Page 68 of Faultline

We stand on the sidewalk outside Hank's, and during that time, Liam's hand stays on the small of my back. Settled there like a survey stake driven into ground he intends to hold.

Sally Calloway walks past with a bag from the hardware store. Her eyes drop to Liam's hand on my back, travel to our faces, and return to the sidewalk. She doesn't comment. The set of her mouth says she doesn't need to.

We drive back up the mountain in the late afternoon. The switchbacks climb through timber that's starting to turn, the birch going gold at the edges while the spruce holds dark and permanent around it.

The road narrows past the cattle guard, and the new steel gate stands across it with the graceless authority of something built for function and nothing else.

Liam unlocks it, drives through, locks it behind us.

The cabin is quiet when we walk in. The woodstove has burned down to coals, and the cold is settling into the corners the way it does when autumn remembers it has a job to do.

Liam feeds the stove. I set my laptop on the kitchen table and pull up the evidence files, because the case doesn't stop for briefings or timber contractors or the lingering heat of a man's hand against my spine.

The wind is picking up outside. Through the kitchen window, the spruce on the south slope are bending in a pattern that says weather is coming. Not the ordinary kind. The kind the mountain broadcasts hours in advance, when the pressure drops and the clouds stack against the ridgeline. The air goes heavy with something it hasn't decided to release yet.

"Storm coming," Liam says from the stove. He's watching the tree line through the same window.

"Big one?"

"Looks like it."

He straightens from the stove and stands in the middle of the kitchen. The quiet that comes off him is different from his operational silence, different from the focused calm he wore all day in Harlow's office and on the sidewalk with the cooperative men. This quiet lives deeper. He's run out of tasks to put between himself and whatever he's been carrying since he saw those red markers clustered on the bridge.

"Harlow told me the GPS data shows repeat stops near my office," I say. "They've been watching me."

His whole body goes still. The kind of stillness I've seen in men who are about to do something they can't take back.

"How many times?"

"She didn't say exactly. Enough to call it a pattern."

He crosses the kitchen and stops in front of me. His hands close on my upper arms and pull me to my feet. The chair scrapes back. His grip slides to my hips, hard enough that my breath catches. Pressure, not pain. The weight of a man holding something he's terrified will be taken.

"Liam."

"I can reinforce the gate." His voice is low, rough, scraped down to the grain beneath the polish. "I can rig the trail and drop trees across every road on this mountain. I can build communication networks and call in favors and turn this property into something that costs them more than it's worth to take."

His forehead drops to mine. The contact is so close I can feel his breath against my mouth.

"I can't build anything that protects you from a company that's decided you're the threat they need to remove."

This is what Harlow warned me about. Not Cascade's lawyers. Not the surveillance. Liam's face, stripped of every defense he builds for other people, showing me the one thing he can't fortify against: that I've become the target his property was never designed to protect.

"You're not going to lose me," I say.

"Don't." The word comes out like something torn. "Don't tell me that. You don't know that. Nobody knows that."

His hands slide from my hips to my waist, pulling me against him until I'm pinned between his body and the table behind me.

Chest to thigh, every inch of him pressed against me. The heat of him radiates through the flannel and into my skin until my lungs are working harder just to keep up.

"I've been running logistics all day." His mouth is at my temple, the words vibrating against my skin. "Gates. Radios. Sight lines. Obstacles. And the whole time the only thing in my head is that every one of those defenses points outward and you're sleeping inside the perimeter."

I tilt my chin up. His eyes are dark, emptied of everything except raw, unprocessed fear. He's finally identified the one thing he can't engineer his way around.

"Then stop building walls," I say, "and tell me what you actually need."

His jaw works. The muscles in his arms are rigid against my waist. He holds me hard enough that I can feel his heartbeat through the flannel, heavy and fast. The vulnerability underneath his hands is more disorienting than any physical claim he's ever made on me.