Page 51 of Reluctant Bride

I’m standing at the edge of the wreckage, running the scenarios. Controlled blast, not a fuel line failure, not old wiring. The seat of it sits wrong for anything accidental, concentrated at the base of the lift where nobody stores anything volatile enough to do this kind of damage on its own.

Somebody built this on purpose. Somebody built this here, on Sullivan land, in a bay Mick Harlan has worked in for eleven years, and I am standing in the middle of it with soot in my teeth and anger flooding my veins, barely controlled.

“Dawson.”

Holt, arriving on his stallion, Trane, at a dead run because the road in is blocked with fire trucks and he didn’t wait for it to clear. He’s off the horse before it’s fully stopped, and whatever he reads on my face makes him slow down the last few steps toward me, careful in a way Holt is never careful around me.

“Mick’s alive,” I say, before he asks. “Leg’s bad. Ambulance has him.”

“I called Sage. Fifteen minutes out.” His eyes go past me to the wreckage, taking it in like he takes in everything, fast and complete. “This wasn’t an accident.”

“No.”

“You knew that before I said it.”

“I knew that before the smoke cleared.”

He doesn’t answer that. He just looks at me a second longer than the situation requires, the same unreadable calm he’s worn all the years I’ve known him, patient and watchful in a way that usually means he’s already three moves ahead of me, and something in it makes the back of my neck go tight.

A man breaks from the tree line at the edge of the yard.

He’s moving fast, head down, cutting toward the county road instead of toward the wreckage, which is the wrong direction for anyone with a reason to be here that doesn’t involve leaving before anyone asks him a question. Coveralls. A contractor’s badge clipped to the chest pocket, the kind we hand out to people doing work on-site for the week.

I know that badge. I signed off on it three days ago.

“Hey.” I’m already moving. “Hey!”

He doesn’t stop. That’s the mistake. A man with nothing to hide stops when the owner of the yard he’s standing in yells at him. This one puts his head down and picks up his pace, and whatever’s been building in me since the fire finds a direction to point itself in and takes it gladly.

I catch him twenty feet short of the fence line, one hand fisting in the back of his coveralls, and I spin him around hard enough that his boots skid in the dirt.

“You were on-site an hour ago.” My voice doesn’t sound like mine. Too rough. Too fast. “Lift inspection crew. I saw the sign-in sheet.”

“I don’t know anything about the fire.” He’s got his hands up already, palms out, a man who’s decided fast that this is a conversation he wants to survive. “I finished my section and left. That’s it. That’s the whole story.”

“Then why are you running?”

“I’m not running, I’m⁠—”

His hand drops toward his jacket pocket.

I don’t think about it. That’s the part I’ll spend the next hour trying to explain to myself and failing. There’s no calculation in it, no version of the precision I performed on Curtis two nights before my own wedding. My knife is already off my belt and moving before my brain finishes registering the shape of what’s in his hand, pure reflex skipping every civilized step I usually run first, and I open a line across his palm fast enough that he’s still reaching when it happens, the blade catching him at the base of the fingers where a man holds a grip.

He screams. A small pistol drops out of his loosening hand and hits the dirt.

I’m still holding the knife. My hand is shaking so hard the blade catches the light in short, broken flashes, and for one full second I can’t make myself put it away, can’t make my fingers understand that the threat is already on the ground and bleeding and doesn’t need anything else from me.

“Cruz.” The name comes out of him fast, high, desperate to give me something that’ll make me stop looking at him like this. “Cruz told me to be here. Cruz set the timing. I don’t know anything else, I swear to God, that’s the whole⁠—”

I believe him. For about a second and a half, I believe him completely, the same clean relief I felt the first time this name came out of a scared man’s mouth in a dispatch office.

Then his eyes cut past my shoulder. Not to the wreckage. Not to the pistol still lying in the dirt between us. To Holt, already there, already still, zip ties in one hand like he’d had them ready since the man first broke for the tree line.

Checking that Holt heard it too.

That’s not a scared man blurting out his handler’s name under pressure. That’s a man making sure the right Blackwater was standing close enough to carry that name home himself.

The belief goes dead and starts curdling into something else before I’ve even decided what to do with it.