Page 65 of The Drifter

I don't demand.

I have never once in my life stood in front of family and demanded. I flow. I move around the rock, I find the seam.

Not today.

Today, there was a woman locked behind two locks because of me. Because whatever this family had stirred up, whatever this Craine was—a man I'd never met and was already strangling in his sleep—it had put a camera six feet from her bare skin, in the one place on this earth she'd carved out for herself, and fuck that. Fuck the flow. My brothers were going to stand in front of me today and empty their pockets, all of them, every card, or I was going to walk out those iron gates and take her with me and the family could keep its castle.

The questions were right there on my tongue. Lined up. In order.

Cash stood up off the steps, unhurried, reading my face the whole way. I opened my mouth⁠—

Max's head snapped around.

Not at me. Behind him. Back toward the great front doors of the house, ears up, body gone from at-ease to attention in half a heartbeat. I almost dismissed it—a house that size has staff, has people, has a hundred comings and goings—I was already turning back to Cash with the first question loaded⁠—

And then, my eyes took in who was standing in the doorway.

The world stopped making sound.

No.

Everything in me went to stone, blood and bone and years of miles, all of it stopped at once, because it was impossible. Completely and totally impossible. I had watched that walk go away down a caliche road when I was a boy. I had hunted it on every road since. I had buried it, mile by mile, in every town in Texas, and taught myself with my own two hands to stop looking up when a tall man came over a rise.

He was older. Gray through the hair, weathered in the face, heavier through the shoulders. Standing in the doorway of a castle with the morning light on him, looking down at me with eyes I knew, because I see them every time I look in still water.

Cash's voice came from a long way off, quiet, careful, like a man read my mind and decided to answer it.

"He's why you're here," Cash said. "And he's why the FBI is after us."

The man in the doorway was my father.

Byron Dane.

19

SASHA

Isat on that floor between my two doors longer than I want to admit.

Then, the part of me that has never once known how to sit still got up off the boards and got dressed, because being dressed is being ready, and being ready is the only prayer I know.

I didn’t go to the window.

That was the strange part, moving through my condo like there was a wire strung across it at knee height. I made the coffee I hadn't made. I stood at the counter to drink it instead of the balcony. And the whole time, some low, cold, reading thing in the back of me kept its eye on the glass without letting me look at it, because a man who doesn’t scare had looked at that window on his way out the door. I had caught it.

I got as far as the counter and I picked up my phone.

I'd let her ring out. I had never once done that, and I'd done it that morning, and the not-doing-it-again was suddenly the most important thing in my life. Because if I sat in this condo one more hour by myself, reading my own walls, I was going to come apart in a way I didn’t have a plan for. There is exactly one person on this earth I have ever come apart in front of.

She answered on half a ring.

"Sasha."

Not hey. Not there you are. Just my name, fast, the way you say a name when you've been holding the phone in your hand.

"Can you come over?" I asked.

I heard her already moving. I heard keys.