“Decker.” Not a question now.
“Later,” I say.
Her eyes hold mine a beat too long. “You keep saying that.”
Chapter 29
Decker
I wake with Grace asleep half on top of me, one leg over mine, her cheek on my chest, her hand curled loose beside it. Her breathing is deep and even. Nothing in her is braced. It took days for that last guard to leave her body, and now that it’s gone, I can feel it under my hands. She’s heavier asleep than she used to be. She trusts the ground she’s lying on.
The rut has thinned since yesterday. It still turns over when she moves against me, but the constant drive is gone, and what’s left underneath isn’t hunger. The bear lies low and warm in me, fed, wanting nothing. I keep waiting for him to want something.
He doesn’t.
Neither do I. That’s the strange part. Twenty years of waking up already halfway into the day’s problem, and this morning the only plan I have is not waking her. No route out of here. No fallback. Just her heartbeat against my ribs and the water trickling in the pool passage.
I lie there and soak it in.
She wakes the way she’s learned to wake in this cave—slow, without checking anything first.
“Morning, bear.” She presses her mouth to my chest, once, and slides off me into the cold. I move to sit.
“Don’t get up,” she says. “Your side of the fur is the warm side.”
She pulls my shirt over her head. It reaches her thighs. She crosses the den in it, bare-legged on cold stone, and lights the stove without swearing at it, which is new. She takes the two cups off the shelf and puts a teabag into both.
I watch her do it. There’s nothing to the moment. Water heating, a woman in my shirt, my scent all over her and hers all over me. I’ve holed up in this cave for years, and it was never anything but a place to lay low. She’s been in it days, and I can’t remember what it was for before.
She brings the cups back and tucks herself into my side, and we drink tea in the gray light without a word that matters.
“I think the stove has accepted me.”
I chuckle. “It took longer with me. You have a gift.”
Her laugh ripples through my ribs where she’s leaning, and the bear soaks it up.
Her wrist turns as she drinks, and the old raised lines inside her elbow show. What I know about her blood shifts once in my chest. I leave it where it lies.
The phone buzzes on the ledge.
I’m looking at it before the second buzz. Viktor’s call isn’t due.
Grace has gone quiet against me.
“Stay warm,” I tell her, and I’m up—jeans, boots, the phone in my fist. I push the boulder aside, step onto the slope, and answer with the entrance still open behind me.
“You’re early.”
“Jericho ran an operation last night.” Viktor’s voice is flat in the way it only gets when something has gone wrong in a useful direction. “You need to hear how it ended.”
“Go.”
“Once Faine’s corridor firmed up, Jericho started building a net for the supply convoys that feed it. He picked his ground—a bridge crossing on a county road the convoys have used every run. Two teams, one night, everything drawn up inside the restricted wing.” A pause. “The convoy never reached the bridge. It broke into cars twenty miles out and went around on ranch tracks it has never touched. Hours before the net would have closed.”
I walk a few steps down the slope, out of the wind. “Convoys reroute.”
“They didn’t avoid the corridor. They avoided the bridge. The one crossing Jericho chose, out of a dozen he could have. That choice was made in a closed room and never left it.” He lets that sit. “And here’s the part that affects you. The plan didn’t exist until after Grace was up there with you. She could not have sold it. Nobody can argue otherwise now, and I mean nobody.”
