Your wife, he said almost bored, lived on land my employers needed cleared for a railroad survey. She wasn't the target, Callaway, if it's any comfort to you after all this time. You were a soldier with your record, asking the kinds of questions you'd started asking about missing requisitions that made you a liability. She simply had the poor fortune of being home that morning instead of you. Something broke open in Wade's chest.
Hot and enormous. five years of grief and misdirected. Hate finally finding its true target. And for one terrible second he wanted nothing in this world so badly as to close the distance between them and make Silas Reed answer for it with his own hands. Autumn Sky fingers found his arm gripped hard. Wade, she said quiet, urgent, cutting through the roar in his head like the only clear sound left in the world.
Not like this. Not with a dozen rifles, waiting for exactly this excuse. She wouldn't want this for you. I don't think she would. Wade's whole body shook with the effort of standing still.
She wouldn't, he agreed. Finally, the words costing him everything he had left. She always did have better sense than me. Touching, said unimpressed. Truly, though, I'm afraid sentiment doesn't change my position here, Callaway.
You know too much now. Say too much of it to the wrong people, and five years of careful arrangements come apart at once. Then I suppose you'll have to make sure none of us leave here able to say anything at all. Wade said, "That's your plan, Reed. Because I count a dozen witnesses standing right here who disagree real strongly with how that story gets told afterward."
"A dozen witnesses," Reed said, almost gentle, is a manageable number, Callaway. "You'd be surprised how manageable out here, where nobody comes looking for a very long while." Autumn Sky grip tightened on Wade's arm, and for one long suspended moment, the whole clearing held its breath. A dozen rifles on one side, three exhausted rescuers, and a rescued woman on the other. The math of it plain and terrible, and entirely in Reed's favor.
Funny thing about arrangements, a new voice cut in from somewhere beyond the ring of firelight. They tend to come apart anyway once enough people start asking the same questions independently. A line of riders emerged from the dark beyond Reed's camp. Army blue catching cavalry blue 20 strong led by a lean man with a captain's bars and the tired watchful eyes of somebody who'd stopped being surprised by anything a long while back. Major Hartwell Reed said and for the first time all night something like genuine alarm moved across his face.
This is a private operation. Government contracted government-contracted operations don't typically involve unlogged requisitions going back five years. Hartwell said, "Dismounting unhurried or reports of an armed militia holding a young woman against her will less than a mile from where I'm currently standing." Funny thing, Colonel man matching your descriptions been the subject of an inquiry for the better part of a year now. Missing supplies, missing men, a pattern of settlements and camps, burned under circumstances that never quite added up to the story told about them afterward.