Page 40 of Her Mountain Man Protector

Billy.

I sit still the way a trapped person sits still. Left. Left. A long straight that has to be the river road. Right onto something washboarded. I count the man's watch from the slice of his wrist I can see. Eight-forty. Eight-forty-three. I keep my eyes open so I can tell Colt every detail if I get the chance. Plastic cuffs chew the skin above my pulse. My shoulder throbs where I hit the wheel well. None of it is as loud as the missing shape of him in the lot.

I study the passenger too. Early forties. Clean shave. A scar on his neck right under his ear. He speaks like a man who’s done this in nicer vans. The driver never speaks at all. His helix ring clicks on the wheel when he turns.

I press my bound wrists against the wheel well until the plastic bites and I whisper to the dark metal, because the driver is watching the road and the passenger has turned back around.

"You should have taken the camera too," I say. "You're going to wish you knew what else I kept."

Nobody answers. The rattle in the wheel keeps time. Somewhere behind us a truck engine screams onto the county road, too distant to be a rescue yet, close enough that I know he’s coming.

I close my mouth. I keep counting. I don't cry. The van takes another turn toward wherever they think a Hawthorne father will come collect, and I make myself a witness all over again, frame by frame, because that’s the job even now.

15

Colt

The van is a dark smear eating the county road and then it’s gone. I put two shots into the snow where its tires were. Useless. She's gone. The fact of it sits in my chest, live and uncut.

I stand in the lot with the warehouse roll door still down and my breath tearing out of me white. I want to burn Yard 4 to the ground. I want to burn the landing and the mill tunnels and every Helix office that ever stamped a crate. I want her back in the truck with her knee against mine and her mouth still smart.

I can't have any of it. The lot is empty except for my truck and her scream still hanging in the cold.

I drag my phone out to call Alden and my hand is shaking so hard I almost drop it. Before I can thumb the burner, a man steps out from behind the office shed.

Tall. Gray in the beard. Same coat as the trail cam. Same worn outside heel I found in the dirt above the lower pool.

Dad.

Billy Hawthorne walks toward me across the snow. He’s been standing in the trees the whole time I was losing her. He looks older than the last time I put eyes on him, three months back on a Sunbreak Harbor side street when he was taken. He looks tired. He looks alive.

"Colt."

I laugh once and it sounds ugly. "You pick now."

"I pick the minute they moved her. I was already on the ridge. I couldn't reach the van without putting a hole in the cargo." His voice is the one from the garage and the lunch notes. "She's breathing. They need her breathing. That buys us time."

I close the distance and I don't hug him. I grab a fistful of that coat and hold on because if I let go I'm going to put him in the snow.

"You were taken," I say. "Sunbreak Harbor. We tore the map apart. Nash almost died. Sin almost died. I sat on this mountain for months chasing a ghost you decided to be."

"It was a ruse." He doesn't flinch. "My team pulled me in because I wasn't done. I still had a wife to keep off their books and seven sons who kept walking into my mess. I had my people fake the grab so Helix would stop using you as bait and start hunting a dead man again."

"You had to know we'd keep looking."

Billy's mouth twists. "Yeah. I know that now."

The wind cuts across the lot. I still have her scream in my ears. I make myself listen anyway. "Start at the beginning," I tell him. "The real one. Then we go get her."

He nods once. We take my truck. He talks while I drive too fast toward the mill, toward people who can turn a van into a map.

"Years ago I was in a program I can't name on a document. I found a leak. Vanguard Helix wasn't only a contractor. They were selling military secrets out the side door to whoever paid. I brought it up the chain. The chain was already bought. So I died. On paper. Your mother got a folded flag and a story. You boys got a hole I thought would keep you clear of it."

My hands are bloodless on the wheel. "Every Christmas. Every birthday. That was protection."

"Every move I made after that flag was protection. I stayed in their walls as Billy the dock hand and Billy the consultant and Billy the man who signed clipboards in the backs of photographs. I was looking for the one name at the top. The man who greenlit the sales. I got close real close in Sunbreak Harbor. Close enough they started circling your mother again. Close enough Nash and Sin got taken. That was my failure. When the rest of you were clear enough to breathe, I had my team take me off the board. I left so you would stop being useful to them."

"We never stopped being useful. Oakley photographed your breadcrumbs and they took her instead."