Don't tell her about." He stopped. " About what?" She turned to face him, and her expression was something he hadn't seen from her in the past 24 hours. Not fear of Luther, not the cold authority of the boardroom, something much more vulnerable than either, and much harder for her to hold.
About any of it, she said about She stopped, started again about the kiss. He was quiet. I need you to understand something. She held his gaze steadily, even though it clearly cost her. I know what I am.
I know what it looks like when a woman like me enters the life of a man who has a child. And I know what that child has already lost. Her voice dropped slightly. I won't be the reason she thinks she's stopped again. He looked at her carefully.
You think she'd see you as replacing her mother? Wouldn't she? He thought about Brin. Her particular 8-year-old logic sharp as attack and twice as pointed. The way she watched people who came near her father.
The way she asked questions that sounded simple and weren't ay, he said honestly. At first, Octavia nodded like that confirmed something she'd been carrying. So, you want me to pretend tonight didn't happen? He said, "I want you to give her the option of deciding what tonight meant without it being handed to her before she's ready." She looked at him directly.
That's not the same thing. He stood with Brin's photograph still on the screen of his phone and Octavia's dark eyes on his and the helicopter getting louder overhead. And he thought that of all the things he'd expected from this woman since pulling into her estate 3 weeks ago, the thing he'd expected least, was this the particular care she was taking with a child she'd never met? He didn't say yes. He didn't say no.
He looked at her for a long moment and said, "We should get our coats." She held his gaze for one more second. Then she went to get her coat. The helicopter set down in the east meadow at 10:43 in the morning. Cade knew the exact time because he'd been watching his watch for the last 20 minutes.
Standing at the back door of the estate in his coat while Octavia stood beside him and the rotors kicked up a second storm of loose snow across the already destroyed landscape. Two rescue technicians came out first, moving fast and purposeful across the field. Behind them, two sheriff's deputies in cold weather gear. Behind them, a man in a dark jacket that said sheriff across the back in yellow letters who was already on a radio before he cleared the rotor wash. They debriefed for 40 minutes in the main sitting room.
Cade sat in the chair he'd occupied most of the night and let Octavia do the primary talking because it was her property and her employees and her corporate conspiracy and because she did it better than he would have precise sequential. No excess detail, no emotion that wasn't factual. The deputies recorded everything. One of them went down to the sublevel to retrieve Luther, which produced a period of muffled conversation and then footsteps and then Luther being walked through the sitting room with his hands zip tied and his face carrying the expression of a man who had spent 3 hours in a cold equipment room, arriving at conclusions he should have arrived at a long time ago. He didn't look at Octavia when they walked Luther through.
She looked at him. Cade noticed that. She looked at him directly without hatred, without satisfaction, just looked. The way you look at something you want to remember accurately rather than the way you want to remember it. The second man whose name came out in the debrief as Regg Hollander, a private contractor with a documented history of work for hire and corporate security disputes, had been found by a search and rescue team 2 miles down the mountain road, alive and hypothermic, and very willing to talk.
Willing to talk was an understatement, apparently. The deputy who relayed this information said Hollander had begun providing names before they finished getting him into the heated vehicle. That was the thing about people who did this kind of work for money. Cade thought the loyalty only ran in one direction. A paramedic looked at Cade's burned fingers index and middle on the right hand.
First degree mostly, one small patch that was going to need proper dressing, and at the cut on his palm, which had opened again during the business with Luther in the corridor, and at his shoulder, which the paramedic pressed on in several places, with the expression of someone who is not going to deliver good news. Partial separation, maybe, the paramedic said. Need imaging to confirm. You're going to want to keep that arm in a sling for a couple of weeks at minimum. I'm a one-man operation, Cade said.
I understand that. at the paramedic said. And your shoulder doesn't care. Octavia heard this exchange from 6 ft away where she was finishing the debrief with the lead deputy. She didn't say anything, but Cade noticed her listening.
By 1:00 in the afternoon, the estate had been photographed, documented, processed, and largely emptied of law enforcement. The lead deputy told Octavia that a forensic team would need access to the property in the coming days, and she agreed with the efficiency of someone who had already moved past this particular phase of the crisis and was now thinking three phases ahead. One of the deputies offered to drive Cade down the mountain when the road was confirmed passable. The storm had broken enough, barely, but enough. The plows had gone through once and would go through again.
Cade went to find Octavia before he left. She was in the library, the room they'd locked themselves into that morning, which felt like it had happened in a different week. She was standing at the reading table with a legal pad and a pen, writing something in the longhand style of someone who thought better on paper. She looked up when he appeared in the doorway. Roads open, he said.