Chapter 156 Back to Sage

Chapter 156 Back to Sage
The image wouldn't stop.

It played behind Sierra's eyes like a film reel jammed in the projector, Ryder's fists rising and falling, the wet crack of knuckle against bone, Viktor's head snapping sideways, blood spraying in a fine mist that caught the weak light of the tactical flashlights. And then the freeze-frame. The one her mind kept returning to. Ryder's body coiled and trembling, Collins and Vargas gripping his arms, his chest heaving, his knuckles split and glistening, and his eyes, those eyes she had come to love so much, burning with something she had never seen before. Something feral and barely leashed.

She'd seen Ryder angry. She'd seen him protective. She'd heard him tell Cody that he'd hung a man from a tree and assure her brother that nobody would ever find the body.

But she had never seen the thing that lived behind those eyes in that basement.

The night air rushed through the SUV's open windows as Vargas drove them through the outskirts of Pittsburgh, the city's skeletal industrial bones giving way to the interstate. Ryder sat in the front passenger's seat, as if he understood that the space she needed right now was measured in bodies. Sierra sat in the back seat, Sylvia pressed against her side, Collins on Sylvia's other flank. 

Collins posture relaxed but his eyes were never still, scanning mirrors and side streets with the practiced rhythm of a man who had done this kind of work for a very long time. Neither he nor Vargas had said much since pulling them from that basement. When they'd emerged through the warehouse's rusted service door, an old brick building adjacent to the Wolf's Den bar Sierra and Sylvia had so foolishly walked into, Sierra had looked for the rental car. The space where she'd parked it along the curb was empty.

"Where's my car?" The question had come out before she could stop it, absurd in its mundanity, and she'd heard herself ask it as though from a great distance.

No one answered.

Had they destroyed it? Crushed it in some junkyard compactor, or simply driven it to another borough where the police wouldn't connect it to two missing women and a kidnapped rancher? For one surreal moment, Sierra found herself calculating the insurance deductible, the paperwork, the phone call to Hertz where she'd have to explain that her vehicle had vanished during a hostage situation associated with the Russian mob. The thought was so grotesquely ordinary that it nearly made her laugh.

"The Scotsman sent us," Collins said as he was helping them into the SUV, his voice flat and unhurried, as though he were reporting the weather. He turned his head just enough for Sierra to see his profile. "He said you would try to do it yourself."

The words landed with a quiet sting. He said you would try to do it yourself. As if her desperation to find Ryder had been anticipated and predictable, plotted on some invisible graph by a man whose real name she didn't know, who worked for someone whose face she had never seen.

"Who are you people?" Sierra asked.

Collins didn't respond.

Vargas adjusted the mirror.

Neither spoke.

The silence that followed was its own kind of answer, which made the skin between Sierra's shoulder blades prickle, making her feel like a chess piece being guided across a board she wasn't aware of in a game she didn't know she was playing. Collins and Vargas had saved her life. They had saved Ryder's life and Sylvia's life. And yet the gratitude she owed them was tangled with something cold and unsettling, because she didn't know who they ultimately served or what they ultimately wanted, and she had learned. Through Julian, through Pistol Warren, through every gilded hand that had reached for her, the Scotsman and his invisible employer had been there. Was there a cost she wasn't yet aware of at the other end of it all?

Sylvia's head dropped onto Sierra's shoulder. Her breathing was shallow, uneven, the breathing of someone who was not asleep but who had simply run out of the energy required to remain fully conscious. Sierra felt the warmth of her and was grateful for it.

Ryder sat with his hands in his lap, palms on his thighs, the knuckles swollen and crusted with blood that wasn't all his own. He stared at them as if they belonged to someone else. Sierra watched him in the reflection of the windshield,  the hard line of his jaw, the muscle feathering at his temple. She wanted to press her lips to the torn skin and tell him she understood, that she wasn't afraid of him.

But the freeze-frame played again. His eyes. That thing behind them.

And she said nothing.

