Chapter 18
Chapter eighteen
Are We Safe
Riley
Iwake up to an empty bed and the sound of voices carrying down the hall, low and serious in a way that tells me before I'm fully conscious that something has shifted overnight and it isn't small.
Jace's side of the bed is cool, apparently he's been up for a while, and whatever pulled him out of sleep was significant enough to keep him from coming back.
I lie there for a moment in the gray early light doing the thing I always do when I don't yet have enough information to act on, taking stock, listening, letting what I can hear tell me what I can't see.
Two voices, maybe three, all male. His brothers don't show up before sunrise without a reason.
I can hear the timber of it even from here, that particular register men use when the information is serious and the conversation has already moved past shock into something more deliberate.
I dress quickly and move down the hall, stopping to check on Hadley first out of habit, finding her still deeply asleep with her arm thrown over her head the way she's slept since she was an infant
Something about the normalcy of it, the simple uncomplicated peace of a five year old who doesn't know yet that the world shifted again overnight, steadies me enough to keep moving.
The kitchen is full of McCallisters.
Brooks looks up first and whatever serious thing he was about to say gets set aside for half a second. "Morning, Riley," he says, with the quiet steadiness of a man who understands that courtesy doesn't stop because the situation is complicated.
"Morning," Wade says from beside him. Even with the tension coiled in him the way it is, he manages something close to a nod that carries genuine warmth in it.
Luke glances up from the phone in front of him. "Coffee's fresh," he says.
It catches me off guard, that small normalcy in the middle of everything. I feel something loosen slightly in my chest. The simple human decency of three men who could have made me feel like an outsider in this room choosing instead to make me feel like I belong in it.
Jace stands slightly apart from all of them, leaning against the far counter with his coffee untouched beside him. When his eyes find mine across the room the look in them tells me everything his voice hasn't said yet.
It got worse overnight.
"Tell me," I say, because there is no version of this where I stand in the doorway and wait to be included, not anymore, not after last night. Everything we said in the dark and the decision I made to stop treating this like something happening around me instead of something happening to all of us.
Jace straightens off the counter and crosses the room and hands me the phone with the trail camera footage already pulled up on the screen. The brothers let him do it without a word, which tells me they've already decided I'm part of this conversation.
I look at the images one after another. The cold that moves through me has nothing to do with the early morning air coming through the kitchen window.
Because the person in those images isn't Colt Ramirez.
It's someone else entirely.
And somehow that makes everything more dangerous than it was before.
Wade is the one who lays it out. Wade has never been the kind of man who softens information by making you wait for it, and right now I'm grateful for that even as the weight of it lands hard.
Someone broke the padlock on the equipment shed on the main property overnight. A clean break, not forced in a hurry but worked at deliberately. The kind of entry that takes patience, the right tool and someone who knew exactly what they were doing.
Nothing was taken. That's the part that sits wrong. A break-in with nothing missing isn't a robbery, it's a search.
The trail cameras on the land told the rest of the story.
The same figure from the footage Jace showed me this morning had been moving along the tree line at the edge of the property in the early hours. Not toward the house but toward the far corner of the lot where the ground had been disturbed when Jace first found the buried evidence weeks ago.
Luke had gone out at first light and found it, a fresh hole dug alongside the original site, not deep but deliberate, like someone trying to put something back or add to what was already there.
"They're planting something," Jace says, his voice flat and certain in the way it gets when the anger in him is being held very carefully in check.
"Whatever they couldn't retrieve they're replacing with something else.
Something that points back at me. Look at the pictures. " His phone moves toward me.
The room is quiet after that, the kind of quiet that happens when a truth lands that changes the shape of everything around it.
Brooks stands with his arms crossed, already thinking three moves ahead the way he always does.
"If they can tie that land to illegal activity and make it look like it originated with you, the whole acquisition gets questioned.
Everything we've built on it, everything we planned for it, all of it becomes evidence in someone else's story. "
"And Jace takes the fall," Luke says quietly, not as a question.
"That was always the plan," Jace answers, and something in the steadiness of his voice when he says it tells me he's had a few hours alone with this information already and has moved past the shock of it into something colder and more resolved.
I look around the kitchen at these four men, at the way they move around each other without thinking about it.
The unconscious ease of people who have been solving problems together their entire lives.
I feel the full weight of what this means, not just for Jace and the investigation, but for all of them, for the ranch and the land and the thing their father built and left in their hands.
Someone is trying to use the McCallister name to cover their own tracks.
And they have been planning it for a very long time.
It's Wade who breaks first.
Not in the way that means falling apart, because Wade McCallister doesn't fall apart. In the way that means the thing he's been holding back since he walked through the door stops being holdable and comes out with the particular force of a man who has been patient longer than feels natural to him.
"You should have told us sooner," he says, and he's looking at Jace when he says it, direct and unambiguous. The way Wade always is, the way that would feel like an attack from someone else but from him is just the truth delivered without wrapping paper.
Jace holds his gaze. "I know."
"We found buried evidence on McCallister land and you sat on it."
"I was handling it."
"You were handling it alone," Wade says, and the distinction in his voice is sharp enough to cut, "which is not the same thing, and you know it."
The air in the kitchen changes, tightening in that particular way it does when two people who love each other are saying something that needed saying and neither one of them is enjoying it.
Brooks puts a hand on the counter between them, not separating them, just grounding the room. "Wade."
"No," Wade says, not backing down but dropping his volume slightly, which with Wade is its own kind of concession.
"He needs to hear it. We have a rule. All four of us, anything that touches the ranch, anything that touches this family, we handle it together.
That's not a suggestion, that's what Dad built into the will for a reason. "
"The will was about land decisions," Jace says.
"The will was about us not going it alone," Wade fires back, and something in that lands differently than the rest of it, quieter and more personal, like it came from somewhere older than tonight's argument.
The silence that follows is heavy, but it isn't hostile. It's the silence of people who are on the same side having a hard conversation, which is a different thing entirely and I've seen enough families to know the difference.
Luke is the one who breaks it with the question none of them have asked yet. "The person in those images," he says, looking at Jace steadily. "You know who it is."
It isn't a question.
Jace's jaw tightens. "Yeah."
"And you haven't said the name yet."
"No."
Luke nods once, slow, like he's already figured out why and is giving Jace the space to get there himself. "Because saying it makes it real," he says quietly, "and you're not ready for what comes after that."
The room stills completely.
And I watch something move through Jace's expression. Something that cracks the surface of the control he's been holding all morning. Not breaking it, just showing what's underneath it for a single unguarded second.
Because Luke is exactly right.
And all three of his brothers know it.
And now so do I.
Hadley walks in about that time. Padding into the kitchen in her socks with her hair still flattened on one side from sleep.
The effect she has on the room is immediate and involuntary. The tension dropping a register the second she appears. Four grown men rearranging themselves around a five year old without a single word being said about it.
Wade crouches down to her level without being asked, which surprises me even though it probably shouldn't by now. "Morning, little bit."
She studies him with the serious evaluating look she reserves for new situations and for people she hasn't fully categorized yet. "You're the loud one," she says.
Wade blinks. Then something that might be the beginning of a smile crosses his face. "Yeah," he says. "That's me."
She seems to find this acceptable and moves past him toward Jace, who has already pushed off the counter and is meeting her halfway, and she raises her arms in the wordless language of small children.
He picks her up without hesitation, settling her against his side with a naturalness that still catches me somewhere tender every time I see it.