Page 94 of Forbidden Protector

I wait, eye pressed to the scope, the tree line pulled close and green-black through the glass. My own heart is going hard enough that I can feel it in my back teeth. Behind me, through my shoulder blades, his isn't. Slow and even, a metronome set for a country he never fully left. This is nothing to him. This is Tuesday.

My finger rests along the guard, not on it, muscle memory from a firing range at Quantico and a fence rail in Choteau before that. Two different lives that never once expected to end up aiming at the same man.

The shape moves. Clears the deadfall exactly the way he said it would, a man in dark gear with a rifle already coming up, already hunting the kitchen window, the one that was lit a few minutes ago and is now completely dark.

"Now."

I break the shot.

The recoil goes through me and the rifle and out into the dark.

For one endless second, nothing happens at all.

No confirmation, no sound but the ring in my own ears. Then the shape at the tree line goes down and doesn't get back up. Gus is screaming below us, Trane has gone quiet, and the whole valley holds its breath along with me.

"Confirmed hit." Holt's voice, flat, doing the job, though his hand on my shoulder has gone rigid enough that I feel it through two layers of shirt. "Stay up. I'll clear it."

"Like hell you will." I'm already moving for the stairs, rifle still in my hands because some part of me isn't ready to set it down yet. "You've got one working hand and I've got the only pair of hands in this house that just proved they can be trusted with a rifle. We clear it together."

He doesn't argue. That's how I know how close to the edge he really is. A week ago he'd have found four different sentences to keep me upstairs and safe, and tonight he just falls in half a step behind me instead, sidearm up in his good hand, and lets me lead.

We find Voss where the shot put him. On his back in the wet grass at the tree line. There's nothing calculated left in him, no scope catching moonlight, no patient professional stillness. Just a man who ran out of angles.

Holt crouches over him with two fingers at his throat and holds them there a long moment.

When he stands up he doesn't say anything at all. He doesn't have to. I already know what the silence means.

"It's over," I say, because somebody has to say it out loud, and my voice comes out steadier than I feel.

"For him." Holt looks at me across a body neither of us is going to grieve, wrung out and relieved with nowhere left to put either one. "Not for us. Not yet."

He looks down at his own hand, the bad one, hanging at his side the way it's hung for three weeks, useless for the one thing it used to be for.

"Fifteen percent," he says, quiet. Not to me, mostly to himself. "Couldn't hold zero if my life depended on it. Tonight it depended on somebody else's."

"It depended on both of us." I close the distance between us, mindful of the ground and careful of everything else. I don't wait for him to decide whether he wants me there. "You gave me your eyes. I gave you my hands. That's not a consolation prize, Holt. That's the whole equation."

He doesn't say anything to that, and I let the silence hold a beat, because some things need room before they'll come out honest.

My phone buzzes in my back pocket. I almost don't check it, but then I do, because some habits don't quit even at a dead man's feet.

Confirmed. Hartigan and the coordinator both named in the indictment. Calgary account frozen pending further review.

I read it twice to be sure, and then I laugh, short and disbelieving, entirely wrong for the ground I'm standing on.

The money's dead too. Everything Wade Calloway swallowed a pill to protect; gone in the same ten minutes it took me to put a bullet through the man who shot Holt's hand off its hinge.

"The account," I say. "It's done. All of it."

Then, because he walked in tonight and went straight to the memo before I ever got the chance, I say the rest of it too. "There's a coordinator. Russell Hartigan, out of Great Falls, running the shells that fed Wade Calloway's money north. I found it today when you went to see your father. The truck that killed Jacob's been on payroll the entire time, the same account funding Hartigan's shells since before McKenna existed on paper. I burned the pages with your family's name on them myself, in the fireplace in your own living room, because I decided you'd earned that much trust before I ever handed anything to the Bureau. I was going to tell you the second you walked back in tonight. Then you found out about the memo instead, and there wasn't room left for anything else."

His jaw moves, once, and then I say the thing I've been carrying since a study door closed on a routing number and a dead man's name.

"You were right about one thing tonight." My voice doesn't shake, though it wants to. "I did write it down. Four months before I ever met you, there's a memo with your name on it, one line in a stack of paperwork, and you had to hear about it standing outside a door instead of from me. I'm not going to pretend that away."

"Mackenzie—"

"Let me finish." I put my hand flat against his chest, over the scroll, over the heart that's been beating steady for both of us tonight.