Page 72 of Forbidden Protector

"Wasn't planning on it." He doesn't look up from the mag he's seating. "Didn't peg you for sentimental about hair, Tatum."

"I'm not sentimental. I'm making a demand." I watch him work, watch the dark length of it catch what little light the kitchen's giving off, and hold onto the sight of it like I hold onto everything I don't have time to feel yet. "Come back with all of it attached."

He looks up at that. Just for a second, and for once he doesn't put any of it away.

"Yes, ma'am," he says, all gravel, and goes back to the mag in his hand like it didn't just take him a full breath to get the words out.

Black on black, every piece of it.

Base layer, then a soft-shell that doesn't shine under a moon. No zippers left bare to catch light, no metal anywhere that hasn't been taped or blacked out.

He works through it same as he works through everything, no wasted motion, no hurry that looks like hurry.

Magazines counted and loaded, set in a row. A suppressor threaded and checked, unthreaded, checked again. A rangefinder, a wind meter no bigger than a lighter, a battered green notebook that isn't the one Jacob built and isn't mine either. A data book of his own, wind calls and drop tables in handwriting too small for anyone but him to read.

"No night vision?" I ask, because I've watched enough of his equipment come out of that duffel to notice what isn't in it.

"Moon's near full and I know that hillside blind." He racks the bolt on the rifle once, smooth, and sets it down open, unloaded, the way a man leaves a door unlocked on purpose. "Glass does the rest. I don't need to see in the dark. I need to see far, and I need to be right the first time."

He checks the rifle's zero against nothing, dry, just his eye and the scope and some memorized truth about where the crosshair sits. Then he checks it again, because a man who has bet his life on a rifle before doesn't trust a thing twice as much as he trusts it three times.

He pats every pocket once it's loaded, patting them a second time in a different order, and I understand, watching him do it, that this isn't nerves. This is liturgy. This is the only prayer Holt Blackwater has ever fully believed in.

"You're doing that on purpose," I say. "Slow."

"Fast gets a man killed by his own gear failing at the wrong time." He zips the pack shut last and leans the rifle against the doorframe, everything staged and ready for the truck.

For a second, in his own kitchen with the black clothes and the blacked-out steel, he doesn't look like the man whose eyes went warm and unguarded over a crayon drawing stuck to his refrigerator. He looks like exactly what his file always said he was and never once made me believe until right now.

He reaches for the phone and doesn't dial yet.

"They know I'm coming too," he says first. "Whoever's smart enough to run this bait is smart enough to plan for overwatch."

"So the ridge isn't just an advantage?"

"It's the first place I'd look, if I were him." He doesn't say it like it scares him. He says it like a man calculating what he's already decided not to argue with. "Means I go up assuming the high ground's already spoken for, and I find out who's holding it before he finds out I'm there."

We build the rest of it fast, like you build anything that has to survive contact, every job assigned before anyone's adrenaline gets a vote.

Knox takes the county road with the radio, close enough to move, far enough not to spook whoever's watching that pullout for exactly the reason we're about to give them one.

"I don't like this," I tell him, hands steadier than they have any right to be.

"Good. Means you're not stupid about it." His voice has gone into the flat, level register I've learned means he's already three moves past whatever I'm about to suggest. "You go in loud enough whoever's watching thinks you believe it's real. The second my channel goes quiet, you're gone, whether or not you've got what you came for."

"That's the deal."

"That's the deal."

He doesn't kiss me. Two fingers under my jaw instead, the same place he held it in a frozen motel lot the night this county tried to kill me, held half a second longer than checking requires. "Talk to me the whole drive up. I want your voice in my ear before I need it for anything else."

"That's either the most romantic thing you've ever said to me or a tactical requirement. I genuinely can't tell."

"Both." He's already turning for the door. "Don't let it go to your head."

I don't tell him I'm scared. He already knows. Some things don't need saying out loud between two people who've already stopped pretending.

Holt goes up the ridge on foot an hour ahead of me, knowing full well somebody might already be sitting on that hillside waiting for exactly the kind of man who'd climb it. He goes anyway, because there was never a version of tonight where he let me walk into this alone so he could stay safe on the ground instead.