by Megan Crane
In a way, it reminded her of Two Oaks. Entirely its own universe, close and contained, suspicious of outsiders. But Mariah could smell salt and pine in the air, mixed with wood smoke. Not honeysuckle, deep green woods, and her mama’s homemade biscuits and gravy. This was Alaska. It was nothing at all like Georgia.
And that was a good thing, because David was in Georgia. Her cupboards and refrigerator full of potentially tainted food was back in Atlanta. Mariah went ahead and acknowledged a truth that she knew would horrify her entire extended family, assuming they hadn’t all written her off for putting on airs.
She’d never been so happy to be out of the South in her life.
Griffin led her to a place called the Water’s Edge Café, set up from the water on one of the boardwalk lanes. Outside, it was a sturdy two-story house painted a cheerful yellow. Inside, there were merrily mismatched tables and chairs, everything bright and happy, with charming drawings hung on the walls. Mariah was smiling before she sat down in the far corner, where Griffin directed her.
He sat with his back to the wall, so Mariah had to twist to keep looking around as she shrugged out of her vest and hung it on the back of her chair. Two other tables were filled, one with a group of men she decided were fishermen, with their big boots and waterproof pants with suspenders. They all sported impressive beards and weathered hands, and let out deep and hearty laughs as they shoveled down huge plates of potatoes and meat. At the other table was a tourist couple Mariah recognized vaguely from the ferry. They had a map spread out between them and camera equipment stacked next to the sugar dispenser, and they were muttering at each other through fixed smiles.
A style of argument Mariah was all too familiar with.
And even though the tourist couple had clearly been sitting there longer, the sharp-eyed, dark-haired woman with a black half apron tied around the low-slung waist of her jeans ignored them entirely and came over to Mariah and Griffin instead.
She didn’t smile. She didn’t offer a greeting. She crossed her arms and glared.
“Coffee?” she asked Mariah. She shifted her gaze to Griffin as if it cost her. “Are you eating or working?”
“Coffee for me.” Griffin nodded at Mariah. “She’s fresh off the ferry. Jet-lagged.”
It was the easiest he’d sounded since Mariah had met him, which didn’t help at all with that melting sensation that was sweeping over her. His voice was even richer when he wasn’t issuing orders. More compelling. Mariah tried to shove that unhelpful observation aside. She concentrated on the fact that the woman’s unfriendliness wasn’t noticeable or notable to him, which likely meant it was normal.
Mariah decided it was charming, like everything else in this place.
“I don’t think I’m jet-lagged,” she said, almost idly, because neither one of them was paying attention to her. “I got a great night’s sleep in Juneau.”
“She could use some protein,” Griffin was saying. “But no shellfish.”
“Did you really just order for me?” Mariah asked when the woman walked away again. She should have been angrier than she was, but she couldn’t seem to muster up more fury at his high-handedness. She suspected it had to do with the impossibly sharp line of his jaw. Or maybe his mouthwatering cheekbones. Or possibly her own shallowness. “I didn’t even get a chance to look at a menu.”
Griffin’s expression tightened as he gazed at her. “There aren’t any menus. Caradine cooks what she wants. And if she doesn’t like the look of you, she won’t cook at all.” He did something with his shoulder that made her think he’d shrugged when he hadn’t. “Welcome to Grizzly Harbor.”
“I’m surprised that there are enough people here that she can pick and choose who to serve and still stay in business.”
“Nobody comes to Alaska because they want to be like other people. This isn’t a place where anyone conforms, and those of us who belong here like that.”
There was a rebuke in that if she wanted to look for it. She didn’t.
Mariah considered him instead. “How does that nonconformist thing work when you have to do military maneuvers, or whatever you do? Don’t you have to follow orders?”
She had no idea if he did military maneuvers. All she knew was what she’d heard in that video and in the other limited comments about Alaska Force she’d found in strange corners of the internet. Corners where everyone was a soldier, according to them, and were therefore forever throwing around nonsensical terms like alpha charlie whatever.
“I follow the chain of command,” Griffin said stiffly.
“Meaning you follow orders.”
“Don’t you?”
He didn’t look angry, and he certainly didn’t sound it—beneath all that tight control. And yet the question was another one of those belted-out sentences that Mariah was starting to realize was a weapon. Because every syllable felt like a blow.
Griffin didn’t wait for her to reply. “I read your file. Married young to an older, much richer man.”
“You make him sound like he had one foot in the grave. David was twenty-nine when we met. Not exactly ancient.”
“It was a Cinderella story, right? That was what you called it. Whirlwind romance. Picture-perfect wedding out in the country at his folks’ place. I’m betting they paid for it. Did you call the shots after all that? Is that how things worked?”
Mariah had trouble keeping her gaze steady. But that half smile stayed welded to her mouth, because she’d certainly heard worse things about her marriage. Usually delivered directly to her face with a syrupy drawl and a butter-wouldn’t-melt expression.
