by Megan Crane
“Let’s circle back to reaping and sowing,” Templeton suggested.
“That’s the beauty of this,” Liberty said then, her gaze like stone and her mouth twisted. “I don’t have to do anything to you, Kate. We’re just out here, living our lives the way we want. Lives you tried to take from us years ago.”
“It’s funny, though, that only one side took lives, and it isn’t me.”
“You’re filled with guilt and shame, and you should be,” Liberty continued, and her voice changed. It got . . . calm. In a creepy way that made Templeton’s neck itch. “You need to make us the enemy. When I think you know better, Katie. The only real enemy is you.”
“A merry Christmas to you, too, cousin,” Kate murmured, something like grief in her gaze, though she was still smiling.
Russ snorted. “Why am I not surprised that the family traitor is a capitalist?”
Kate shook her head. “You sound just like him.”
“I take that as a compliment,” Russ snarled. “Father Samuel is a great man. A true martyr for the cause. I’m honored to follow his example.”
Templeton restrained himself from pointing out that martyrs usually died.
“Does that mean you want to spend the rest of your life in prison, too?” Kate was asking her cousin. “Because that can be arranged, Russ. Just give me an excuse.”
“It doesn’t matter where Father Samuel is,” Liberty said. “His messages are in here.”
And she tapped on her chest. Hard.
“When I check his visitor logs down there in Spring Creek, am I going to see your name?” Kate asked. She tilted her head slightly. “Or does he communicate directly into your heart?”
Her cousins looked at each other, then back at her. And when Liberty smiled again, it was . . . unsettling.
“We don’t turn our back on our family,” Liberty said. “It’s a privilege to be able to visit Father Samuel when we can. Will’s afraid to go. Just like he’s afraid to come here. I bet he didn’t mention that when he sent you here.”
“Never could choose a side,” Russ said derisively.
“I never thought we’d lay eyes on you again.” And Liberty’s voice was almost a singsong. Templeton’s neck itched again. More than before. “But Father Samuel knew different. He always promised that you’d return to face judgment.”
“I won’t be back again,” Kate assured her. “And if I am, Liberty, make no mistake. It will be to escort you to your own jail cell. If that’s not the judgment you’re looking for, my advice to you is to follow less in the footsteps of a crazy person.”
Liberty laughed. “He was right about you. Back then, and now. He was right about Will. He’s right about everything. Don’t you get tired of pretending otherwise?”
“He’s a creep,” Kate said softly. “An unhinged narcissist who preys on weak-minded people, Liberty. Like the children he groomed to be his willing accomplices. Like you.”
And that was how Templeton knew that all of this was getting to Kate, no matter how calm and collected she pretended to be.
Her words were like a lit match tossed down into a puddle of gasoline, and he had to think she knew they would be.
Liberty snarled in outrage. There was a shocked sound from the landing up above, but Templeton kept his gaze on the two men. It took approximately one second for Kate’s words to sink in, and then Russ moved.
He launched himself toward Kate like he planned to beat his feelings directly into her face.
Kate sidestepped him, smooth and easy.
Which meant the only face Russ had in front of him was Templeton’s.
Templeton put him down. Harder than necessary. Then held him there, with a foot at his neck. Happily filtering out the screaming from the loft above and the blue streak Liberty’s husband was swearing up and down.
Liberty herself moved toward Kate as if she intended to finish her brother’s job, but it was Kate who stopped her dead.
“One more step,” she told her in a voice that was entirely steel-edged trooper, “and you too will be facedown on the floor with a foot on your neck. My foot. Do you understand me?”
Templeton hadn’t gotten around to asking Kate if she had any martial arts training or self-defense experience. Probably because he was far more interested in all that sleek fitness of hers on a very personal level. But he could see from the way she stood, on the balls of her feet and perfectly ready for whatever might come, that she did.
Of course she did. She knew whose daughter she was. He imagined that on some level, Kate had been preparing for a day like this since that night she’d lit out of that original compound on a snowmobile in the winter dark.
Something he couldn’t really let himself think about too hard, especially not when he had her cousin at his mercy.
“If I wanted to,” Kate said into the tense silence, “I could bring all of you in. There are always consequences for behavior, on that we agree, but I won’t strip you both down and throw you outside to see if you can magically survive the elements. I’m not a monster. You can’t say the same about yourselves. Or the man you think is so great that he planned to sacrifice his own child because I dared to have thoughts of my own. I hope you remember that when your own kids start acting up, the way kids do.”
“I hope I never see you again,” Liberty gritted out. “Unless it’s reading your obituary.”
“Keep making threats,” Kate suggested. “It’s not going to end well for you.”
But she didn’t ask any more questions. She stepped away from Liberty and headed toward the door. She slid a look Templeton’s way as she went, and he understood it at once.
He let Russ up, grinning when the other man scrambled to his feet, red-faced and puffing with fury. He looked as if he was about to take another swing. Templeton wished he would.
