Chapter 20
TWENTY
DAWSON
Eight years of hating a girl for wanting me turns out to be the easy version of this story.
Mackenzie hasn’t moved from the doorway since she said the name out loud, and the room hasn’t finished absorbing it either, the kind of quiet that comes right before a structure decides which way it’s going to fall.
“Say it again,” I tell her, because some part of me is still hoping I misheard it the first time.
“Ashley Rourke.” She doesn’t soften it. Mackenzie’s never once softened anything since I’ve known her, and I respect her too much to want her to start now.
“There’s a payment record buried three folders past the name, dated years back.
I need you both upstairs so Tate can walk you through what it actually says before either of you decides what it means. ”
Sage is still sitting on the horsehair rug, shirt half on, hair a wreck I put there myself, and she’s watching my face with intense scrutiny.
I know that look. I’ve been on the other side of a table from it exactly once, the day she buried my road in front of the county commission, and I remember thinking even then that I’d rather be cross-examined by her than loved by anyone else.
I don’t get to enjoy that thought right now. Right now it just tells me she’s already building a case, and I’m the one holding the evidence she hasn’t seen yet.
“Okay,” I say, and my voice seems to come from somewhere outside of my body. “Let’s go upstairs.”
She doesn’t ask me a single question on the stairs. That’s worse than if she had.
Tate’s got three monitors going in Knox’s main house office, the smell of burnt coffee thick enough to taste, and he doesn’t look up when we walk in, which from Tate means he’s already hours deep into something he doesn’t like.
“Payment’s routed through a shell called Highline Consulting,” he says, pulling up a scan of a wire transfer old enough that the letterhead looks like it belongs in a museum.
“Same year Mackenzie’s talking about. Six figures, to an account that traces back to A.
Rourke. Just initials and a routing number somebody thought was untraceable back then. ”
Knox is at the window with his arms crossed, watching all three of us with the diminishing patience of a man who has spent the whole day getting nowhere on the thing he needs. “That’s interesting,” he says, when Tate finishes. “It’s also not Cruz.”
“No,” I say. “It’s not.”
“I gave you until tonight.” Knox doesn’t raise his voice. He’s never had to. “That clock hasn’t stopped running because you found a more interesting name to chase.”
“I’m aware of the clock, Knox.”
“Then start acting like it.” He pushes off the window, and for a second the office feels a size too small for the three men, one fuming wife, and one federal agent.
“Ashley Rourke doesn’t clear Cruz. She doesn’t put him back on your ranch and she doesn’t buy him one more hour.
I need something that does, and I need it before Gideon decides twenty-four hours was generous. ”
“Then let us work,” Mackenzie says, not looking up from her screen, in the focused tone of a woman who has clearly had this exact argument with Knox before and won it every time.
Knox doesn’t answer that. He just holds my eyes a second longer, the warning plain enough that he doesn’t need to say it twice and goes back to the window.
I stare at the wire transfer until the numbers stop meaning anything, and somewhere under the part of my brain that’s remembering shell entities and routing numbers, and the part still counting down whatever’s left of Knox’s patience, a much older, much uglier certainty starts to crack straight down the middle.
Sage already has a story about Ashley. She’s had it since the summer Ashley found us together and I ended things a week later without telling her why.
What she got instead was Ashley’s arms around my neck at the fairgrounds, and she built the rest herself.
Ashley wanted me, Ashley got me, and I let her.
She wasn’t wrong about the wanting. Ashley had been trying to get me to look at her since we were fourteen, sliding into every empty seat next to mine at every fundraiser and athletic event, like proximity alone might eventually work.
I always believed she’d acted alone that summer, out of nothing but that old, ordinary wanting finally finding an opening.
I let Sage believe the simple version because the true one had a piece in it I’ve never handed her.
Ashley had something on me. That’s the part Sage never got.
I never once considered that Ashley might have been somebody’s tool. That the opening wasn’t found. It was built and handed to her along with the money.
“Dawson.” Sage’s voice, quiet, close. “You’ve gone somewhere.”
“I’m here.”
“You’re not.” She doesn’t touch me, and I feel the absence of it more than I’d feel her hand. “You look like a man reading his own obituary.”
