He wasn't asking to find out. He was asking to put me on record." Nayeli turned her head toward him in the dark. He couldn't see her expression clearly. Just the outline of her.
"You understand men like him." she said. "I've known a few." A long pause. "So have I." she said. The attack came on the second night after.
Not a full day. Not two. Malone was patient, but not slow. He came back with more men, and he came at the time all men like him choose. The heavy dark before the early light.
The hour when bodies are deepest in sleep and the mind takes longest to clear. Except Hadley wasn't asleep. He'd been awake since midnight. Not from fear, or not only, from the instinct that sometimes replaces information. The sense that tonight was different, that the air outside had a different quality, that Rex had been restless in the barn for an hour before it started.
The first thing was the smell. Smoke, not the wood stove, not the fireplace outside. He was up before he'd consciously decided to move, across the room to the window, and through the glass, orange light growing. The barn. "Up," he said, "loud, clear, both of you.
Now." And they were up, immediately. No grogginess, no confusion. Because they'd been half awake, too. Because some part of them had been waiting for this moment since the day they understood the smoke on the ridge.
The barn was burning. And the cabin door was about to receive company, three men. They came fast, and they came confident, which is the thing that gets men like that killed. Confidence assumes the situation is what you think it is. Confidence doesn't account for the woman by the east window with a clear line on the approach.
Doesn't account for the other one who'd spent two nights quietly determining exactly which floorboards didn't creak. Hadley hit the bar across the door a half second before the first shoulder came into it. The door held. The second blow cracked the frame. The third, he stepped back from the door.
Let the next blow come. And when the door burst inward and the first man came through, moving forward with momentum, Hadley was already to the side. The rifle was a presence he didn't have to think about. It went fast after that, the way violence always goes. Not like in stories, not dramatic, not extended.
Sudden, and then over. Two of the three men decided the inside of this cabin wasn't worth what it cost. They went back through the door into the dark the third on the floor alive considerably less confident than he'd been 60 seconds ago. Hadley looked at him with a specific expression. The man didn't need to be told twice.