Page 47 of Rope Burn

The line goes dead. I tuck the phone into my back pocket and finish pulling tape.

I pull up Morgan's number, the one she handwrote on the back of the card she left beside my boot at the ranch. I type two lines and send.

If you come south to explain, I'll be behind the stock pens at five. Come alone.

That was hours ago. I'm behind the stock pens when I spot an unfamiliar sedan entering the competitor lot. Morgan is behind the wheel, but the Western Range Mutual truck is gone.

The cover vehicle died with the cover. She's driving something personal, without the federal procurement trail that Neil used to blow her identity apart.

She parks at the far end of the lot and walks toward me. The lanyard, the clipboard, the professional posture she wore over her real one, all of it has been thinned to something leaner and harder to read.

Morgan walks through the fairground lot with her shoulders set, her chin level, nothing in her hands.

The soreness along my left ribs pulls when I turn to track her. The corridor's reminder from the back lot is settling into my body. Two men, controlled brutality, and a warning that Neil's patience has a shorter shelf life than I estimated.

She finds me where the loading alleys empty into the competitor side. The late-afternoon sun throws long shadows from the grandstand structure across the packed dirt, and the air smells like diesel, trampled grass, the metallic edge of livestock in close quarters.

She stops several paces from me. The distance is deliberate and new. Every previous approach she's made had the compressed energy of someone working an objective.

Today she's standing in the open with her hands empty and her cover identity absent.

"I went to Torres," she says. Direct, unpadded. "I disclosed the relationship. All of it. The sexual contact, the timeline, the undisclosed progress reports. I recused from every decision and operational communication involving you, your cooperation or your parole status."

I lean against the fence panel and let the words settle. Her voice is level and professional, but the levelness is doing work.

She's holding the edges of this conversation in place with her tone because the content would blow them apart.

"Torres called me," I say. "This afternoon, behind the chutes."

Morgan registers that without flinching. She expected it. The call was the institutional machinery grinding forward without her.

"Then you know the terms," she says. "I can't discuss them. I can't advise you, relay conditions, or carry messages between you and the task force. I'm off the case. Another analyst has my files, my surveillance notes, my transport analysis. The operational phone is with Torres."

She pauses long enough that the lowing of cattle in the holding pen fills the gap.

"The things I told you under the cover identity were accurate. The investigation is real. The women are real. What wasn't accurate was me."

The call confirmed what Morgan's words are making physical: the operation is continuing without her. The deferral she arranged, the cooperation she was building, the intelligence she assembled, all of it has moved on. Morgan came south carrying only what she did and why.

"You risked your career," I say.

"I made a disclosure. The internal review will determine what it costs."

"That's the same thing."

"Yes." She meets my gaze, and for the first time since the ranch, there's no operation behind her posture. Just Morgan standing in the dirt beside a stock pen with nothing to trade.

I hold the contact for a long count. The sun is behind the grandstand now, the shadows stretching past us into the loading area. Her face is half-lit and half-shadow, and the division falls along the line of her cheekbone.

I don't forgive her. The word doesn't apply to what she did, because what she did wasn't one thing. Morgan lied about her name, her job, her reason for being on this circuit.

She listened to me tell the Cheyenne story knowing the official version before my mouth opened. Filed reports that recorded what I told her while omitting what happened between us, then slept beside me while those omissions protected her operation.

Those are facts. They don't change because she walked into Torres's office and detonated her own field assignment.

The truth is also on the table. She told it when lying would have been easier and professionally safer. Surrendered every piece of intelligence she built rather than let it be used as leverage. Came south after giving up the authority that gave every previous conversation its force.

Those are also facts. They exist beside the first set without canceling them.