She's already dialing.
Judge arrives in fifteen minutes.
Not Ronan. Judge himself, which tells me exactly how seriously they're taking this. He parks his Road King at the curb and walks up the porch steps with the calm, unhurried pace of a man who has handled significantly worse situations than an ex-boyfriend in a mountain town.
Patty lets him in.
"Harper," he says. A nod. Nothing more. He doesn't waste words.
"Judge."
He sits across from me at the table. Patty puts coffee in front of him without asking. He takes a sip, sets it down, and looks at me with pale eyes that have seen things I'll never fully understand.
"Tell me about the call," he says.
I do. Word for word, as much as I can remember. The tone of it. The threat underneath the pleasant surface. The fact that he knows I'm not alone, that I've made friends, which means he's been watching or having people watch for him.
Judge listens without interrupting. When I'm done, he's quiet for a moment.
"He's testing," he says finally. "Seeing if you'll come to him. Seeing if you're scared enough to try and manage this alone." He looks at me. "Are you?"
"No."
"Good." He picks up his phone. Types something. "Ronan's on his way. He'll be here in five minutes."
"Judge, I don't want him doing something he can't come back from—"
"Harper." Judge's voice is flat. Certain. The voice of a man who commanded soldiers in combat and never had one question the call. "Ronan has already done things he can't come back from. We all have. What we don't do is let men like Derek Sutton operate in our town without consequences."
"This isn't your fight."
"You're here. You're under our protection whether you asked for it or not. That makes it our fight." He stands. "And for what it's worth, Ronan made it his fight the night you walked into that bar. He's just been waiting for permission to act on it."
The sound of a motorcycle comes up the street.
I know the engine note by now. Deep, steady, controlled. Everything Ronan is.
He cuts the engine and he's through the door before I've fully stood up.
His eyes go to me first. Scanning, checking, the same way he checked me outside the bar after Cal touched my wrist, the same way he's been checking me since the first night, like he's running threat assessments without knowing he's doing it.
"You okay?" he asks.
"Yes."
His jaw tightens. He looks at Judge.
"He called her," Judge says. "Pinecrest Lodge, room 212. He's here for three days. He wants her to come to him."
Ronan goes very still.
It's not the stillness of someone who's frozen. It's the stillness of someone who's just received targeting coordinates and is running calculations.
"He called her directly," Ronan says. Flat. Even.
"From a local number."
Ronan looks at me. "What did he say."
