Daniel spat pink onto the white floor. “Goddamn ex-con trash,” he muttered, low and ugly. “She let you fuck her, didn’t she? What’s it like, knowing that she’s just slumming? Taking a pity fuck from a sideshow like you?—”
Bear moved before the words were all the way out. Daniel didn’t see it coming—not the way people never saw it coming with someone Bear’s size. He crossed the room, wrapped a hand in the SOB’s shirt, and buried his fist in Daniel’s gut, once, exactly where it would hurt and not kill. The noise that came out of Daniel wasn’t even a noise; it was the world losing power in his lungs. Then Bear spun him around, careful—so fucking careful with the angle, with the velocity, with every pound of force—and shoved his face into the cinderblock wall by the fish-and-game calendar.
“You ever come near her again,” Bear said, “I will break you.”
Daniel twisted, tried to get a hand up.
Bear didn’t let him. He turned the wrist against the joint — not all the way, not enough to snap it, just enough to let the man understand with complete physical clarity that the leverage here was not in his favor, had never been in his favor, and was not going to change. He walked him backward three steps with the grip on his wrist, got a hand on the back of his neck, and put him face down across the counter.
It should’ve been over. Daniel should’ve realized he was outmatched and given up, but the damned fool grabbed a hunting knife from the display stand.
It wasn’t a trained strike. It was desperate and wild, the move of a cornered animal. Bear saw it coming—the guy might as well have telegraphed his actions with a neon sign—and pulled back.
The blade caught nothing but air.
Enough.
Bear pulled back his fist. He measured it as he threw it— his whole body already locked into the precise calculation he’d been running in the back of his head since the moment he’d walked through the door: how hard was enough. This wasn’t the bar. He was not drunk, not in a blind rage. He was not in the place he’d been at twenty-six when Jason Miller had gone down and hadn’t gotten up. He knew exactly where that line was. He’d spent twelve years learning exactly where it was.
He hit Daniel Goodwin exactly hard enough.
The man dropped.
The knife hit the floor.
The display stand tipped and followed it. Daniel slumped against the base of the counter with his chin on his chest and his legs folded under him, and he was still.
Bear stood there.
And waited.
Watched Daniel’s chest.
It moved. A shallow rise, a fall. Once. Twice. Three times.
He counted each breath, then knelt to check his pulse and caught a glimpse of his knuckles. Red, but not split. He opened his fingers. He looked at his palm, the lines of it, the old calluses and newer ones layered over each other from woodworking and construction and King’s leash, from the handles of shovels and framing hammers and the weight bar in the bunkhouse gym. He closed his hand. He opened it again.
He was thirty-nine years old and twelve years sober, and he’d walked into a hunting supply shop in Hamilton, Montana, and thrown a man into a camo display and hit him once and stopped.
He exhaled once, hard, through his nose.
Then he turned around.
Greta was still against the wall. The band of red across the front of her throat was already darkening. Her left hand was at her throat, light, fingertips resting against the mark like she was taking her own pulse. Her right hand hung at her side, the knuckles split— she must have hit him earlier, before Bear had gotten there, and the skin had opened across the second and third knuckle and dried dark.
He crossed to her.
She was watching him with an expression he hadn’t seen on her face before, and he tried to read it and couldn’t, which was not something that usually happened with her. Greta was an open book. She had an opinion about everything, and it was always visible on her face.
But not now.
“You okay?”
She didn’t answer.
Behind him, Atlas was still going. The barking had shifted to a higher pitch, the sound he made when he’d been at it long enough to start losing his mind about it.
“Greta.” He stopped an arm’s length away. He looked at the mark on her throat and made himself look away from it because he wasn’t going to be useful if he went back toward the man on the floor right now. “Are you okay?”
