Page 45 of Forbidden Protector

"Hoover. See. He likes it."

"He likes you. That's not the same thing as liking his own name."

"With men like you, it usually is."

I don't have an answer for that, so I let the cat keep the name, and tell myself it's because arguing over a barn cat is beneath both of us. Not because there isn't much else on this ranch I'd hand her that easily, if she asked.

Knox finds me at the fence an hour after that, radio in one hand, phone in the other, checking the second one more than the job requires.

"Anything on the truck?"

"White or silver, gas engine, crew cab, newer than anything we run." I watch him thumb the phone screen dark without reading whatever's on it, twice, which for Knox is the same as pacing a room. "Gunderson's word against a hundred miles of highway. Could be a rancher's hand. Could be Dane Voss."

Knox's head comes up. "Who's Dane Voss?"

"Counter-sniper. Contract work, most of it overseas, some of it closer than anybody likes to say out loud." I haven't said the name since John first put it in my ear, a voice out of Butte telling me to remember it in case a rifle ever turned up in this state doing something too clean to be luck. "John flagged him for me a while back. Said if this ever got that far, that'd be the name on it."

"Voss." Knox says it like he's tasting something gone bad. "He's good, then."

"Better than good."

"Better than you?"

"Ask me from cover," I say, and he snorts once, which is the nearest thing to real amusement Knox allows himself in front of me.

His phone buzzes again. He looks at it, doesn't answer it, and puts it face-down on the fence post like that solves something.

"Maren's people are running the Calgary routing from their end too," he says, too casual, looking at the mountains instead of me. "Sullivan books cross McKenna paper in three places her father's accountant found last week. Declan's furious. Says somebody's been laundering through his cattle same as they've been laundering through ours."

"Since when do you know what Declan Sullivan's furious about?"

"Since Maren texts me about it," Knox says, in the exact tone of a man who has decided that sentence sounds less damning than it is. "For the case."

"For the case?"

"Don't."

"I didn't say anything."

"You've got a face that says plenty." He pockets the phone. "Point is, it's not just us hunting this thing anymore. The Sullivans want McKenna's head on a fence post as bad as we do. Whatever this is, it's bigger than one family's books."

I mark that and don't ask him what he means to do about the phone he keeps not answering.

A man doesn't get to interrogate his brother about a woman when he's spent the last two weeks failing at the exact same discipline himself.

I find Mackenzie at the dining room table that evening, laptop open, papers fanned across two chairs and a spreadsheet running longer than my arm.

"Feedlot transfers, the Calgary account, and now a shell company registered eight months before Jacob died." She turns the screen toward me without looking up, still working the next column. "Whoever's moving this money set up the structure before anybody in this county knew there was a reason to hide anything."

I read the number on her screen twice.

Nothing moves. Not my hands, not my face. That's the kind of stop a man trains into himself.

I know that account.

Knox burned the page it came from two years ago, in his own office at the main house, two doors down from Gideon's study. Told me it never happened. I let it not happen, same as any man does for a brother who asks with his eyes instead of his mouth.

I know whose signature sits behind that routing number. It isn't McKenna's. It isn't Voss's. And handing it to her isn't mine to do.