Page 128 of Wild Sanctuary

I take another sip instead.

The coffee is too strong because Marcus makes it the way Dad used to, and the taste is so familiar it’s obscene, but I make myself swallow. I smile over the rim on autopilot, because he’s watching me with that warm, fatherly face he’s worn for as long as I’ve known him, and the second I stop performing is the second he knows I’m onto him.

“He really was a good man,” Marcus says quietly. “Your dad.”

Worse still, he means it.

His voice is soft and real, and there’s a twitch at the corner of his mouth that looks an awful lot like grief. Marcus loved my father. Bill, too. He sat at this table with them a thousand times, and they trusted him as if he were family.

And then he had them killed.

My mouth goes bone dry, and I have to look down at my mug before my face gives me away.

Two hundred yards past the back door, a seventy-six-year-old man with one working ear is cursing at an alternator. The Suburban keys sit on the corner of the table. Marcus’s phone is clipped to his belt.

I pick my head up, dig deep, and find a smile.

“He really was the best, wasn’t he?”

Marcus nods, then lifts his mug and takes a long, unhurried drink. His actions are those of a man who has nowhere he needs to be.

Nowhere he needs to be.

Marcus Donnelly is the ranch accountant for half the county. Saturdays are not empty for him. He was supposed to be at the Mason spread this morning. Mason wasn’t home, so here he sits with his whole Saturday freed up, watching me over his coffee.

And the moment I think it, the rest slides into place the way facts do when you’ve been circling them all morning without knowing it. Colt and Rhett chasing cattle down the east ridge. Maggie called out to a colicky foal. June stuck at Maggie’s because my Honda and her truck are both out of commission. Wyatt on the other side of Blackstone Creek fetching her home.

Every person between me and the county line is exactly far enough away to be inconsequential.

My pulse skyrockets as a cold shiver runs the length of my spine.

This morning wasn’t an accident, Monroe. It was a board being cleared.

“Tell me something about him,” I hear myself say, bright and easy. “Something I don’t know. Something he’d hate that I found out.”

Marcus’s whole face warms, slow and real, as a memory lifts to the surface.

“Oh, sweetheart.” He chuckles, low and fond. “Have I got a story for you.”

I smile back like I’m ready to be charmed while Marcus settles back with his mug.

“Lordy, where to even begin.”

I hold my face in the shape he needs it to be, and underneath, I count my pulse and wait.

“There was this one summer your daddy got it into his head he was gonna fix the old red tractor that’d been sittin’ in the barn for fifteen years. Bill and I bet him twenty dollars each that he wouldn’t get it started before the Fourth of July. Now, Tom, he never could resist a bet, especially one where Bill was involved⁠—”

Tires on the gravel driveway interrupt Marcus’s story.

The first thing I notice is that it’s not Wyatt’s truck. I know the sound of Wyatt’s truck the way I know my own breathing. This is a lighter engine. And it’s close.

My stomach drops.

Marcus’s head doesn’t turn. His eyes stay on me, and the corner of his mouth that was soft a second ago has gone still.

Oh God.

My heart ricochets against my breast as I realize the prediction I made thirty seconds ago in the privacy of my own head has pulled into the driveway.