Page 56 of Sergeant's Christmas Siege

Her cousin shook his head as if this all caused him pain. Or distaste. Or maybe both.

“I thought I could hold on to the family. I wanted to hold on to something. You don’t know what it was like when they came. That raid. The way they stormed in and took us all away...” He shook his head again, but this time like he was trying to shake the memory out. “But there was nothing to hold on to. They all thought I was a traitor, just like you. We hadideas. They would have made us answer for that sooner or later.”

“Sooner, not later,” Kate said softly. “Why do you think I left?”

Her cousin blinked. “They weren’t going to put you through the ritual. I would have heard.”

“It was coming. They’d discussed it. My father was pretending to be the holdout vote.”

William swayed a little on his feet.

“I’m missing the subtext here,” Templeton belted out into the sudden tension in the room, and was gratified when both Kate and William shifted their positions, like he’d succeeded in breaking that chain with the past. “What ritual are you talking about?”

“The ritual was a favorite practice, doled out to traitors.” Kate smiled at Templeton. It went nowhere nearher eyes. “In case you’re wondering why my father was transferred back here from his stint in federal prison for the mail fraud and the tax evasion to do his life sentences for murder, it wasn’t only for the troopers he shot during the raid. It was the ritual. It was his way of rooting out a traitor, because a traitor was an offense to the bountiful land that gave us all we should need.”

“Any man, woman, or child who could withstand nature’s fury could prove beyond any reasonable doubt that they weren’t actually a traitor,” William intoned.

Kate was still smiling at Templeton. “You know how cold it gets up here in winter. Guess how many traitors lived through the night when they were forced to stay outside? Naked?”

Templeton thought of fifteen-year-old Kate and muttered a curse.

“Exactly,” William said sourly. “That many.”

“And it was all, always, my father’s idea. But he was really, really good at getting other people to convince him to do what he wanted to do in the first place.” Kate shifted her gaze back to William. “A master manipulator to the end.”

“There is no end,” William said, his voice rough. He swallowed hard enough to make his Adam’s apple bob. “They all still love him the way they always did. They’re never going to see the light. And that means I get it from both sides. No one who knows who my family is wants anything to do with me. And no one in the family wants anything to do with me, either.”

If anything, Kate’s smile got wider. “Let me guess. That’s all my fault, too.”

“I know it’s not your fault, Katie. Believe me, I know. But I blame you anyway.”

And the look on William’s face then tore at Templeton. Because he was terribly afraid that he knew what that felt like. A terrible yearning mixed with sorrow, bound up in anger that had nowhere to go.

He’d had similar feelings about his own father his whole life.

Templeton didn’t like recognizing it on another man’s face. He didn’t like admitting he knew what it was. And he couldn’t decide if he felt empathetic or if what he really wanted to do was punch William—hard—until that awful look went away.

And what did that make him?

“Someone left a dead body in my seaplane,” Kate said quietly. And her voice was different—harder, maybe—but Templeton was too busy looking into a mirror he wanted to deny existed to glance over at her. “And then someone broke into my apartment in Juneau. Maybe the same someone. Only that time, it looks like they were waiting for me to come home, presumably so we could throw a little Christmas party. Or who knows, perform the ritual after all. And yes, it seems pretty clear that they were waiting for me specifically, because I wasn’t the woman who walked in on them. Do you know anything about any of that?”

“You think I have access to dead bodies?” William blinked. Then a mottled sort of color washed over his face, making his neck tattoo stand out even more. “Oh, wait, you think I’dmurdersomeone? Then come at you in your own apartment? All these years later, that’s what you think of me?”

“You’re either like them or you’re not, William,” Kate said, and she sounded tough again. Giving no quarter, no matter that this had to be eating away at her. If Templeton was seeing his own ghosts in this room, what was she seeing? “I have no idea what the years have done to you inside. Only you do. But you either know information that could help me or you don’t, and that’s why I’m here.”

William’s fists curled at his sides, but even as Templeton clocked it and shifted to a higher gear, he could tell that the other man was fighting himself. He wasn’t about to swing at his cousin. Which meant Templetondidn’t get the opportunity to show him why that would be a terrible idea. William swallowed hard. Again. Like it hurt him.

“I told you. They don’t want any part of me.”

“That doesn’t mean you don’t hear things.”

“I hear things,” William admitted. Grudgingly. “And last I heard, Liberty and Russ went back. To Nenana.”

Kate was too still. It was the first time since they’d gotten here that Templeton thought her cousin had really made it under her skin. “Not the compound.”

“No. Not that far out.”

“I thought they were in Palmer.”

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