Chapter 22
TWENTY-TWO
DAWSON
“—hit her, he hit her car, crashed into—” The kid on the north gate comes apart on Holt’s radio before he’s even keyed it all the way in, and the room breaks in every direction at once.
I don’t remember deciding to move. I remember Knox’s chair hitting the floor behind me, Holt already through the doorway with the radio still crackling in his fist, boots hammering the porch boards ahead of mine.
Three trucks fire up in the yard within seconds of each other, mine first, then Knox’s, then Holt cutting across the gravel at an angle that’s going to save him maybe ten seconds and asks nothing of him to try.
I see the wreck before I see her. The Range Rover spun sideways across both lanes, rear end caved around the bumper, glass thrown bright across the road like something spilled instead of shattered.
The grey Silverado crumpled into that bumper, no plates, the same truck that sat idling behind us at the fundraiser, engine still running, one headlight blown and staring at nothing.
I clock the second truck parked up the shoulder before I’ve even braked, a shape behind the wheel that doesn’t move right. Something long catches the light across the door frame, barrel or scope, close enough to guess and too far to be sure, and I don’t wait around to find out which.
I stand on the brake. The truck skids crooked across the shoulder and stops, and I take the shot from the seat, one elbow braced on the door frame, the rifle I keep behind the bench for coyotes and worse already up.
Call it eighty yards. The windshield takes the round clean, and the shape behind it slumps sideways and doesn’t come back up, whatever he was holding gone from view before I’ve finished exhaling.
I don’t feel anything doing it. My hands don’t shake.
My pulse doesn’t spike. Some old, trained part of me just does the math, range and drop and windage, like a freight route, and pulls the trigger with the same certainty I’d sign a shipping manifest. That’s the part I’ll sit with later, once there’s time to sit with anything.
I’m on foot before the engine’s off, and Cricket’s already locked onto the second man’s thigh at Sage’s door, every ounce of red heeler dug in and refusing to let go no matter how hard he swings his free arm trying to shake her off.
He’s still got the door half wrenched open, a tire iron gripped in his other fist and forgotten mid-swing while he fights her, and those seconds of him fighting a dog instead of watching me close the distance is all I need.
I don’t draw a weapon. I use the door.
I slam it into him with everything I’ve got, catching him between the frame and his own ribs, and I feel something give under the impact that isn’t the truck.
He goes down hard, dog still locked onto his leg, and I’m on him before he finishes falling, my knife already out of my belt and moving with no hesitation in it at all.
No shake. No rage. Just the quiet, practiced work of a man who has done this before and knows exactly how long it takes.
It’s over in four seconds. Maybe five.
I sit back on my heels in the gravel, knife still in my hand, and wait for my body to catch up to what it just did.
It doesn’t. There’s no wave of horror coming for me like there was in the yard yesterday.
No shaking hands. No knife I couldn’t make myself put down.
Just the ordinary, terrible stillness of a man who did this well, kneeling in blood-flecked gravel, understanding for the first time that doing it well isn’t the same thing as being broken by it.
Cricket finally lets go. She sits, chest heaving, blood on her muzzle that isn’t hers, and looks up at me like she’s waiting to be told she did good.
“Good girl,” I tell her, and mean every syllable of it.
“Dawson.”
Sage’s voice, from the cab, thin and furious and alive. I’m already there.
She’s got blood at her hairline, dark and already tacky, a scrape running the length of one forearm where the airbag didn’t quite catch her in time.
She’s shaking hard enough that her teeth are chattering despite the July heat still baking off the gravel, and she’s already trying to climb out under her own power before I get a hand under her arm.
I don’t let her climb. I take her face in both hands instead, careful, gentle, tilting it toward what’s left of the daylight so I can see the cut at her hairline clean.
“Hold still.”
“I’m fine, Dawson.”
“Hold still anyway.” My thumbs frame her jaw, and I watch her pupils, even and matched, watch her track my finger when I move it in front of her eyes.
No concussion. No slur in her voice, no delay in her focus.
My hands are steadier doing this than they were pulling a trigger, and I hate how much that tells me about what rattles me and what doesn’t. “Follow my finger. Good. Again.”
“You already checked. I’m not concussed. I’m just bleeding a little and extremely done with today.”
“I need one more second.” I don’t move my hands.
