Total pages in book: 39
Estimated words: 35507 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 178(@200wpm)___ 142(@250wpm)___ 118(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 35507 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 178(@200wpm)___ 142(@250wpm)___ 118(@300wpm)
Alden catches me looking. "You nervous, Vega?"
"I'm sitting in a secret mill with a man who shoved me out a window and a woman who already knew my kill fee. Nervous would be the polite word."
"Polite doesn't keep you alive. Careful does. The house will feel far. That's the point. Far is what you needed in Chicago and didn't get. You'll get it here."
Colt's hand finds the back of my chair, not quite touching me, close enough that the heat of him is a fact I can't argue with. "She stays with me. That's the condition."
"I assumed," Alden says. "One bed up there, last I checked. Try not to break my furniture."
My face goes hot. "We're adults. We can handle a floor."
"Speak for yourself," Colt mutters, and Marin actually laughs once before the tablet steals her attention again.
Alden walks us back through the Watchline so I can see the river from the glass, then down past the gym and the turbine hall doors he doesn't open. He talks in that stoic, methodical register the whole way, pointing at cameras and the lot gate, giving Colt the tour as a workplace briefing even though this mill is the only safe building left in the county. I file every turn. I can't help it. Seeing is the job even when the job has become staying alive.
At the lot Alden clasps Colt's shoulder, a brief, solid hit of friendship that doesn't need extra words. "I'll look into the dock name and the jacket stitch. If Helix has a local pair of eyes in town, Marin will find the money that pays them. You two disappear up the falls. Check in at dark." He hands Colt a keyfob. “Here, take the black one,” Alden says, nodding toward a black truck in the lot.
"Copy," Colt says.
I hold Alden's gaze. "Thank you. I feel like a nuisance."
"You're the witness who kept the files. That makes you useful."
Colt opens my door because he’s a gentleman underneath all that rugged handsomeness. I climb in with the camera and the drive and the leftover diner heat still in my fingers. The mill shrinks in the mirror as we take the river road toward the far side of the falls, toward a high ugly driveway and a bed situation I’m absolutely going to fight him about, and I keep my eyes on the water because looking at his hands on the wheel does something restless and inconvenient to the rest of me.
"You're quiet," he says.
"I'm storing the layout. And deciding whether I'm impressed or furious that you had a whole secret mill and still let me believe the cabin was your entire personality."
"The cabin was mine. This is borrowed when I need it. Tonight I need it."
"Tonight we need it," I correct.
He glances over, grumpy and unwilling, and the corner of his mouth gives up a fraction. "Tonight we need it. Keep the camera down until we're behind the gate. Then you can photograph whatever you want as long as it isn't the road behind us."
"Deal," I say, and I don't take his hand even though it's right there on the gearshift, close enough to steal. The falls show white through the trees on our right, loud even through the glass, and the truck starts to climb.
“Look,” I say once we’re a few miles down the road. “It’s a country store. We’ll need supplies.”
Colt nods, turning into the lot. We hop into the store grabbing essentials and Colt’s good about getting the right type of supplies to keep us alive. When we’re out of the store, and packed back into the borrowed truck, I’m already itching to snap pictures of Colt in this different type of element. Normal.
5
Colt
The driveway is every ugly thing Alden promised, a steep cut of gravel that switchbacks through wet pine until the falls drop out of sight and the house shows up all at once, dark timber and narrow windows, sitting high enough that the river looks like a pale thread and low enough that I can still hear it if I roll the window down.
I don't roll the window down. Oakley's camera is already lifting an inch off her lap.
"Gate first," I say. "Pictures after I clear the rooms."
"You clear rooms. I document my kidnapping. It's called balance."
"It's called staying in the truck until I say otherwise."
"You say otherwise a lot. It's becoming your personality."
I punch Marin's code into the panel. The gate drags open on a slow iron complaint. I pull through, wait until it shuts behind us, and sit there listening to the tick of the engine and the far white rush of water. No other tracks in the gravel. No lights in the trees. The house looks empty the way Equinox properties are supposed to look empty, which is to say staged for nobody and wired for everybody.