Not the polite laugh people give when they’re being diplomatic. Not the performed laugh that comes with an agenda. The real one—full and warm and surprised, like I’d caught him off guard with something genuinely funny, and the sound of it did something to the air in the room that I didn’t have a category for.
I filed it under: problem.
“You always say that,” Mitch said, pushing off the door frame and stepping into the room. He moved the way he always moved—unhurried, covering ground without seeming to hurry, taking up exactly as much space as he wanted and not apologizing for any of it. “It’s not getting more convincing with practice.”
“It’s not supposed to be convincing. It’s supposed to be accurate.”
He was still grinning. “You want a beer?”
“No.”
“You want the truth about how bad that leg looks from where I’m standing?”
“Also no.”
“Tough. You’re getting both.”
And then Caleb was there.
He appeared at Mitch’s shoulder the way he always did—smaller, quieter, moving with the grace of someone who had learned to take up less space than he was entitled to. His strawberry-blond hair caught the last thin light from the east window and turned it copper. His eyes—hazel like his brother’s, but warmer, softer at the edges—found my leg first, then my face, and something in his expression shifted.
It went soft. Not the kind of careful concern people offer when they’re being polite. The real kind—a warmth that reached across the room and landed somewhere behind my sternum with the precision of a round I hadn’t heard coming.
My threat-assessment instincts had no category for that look. They spun for a second and came up empty, which was worse than coming up with a threat, because at least a threat I knew how to handle.
“Sit down,” Caleb said.
His voice was gentle. So gentle it almost sounded like a suggestion, the kind of thing you could take or leave depending on your mood and the state of your leg and how badly you wanted to prove a point to the man who had just laughed at you.
I sat down.
My body made the decision before my brain had finished processing the command. The relief was immediate and humiliating—the weight off the bad leg, the tension in my lower back releasing all at once, the specific surrender of muscles that had been holding a line for too long.
I was sitting on the edge of the bed with my hands on my knees and my bag still on the chair across the room and Caleb Pruitt looking at me with an expression that contained nojudgment whatsoever, which was somehow worse than if he’d looked smug.
I had sat before I decided to. The command had bypassed the part of my brain that refuses things on principle, and I didn’t know what to do with that information except file it under the same category as Mitch’s laugh and the flannel on the hook and the wrongness of boots by the door that weren’t mine.
Problem.
Caleb didn’t say anything else. He just looked at me for a long moment, his head tilted slightly to one side, and then he turned and walked into the kitchen. I could hear him opening cabinets, running water, the domestic sounds of someone who had decided that making coffee at nine-forty-five at night was a reasonable response to finding a wounded operative sitting on a bunk with his guard down.
Mitch was still standing in the doorway, watching me with that same unhurried grin, and I knew without asking that he had seen exactly what happened—the command, the response, the gap between what Sterling Callahan was supposed to do and what Sterling Callahan had actually done.
“You want to tell me what happened to the leg?” he asked.
“No,” I said.
He nodded, like that was the answer he’d expected, and pushed off the door frame. “Coffee’s coming. Try not to look so fucking miserable while you drink it. It hurts my feelings.”
He was lying. Nothing hurt Mitch Pruitt’s feelings. He said it anyway, and then he followed his brother into the kitchen, and I was left sitting on the edge of the bed with a leg that hurt and a door in my head that had just been kicked open by two men who had no business being there, and the particular, uncomfortable certainty that the twenty minutes of peace I’d just bought myself were the last twenty minutes of peace I was going to get for a very long time.
* * * *
The three of us settled around the long plank table like men negotiating a truce nobody had officially declared. I took the head—my spot, the one with sight lines to both exits—and Mitch dropped into the bench across from me with his boots up on the wood like he’d been sitting there for years. Caleb took the end, close enough to the stove that the heat caught the copper in his hair and turned it gold.
The wood stove ticked. The February cold pressed at the east-facing door and found no weakness. Outside, the ranch was going dark, the last thin light bleeding out of the sky over Black Butte, and the bunkhouse windows had turned to mirrors, showing me three men sitting at a table that was too big for the conversation we were having.
Which was no conversation at all, because I wasn’t having one.