I can’t. Her pulse is going hard enough under my palm that I can feel it in my own fingers, too fast, too thin, and every part of me that just put two men down without blinking is right here shaking instead, held together by nothing but the fact that her eyes are open and finding mine and furious instead of glassy.
“I almost didn’t get here in time. I need one more second before I let go of you. ”
Her face softens at that, some of the fury bleeding into something else, something that isn’t fear either. Her hand comes up and covers one of mine where it’s still cupped along her jaw, and she doesn’t pull it away. She just holds it there, steady, letting me have the second I asked for.
“You have it,” she says, quieter now. “Take your second.”
I take it. I let myself want her, right here, blood on both of us and a dead man still cooling ten feet away, want her so hard it aches somewhere I can’t reach with my hands, and underneath the wanting is the fear I can’t get out from under no matter how still my hands stay.
I almost lost her before whatever this is between us got the chance to be anything but stolen minutes and a contract full of clauses. I’m not losing it now that it’s real.
“Okay,” I say, finally, and drop my hands, though it hurts to do so.
“Whatever sentence you were building before that,” she says, “the one where you tell me to go home and let somebody else handle this, you can leave it right there. I already know how it ends.”
“I wasn’t building that sentence.”
“You were building it before you touched my face. You stopped once you got close enough to feel my pulse.” She holds my eyes, steady despite the tremor still running through her hands. “I felt you decide not to say it.”
I don’t deny it. Lying to her buys me nothing.
Knox and Holt are already there. They pulled in somewhere behind me, close enough that I heard the second truck’s doors but not close enough to interrupt, both of them hanging back at the edge of the wreck while I had my hands on her face. Now that I’ve let go, they move in at once.
“Both dead,” Holt says, taking in the scene in one sweep, not a question. He keys the radio without waiting for confirmation. “Ranch on lockdown, gate to gate. Finn and Tate are closing every road in and out of the valley.”
“West is on the second truck’s plates now,” Knox says, already crouched at Sage’s other side, checking her over with the same brisk efficiency he’d run on a spooked horse.
“He’ll have something before it’s finished smoking.
Maren’s already lit up both families’ phones.
Sage safe. Lockdown now. That’s all anybody needs until we know more. ”
“That’s everything we’ve got,” I tell Sage. “What do you want?”
She looks at me for a long moment, blood drying at her temple, hands still trembling at her sides, and something steadies behind her eyes.
“They wanted me alive,” she says. “That rifle wasn’t aimed at me.
It was aimed at you, or at anybody who came to help me.
The man at my door wasn’t carrying anything built to kill me either.
He wanted me in that truck, not in a body bag.
” Her jaw sets. I’ve watched that jaw take apart a whole diner. “So let’s find out why.”
“Sage.”
“I’m not asking you to let me get taken, Dawson.
I’m asking you to let me be the reason they try again, on our terms instead of theirs.
Controlled. Watched. Bait that bites back.
” She holds my eyes, firm despite every part of her body still running on adrenaline and fear.
“You just proved in about five seconds flat that you can end anyone who gets close enough to touch me. I’m not scared of what you are.
I watched what you are keep me alive. I’m asking you to trust it enough to use it on purpose instead of just in an emergency. ”
I think about the yard. About the version of me that scared her without meaning to, the shaking hands, the knife I couldn’t set down.
This isn’t that. This is the other one, the one that doesn’t take anything out of me to activate.
I’ve spent two years building it on purpose, ever since I came home and understood what Sullivan Transport needed from its next enforcer.
Watching her sit here, blood on her face and no fear of me in her eyes at all, I understand for the first time that the yard wasn’t the truth of what I am.
It was the one time the control slipped. This is what it looks like when it doesn’t.
“Then we do it together,” I say.
Holt’s already crouched by the body at Sage’s door, the dead man’s wallet open in one hand and his phone in the other.
“Name on his license matches the lift crew sign-in sheet,” he says. “That’s the second man. The one who got away from me at the yard.”
The man who blew up our truck bay and put Mick in a hospital bed, dead in the gravel with my wife’s blood still drying on the door he tried to drag her through. I wait to feel something about that. What comes is closer to arithmetic. One more name crossed off.
Holt thumbs the phone awake, scrolling. He straightens, and whatever’s on that screen has drained something out of his face I’ve never once seen drain out of it before.
“Dawson.”
“What.”
He turns the phone toward me instead of answering, and I read the name sitting three lines down a short, recent contact list, the only entry that isn’t a burner string of digits.
Erin.