“I’m reading somebody else’s.” I keep my eyes on the screen instead of her face. If I look at her right now she’ll see everything I’m not ready to hand her. “I thought I understood what happened back then. Turns out I only understood the part somebody wanted me to understand.”
“What does that mean?”
“It means there’s a piece of that summer I’ve never told you.” I say it plain, no dodge in it. Lying to her outright isn’t a thing I’m willing to do. “And I’m not telling it with your brother four feet away.”
She weighs it, and I watch her decide whether to push me right here, in front of Knox, Tate and Mackenzie.
She lets it go. Not because she’s satisfied.
Because she’s picking her ground, the same patience she described using on Cruz in that truck cab, and I know exactly what that patience means.
She’s not done asking. She’s just choosing her moment.
“Fine.” She pushes off the doorframe she’d been leaning against, arms still crossed and holds the rest of it behind her teeth because Knox is four feet away pretending not to listen. The look she gives me on her way past could still strip paint. “Later.”
“Later,” I agree. Knox doesn’t look at either of us, which is a comment all by itself, and I feel the muscles across my back pull tight enough to ache before Sage even clears the doorway.
I go after her.
She doesn’t slow down for me, doesn’t acknowledge I’m there until we’re both inside her office down the hall and I’ve shut the door behind us. She drops into her chair and pulls a folder toward her without a word, and I take the chair across from her desk instead of leaving.
West knocks and enters without waiting ten minutes after that, laptop already open, a different kind of urgency on his face, the kind that means he’s found something that isn’t Ashley and needs somebody to care about it anyway.
I didn’t know all my brothers were here this morning, working out of Blackwater offices.
“The cove camera,” he says. “The one with our asset tag. I’ve been running the authorization chain since the warrant mess, cross-referencing every credential that’s touched equipment checkout in the last six months.”
“And?”
“Same signature that moved Robbie’s truck.
Same signature that forged the Cruz warrant through Foster and Reyes.
” He turns the screen toward me, and it’s laid out clean, the checkout log for a piece of surveillance hardware that had no business sitting above a private cove that belonged to nobody but me and Sage.
“One hand, three tools. Whoever this is doesn’t improvise. They reuse what already works.”
“That’s not comforting,” Sage says.
“It’s not supposed to be comforting.” West closes the laptop halfway, apologetic, like he wishes he had better news to deliver along with the bad.
“It’s supposed to be useful. Whoever’s doing this isn’t a ghost. They’re a person with a pattern, and patterns are the one thing you can actually catch. ”
I think about the boot prints at the fence line.
The photograph timestamped hours before either father said a word about the house.
The camera mount tucked into granite nobody should have found.
Every piece of it stitched through with the same patient, methodical hand, and somewhere underneath the fear that thought should put in me, there’s something closer to relief.
A ghost, you can’t fight. A pattern, you can.
“Good work,” I tell West, and mean it.
Sage finds me alone in the Blackwater kitchen an hour later, both of us finally released from the war room long enough to remember we haven’t eaten since morning.
She doesn’t say anything at first. She just leans against the counter across from me, arms crossed, watching me like everything else that matters to her, patient and thorough and entirely unwilling to let me hide inside my own silence for long.
“I know what Ashley is,” she says. “I’ve known since I was fourteen and she made fun of my glasses in front of half the county fair.
I’ve watched her chase you at every function both our families ever shared since she was old enough to know what chasing meant.
I watched her arms around your neck at the fairgrounds, the week after you stopped answering my calls, and I built a whole story out of it.
Girl finally got the thing she’d wanted for a decade.
I’ve lived inside that story since college. ”
“Sage.”
“I’m not finished.” Her voice stays level, but there’s an edge under it now, the one she uses right before she takes somebody apart with facts instead of volume.
“Tate just told us somebody paid her a small fortune to do whatever she did to us. Somebody who knew how long she’d wanted you and how easy that would make her to use.
That’s not the story I’ve been carrying around.
That’s a different story wearing the same face, and you’ve had it for over an hour and you still haven’t told me what’s in it. ”
I don’t answer right away. There’s a version of this conversation where I hand her everything, right now, standing in a kitchen that isn’t even ours, and I want that version badly enough that my hands go still on the counter to keep from reaching for her.