The sad truth was that she’d been head over heels for David when they married. He hadn’t forced her into anything. She hadn’t been blind, and she’d walked down that aisle with her head high and her eyes wide open. She’d known what her marriage was. Or at least she’d known its dynamics. She hadn’t minded. What did a no-account waitress know about anything outside Two Oaks and the rural county spread out around it? It had been so easy to let David take charge.
It had been a relief, if she was being honest.
All you have to do is stay pretty, he had told her.
That had been a far sight better, to her way of thinking, than having to be responsible for her troublesome younger siblings and her wild cousins and, all too often, her mouthy aunts, drunk uncles, and even sometimes the father Rose Ellen had never bothered to marry before she’d tossed him out. Mariah had been tired of being the one the county sheriff always called to come pick up this or that relative. She’d been neck-deep in all the assorted troubles of every generation of McKennas in the area whether she’d liked it or not, and she’d had no idea what was going to become of her.
Was she going to settle down the way everyone seemed to do for lack of any better options? Have a few babies? And maybe even do those two things out of order, so she could take her turn as the source of family gossip for once?
People in her family barely made it through high school. They certainly didn’t prance off to collect degrees, even if there had been money lying around for such rich-person foolishness, which there wasn’t. They also didn’t up and join the army like some folks in town, and if there were other ways out of Two Oaks, Mariah had never heard of them.
Until David.
It pained her to admit it, even to herself, but he’d been like magic.
Five
“I wouldn’t say David called the shots,” Mariah said now, carefully. Coolly. And too aware of the weight of Griffin’s dark gaze. “That’s a cynical way to put it.”
“If the two of you had a fight, and you couldn’t come to an agreement, who won?”
That shouldn’t have scraped at her, but it did. Mariah shoved that away, too, because what did it matter if she felt raw? That was nothing new.
“At first we didn’t fight at all. There was nothing to fight about. Then, later,
we had discussions about various points of contention. I wouldn’t call those fights because I always saw David’s point of view.”
Because he had known so much more than she did, about everything. Because it was his world and she knew—she knew and he knew and his family knew and all of Atlanta knew—that she would never really fit in. Because he was the one with the college degree from fancy Vanderbilt. Because everything she had, he’d given her.
“Everybody takes orders, princess.” She didn’t know which was harder, Griffin’s voice or the way he was looking at her. Like he’d heard every single thought she’d just had. Or maybe she’d shouted out the way she’d scrubbed her own self out of existence right here in this disconcertingly cheerful café. “The difference between you and me is that the man I take orders from is a man of honor. I would lay down my life for him in a second, and he would do the same for me. I take orders from him because I choose to. Because I trust him with my life. Is that what your marriage was like?”
“I believed it was,” Mariah said quietly. “Or I wouldn’t have married him.”
“Wouldn’t you?”
There was a slap in that, but Mariah couldn’t do more than frown, because the woman he’d called Caradine was back, all sharp edges and a scowl, thunking down big mugs of coffee on the table between them.
“Food will be another minute,” she said in a voice that, again, wasn’t remotely friendly.
But Mariah wondered if she was simply used to the South. Everybody sounded friendly all the time back home, especially when they harbored nothing but black and abiding hatred in their hearts. For all she knew, this Caradine woman was simply neutral, but Mariah was too Southern to tell the difference.
“The first thing you need to know about my marriage is that I loved my husband,” Mariah said after she’d taken a deep, head-clearing chug of her coffee. She was delighted to find that it was good. Really good. And strong. “It took him years to chip away at that. I was under the impression we were in it together, from his political aspirations to our fertility issues. When I caught him sleeping with other women, it wasn’t business as usual. Because it wasn’t ever a business to me. It was real. I thought it was real.” She took another pull from her mug. “And most of the women in my position stay. They stay and they make it work, but I didn’t. I couldn’t. By the end, the marriage wasn’t what I’d imagined it was when we started, but I never would have left him if he hadn’t cheated on me. I wanted it to work.”
“If you say so.”
“I know so.”
“You married an older man with money, but sure. It was love. You were head over heels for the guy. Not his bank account, his big house, his expensive toys. You would have loved him the same if he’d had none of those things and wanted to sweep you away to the house down the block.”
Griffin didn’t actually call her a gold digger. He didn’t really have to.
Mariah concentrated, fiercely, on cupping her hands around her mug and lacing her fingers together.
When she raised her gaze again, she’d gotten control of herself and of the pain he didn’t deserve to see. “Who ripped your heart out and stomped on it?”
Another man might have flinched. But Griffin’s dark gaze only got colder. Just as he got even more dangerously, lethally still.
“Excuse me?”
“You seem to have a lot of opinions about a stranger’s marriage. In my experience, that kind of thing usually comes from a person’s own ugly stuff bubbling up.”
“I don’t have stuff.”
She smiled. “Okay.”
“I don’t have stuff, princess. And Marines don’t bubble.”
“That sounds like a whole lot of stuff. And I’m not a princess. If you know my husband swept me off my feet and let me pretend to be Cinderella for a while, you know that Cinderella doesn’t start off with a coronation. I was dirt poor. I came from nothing and expected a long life of the same. There’s not a royal bone in my body.”
