Page 81 of Sergeant's Christmas Siege

And if she overlooked that familiar, burning hatred in his gaze when he looked at her.

“Cat got your tongue?” her father asked in that same voice she remembered. Dark and deceptively flat when she’d learned young that he was alwaysthis closeto raising it. “You had no trouble shooting your mouth off in court, as I recollect.”

Kate eyed him for a moment, then let out a light laugh that made his eyes narrow.

“This is so funny,” she said, shaking her head and even smiling like she expected him to join in. “It’s so hard to remember why you were intimidating. I mean, look at you. Gray, old, locked away. And pretty much forgotten entirely out in the real world, unless someone’s writing a book report on easily caught local criminals.”

His furious gaze got more intense. And Kate couldn’tpretend it didn’t get to her. It did. She remembered what had always come next. How he liked to administer his form of judgment and retribution. But the difference was, now she knew how to hide her reactions. And, better still, she wasn’t a dependent child that he could hurt on a whim.

She was a grown woman. One he didn’t know at all.

That thought made her smile a little wider.

“Forgotten by everyone except you,” he said after a moment.

Kate nodded at Templeton. “I wouldn’t have thought of you at all, if I’m honest. It was this guy.”

And it wasn’t as if they’d planned out what they would say. But Templeton grinned wide, the way he always did.

“Funny thing,” he said. “But in the state of Alaska, if you start talking about whackadoo groups who tried to get all culty, your name comes up every time.”

Samuel Lee—because Kate really didn’t think of him as her father—glowered.

Kate made herself take a breath. She remembered that bitterly cold snowmobile ride in the dark, fifteen years ago this very day. How scared she’d been. That she would die out there. That she wouldn’t. That she would make it all the way to the police only for them to take her back. That what her father had told her more than once, sometimes with his hand around her throat, was true—she would never escape him. Her life was his, to elevate or extinguish as he pleased.

The fifteen-year-old she’d been had held on tight to the feeling—little more than a fantasy—that whatever was out there in the big, wide world, it had to be better than the life she knew.It just had to be.

That terrified, determined, defiantly hopeful teenager would never have believed that this was the way it would all end up. Samuel Lee locked away forever. And Kate left to live her life exactly as she pleased.

Is that how you live your life?something inside herasked.Or have you been reeling around in fear since that night—locking yourself away as surely as if you were the one who ended up behind bars?

But this wasn’t the time for a chat with her inner turmoil. Not after the day she’d spent with Templeton, which had lit her up in so many different ways she was more or less scorched straight through. And certainly not when the boogeyman she’d feared all her life was sitting right there in front of her at last.

“I shouldn’t have to tell you this, Dad,” Kate said then, with an emphasis on the word because she knew he hated the familiarity and preferred to be called Father Samuel, even by her.I am everyone’s father, Katie, he’d told her during a spanking she’d earned because she’d cried when told she couldn’t call him Daddy.Only a selfish, wicked girl would want to claim me as her own.She’d been six. “But if you’re found to be up to your old tricks in any way, it’s going to make your time here a lot harder.”

Her father didn’t respond the way she thought he would. He stared at her for another long while. His eyes burned with a malice that seemed to hook into her and pull at her flesh.

And she’d forgotten this part. When she thought about her father, it was always the lectures. The rants and the punishments. His thunderous volume and all the words he used. Or the cruelty of his hard hands.

She’d forgotten about his silences. How he could sit and stare until you would do anything at all, anything he asked and all the things he didn’t ask, to get him to snap out of his furious silence. To shift that gaze somewhere else.

Kate stared back at him, ready to sit across from him and hold his gaze forever, if only to prove she could.

But she realized she wasn’t prepared. She’d forgotten his deliberate, deadly silences, but she could handle that.Because while he’d been sitting in jail, she’d been trained in all manner of interrogation techniques.

That wasn’t what got to her. It was the family resemblance.

She’d forgotten that they had the same nose, though hers was daintier. She’d forgotten the similarity in the shape of their hands. And, more disorienting, the similar gestures she hadn’t realized she’d picked up from him. Her father sat with his hands folded in front of him and his back straight, and it was like looking in a mirror. She could see all the times she’d sat exactly like that, staring down one of the subjects of her investigations.

She had gotten so used to thinking of him as a monster and nothing else, nothing more. She’d forgotten all the ways that he was human. And she’d completely blocked out the fact that he’d contributed half of her DNA.

Maybe she’d never really thought about that, back when she was a kid. She certainly didn’t enjoy thinking about it now.

“I know why you’re here,” her father said, and Kate allowed herself the faintest smile, because she’d won. He’d been forced to break the silence. And the faint red flush on his face told her he knew he’d lost. “Deep down, Katie, you must know that you’re well overdue a reckoning for the things you’ve done.”

She heard Templeton shift behind her, but he didn’t say anything. He didn’t jump in. And even though he’d been oddly quiet and contemplative this morning, she knew that he was fully prepared to let her take this wherever she needed to go.

“I’ve already had a public reckoning in court,” she said, mildly enough. “They called me a hero. They still do. That’s not a word they use for you, Dad.”

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