I don’t hand it to her. Not here. There’s a piece of that summer that’s mine, not Ashley’s, and I’ve carried it alone for eight years. I’m not setting it down for the first time in Gideon Blackwater’s kitchen.
“There’s more to it,” I say. “Somebody knew which desire to fund. And there’s a part of it that’s mine, something I did that summer, that I’ve never told a living soul. You’ll get it. Not in your father’s house.”
“That’s not an answer, Dawson. That’s a well disguised no.”
“It’s a where, not a no.” I hold her eyes and don’t look away from it. “Tonight. Ours.”
“You said that after the records fire too. Full disclosure, no more deciding for me. That was the whole deal we wrote into this marriage.” She’s tight through the shoulders, but she hasn’t moved away from the counter, hasn’t put distance between us like she did in the gravel after the bombing.
“You keep promising me the whole truth eventually. I keep getting told to wait for it.”
“I know how that sounds.”
“Do you?” She steps in close enough that I catch her shampoo first, something clean and green, and under it the sweet drift of the body mist that’s been sitting on her bathroom counter since the day we started living together.
It is a genuinely unfair thing for my body to notice in the middle of being told how badly I’m failing her.
“Because from where I’m standing, it sounds exactly like the year you left.
Something happens with Ashley, and you decide, alone, what I get to know and when. ”
That one hurts, bone deep, more than anything Knox or her father has managed to throw at me all week, because it’s true, and because she’s not wrong to say it out loud.
“This isn’t that,” I say, and I make myself say it slow, so she hears that I mean it.
“That year I decided for you, alone, and let you live inside a lie. I’m not asking you to live inside anything.
I’m asking for one drive home. Tonight you get why I left, the whole of it, in our house, where nobody’s four feet away pretending not to listen. ”
Her eyes hold mine a long moment.
“Fine,” she says finally, jaw tight, her eyes narrowing. “Tonight. But if I find out you had more than this and sat on it anyway, I’m not going to be this reasonable a second time.”
“I wouldn’t ask you to be.”
She steps in close enough that I see her irises gone dark, whiskey brown shot through with something furious and unresolved. Her hand finds my jaw, gentle despite everything she just said. “I’m still furious. I want that on the record.”
“Noted for the eulogy.”
That almost gets her. The corner of her mouth twitches before she catches it, and she goes up on her toes and kisses me anyway, taking her sweet time, nothing soft left in it but nothing angry either, and for as long as it lasts I let myself believe we get to have this, easy and unrushed.
My hand slides to her waist, thumb finding the strip of bare skin where her shirt’s ridden up, and she makes a sound against my mouth that has nothing to do with being furious with me thirty seconds ago.
Her arms wrap around my shoulders, and she tips her head to the side to give me better access, deepening the kiss until neither of us is thinking about Mackenzie or the war room or anything else that isn’t this.
It’s the same violent, hungry pull that took us both to the floor of The Ledger, except there’s no grief driving it, no dead men’s letters scattered around us, just need, rising hot, and the kitchen goes quiet in the good way.
My phone buzzes against my thigh, right where she’s pressed against me, and we both feel it at the same time.
Sage doesn’t pull back right away. I feel her decide not to, her arms still locked around my shoulders, her breath still uneven against my jaw, one more second stolen before the day gets to have her back.
She pulls back an inch, forehead against mine, both of us still catching our breath.
“Ignore it,” I say, though I already know whose name is sitting on that screen. Mackenzie doesn’t text unless it matters.
“You don’t believe that any more than I do.”
She’s right. I never do.
Mackenzie’s already reading the screen when we cross into Knox’s office, and whatever’s on it has drained every ounce of the calm she’s worn all day.
“Dawson.” She doesn’t look up. “Sage’s credentials. Not the cover ones. They just logged into a restricted Sullivan Transport system. From inside this house. This office. Nine minutes ago.”
Sage goes very still beside me.
“That’s impossible,” she says. “I haven’t touched that terminal all day.”
Mackenzie finally looks up, and there’s nothing in her face that makes either of us feel better about what comes next.
“I know,” she says. “That’s the problem.”