Alyssa placed her sketchbook and medication in her bag, and Mack gave her several pairs of thick, wool socks to pull on and a pair of his boots. They were still too big for her, but better than the strappy heels.
He handed her his spare jacket, and she put it on without comment. It hung past her hips. She looked small—and his. “Ready?” he asked, his voice coming out rough.
She held her bag close and glanced around the cabin. To the table where she’d broken down. The bedroom where she’d slept in his bed. The kitchen where they’d had breakfast, and Blake had called, and her world had changed.
“No,” she said. “But let’s go anyway.”
He opened the door. The cold air hit hard, sharp and clean. The sun was bright on the new snow, turning everything white and pristine, like the world had been reset overnight.
Behind them, the cabin sat quiet. The place that had kept them safe, isolated from everything, and together in a way they hadn’t been in two years seemed bigger to him.
Ahead was Missoula, the FBI, the cartel, half a million dollars on Alyssa’s head, and every reason this was going to get complicated.
“Stay close to me at all times,” Mack said.
She met his eyes. “Where else would I go?”
CHAPTER SEVEN
The cabin disappeared one piece at a time.
First, the porch, swallowed by the curve in the road. Then the roof, sinking below the tree line like something being pulled under. Alyssa watched it go in the side mirror until there was nothing left but snow and pine and the long white ribbon of road behind them.
She turned forward and settled her hands on the sketchbook in her lap. Her whole body shook under Mack’s coat. The sharp sting of tears burned the backs of her eyes.
You’re fine, Bennett. You made a decision. Now live with it.
It wasn’t that easy, though. It had been less than twenty-four hours and so much had happened in that cabin. Her whole life had changed.
A part of her didn’t want to face what was to come. It wanted to stay hidden away with Mack inside his home.
He drove with his attention divided between the road, the mirrors, and the tree line in a steady rotation that never broke rhythm. His scarred left hand rested on the steering wheel, and she found herself watching it—the way the damaged skin pulled tight over his knuckles, the slight stiffness in his grip that he compensated for so seamlessly most people would never notice.
She noticed. She’d always noticed.
That scar was Blake’s doing. Shrapnel from the firefight that killed David Morrison and three civilians and ended Mack’s career as a Marine Scout Sniper. Forty-seven stitches. She knew the number because she’d overheard Blake telling their father it was barely a scratch, and later, when she’d seen the wound herself, she’d understood exactly how much that lie had minimized the horrible incident.
She looked away before he caught her staring. Outside, Montana spread in every direction—mountains shouldering up against a sky so blue it looked manufactured, snow draped over everything like a clean sheet.
It was beautiful. The world didn’t care that her life had detonated overnight. It just kept being gorgeous.
She opened her sketchbook. Blake’s face stared up at her from the page she’d drawn at the kitchen table—the careful rendering of her brother’s features, every plane and angle precise enough to hold up in federal court. She turned past it, his voice ringing in her ears, telling her not to make him choose.
She flipped to a blank page and started drawing the landscape. Her talent was with people, but occasionally, she liked to clean her palate with something else. The mountains, the road, the dark spears of lodgepole pine against the snow—it was comforting in a way nothing else could be.
Her hand moved in the quick, economical strokes she used when she was processing rather than producing—sketching to think, not to create. The charcoal was familiar between her fingers, grounding her when everything else felt like it was sliding sideways.
What had happened in the cabin sat between her and Mack, taking up space like a third passenger. The almost-kiss, her decision to testify, the way he’d squeezed her hand as they walked to the SUV, and then let go as if it burned. He’d called her sweetheart and rubbed her back when she broke down over Jenna. He’d coached her through the uncomfortable conversation with Blake.
He’d given her the choice of whether to meet with the FBI now or tomorrow.
She kept sketching. A ridgeline. A fence post. The curve of the road ahead. This rugged place matched Mack. He was as steady as the mountains, as certain in his convictions as the seasons, as vast as the sky overhead.
Her mind circled back to Blake’s voice on the phone. Don’t make me choose between you and?—
And what? What had he been about to say?
It didn’t matter. What mattered was the unfinished sentence itself—the fact that there was something, some loyalty or obligation or fear, that he’d weigh against his own sister and possibly find her wanting.