Page 56 of Forbidden Protector

"I mean I've been standing in your kitchen for a week eating breakfast next to the family that might have killed my grandfather, and nobody thought that was worth mentioning until I found the paper trail myself."

"I didn't know the shape of it until last night. I've told you that twice now."

"And I'm supposed to just believe a Blackwater when he says he didn't know something?"

That lands exactly where she means it to.

It goes in clean, the way her stitching went in clean in that line shack, the way everything about this woman does one job without wasted motion.

"We slept together four nights ago," I say. Not soft. A fact laid on the table like a blade.

"I know what I did." She throws it back at me, her eyes gone hard and gold and furious. Honey burned down to something that could cut.

"Then don't stand in my study and talk to me like I'm a stranger you caught breaking into your house." The voice that comes out isn't the one I ration by the word. It's wild, raw, barely mine.

"You are a stranger." She says it fast, too fast. "I don't know anything about your family that isn't also a motive. I don't know anything about you that isn't also a cover story. I've spent a week convincing myself that the man who turned a truck into a fence post to keep me alive is the same man whose father may have ordered my grandfather into the snow, and now I find out I was right to keep both thoughts running side by side the whole time, because you had this," her hand comes down flat on the folder, "and you decided for both of us how long I got to keep not knowing it."

"You've believed worse from better men. Don't pretend I'm the first thing in your life you've had to lie to yourself about."

I've held a rifle steadier than I'm holding my own temper right now, and there's nowhere in this room to aim it that wouldn't be the wrong target.

"I wasn't deciding for you. I was deciding for me. I needed one night to be sure of what the hell I was looking at before I put it in your hands."

"That's not your call to make." Her voice has climbed two octaves and gone unsteady with it, her hands not quite holding still at her sides.

"No." It comes out of me low and rough, torn loose instead of spoken. "It isn't. I made it anyway. You want to hate me for that, go ahead. It won't be the first thing about me you've hated and it probably won't be the last."

Something crosses her face, fast, gone before I can name it. Grief, maybe. Or the ghost of the version of today where she doesn't have to be this angry at me. Then it's shut away and the wall's back up, higher than I've seen it since the airport.

"I want the boxes," she demands. "All of them. The archive access, the login, whatever you used to find this. Today."

"You'll have it."

"And I want to know if Gideon's ever said a word to you about nineteen forty-one."

Something in me goes rigid before I can stop it. She reads that the way she reads everything, and it confirms whatever she was already halfway to believing.

"You know something about that too."

"I know he doesn't talk about it. That's not the same as knowing what it is."

"It's exactly the same, from where I'm standing." She shrugs her coat on hard, one arm and then the other, a woman arming herself the only way she has left in a room with no weapon in it but words. "I'm going back to the Riverview."

"There's a man out there who wants you dead."

"Then I'll take the room with two doors again. I did it once. I can do it twice."

I don't try to stop her, because some fights you lose worse by winning them.

"I need to get out from under a roof that might have buried my own blood."

Down the hall, low, once, Gus lifts his head off the hearth rug and doesn't settle it back down. I hear it without turning to check. Whatever's got him isn't in the house. It's on the road, or it's nothing, and I don't have the luxury of finding out which while she's got one hand on the door.

"Tatum."

It comes out of me before I've decided to let it, and I hear what I've done half a second after I've done it.

A week since I called her that. A week since Tatum meant a case file and not a woman asleep on my bad arm in a line shack, her hand curled loose around a weapon she trusted me enough to stop holding.