Page 66 of Sergeant's Christmas Siege

Kate smiled. “That’s not going to happen.”

Templeton was surprised that there was no argument. Liberty glared at him, but then jerked her chin in what he chose to take as an invitation, though the way she stepped deeper into the house could have been read as ominous.

He ambled inside behind Kate, and it wasn’t lost on him that once again, they fell into the kind of patterns that usually took a hell of a lot more time to develop. She marched in with all the confidence in the world, putting on a show. He followed, looking and acting lazy and aimless, and took in all the details.

“I see you share the same decorating taste as our parents,” Kate was saying. Templeton glanced around the stark room with no furniture, which that would have been a living room in any other house. It was empty, the way it looked at first glance, save for the huge yellow flag covering most of one wall with a snake coiled in the middle of it and the wordsDON’T TREAD ON MEemblazoned across the bottom. There were mats along the walls, but no television or comfortable sofa. And the wall across from the flag appeared to double as an armory.

“Do you all sit around and meditate together?” Templeton asked. “This looks like a great yoga room.”

All he got in return were a few stray growls. And that gleam in Kate’s gaze when she glanced over at him.

But all that muttering kept the attention on his outrageousness. He was more interested in the individual who stood behind Liberty, whom he could now see fully. The man was all dark brows and another epic beard to match. And up at the top of the narrow staircase that led to the open loft area above, there was a woman even rounder and softer than Liberty. She looked like a fertility statue as she corralled two surprisingly quiet kids under ten or so, a tearstained toddler, and the baby she wore in a sling.

At least the presence of potential spouses meant thingshere were a lot less Appalachian than they’d seemed on paper, he thought. Because Templeton had made a whole career out of finding the silver lining anywhere he looked.

“Kate was terrified by our childhood,” Liberty was saying. It took Templeton a moment to realize she was responding to his ridiculous yoga remark. “We weren’t.”

“So you and Russ figured you’d move back to the old stomping grounds?” Kate asked, and once again, she was in total trooper mode.

As if this weren’t her family. As if she were answering a call, didn’t know these people, and hadn’t grown up in a room a lot like this one.

An image Templeton really didn’t like at all.

Because he wouldn’t like anyone growing up here, he assured himself. Sternly. Including the kids who lived here now. It had nothing to do with any inappropriate emotional connection to—

Shut up, dumbass.

Templeton concentrated on the information he was receiving from the house around them. He could hear Cousin Russ’s thumping progress down off the roof, then in through a back door. He could hear it every time someone shifted position. It took maybe two full heartbeats for him to pinpoint where every person in the house was standing and to determine that there very likely weren’t any surprise visitors hiding in the rooms he couldn’t see. Still,very likelywasn’t anall clear. He kept his back to the wall so that, if he was wrong, he could disarm Liberty and the man he assumed was her husband with maybe three moves. Then help himself to one of the weapons displayed on the wall behind them, if necessary.

“It’s beautiful here,” Liberty was saying, a harder note in her voice that made it seem highly unlikely she was an avid hiker, outdoor sports enthusiast, or, say, an arctic photographer. “We were homesick.”

“You either have a heart for this land or you don’t,” Russ said, stamping in from the back of the house, looking red from the cold and bitter straight through.

“I was unaware that hearts were involved in anything that happened out here,” Kate replied lightly. “I thought it was mostly manual labor, hunger, and my father’s endless, unhinged lectures.”

“Your father is a great man,” Russ said darkly. “Agreatman. You watch your mouth when you talk about him.”

“Or what?” Kate asked. But she managed to make it sound like it wasn’t a direct challenge, more that she was musing on the topic. “The thing is, Russ, you might think he’s a great man, and you’re welcome to your opinion, of course. But the state of Alaska and the federal government disagree.”

“This isn’t the right place to rehash all your lies,” Liberty said, and she did not sound light or musing. “Is that why you came here? You think you can poison us the way you did my brother?”

“Will didn’t seem particularly poisoned to me,” Kate observed.

“You’re both traitors,” Russ growled. “End of story.”

“Once again,” Kate said quietly, “the state of Alaska disagrees. They don’t like it when people kill their law enforcement officers. And they took a dim view of the ritual that claimed the lives of two people that all the adults in this family allowed to happen. I’m not sure truly great men come with a body count.”

“Lies,” Russ shouted. “We all know how you twisted it. But no one in this family is responsible for two grown adults who chose to walk out into a winter storm.”

“Naked,” Kate reminded him. “And so far out in the bush that even if they changed their minds, it wouldn’t have mattered.”

“You can’t blame our family for other people’schoices,” Liberty chimed in, the same impassioned—or unhinged—note in her voice.

“I understand that’s what you believe,” Kate said after a moment, and maybe Templeton was the only person in the room who could hear the fury she was obviously trying to conceal. She took a breath, then smiled. “There’s no need to litigate it here.”

Because, Templeton knew, she had been cross-examined on this subject repeatedly. Her parents, her aunts and uncles, her father’s cousins—Kate had been a star witness for the prosecution in each one of their trials. She’d been called to the stand at their appeals.

And none of that changed the fact that of the small handful of nonfamily members who had been a part of this group all those years ago, two had ended up dead. Both after participating in what the Holiday family calledthe ritual. The one Cousin William had referred to yesterday, which involved a so-called test of worth against an Alaskan winter. The remains of Christine Cotter had washed downstream two summers before Kate walked into the Nenana Trooper station. The remains of her husband, Gerald Cotter, had never been found.

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