Page 48 of Rune’s Solace

SOMEBODY CAME UP my path at midnight, and my hand was on the gun before I knew who it was. Boots, quick, no care taken. Nobody hunting anybody walks up a gravel path like they’ve got a right to.

I put the piece away and stepped into the doorway, lamp behind me, then she came out of the pines and I damn near forgot how to breathe.

She looked bad.

Worse than bad.

Skin pale under the dim bulb, shadows under her eyes deep enough to look bruised, thinner than she’d been a few weeks ago, and shaking hard enough I could see it from the top step. Wasn’t cold. July in South Carolina didn’t know cold. This was a body running on fumes and starting to lose the argument.

Six days, Sawyer had said. She looked like it had been six weeks.

And under all of that, blazing out of a face six days past the end of itself, the maddest eyes I’ve ever seen.

“Amy — ”

“You didn’t sleep with her.”

Everything in me stopped.

She said it matter of factly. Standing at the bottom of my steps in the dark with her hands in fists at her sides. Not a question. She was watching my face when she said it, waiting for the thing my face was going to do. I’d spent most of my life learning not to give anything away.

Didn’t help worth a damn.

She saw it.

“There it is,” she said, and her voice broke apart on it. “There it is.”

“Who told you.”

“Does it matter?” She came up one step. “You’re not even going to lie? Not even a little? You’d think a man who built an entire play would have a second act ready — ”

“Sable,” I said. It wasn’t a guess. She’d been at the clubhouse that last night, before they moved her and the kids out, and I remember seeing her in the shadows.

“Yep.” Another step. “She saw you heading back to your cabin, about ten minutes after you paraded that woman down the hall. She saw you alone, Rune.” She was on the porch now, close enough that I could see how bad the shaking was, she tipped her chin up at me and didn’t back off one inch. “So say it. Out loud. Right now. Say the thing you did.”

There wasn’t anything left to hide behind. Truth was, I was tired of hiding behind it anyway. “I didn’t touch her.”

Amy went still.

“Walked her to the end of the hall, gave her forty dollars to keep her mouth shut, and went outside.”

She made a sound like the words had hit somewhere physical.

“There,” she whispered. “There it is.”

* * *

She came inside because I stepped back and left the door open, and there wasn’t anywhere else for this to go. She didn’t sit. Just stood in the middle of my front room with her arms wrapped around herself, and for the first time that cabin felt too damn small.

“Why.”

“Amy—”

“Why.” She spun on me. “You kissed me. Then for two days you let me walk around that compound thinking—” Her voice broke and she stopped, swallowed, got it back. “Then you did that. In front of everybody. In front of Brenda. Do you know what that felt like? Standing there while every person I knew watched me figure out I meant nothing to you?”

“You were never nothing.” Came out low and mean enough that she blinked. “Don’t say that about yourself in my house.”

“Then why?”