Page 46 of Forbidden Protector

"You've gone quiet," she says.

"I do that."

"You do that when there's one thing you're hiding, not just being tired." Her eyes come up off the screen, sharp. "Which one is it?"

"Long day."

She holds my face with that stare another two seconds. It’s the exact length of time it takes a good interviewer to decide whether pushing again buys more than it spends. Then she lets it go, because she's better at this than almost anyone I've ever sat across from, including men paid to lie professionally.

"Fine," she says. "Keep your secrets, Blackwater. I'll find them anyway. I always do."

"I have no doubt," I respond, and mean it as a warning as much as a compliment, and don't say the rest.

Gus starts it a little after midnight.

Our surveillance cameras cover the driveway gate, the house, the barns, and the outbuildings, and nothing past them.

I've said as much to my father for two years, that a lens is only as good as the ground somebody bothers to point it at, and the back fence line has never made anybody's list.

So we sit the porch ourselves. Her sidearm reloaded, mine across my knees, watching the tree line like you watch a tree line when somebody's already put a truck through your family once and tied a flag on your fence to prove they can do it again.

Gus has been asleep against the rail for an hour. Then a vehicle passes a half mile out on the county road, engine note carrying thin and clean across the cold, and the dog comes up off the boards like he's been shot.

Ears forward. Every muscle locked. A low sound in his chest that isn't a bark and isn't a growl, but something older than both.

The truck passes. Taillights, then nothing. Gus doesn't settle for a long five minutes.

"That's new," Mackenzie says, watching him instead of the road.

"He does that sometimes." I don't tell her it's the second time. I don't tell her the first time was the morning Wyatt dropped him off, right after we put Jacob in the ground. That's a problem I'm not ready to hand her yet. Not until I know what it adds up to.

She lets it sit, same as she let the Calgary account sit, tucking it away for later.

She notices everything I don't say. She just chooses her moment.

"Cold out," she says instead, after a while, shifting closer on the step without making a production of it. Her shoulder finds mine and neither of us moves off the contact.

"You want to go in?"

"I want to sit right here." Her voice has dropped, quiet, pitched for the two of us and nobody the dark might be hiding. "Somebody's out there working this same case from a different angle. Maybe more than one somebody."

Voss, I think, and don't say it.

"Whoever it is, and whoever's behind him," she adds, "and unless I misread what I saw at that funeral, the Sullivans want him found as bad as you do." A ghost of a smile. "A family doesn't cross a church aisle over a body for nothing, Blackwater. This whole county's chasing the same ghost. We're just the only two doing it half-dressed on a porch at midnight."

"I've got a coat on."

"You've got a coat unbuttoned to the sternum, which around here counts as half-dressed." Her hand finds the inside of my forearm, over the old scar, thumb tracing it slow, thinking with her hands instead of her mouth. "I like you dangerous. I don't love you freezing to prove a point."

I turn my head. Close enough now that I can feel the heat coming off her skin instead of mine. For a second, the rifle, the dog gone rigid twice in a week, the account number I'm never going to explain, all of it goes quiet. Crowded out by the one thing in this county I've never once managed to treat like a threat, no matter how hard I try.

"Say that again," I tell her.

"Which part?" Her mouth curves, like she already knows exactly which part and wants to make me ask for it plainly.

"You know which part."

"Make me." Two words, and I feel them land somewhere no threat like that has any business landing on a man holding a loaded rifle.