“I’d think twice if I were you, friend,” he drawled, because he really was a saint. “I have six inches on you, not to mention enough training to knock you out before you hit the ground. Twice. Choose wisely.”
“You better pray to God I don’t shoot you in the back on your way out of here,” Russ all but shouted at him.
“I hope you do,” Templeton replied lazily. “I’ll die a happy man, knowing you’ll join the rest of your creepy family behind bars. Which is where all of you belong, as far as I’m concerned.”
And then, because it was insulting, Templeton turned his back on the room and took his time sauntering outside, following Kate to the SUV.
Her cousins followed them out, standing in their clearing with different degrees of rage and hatred all over their faces.
And later, Templeton would look back and pick this as the moment that his heart sustained a fatal blow.
Because beside him, his prickly, tough, ridiculously beautiful trooper smiled big and bright, then gave her family a cheerful wave as they drove away.
Seventeen
“It makes me sick to say this out loud,” Kate said about halfway through their drive back to Fairbanks, while the low sun hit them too bright to last and the temperature sank like a stone, “but I think I have to visit my father.”
She’d been fighting it since they’d left Russ and Liberty’s nauseating new version of the same old compound. She hadn’t wanted to think it, much less say it out loud.
And she was holding her breath, she realized, as she waited for Templeton’s answer.
“I’d like to visit your father,” Templeton said shortly. “But not in a prison where we’ll be monitored.”
That was gratifying. She was surprised at how it worked its way through her like separate strands of warmth, braiding together and wrapping all around her. And she hadn’t understood how cold she felt until he heated her up a little.
“But yeah,” Templeton said after a moment. “That seems like a reasonable next move.”
�
��Russ and Liberty seem as deluded as I remember the entire family being, back in the day,” Kate said, staring out the windshield in front of her at the wintry, snowy highway, because that still felt safer than looking directly at Templeton Cross. “But they said they don’t have a plane. That fits with what the troopers told me about them. They don’t have the capability to fly themselves in and out of the Panhandle to make mischief for Alaska Force or break into my apartment. They would have to fly commercial, which I doubt they can afford. Or involve a third party. And none of that gels in my head with freaky little wannabe cult members, hunkered down for the winter out there. But not too far out there, so they can drive into Nenana for supplies.”
“Agreed.” Templeton shifted his big body in his seat. “Oz is already doing deeper background checks. If any of them flew commercial in the past six months, we’ll know soon. And knowing Oz, he’s going to dig into all the private planes that left the airport in Nenana over the last month. I’ll nudge him on that, too.”
The winter road was loud, no matter how quiet it was inside the car.
“I think Liberty wanted me to feel threatened, but I don’t think she was being specific so much as mean,” Kate said after another little while passed. “On the other hand, I’m not sure I see my father masterminding any of this from behind bars. For one thing, how would he even know what Alaska Force was, much less where you keep old storage facilities?”
Templeton grunted. “Excellent point.”
He made another call into Alaska Force HQ while Kate stared out at the road. The temperature kept dropping, mirroring how cold she felt, but she ordered herself to remain calm.
Will last night. Liberty and Russ today. And now, potentially, her father tomorrow?
It was more family than she’d been forced to contend with in years. It was too much family, by any tally. And the real trouble was, being around them was even worse than thinking about them. They made her feel dirty. Tainted.
As if proximity to her cousins had exposed her. The messy, unhinged, potential-cult-member truth of her that she’d spent her whole life trying to hide.
What she didn’t understand was why she wasn’t doing everything in her power to put distance between herself and Templeton, if not physically, then verbally. Because he’d seen. Because he knew. Because there was no pretending now.
She wasn’t going to fling herself out of a moving vehicle on the Parks Highway in the middle of winter while a cold front moved in. Kate had always hated theatrics. But she couldn’t help noticing that she hadn’t shut down. She was talking to him, when he wasn’t on the phone with the rest of Alaska Force. She wanted to talk to him. Her brain wasn’t madly spinning, trying to come up with escape plans.
When her pulse kicked up, drumming panic throughout her body, she had the sneaking suspicion that it wasn’t Templeton or what he’d seen that was making it happen. It was the fact that she didn’t mind that he’d seen the truth about who she was as much as she should have.
She was still stuck on that anomaly when they made it back to the little house they’d left this morning, what seemed like whole lifetimes ago. Kate remembered their run, in the razor-blade cold, but it almost felt as if that had been someone else.
She felt cracked wide open like an egg.
And the last thing in the world Kate wanted to do was muck around in all that yolk.
Okay, she told herself testily after Templeton plugged in the car so it would start again in these temperatures when they needed it, then jabbed in the numbers to open the padlock on the front door. Enough with the egg.
“Isaac is setting up a flight right now,” Templeton told her. “Can you be ready to go in fifteen?”
