling Colt the truth.