A beat.
Then the big dog pushed himself up and lumbered over. He paused at the threshold and looked back across the street one more time.
Logan followed his line of sight back to Greta’s house and rubbed his hand over King’s head. “What’s wrong, buddy? Do you miss Atlas?”
Something shifted near the hedge.
Logan blinked.
Did a double-take.
Nothing moved.
“Logan.” Bear’s voice came from inside. He was already on the phone with the pizza place. “Still like pepperoni and olives?”
“Yeah.” He stepped in after King and pulled the door closed behind them.
Just a cat.
Solace was full of cats.
seventeen
The engine was still ticking when Greta leaned her head back against the headrest and stared at the ceiling. Atlas stood in the back seat, pressing his muzzle into the gap between her headrest and the window, his breath warm against her neck.
Three days.
Six hundred miles.
One woman in a Spokane apartment complex who had auburn hair and pale eyes and was not her sister.
She’d known it before Ashley opened the door all the way.
Not Alice.
Barely a shadow of Alice.
She’d introduced herself anyway. She’d said,I think you might know my sister.She’d watched Ashley’s face go careful and remote, watched her do the math behind her eyes, and then the door had started closing.
I don’t know anyone by that name.
Greta had pushed, one more time, because she always pushed one more time. Ashley had looked at her with something that might have been pity, might have been warning, and said she was sorry for her trouble, and the door had clicked shut.
She’d stood on the landing for a beat, listening to the absence of sound behind it. Then she’d walked back down the stairs to the parking lot where Naomi and Corbin Brandt were waiting.
Another dead fucking end.
How many more could she face? How many more
She didn’t know, but she was starting to think the answer was a fixed number, and she was getting close to it.
Atlas pushed his nose harder into her neck.
“Okay,” she said. “I’m moving.”
She got out. The air was clean and cold, pine-sharp, and it hit her face like the return it was. Home. She’d driven the last two hours on muscle memory alone, her mind replaying the hallway landing and the sound of that door. She opened the back, and Atlas landed in the yard and immediately trotted to the corner of the fence to pee on the same patch of grass he always hit first.
She was lifting her bag from the back of the Jeep when she heard the thunk. It was a clean, dense sound—the flat crack of an axe splitting wood—and it came from across the street.
