The Honey Trap
Copyright© 2026 by Komiko Yakamura
Chapter 10
She told her father that evening, sitting on his porch in the last of the daylight with two cups of tea going cold between them.
She told it straight. The site walk, the fallen cottonwood, the kiss, the eggs in the kitchen, the back porch roof. She left nothing out because leaving things out with her father was a tax that compounded and she had stopped paying it years ago.
He listened without moving.
When she finished he picked up his tea and found it cold and set it back down. A night hawk was working the field across the road, its call coming down in the dark like something dropped from a height.
“The kiss,” he said.
“Yes.”
“Who.”
“I did.” She looked at the cottonwoods. “He was waiting.”
Her father was quiet for a long moment. “Wallace is going to say it was the plan all along.”
“Wallace can say what he wants.”
“He’ll say it loudly and in front of the council.”
“Then the council can decide what it thinks.” She turned to look at him. “The water agreement stands regardless. That’s separate.”
“Nothing is ever separate.” He said it without harshness, just fact, the way he stated most true things. “You know that.”
“I know that.” She wrapped her hands around the cold cup. “I’m not asking for permission. I’m telling you because you deserve to know and because I don’t do things behind your back.”
He looked at her with the expression that meant he was holding several things at once, the chief’s calculation and the father’s feeling and the memory of her mother that lived behind everything he did.
“Bring him Sunday,” he said. “For dinner.”
She looked at him. “That’s it?”
“What else would you like me to say.”
“Wallace—”
“Wallace doesn’t eat dinner at my table.” He picked up his cup and stood. “Sunday. Six o’clock. Tell him I have questions and he should come prepared to answer them honestly or not come at all.”
He went inside and the screen door settled behind him and she sat on the porch in the dark listening to the night hawk and thinking that her father was a more complicated man than most people knew and that she had spent her entire life being grateful for it.
She called David the next morning.
“Sunday,” she said. “Six o’clock. My father’s house.”
A pause. “Dinner.”
“Yes.”
“Should I bring something.”
She thought about her father’s kitchen, the particular order of it, the things that were always in the same place and the way he felt about people rearranging them. “Don’t bring food. He’ll cook and he’ll consider it a statement if you bring food.”
“Wine?”
“He doesn’t drink.”
“Then what.”
She considered. “Come empty-handed and shake his hand with both of yours and look him in the eye when he asks you something.” She paused. “That’s all he wants.”
“All right.”
“David.”
“Mm.”
“He has questions. Real ones. About the ranch and the note and what you intend.” She said it straight so there was no confusion later. “He’s not going to make it easy.”
“I’d be suspicious if he did.” A brief pause. “He should have questions. She’s his daughter.”
She held the phone and felt the particular sensation of a man saying the right thing without knowing he was being tested, which was the only kind of right answer that counted.
“Six o’clock,” she said.
“I’ll be there at five fifty-five.”
Sunday came in warm and clear, the mountains sharp against a sky that had gone the deep blue of late spring. She drove to her father’s at five and found him in the kitchen making elk stew from a roast he’d been braising since morning, the whole house smelling of it, juniper and onion and the dark richness of the meat.
She set the table without being asked and he moved around her in the kitchen without comment, the practiced choreography of a household that had operated for twenty-six years with two people and before that with three.
“Thomas called this afternoon,” her father said.
“Of course he did.”
“He wanted me to know that Raymond Whitehorse told him the Branson boy was straight to deal with and paid his deposit the same day they shook hands.”
She set out the last fork. “And what did you tell Thomas.”
“I told him I appreciated the information.” He stirred the stew. “Thomas also wanted me to know that Pete Hargrove told the man at the Crow Agency feed store that David Branson had been in a better mood in the last three weeks than in the previous three years.”
She looked at the back of her father’s head. “Thomas is a one-man intelligence network.”
“He has been since 1987.” Her father tasted the stew and added salt. “I’m telling you so you’re not surprised by what the council already knows.”
“Does Wallace know.”
“Wallace knows everything Thomas knows within forty-eight hours.” He set the spoon down. “He called me this morning.”
“What did he say.”
Her father turned from the stove. His expression was the careful neutral one, the chief’s face rather than the father’s. “He said the tribe’s interests needed to be protected. That a relationship between you and the Branson boy created a conflict of interest in the water agreement.”
She felt the familiar heat of it in her chest, measured and controlled it. “The agreement is already negotiated. The lawyers have the document.”
“I told him that.”
“And.”
“He said conflicts of interest don’t expire when documents are signed.” Her father held her eyes. “He’s not entirely wrong, Alachooshe. You know that.”
She looked at the set table, the four chairs, her father’s kitchen, the elk stew that had been braising since morning. “He’s using a legitimate concern to say an illegitimate thing.”
“Yes. He is.” Her father turned back to the stove. “I’ll handle Wallace. I’ve been handling Wallace for eleven years.” A pause. “I’m telling you so you know it’s coming and so you don’t say anything to David tonight that makes it worse.”
“I wasn’t going to say anything to David tonight.”
“Good.”
She stood in the kitchen and breathed through the heat in her chest until it settled. Outside through the window the cottonwoods were loud in an evening wind off the mountains, the new leaves showing their pale undersides.
David’s truck came up the road at five fifty-three.
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