Griffin eyed her for a moment that went on much too long. So long Mariah felt herself start to get much too hot. “You look like you got used to having more than nothing.”
“My goodness,” she murmured, like the Southern belle she wasn’t. “I had no idea that I’d be running from murder attempts to character assassinations. That really should have been included in the introductory email.”
But if she imagined beautiful, deadly Griffin would be abashed, she was mistaken. He leaned forward, his face set into a stern expression that she tried to see as commanding and very, very scary. When really she wanted nothing more than to reach out and touch him.
Instead, she clenched her fingers tighter around her mug until the heat of the ceramic burned.
“I’m not assassinating your character,” he said, his voice cold enough to make her shiver. She tried to hide it, but she knew that he saw it. The same way she knew he saw everything else. Inside her. Inside this café. And out on the streets of Grizzly Harbor, too, she had no doubt. His awareness was like a Southern gentleman’s chivalry. Knee-jerk and constant. “I’m trying to figure out if you’re a liar. Delusional or dramatic or anywhere in between. Or maybe you’re a run-of-the-mill rich man’s first wife, who didn’t like getting tossed aside for a newer model and suffered through a round or two of self-induced shellfish poisoning to point the finger at the ex. Believe me, we’ve seen it all before.”
“If that’s supposed to make me feel better about being the potential delusional drama queen in question, it doesn’t.”
“I’m not here to make you feel better. If we decide to handle your situation, our goal will be to neutralize the threat, not concern ourselves with your emotional state. You should probably get your head around that now.”
“I have to say I’m amazed that a super-secret band of heroes hidden off in the hinterland, who roam about solving crimes and saving folks, would choose this as their marketing approach. Do y’all actually have any clients?”
Griffin’s hard expression didn’t change at all. “Do you have something to feel guilty about? Any lies, omissions? Anything you made up?”
“I don’t know a single grown person who doesn’t feel guilty about something,” Mariah replied, keeping her own voice light and her gaze trained on his. She pretended she couldn’t feel any heat. Or that hollow yearning that reminded her of the way she’d always wanted to please David. “What about you?”
“Guilt is a luxury.” Flat. Certain. “I prefer action.”
That felt a lot like a kick in the stomach.
“Exactly what kind of action are we talking about?” Mariah asked after a moment, when her stomach stopped feeling quite so fragile. “Because I don’t want . . .” She couldn’t finish that sentence. “I want to divorce David, that’s all. I want to live long enough to be single.”
“Alaska Force is not a contract-killer service. Jesus Christ.”
“What are you, then?”
“We specialize in containment. And solutions.”
“Is that a fancy way of saying—”
“It’s not a fancy way of saying anything. That’s what we do. You’ve had two separate instances of anaphylaxis in the last month, correct?”
That was a dizzying subject change. Or maybe he made her dizzy. “Yes.”
“Why didn’t you contact the police if you thought your ex-husband was involved?”
“David’s family regularly has the police commissioner over for Sunday dinner. I didn’t think that reporting him would do anything except make me more of a target. Because the only thing my in-laws like less than a white trash daughter-in-law who can’t even get herself knocked up is any kind of public embarrassment.”
“But you didn’t test that theory.”
“It’s not a theory. That’s the guiding principle of the family. No public humiliations or scandals upon pain of excommunication.”
“So again, you didn’t report your suspicions to anyone. Not the Atlanta police. Or any of your doctors.”
“I thought the first time could have been an accident. To be honest, I wanted it to be an accident.” She felt too intense, too visible, and looked away. “Because if it was an accident, I wouldn’t have to make myself face the fact that I spent ten years of my life sleeping in the same bed as someone who could turn around and want me dead. And worse, try to make that happen. I’m still holding out hope that I’m paranoid and crazy and you’ll tell me it was an accident after all.”
She remembered glimpsing movement in the shadows here, where no one knew she’d gone, and wondered if that was what Griffin was here to tell her. That she was plain off her rocker like her aunt Annie May—because in her corner of the poor, rural South, mental illness was often considered part of a family’s colorful story.
“What made you decide to seek out Alaska Force?” he asked instead.
Mariah decided not to share any details about conspiracy theorists and her addiction to online how-to videos, because that would give him ammunition she was pretty sure he didn’t need. Not when he was already looking at her like she was wasting his time.
“If I stayed in Atlanta, he was going to kill me,” she said. Simply. “And I wanted to live.”
It was nothing she hadn’t thought before, or typed out to an anonymous email address. But it was different to say it out loud. To say it to another person. Not to hedge or try to pretty it up or contradict herself as she said it. Not to tell herself she was being paranoid in the next breath.
And the fact that Griffin didn’t so much as flinch, that all he did was gaze back at her steadily, made it possible for her to continue. More than possible—easy.
“He must have had someone break into my apartment. I can’t think of how else he could have poisoned me. And if he could do it once, he could do it again. So when I remembered that I’d heard about Alaska Force, I looked you all up. And here I am.”
“Here you are.”