They drove through the night. Somewhere over Pennsylvania, Vargas pulled into a private airstrip where a small jet waited, engines already warming. Sierra didn't ask who it belonged to. She didn't ask where it had come from. She climbed the stairs and strapped herself in and watched the ground fall away and told herself that when her feet touched Arizona soil, she would feel like herself again.

\-----

When she stepped out of the SUV that had been waiting for them at Kingman Regional Airport, she felt the familiar gravel of the ranch yard under her feet and the buildings of Sage Ranch materializing in the early hours, its silhouette dark against a sky that was just beginning to lighten along the eastern rim. Collins and Vargas swept the house and surrounding property in silence while Sierra stood on the porch with her arms wrapped around herself. When they gave the all-clear, Sierra nodded.

"You should get some rest," Ryder said, giving her a quick hug. 

"You too."

A beat of silence. The freeze-frame. His eyes.

"Alright if I borrow the truck until I can get to Flagstaff to get mine."

"Not a problem," Sierra responded as he strolled toward the old Ford.

"Ryder."

He paused.

She wanted to say a hundred things. I love you. I'm grateful. I'm frightened, not of you, but of what loving you costs. Of what it costs you. Instead, she said, "Thank you."

He nodded once, continued to the truck, climbed in and drove away.

Sylvia appeared in the doorway behind her. "I don't want to be alone tonight," she said quietly.

"Then stay."

\----

Morning arrived softly, the way it does in the high desert, pale gold spilling over the ridgeline, the air cool and smelling of sage and dust. Sierra sat on the porch with her coffee, her bare feet on the worn planks. Sylvia was curled in the chair beside her, a blanket pulled to her chin, dark eyes fixed on some middle distance that existed only in memory.

"He wanted something," Sylvia said, her voice thin as paper. "They kept asking me what Julian had given you." She shook her head. "I told him I didn't know anything. He didn't believe me."

"He didn't believe me either," Sierra murmured. "I've been turning it over and over. Julian's trust, the land deeds. I returned those properties. It can't be that. I finally decided it had to be the talisman..." She trailed off, her stomach knotting at the memory of throwing it into the trash. "I don't know what he was looking for, Syl. I don't know what Julian had that was worth all of this."

"Whatever it is, it must be serious."

"Serious enough to kill over."

The screen door creaked, and Cody stepped onto the porch with a mug of coffee. He had the look of someone who had been listening to their conversation. He leaned against the porch rail, sipping quietly, his eyes moving between Sierra and Sylvia as they spoke.

"Viktor Sobol," he repeated, testing the name. "And nobody knows what he's after."

"Nobody," Sierra confirmed.

Cody was quiet for a long moment. Then he set his mug on the rail. He straightened slowly, his expression shifting in a way Sierra couldn't immediately read. Something like a door opening into a room he'd forgotten he'd locked.

Without another word, he stepped off the porch and walked toward the barn.

Sierra and Sylvia exchanged a glance.

He disappeared through the barn's side door. Sierra heard the scrape of something being moved. Thirty seconds passed. A minute.

Cody emerged into the morning light with something pinched between his thumb and forefinger. Small. Black. Unremarkable.

As he stepped up onto the porch, Sierra recognized the object is hand.

A thumb drive.

He held it out to Sierra. She took it, turning it over in her palm. It was featureless, no label, no markings, no indication of what it contained.

"Could that be what Sobol was looking for?" Cody asked.

Sierra stared at him. "Where did you get this?"

"This was in the spare room on the floor beside the nightstand." Cody rubbed the back of his neck, his jaw tightening with the particular guilt of a man realizing the weight of something he'd treated as weightless. "I found it after Julian stayed the night here. Figured it was his, thought I'd give it back next time I saw him. Then everything happened, Dad, the funeral, all of it. When things started getting really weird, I hid it in the barn. I forgot about it. Completely forgot." He paused.

Sierra closed her fist around the drive.

"Cody," she whispered. "Do you have any idea what's on this?"

"No." He shook his head. "Not a clue."

Sierra looked at Sylvia. Sylvia looked at the thumb drive.

The desert wind stirred the dust at their feet, carrying with it the scent of sage and the faint, electric charge of a storm that hadn't arrived yet but was already reshaping the sky.