Marlowe
I couldn't reconcile the accusation with the man I'd come to know these past months — Preacher, gruff and blunt and unfailingly competent, who'd tended my wounds without judgment, who'd worked through King's fever with a focused urgency that had felt, at the time, like the purest kind of loyalty I'd ever witnessed.
"I don't believe it," I told King, pacing the length of his office with restless, anxious energy. "He's had a dozen chances to expose me and never once took them. That's not the behavior of someone working against us."
"Or it's exactly the patience Bear described," King said, though I could hear the reluctance in his own voice, matching my own resistance to the theory. "Someone playing a long game doesn't tip their hand early. Doesn't expose you the first chance they
