Page 11 of Forbidden Protector

She waits. She's laid a blade against my family in front of a sheriff and a body and a foot of February air and hasn't given back one inch of it. She'll stand there until the light is gone if that's what it takes.

I give her nothing, because nothing is all I have that's true.

She holds another three seconds, then turns for the truck. The wind lifts her coat and I watch her walk across the exact ground where a man's murder was staged as weather.

I finally hear what she said standing on it.

I've read one just like it.

She didn't come to Rimrock to look at cattle numbers.

She came knowing what this county does to men who go up that mountain, and she knew it before she ever got off the plane.

I get in and start the engine and do not ask her a single question.

My father gave me until morning to find the answer, and I already know I'm not going to like it.

FIVE

MACKENZIE

I take the aisle seat two rows from the back, because it puts the door behind me and the whole town in front of me.

Inside a minute I find out I have made exactly one mistake.

The pew behind me is empty.

St. Bridget's has been standing since 1889 and the floorboards have carried this county the whole time and announce everything that crosses them.

Over the altar there's real stained work somebody's money paid for in a better year, Christ with his hand up over a valley that is unmistakably this one, the Continental Divide behind him in greens and yellows that do not exist in February. Everything else is amber glass and knocking radiators and a full church of wet wool steaming in the heat.

Blackwaters hold the left front, four rows deep. Sullivans hold the right, more of them, spilling back toward the county. Between the two blocks runs an aisle nobody has crossed in a hundred and fifty years, except to be buried.

Wyatt Mercer sits front row left, Blackwater side, where his father's chair sat for thirty years. His hands are open on his thighs like he set them down and forgot where.

Knox Blackwater is beside him. And beside Knox, on Blackwater ground, in a church holding every ranch family in three counties, sits an auburn-haired woman whose last name is Sullivan.

She crossed. In front of Rimrock. In front of both fathers.

Half the county keeps not looking at it the way you keep not looking at a fire. I take the heir out of the enemy column and set him somewhere I have no name for. What I put in his place is leverage, because I was raised on this feud and there is no place in me for the simpler answer.

The organ starts, and it is not a good organ, and the whole county stands up in its wedding suits and its feed store coats.

Behind me the floor gives.

One board, then another, a long complaint out of hundred-and-thirty-year-old timber under something well north of two hundred pounds. Whatever it is, it’s walking quietly on top of all that noise, and the hair comes up on my arms.

Then I smell him. Dark, smoky, dangerous, reaching me a full second before he does. My body knows him before my head catches up. Three days. Three days, and some animal in me has learned a man by smell and goes quiet when it finds him.

The pew takes his weight. The whole row moves. Then nothing.

His knees are against the back of my pew. I sit up straighter, which is its own confession, and then I turn around, because I refuse to be a woman who doesn't.

Holt Blackwater has shaved.

Bare to the throat. The jaw I have watched refuse to apologize for two days is smooth, and it takes years off him, and my next breath arrives late.

No hat.