Page 78 of Forbidden Protector

"What was that?" I ask her.

"Nothing." Too quick. "County gossip. Aldridge's people talk too much."

"Sage. I'm too tired for bullshit tonight. What was that?"

"There's a rumor going around that Jacob's death had help from somebody close." She says it flat, testing the shape of it out loud for the first time. "Somebody on the inside. Ours or theirs, nobody's decided which yet."

"Who started it?"

"Does it matter? It's already moving." Her eyes go to Maren, just for a second, involuntary. Gone before either of them can pretend it didn't happen.

I clock it anyway, quiet, and tuck it somewhere I can find it again when I'm not running on four hours of adrenaline and cold coffee. A week ago I'd have chased it down the hall myself. Tonight I choose not to, on purpose, because chasing anything right now means walking away from these double doors, and a rumor with no fingerprints on it yet is worth that trade.

Maren catches the look too and doesn't flinch from it. "My father didn't do anything to that man," she says, quiet, aimed at nobody and everybody. "Neither did my brothers."

"Nobody said they did."

"Somebody's about to." She looks at me, hazel eyes gone mossy and steady even this deep into the night. The same steadiness that got her through a funeral in enemy territory without breaking stride. "That's how these things start, Mackenzie. Somebody doesn't say it. Then somebody almost says it. Then it's Tuesday and everybody's saying it and nobody remembers who started the sentence."

I think about the church. Blackwaters four rows deep on the left, Sullivans spilling back on the right, a hundred and fifty years of graves keeping both blocks exactly where they belong, except for Maren, who crossed the aisle anyway. It isn't a wall. It's a handshake nobody's tested with real weight yet.

Tonight it's getting tested.

The double doors stay shut.

I catch myself thumbing the screen awake out of pure animal instinct. The part of me that still thinks there's a person you call when the bottom drops out of a night like this. My thumb hovers over the contacts and finds nothing. My mother's name in that list, but not the one I could call for support. My father's been dead four years, and the only man who ever stood in for him professionally sat on my transfer for five months while pretending it was protection.

I put the phone away.

The closest thing I've got to that list tonight is already in this hallway.

Sage, pacing grooves into the tile. Josephine, watching the doors like she's done it before. Maren, whose hand is still faintly warm on mine an hour later.

I hold the coffee cup for the warmth of it instead of the coffee, both hands wrapped around paper now gone cold. My eyes ache with how long they've been open.

Somewhere under the exhaustion is all that bass and gravel at my ear before any of this started. I want your voice in my ear before I need it for anything else. I never once told him the same thing. I think about that more than I think about the blood.

The waiting room empties out around me, chair by chair, until it's down to Josephine, motionless, and me.

At four the hall goes fully quiet. The kind of quiet a hospital only manages in the hour before shift change. That's when I hear him.

Boots. Unhurried. A man who has never once in his life needed to rush toward anything, because things have always come to him instead.

Gideon Blackwater walks the length of the corridor alone, no Knox at his shoulder and no lawyer trailing two steps back. Nothing about him tonight is matching the man who told me across a desk that my grandfather's death was grief dressed up as a case.

He stops eight feet away. Close enough that I can see his hands.

They're not empty.

I can't tell what he's holding. Something small, folded, and held too carefully for a man who doesn't do careful. He stands there in the four a.m. fluorescent light looking at me like he's been rehearsing this walk since the phone call woke him.

I realize, watching him not speak, that I have absolutely no idea what a man like Gideon Blackwater brings with him when he finally decides to tell the truth.

TWENTY-FIVE

MACKENZIE

"Walk with me, Agent Tatum."