Epilogue #3
I’m writing this in January 1998. You’re two years old and asleep down the hall, and I can hear you breathing through the baby monitor on my desk. You snore, by the way. Just slightly. Your mother says you get it from me.
I don’t know what the world will look like when you read this.
I don’t know who you’ll become or what you’ll build or who you’ll love.
But I know who you are right now: a stubborn, joyful, brave little girl who refuses to eat green things and insists on being carried everywhere and has her mother’s eyes and her father’s temper.
I hope you keep the stubbornness. I hope you keep the joy. And I hope, more than anything, that you found someone who sees you clearly and loves what they see. That’s the secret, Rose. Not grand gestures. Not perfect romance. Just someone who looks at you, really looks, and stays.
Your mother and I have that. Whatever happens in the months ahead, whatever this trial brings, we have that.
And I want you to know that every decision I’ve made, the article, the testimony, the risk, I made because I wanted to give you a world where the truth matters.
Where brave people win. Where cowards don’t get the last word.
Be brave, my darling. Be honest. Be stubborn. And let someone love you, even when it’s terrifying. Especially when it’s terrifying.
I love you more than I know how to say.
Dad
My mother’s letter was shorter. Her handwriting was rounder, faster, the penmanship of a woman who wrote like she talked, warmly and without pretense.
Rose,
Your father is writing his letter at the desk right now, and I know he’s being eloquent and beautiful because that’s what he does. So I’ll keep mine simple.
Today is your wedding day, and I’m not there, and that is the hardest sentence I’ve ever written.
But you found him. Or he found you. Either way, you’re standing beside someone who chose you, and sweet girl, that’s not a small thing. Don’t ever let it become a small thing.
Marriage isn’t the fairy tale. It’s the morning after the fairy tale, when someone forgot to close the cabinet doors and you’re both tired and human and imperfect.
Love him anyway. Love him in the arguments, in the three AM conversations when the world feels too heavy, in the silence that comes after the hard days.
Those parts are where love actually lives.
Not in the easy moments. In the stubborn ones.
Be his safe place. Let him be yours. Forgive quickly. Laugh often. And when it gets hard, because it will get hard, hold on tight and remember that you chose each other for a reason.
I wish I could see your face today. I wish I could fix your hair and cry in the front row. I wish I could meet the man who was brave enough to love my daughter, because knowing you, he had to be very brave indeed.
I love you. I will always love you. Even from wherever I am, I’m loving you right now.
Mom
I sat on the tack room floor with my parents’ letters in my lap and my husband beside me and cried in the good way, the way that doesn’t break you but cleans you out, like rain after a long drought.
Graham read them when I handed them over. He didn’t say anything for a long time. When he looked up, his eyes were red.
“They knew,” he said quietly. “They knew there was a chance they wouldn’t be here.”
“Yes.”
“And they wrote these. Just in case.”
“Just in case.”
He pulled me against his chest and held me while the reception went on without us, and I listened to his heartbeat and thought about my parents, twenty-nine years gone, their letters still warm in my hands, and felt, for the first time, like I’d met them.
Blaze found me during the reception.
The party was in full swing. Fury had given his toast, which was equal parts threatening and emotional and included the phrase “if you hurt her, there is nowhere on this planet my money can’t reach.
” Graham was dancing with Brody’s little one while the sun was going down behind the mountains, turning everything gold.
Blaze appeared beside me at the pasture fence, where I was watching Cassie graze in the fading light. He was holding two glasses of whisky, the good stuff, Brody’s Shannon, the single malt he’d named after his mother.
“Hey, Rosie.”
I took the glass. “Hey.”
He was quiet for a moment. Blaze did quiet differently than Fury. Where Fury’s silence was restless, Blaze’s was the opposite. He was thinking. He always looked like he was thinking.
“Beautiful ceremony,” he said.
“Thank you.”
“Graham’s a good man.”
“He is.”
Another pause. He sipped his whisky. In the pasture, Cassie lifted her head and looked at us, evaluated, dismissed, went back to grazing.
“I need to tell you something,” Blaze said. “I’ve been waiting for the right time, and there probably isn’t one, but I can’t keep it from you any longer.”
I turned to face him. His voice had shifted. The professor cadence, steady and deliberate.
“I’ve been investigating Mom and Dad’s deaths,” he said.
The world went still.
“The car accident,” I said.
“It wasn’t an accident.”
The pasture. The music. The laughter from the tent. All of it receded until there was nothing but Blaze’s face and the words hanging between us.
“I’ve been looking into it for over two years now,” he said.
“I started with the police report. The original investigation concluded a semi-truck crossed the center line. The driver had been drinking at a truck stop for hours before he got behind the wheel. He died in the crash too. Case closed. Drunk driver, tragic accident, no one left to prosecute.”
“I know. I’ve read the report.”
“So did I. I’ve read it more times than I can count. And I started pulling threads.” He turned to face me fully. “The timing, Rose. Dad was killed two weeks before he was scheduled to testify against Miguel ángel Ochoa. The lead cartel boss. The man whose empire Dad had exposed.”
“That could be a coincidence.”
“It could. Except I tracked down one of the original investigating detectives. He’s retired now, living in Stockton. And he told me something that never made it into the official report.” Blaze’s voice dropped. “The truck driver didn’t die from blunt trauma in the crash, Rose. He was strangled.”
