Page 56 of Reluctant Bride

I take my time answering.

“I don’t think so.” The mountains stay black and patient in front of us, indifferent to whatever two people decide about each other on a porch underneath them. “I think I’m afraid of how little it would take. Not just from you. From anyone. I watched a man’s whole hand change in about a second and a half, and now I know how thin the line is between the man who reads every word of a contract before he signs it and the man who ends a threat with a blade before he’s even decided to reach for it.”

“That’s not a comforting thing to hear from your wife.”

“I didn’t say it to comfort you.”

Something shifts at the corner of his mouth, quick, almost involuntary, the ghost of a man who’s heard his own line handed back to him and can’t quite pretend he didn’t notice. “Good.” His voice cracks just slightly at the edges, that same fracture I heard in the tack room the first night, back when I still thought I could keep this feeling small enough to manage. “That’s why it means something.”

His fingers move over and don’t take my hand. They rest against the wood of the swing beside it, close enough that our fingers are almost touching and neither of us closes the last half inch. We sit like that a long time, Cricket’s breathing even and undisturbed at our feet, the whole valley quiet after a day that took something out of it.

Neither of us says anything else. There’s nothing left to say that wouldn’t just be circling back to the same fear from a different angle, and some nights the only honest thing left to do is sit in it together instead of talking it to death.

My phone rings inside before either of us has to try.

Gideon’s name lights the screen, past midnight, which means whatever this is couldn’t wait for morning any more than the boot prints could, any more than anything else lately has waited for a reasonable hour to detonate.

I answer it standing, Dawson already on his feet beside me, the same, old instinct in both of us bracing before either of us knows for what.

“Sage.” My father’s voice comes through stripped down to the version he uses when the news is bad enough that softening it would waste time neither of us has. “Cruz has been arrested. Holt did it himself, ten minutes ago, at the ranch.”

The floor shifts under me. “On what grounds?”

“A warrant.” A pause, and in that pause I hear every year my father has spent choosing his words like ammunition. “Sage, the warrant came from a Sullivan complaint.”

I look at Dawson. His face has already gone somewhere I don’t have a name for, somewhere between confusion and the fury of a man who’s just found out his own name got used again without his permission.

“I didn’t file a complaint.” His voice has dropped into ice, the one he uses right before something in his world stops existing, already reaching for his own phone with a hand gone perfectly steady, so much worse than if it shook. “I never authorized anything against Cruz.”

Neither of us says the rest of it out loud. We don’t have to.

Somebody used Dawson’s authority to put Ricardo Cruz in a cell tonight, exactly like somebody used it to move a dead man’s truck, and whoever it is isn’t finished proving how easily they can turn either family against the other one.

EIGHTEEN

DAWSON

Gideon looks at me walking into The Ledger like a man watching an enemy cross his father’s grave.

The Ledger is what the Blackwaters call their records room, has been since before anybody living can date it, a low stone building behind the main house with a door thick enough to survive a fire and walls lined floor to ceiling with land files going back to statehood. Tonight it smells like old paper and gun oil and something colder underneath both.

Gideon didn’t call me to his office. He called me here, to the one room on this ranch built to outlast every man who’s ever argued inside it, and I understood the message before I ever crossed the threshold. He wants me standing somewhere that remembers longer than either of us will.

Gideon doesn’t stand up from the long table when I come in. He doesn’t need to. His stillness does the work standing would.

“You’ve got some nerve,” he says, quiet enough that I have to lean into the silence just to catch all of it.

“I’ve got a warrant with my company’s name on it and no memory of authorizing it. Call it what you want. I call it a problem we both have.”

Knox is already on his feet by the far wall, arms crossed, fury banked and steady behind his eyes, the kind that means he decided his position on this before I walked in and isn’t interested in revising it tonight.

“My head of security is in a cell,” Knox says. “Booked. Processed. On paper that says Sullivan Transport, legal division, sworn complaint.”

“I didn’t sign a complaint.”

“Somebody at your company did.”

“Somebody at my company keeps doing things with my name that I never asked for. You want to help me find out who, or you want to keep standing there measuring me for a coffin?”