“I’m ready to go now,” Kate replied. And was somewhat astonished that she sounded like her regular old self. As if nothing much had happened today. As if there were no yolk risk. “I’ll grab my bag.”
Templeton’s phone buzzed as they got inside, out of the cold. She ran up the stairs while he answered it, picking up the bag in question and starting back down.
“Why do you have that look on your face?” she asked him, coming to a stop halfway down the steps.
“Ice fog,” he said succinctly. “We’re not going anywhere.”
Kate blinked. The sun had already been down as they’d driven up to the house. The dark was coming in, swift and dangerous, with the temperature already at negative forty and dropping, and she didn’t need Templeton to explain to her why ice fog blanketing Fairbanks would keep them grounded. The ice particles in the air made it far too dangerous to fly. It had trapped Kate before, and would again.
She made a show of shrugging and pretended she couldn’t feel the way her own heart started to beat too hard, too loud, and too slow beneath her ribs. “That’s Alaska,” she said, trying to sound as unbothered as she should have felt. “I guess if I was ever really in any kind of hurry, I’d have to think about living somewhere else.”
“You’ve never thought about living anywhere else?” Templeton asked, his voice curiously . . . blank, almost. Maybe it was that he was being careful with her, and she wanted to let that ruffle her feathers. But she couldn’t quite get there. “I can see you not wanting to stay in the state where most of your family lives.”
“I thought about leaving,” Kate admitted. “A lot, when I was younger. Trouble was, I couldn’t think of any place I wanted to go badly enough. There are nice places out there, don’t get me wrong. But none of them are Alaska.”
Something shuddered deep inside of her when Templeton failed to smile. He didn’t flash that grin. He didn’t let out one of his huge laughs. He stood there at the bottom of the stairs, an almost stern expression on his face.
And there was no pretending he wasn’t an attractive man. A beautiful man. When he was smiling, laughing, throwing that booming voice of his around, he was like a thunderstorm in the summertime, washing everything clean all around him whether it wanted it or not.
But when he was still, he reminded her of all the reasons she loved it here in her home state. He was that astonishing. Rugged and infinitely dangerous. And he made something deep in her belly tremble every time he looked at her.
“I’ll get the stove going,” he said quietly. Hushed, even, as if he felt it, too. This heavy tension between them that coiled inside of Kate until she was afraid it might pop at any moment.
He moved off toward the kitchen and Kate pulled in a breath, only aware then that she’d been holding it. She felt a loose kind of relief, but she didn’t sit there and dig around in the feeling to see what it was made of. Maybe she didn’t dare. She turned around, carried her bag back upstairs, and marched herself into the bathroom to splash a little water on her face.
And get herself back under control.
The rest of the evening slid easily enough into another night that Kate might have called pleasant if she weren’t so on guard. Against herself.
And against how easy it was to spend time with Templeton.
They spent a long time going through all the files Oz had compiled on Samuel Lee Holiday and his prison records—which Kate knew she should have objected to Alaska Force having in the first place. But she was far more interested in preparing herself for the confrontation with her father.
“Maybe I’m kidding myself,” she said much later, after they’d both read more or less everything there was to read about the man who’d given her life and had tried to take it away, too, fifteen years and two days ago. “Maybe this has always been inevitable.”
“You don’t have to do it.”
Templeton sounded so matter-of-fact it made Kate blink. She studied him, lounging the way he always did, as if a mere armchair could not contain him. As if he were called upon to demonstrate his bonelessness at every turn. His legs were thrust out before him. He’d kicked off his boots and, like her, had nothing on his feet but wool socks to cut
the chill. Though she doubted he felt that much chill, since all he was wearing was a T-shirt.
And she didn’t want to admit how much energy she was expending not ogling the corded muscles that made up his arms, or the way his biceps stretched against his sleeves.
“You don’t have to do it,” Templeton said again. “You’re not in this alone, Kate. I get this is your family and it feels personal, but it’s only as personal as we let it be. Alaska Force is behind you. I’m here. And I’m perfectly prepared to have a friendly chat with your father.” His mouth kicked over into one of those dangerous curves. “Perfectly prepared and raring for the chance to go at him, if I’m honest.”
Her heart flipped over. Because Kate couldn’t think of another time in her adult life that someone had told her that she wasn’t alone. That she was part of a team, and it wasn’t contingent on her doing a job or impressing everyone with her commitment.
No one had ever made sure she knew that they were willing to jump in if she couldn’t do something, for whatever reason. And not only jump in. She’d had partners before. She’d relied on them, to one extent or another, as appropriate.
But she’d never trusted that if she truly needed help, they wouldn’t use that against her down the line.
Something twisted, deep in her gut, at the notion that she trusted Templeton in a whole different way. Not only to have her back, or to step in here if needed. Kate knew—she just knew—that he would never hold something like that against her. Never.
She felt a little bit light-headed.
“We have to decide what the best strategy is here,” she made herself say.
