Page 16 of Recurve Ridge

He tapped the quilt at my side, his knuckles scarred and calloused. In a swift movement full of a dancer’s grace, he stood and headed for the door.

“Wait!” I called.

“Yes?” Robe turned back, raising one of those manicured eyebrows.

“Am I…? Do I have to stay here?”

Can I go home?

After all that I’d been forced to endure, I didn’t know if I had a place to call home anymore.

Robe stared at me for a long moment. His gaze swept over the lump I made in his bed, huddled beneath his quilt. “If you want, although I advise waiting to return to your life until you’re healed and we’ve… talked.”

Without another word or offering any explanation, he strode from the room, leaving me alone.

It took every fiber of my self-restraint not to call him back again.

5

ROBE

The truncatedstory of Mari Merripen irritated me. Not her presence in my house, but the fact that I didn’t have enough information to keep everyone who relied on me safe because I didn’t understand the scope of the dangers surrounding her yet. Both Jon and Miller had raised their concerns, doubling down on my own, though there was little I could do to alleviate them. Alan initiated his mysterious information network, and I knew he would dig up more for me on command.

Maintaining Recurve Ridge as the best not-kept secret this side of the city had been our mantra as my little herd of wounded men was built up into the ramshackle family we’d become. Over the past few years, Blackthorne and Petersen knew we were hiding in plain sight, but so long as I didn’t venture back toward the city, I could keep my little patch of mountain air and rustic life.

Petersen hadn’t made a move on my business yet, though a coup wasn’t outside the realm of his vengeance.

Snow crunched beneath my boots as I tracked through the woods, trying to follow her path back to where it originated for the fourth time, though I lost the trail a few hundred yards from the house, the elements washing away her presence more and more with each passing day. Still, I knew her trail now. We all did.

And the connotations of her arrival on our doorstep, at least proverbially speaking. Mari was the puzzle we knotted ourselves around, attempted to solve, driving ourselves mad with the singular question we mulled over.Friend or foe? Can I trust the woman in my bed?The measurements of her flight, what remained, were hard to gauge due to the twisting nature of her panicked trajectory, and today’s fresh falling snow was determined to outwit me in my own territory.

Mari had wended her way between trees until she’d run a mile instead of the short distance she covered. We were damn lucky she still had all her toes given the time she must have spent pounding snow to slush in her birthday suit, for fuck’s sake.

“Over here.” Miller raised a hand above his head, waiting for me to catch up. “There, and there. To….” He tracked her invisible path with a quick eye trained in conditions much harder to navigate than my mountainside. “There. And then… nothing. Like she fell out of the sky.”

“I don’t think she parachuted in, Miller.”

He grunted as I caught up with him. “Never know. Kid could have skills.”

“You’re a crabby old man.” I folded my arms over my chest and stared down at him. We’d been over this. Her route, the impossibility of her arrival.

“Feels like it. Where the fuck did she come from?”

I stilled, our banter dying in the wake of the same question I’d asked myself over and over, only to come back to the same singularity. My gaze pierced the trees’ tall shadows that led in the direction of Gideon Blackthorne’s ridge-side residence.

“We both know the answer to that.”

“Then let’s go. We’ve got what we need to finish the job.”

“What job?” I glared at him. “Don’t end up dead on his doorstep. We have no evidence, no strategy. Barging in is a stupid fucking choice. We don’t know numbers inside the house right now, or if he’s there at all?—”

“A better reason to break in.”

“—andthe reason George Petersen keeps his distance is that he has his hound to babysit us while he wallows in the city.”

“Such a poet.” Miller bared his teeth.

“Fuck off.”

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