Page 19 of Remmen

“Why?”

“Because you nearly died in the back of a truck and he’s the one who carried you there, and I don’t think a soul’s said a kind word to him in about six years.” I taped the last edge down. “Also I was three drinks in and feeling brave. Don’t make it a whole thing.”

Mestyn eyed me for another long moment.

And then he talked.

Not to me. To the wall, mostly, and the ceiling, in that same sideways, sneering way, while my hands worked over the wreck of his stomach and gave him somewhere to look that wasn’t my face. The pits. What he’d been by the end of them, once they stopped feeding you enough and let the hunger do the training. The sound a crowd makes.

None of these men were ever going to walk into my office and sit on my nice couch. Not one. But a woman with her fingers already sticky in his guts wasn’t the Agency and wasn’t a lady with a clipboard. Turned out they’d tell that woman just about anything.

I kept my hands moving so none of that showed on my face.

Then his eyes came off the ceiling and landed on me, and stayed.

It was nothing. A look. He was hurt and bored and I was the only new thing in his whole week. But it held a beat too long, and it had a weight I’d felt before, a long time ago, across a rec room on an isolated mining rock. I didn’t like it.

Saved his life. Saw him at the absolute floor of himself. Somewhere in the back of my training a little alarm went off, one clean note.

I argued myself out of it. He was just lonely, I told myself, and mean, and starved for anything that wasn’t a fist. I’d read this wrong before. Perren taught me I didn’t get to trust my own read on who’s getting too attached — it was the one gauge in me that was cracked and I knew it. So I smiled like it was nothing, and I let it go.

“You’re done,” I said, and snapped the kit shut. “Keep it dry. Don’t lift anything. That includes your attitude.”

Mestyn snorted. Then, grudging, at the door: “Rauf. Walk her around before she goes wandering.”

Rauf gave me the tour, for what it was. Barns, pens, a long shed with an engine in pieces across a bench. He was easier out here than he’d been in town, less braced. I liked him. Which, I was starting to realize, might be its own particular problem in a place like this.

He steered me wide of one barn near the back.

I’d have walked right past it. Except something inside shifted its weight, and the whole building took the load, and it made a sound. Nothing on any farm I’d ever set foot on made that sound. Low. Chesty. A purr with teeth in it. Big.

Rauf’s hand came up to my shoulder, light, turning me. “Not that one. Rats out there. Nasty.” He had an easy voice. His eyes weren’t easy at all.

I let him turn me. I didn’t look back at the barn.

But I’d heard the size of what was in there, and I’d had my hands twice now in the mess something had made of Mestyn, and I didn’t like the connection. I hadn’t seen anything, though. It was a sound and a bad feeling and nothing I could prove, and I made myself leave it at that.

I didn’t say a word. I’d gotten in here on a hello and a jar of ointment, on the thin, precious understanding that I could be helpful and keep my mouth shut.

One word about that barn to Otho, to Remmen, to anyone with a title and every door on this ranch would shut in my face for good. And the only place on this whole planet where my actual job was actually working shut right along with them.

“Thanks for the tour,” I said.

At the gate Rauf handed me up into the buggy.

“Wouldn’t want the mayor coming out here looking for you,” he said. Mild. Not a threat, not a joke. Just a man who’d watched Remmen go cold at the sight of him and drawn his own conclusions.

“The mayor’s got a town to run, he’s not wasting his time being worried about me,” I said.

Rauf held my eyes a beat too long. “Sure.”

I drove back with the wind shoving at the little buggy and heard that purr the whole way home.

It was going full dark by the time I got the buggy back to Maisie’s and walked the last stretch home. The lane behind the square was empty and blue with dusk, and I was cutting through it toward home when I saw him.

Remmen. Behind his house, down on his heels in the alley, this huge man folded up small in the dirt. A chipped dish in front of him. Three scrawny cats winding around his boots and his hands, not one of them scared, while he murmured something too low for me to catch.

One of them butted its head against a finger the size of its whole body, and he let it.