Page 11 of Reluctant Bride

Maren’s jaw tightens. She doesn’t ask if I’m sure. She knows I wouldn’t be standing in her office at five in the morning if I weren’t.

“Who?” Knox asks.

I weigh whether to say it here, in front of the two people I trust most in this building, or wait until I’ve confirmed it twice more, standard for anything this size, before I let it near either family. But Knox has been standing in rooms like this with me for a year now, ever since McKenna made allies out of two men who used to just tolerate each other at fundraisers, and I owe him more than a delay built out of my own caution.

“Cruz.”

The room changes temperature.

Knox doesn’t move for a full three seconds, which for a man built entirely out of controlled motion is a scream. Maren’s eyes go from me to her husband and back, fast, watching the fault line instead of the earthquake.

“You’re wrong,” Knox says. Flat. Final. The voice he probably used on federal auditors before he ever used it on me.

“I’ve got a dead man’s blood in a truck and a dispatcher who was told never to say that name. I’m not wrong about what I heard. I could be wrong about what it means.”

“Cruz has run Blackwater security since before I could shave.” Knox pushes off the desk, and for the first time since I’ve known him, there’s nothing brotherly left in the way he’s looking at me. “He was at my wedding. He’s the reason nobody got hurt two days ago, at every fundraiser, every gala, ten years running. You’re telling me a burner phone gave up his name under duress and you’re bringing that to me before you’ve confirmed a single thing?”

“I’m bringing it to you because you deserve to hear it from me before you hear it from anyone else.” My voice doesn’t rise. I don’t let it. “That’s the deal, Knox. That’s what this is supposed to look like now, the two families actually talking instead of burying things and hoping the other side doesn’t notice.”

Maren’s hand finds Knox’s arm. He doesn’t shake it off, but he doesn’t soften into it either, and that tells me how close to the edge he’s standing.

“You brought me a name with no proof,” Knox says, quiet now, quieter than the even voice, which means he’s closer to breaking something than he was a second ago. “A name that, if it gets loose before you’ve confirmed anything, ends a man’s career and maybe his life, over a phone number that could belong to anyone.”

“I know what I’m risking by saying it out loud.”

“I don’t think you do.” He steps closer, and Maren’s hand tightens on his arm on instinct, and I catch the exact moment one year of hard-won trust runs headfirst into generations of loyalty to his own family. “Cruz taught me how to shoot before I could drive. He carried my grandfather’s casket. If you say that name again anywhere near my father before you’ve got something besides a scared man’s confession under duress, one of us doesn’t leave the room. I need you to understand I’m not saying that as a threat. I’m saying it because it’s true, and you and I don’t lie to each other. That’s supposed to be the whole point of this.”

Nobody says anything for a long moment. Maren looks between us, and I watch her decide, visibly, not to referee this one. This fight is only ours to finish.

I think about Sage, ten miles away at Blackwater Ranch still not knowing the name that just detonated in this office belongs to a man her family trusts like I used to trust mine before tonight.

This is the day the clause comes due. I have maybe six hours before it stops being mine to tell her on my own terms.

“I’ll get proof,” I tell Knox. “Before it goes anywhere near Declan or Gideon. You have my word.”

“Your word.” He says it like he’s testing the weight of it, a load-bearing beam before he put his family’s whole house on top of it. “That used to be enough.”

“It still is.”

He doesn’t answer that. He just holds my eyes for one more second, long enough that I understand how much I’ve just spent, and then he turns and walks out, and Maren watches him go with an expression I don’t have the right to ask her to explain.

The door swings shut behind him and doesn’t latch, and I stand in my sister’s office listening to it swing.

FIVE

SAGE

By breakfast, Rimrock has already tried and half convicted somebody for Robbie Vásquez’s murder, and Nell’s chalkboard has a new line under the old one. Someone erased who draws blood first and wrote how long before she files. Somebody else added a question mark, like the outcome’s still in doubt. It isn’t. This valley bets on entertainment, not odds.

Two steps past the door and I already know I’ve walked into a courtroom instead of a diner.

Old Man Petrie’s got his coffee halfway to his mouth and an opinion he’s had since sunrise. “Sullivan boy’s had men and money at his back since he could drive. Doesn’t mean he can’t cut a corner when it counts.” Two booths over, Dale Amundsen, who coached half the men in this room in Pee Wee football, is already up on his elbows defending the boy he used to bench. “You don’t know Dawson Sullivan if you think he’d leave his own signature on a body. Man’s too careful for that.”

Careful. That’s one word for it.

An older woman, in a sheriff’s-office polo, is repeating something secondhand from the counter, the story already fatter than it started, picking up new details like a snowball picks up gravel. Tessa catches my eye from the corner booth and does the thing with her eyebrows that means get over here before this gets worse, which at Nell’s is less a suggestion than a public service announcement.

I slide in across from her. “Don’t.”