The word landed like a stone in still water.
“Strangled,” I repeated.
“There were ligature marks on his neck. The detective said the marks weren’t obvious, and also, it didn’t make sense. How does a strangled man drive a semi-truck? So they filed it away. Left it out of the report. Pretended it didn’t exist because it broke the narrative.”
“Blaze—”
“There’s something else.” His jaw was tight, and his eyes held something older than the rest of him.
“I was eleven. I was in the backseat with you and Fury. You were two, you were screaming. Fury was trying to shield you. And I—” He stopped.
Swallowed. “I’ve always thought I saw something.
After the crash. Before the other cars arrived.
Someone outside the wreck, looking in at us.
Looking at the three of us in the backseat. ”
My skin went cold.
“A woman,” Blaze said quietly. “She looked right at me. And then a car came around the bend and she was gone.”
He let that sit between us.
“Someone else was driving that truck, Rose. Someone who crossed the center line on purpose and walked away from the crash alive. And I believe Ochoa sent them.”
I set down my whisky because my hands weren’t steady enough to hold it.
“Ochoa is in federal prison,” Blaze continued. “Has been since 1999. He’s seventy-four years old and he’s never getting out. But he’s alive. And he knows what happened.”
“What are you saying?”
“I’m saying I’m going to visit him. In prison.
Face to face.” Blaze’s eyes burned with the same quiet, unshakeable determination I’d seen in our father’s newspaper photograph, the one that ran above “Empire of Blood” in 1995.
“I want to look him in the eye and ask him who he sent to kill Michael and Shelly Gracen.”
“Blaze, you can’t just walk into a federal prison and—”
“I can. And I’m not going unprepared.” He paused. “I’ve been in contact with a criminal psychologist who specializes in cartel cases. She’s agreed to consult. Help me prepare for the interview. Read his responses.”
“Who?”
“Her name is Dr. Sera Summers. She’s—” A flicker crossed his face. Unreadable. “She’s good at what she does.”
I studied my brother. The flame-red hair, the jaw set like concrete, the barely contained intensity of a man who’d been carrying this for over two years.
“We need to tell Fury,” I said.
Blaze was already shaking his head. “Not yet.”
“He’s our brother, Blaze. He has the same right to—”
“I know he does. And we will. But you know Fury.” Blaze’s voice was careful, the way it got when he was choosing words like someone defusing a wire.
“The second he finds out, he’ll want to take over.
He’ll throw money at it, hire private investigators, call in favors, bulldoze every lead I’ve spent two years building.
He’ll burn it all down, and I understand that, because part of me wants to burn it down too.
But this thing needs discretion, Rose. Whoever killed Mom and Dad planned it to look like an accident and got away with it.
If we come in loud, we lose every advantage we have. ”
I wanted to argue. Fury deserved to know. But Blaze was right. Fury’s first instinct was always a wrecking ball, and a wrecking ball was exactly the wrong tool for something this delicate.
“After,” I said. “After you talk to Ochoa. After you know more. Then we tell him.”
“Agreed.”
“And you’ll be careful.”
“I’ll be careful.”
“Promise me, Blaze.”
He held my gaze. “I promise.”
The music from the tent drifted across the pasture, something slow, something Graham had probably picked. In the field, Cassie raised her head again, ears pricked toward the sound.
“Call me,” I said. “The second you’ve talked to him, you call me.”
“I will.”
Then Blaze put his arm around my shoulders and pulled me close.
“Happy wedding day, Rosie. I’m so proud of you.”
Later that night, much later, after the dancing and the toasts and Patrick’s tearful speech and Kaya catching the bouquet with a whoop that scared three horses and Fury pretending he wasn’t crying, I stood on the porch of my house and looked at the stars.
Graham was behind me. His arms around my waist, his chin on my shoulder, his breath warm against my neck. The guests had gone to their cabins. The caterers had packed up. The string lights were still glowing in the tent, swaying gently in the mountain breeze.
The barn was a dark shape against the sky.
Inside it, four horses were sleeping. Or Cassie was sleeping.
Brutus was probably plotting something. Starlight was watching the moonlight through her stall window.
And Ricky was pressed against Cassie’s side, because some fears never fully go away.
They just find something warm to lean against.
“Good day?” Graham asked.
“The best day.”
He pressed his lips to my shoulder. “Mrs. Kincaid.”
“Don’t push your luck.”
He laughed, quiet, rumbling, the sound I’d fallen in love with in a barn during a storm.
I leaned back into him and looked at the sky, wide, dark, full of stars, and thought about everything it had taken to get here.
The lies and the truth. The walls and the breaking.
The letting go and the holding on. The ranch I’d lost and the one I’d found.
The parents I’d never known and the letters they’d left behind.
The man behind me, whose arms felt like home.
I closed my eyes.
I was Rose Gracen Kincaid.
And I was exactly where I was supposed to be.
Find out what happens next in LOVE UNGUARDED (The Scottish Billionaires, Book 19)
When Blaze Gracen walks into a federal prison to confront the man who destroyed his family, he’s prepared for everything—except the woman beside him.
Dr. Sera Summers, a criminal psychologist with her own reasons for wanting Ochoa to talk, and she’s nothing Blaze planned for—too sharp, too close, and impossible to walk away from.
He came to find the truth about the night his parents were murdered. He never expected to find love.