Chapter 198

Kade

I had started sleeping in my office.

Not sleeping, most nights. Sitting. In the chair behind the desk with the lamp turned low and Vincent’s map of the Blackridge passes spread out in front of me, weighted at the corners with whatever came to hand. A mug. A stapler. Ryan’s knife, which he had left there two days ago and not come back for.

Vincent rang every evening at nine. Every evening he said the same thing. His men had been up the north pass and the west one. They had looked into every shepherd’s hut and every hunting cabin they could find, from a distance, carefully, the way he had promised. They had found tracks of deer and a fox and one old boar. They had found nothing else.

“If she’s up there,” he said on the third evening, “she’s somewhere my men don’t know about. And my men have walked those mountains since they could walk.”

I put a small pencil cross on the map every time he named a place they had looked. There were a great many c