Page 25 of Reluctant Bride

“I never claimed that. I claimed I slept great. Those are different lies.”

“You’re a barista.”

“I was a barista. The last two years of college.” After he tore my heart out and stomped on it, I needed a more distracting, fast-paced job to forget. “Paid better than the library job and I got free coffee, which at the time felt like winning the lottery.” I pull two shots instead of one, because apparently my hands have decided he’s getting a cup whether either of us discusses it. “I heard the bar drop on that bench three separate times through the mudroom door. Sounded like you were trying to bench-press your feelings out of your chest.”

“Working through a few things.”

“Which things?”

“The photograph you sent me just before midnight, mostly.” He says it level, conversational, like he’s mentioning the weather, and my whole neck goes warm before I can stop it. “The rest of the workout was just core.”

“You shouldn’t be maxing out a bench alone at five in the morning. No spotter, nobody even awake in the house. That’s how men end up on the news.”

“I’ve been lifting alone for years, Sage.”

“Doesn’t make it smart. Next time knock on my door. I’ll spot you.”

“You. Spotting me.”

“I have upper body strength you know nothing about.”

“I know plenty about your upper body strength.” His eyes drop, taking their time, and climb back up taking more. “I’m not opposed to testing it.”

I slide his cup across the counter harder than necessary. He catches it without spilling a drop, which is somehow the most infuriating part of the whole exchange.

“We’re not doing this before coffee.”

“You started it. Nashville, remember?”

“I regret everything.”

“You regret nothing. You just don’t want to admit it out loud.” His eyes hold mine over the rim of the cup, and a pull goes tight low in my stomach, nothing to do with caffeine. “This is good, by the way. The coffee. Genuinely.”

“I know it’s good. I made it.”

“There she is.”

I drink my own shot standing at the counter and refuse to acknowledge what that comment does to me, because sitting down across from this man at six in the morning feels like a decision I’m not ready to make twice in one week.

Both our phones buzz halfway through the second cup, Tate’s group thread lighting up mine and his together, same clipped rhythm as every message he’s sent since Robbie’s truck was found on the Corridor road.

Terminal trace confirmed. Three relay points, all burner, all dead ends on their own. But the timing pattern’s consistent. Whoever routed the credentials through Curtis’s station has done it before. Old logs show two smaller anomalies in the last six months that nobody flagged because nothing came of them. This time something did.

Dawson reads his own screen at the same time, close enough that I catch soap and sweat and the last of his workout still clinging to him, and his whole face shutters, and he goes somewhere in his head I can’t follow.

“Two anomalies nobody caught,” he says, half to himself. “Which means it’s not the first time somebody’s used my credentials as a key. It’s just the first time it mattered enough to trace.”

My own phone lights up a second later, separate thread, Mackenzie this time.

Recovered a partial cloud backup off the informant’s personal account before whoever killed him tried to scrub it. Most of it’s corrupted. What’s left references a command layer above whoever’s been working the local end, somebody Robbie never identified by name, just a title. He was building toward something bigger than local corruption. I think he knew there was a person above the person we’ve been chasing.

I hand Dawson my phone without a word. He reads it twice, a muscle ticking once at his jaw.

“A command layer,” I say. “That’s not Cruz acting alone. That’s somebody running him.”

“Somebody running the whole thing from above.” He hands the phone back, and a cold current slides in behind his eyes, the kind of quiet I remember from the truck three days ago, right before he asked me to say a name I still can’t say without my stomach dropping. “Which means Knox was right to tell me to sit on that name until I’ve got real proof. Not a scared man’s confession. Not a data entry error. Proof.”

“Mackenzie’s people don’t have a name?”