Lila’s fingers tightened around the meat. Even in the firelight, she kept her face blank. Habit was a chain, and hers had been forged carefully.
“I don’t care why you pretend,” Rowan continued, not unkind, just blunt. “But on this mountain, if you don’t listen, you die.” He turned his back to her and lay down as if trust were something you could choose by necessity.
The next day, they reached his cabin, built into a cliff like an eagle’s nest, half-hidden by pines and rock. It was not the lair of a savage. Inside were shelves of books, weapons cleaned and ordered, herbs hung to dry, and a table scrubbed smooth. The place held the disciplined quiet of someone who had once believed in rules, even if the world had stopped believing in him.
Rowan set down his pack and nodded toward a broom. “This is it,” he said. “I hunt. You cook. We both work.”
Lila swallowed, her throat raw with unsaid words. The arrangement sounded simple, but nothing in her life had ever been simple. Still, the cabin felt safer than the town. Safer than Amos. Safer than Bart Vane’s hands. She took a risk so small it felt enormous. “Why?” she whispered, voice thin from disuse.
Rowan froze. Slowly, he turned, and for the first time his expression shifted, something like pain flickering behind his eyes. “Because I know who your father is,” he said. “And I know who Bart Vane works for.”
Lila’s knees threatened to fold. “Kessler,” she breathed, the name tasting like dust.
Rowan nodded once. “Gideon Kessler’s been looking for something that went missing the night your mother died. He thinks you have it.”
The truth hit her like a door slamming. The ledger. The black book her mother had hidden under a loose floorboard, the one Amos had never found because he was always too drunk to look carefully. Lila had kept it not because she understood it, but because her mother’s hands had been shaking when she pushed it into Lila’s arms and mouthed one word with terrified urgency: proof.
Lila nodded, because denial would have been pointless in a cabin this small, with a man this perceptive. Rowan closed his eyes as if hearing a verdict. “Then the war isn’t over,” he murmured. “It’s just coming up the mountain.”
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