Chapter 10 #2
"Grant's sister." I say it to the window, to the mountains, to anyone other than her. "Grant Corbin's little sister. The one he raised. The one he talked about like she was the only good thing in his life."
"Colt, let me explain."
"Explain what?" I turn on her, and the fury is a living thing in my voice. "Explain how you walked onto this circuit with a fake name and fake credentials and looked me in the eye and lied? Explain how you used my grief, my guilt, my connection to your brother to manipulate me into helping you?"
"That's not what happened."
"That is exactly what happened. You knew who I was before you approached me in Amarillo. You knew I was Grant's best friend. You knew I was investigating his death. You targeted me."
"I came to the circuit to find out who killed my brother. You were a source. You were supposed to be nothing more than that."
"And then what? You decided sleeping with your source was good journalism?"
The shot lands. She flinches, and the flinch is real, and watching it gives me no satisfaction.
"You used me," I say. "You stood in my space and let me talk about Grant like he was my loss, my burden, my failure, and the whole time you knew. You knew who he was to you, and you let me carry that weight like I was the only one carrying it."
"You think you're the only one carrying it?
" Her voice breaks, just barely, a crack in glass that's been holding too much weight for too long.
"You are a self-destructive asshole who is more interested in dying heroically than actually solving Grant's murder.
You've been riding bulls with a death wish for two months, picking fights, burning every bridge on the circuit, and accomplishing nothing.
I walked onto this circuit and moved the investigation further than you had, or ever would have, on your own. "
The shot lands like a kick to the chest, because she's not wrong.
She stands. The chair doesn't screech. She's too controlled for that, even now.
"Grant and Dax were my only family, and now Grant is dead. I was so young when I left home that Grant and Dax took over making sure I was safe. They helped pay off my student loans so that I didn’t have that financial millstone around my neck.
I wasn’t as close to Dax as Grant. He’d call me every Sunday, and he showed up every time I needed him.
After he died, Dax sort of disappeared. It felt like I had nothing. Nobody."
She moves toward me, and her voice doesn't waver.
"I sold everything I owned. I faked press credentials.
I drove onto a rodeo circuit where nobody knew my face and started asking questions that could get me killed, because the alternative was sitting in an empty apartment while the authorities told me that my brother's murder was a tragic accident and there was nothing to be done. "
Her voice is shaking. Her eyes are dry.
"I lied to you, Colt. Every single day. And yes, I used your grief and your guilt and your connection to Grant, because I was willing to use anything, to burn anything, to lie to anyone, to find the people who killed him."
"Including me."
"Including you."
The honesty of it is the worst part. There's no excuse in her voice and no justification dressed up as explanation.
She lied. She used me. She's telling me that she'd do it again, and the steel in her spine while she says it is the same steel that drew me to her in the first place.
"But falling for you was never the plan.
" Her voice goes quiet and stripped. "What happened between us was real.
You can hate me for the lies, and you probably should.
But you can't look at me and tell me that what happened in that motel room and that bunkhouse was part of a con. Because we both know it wasn't."
She's standing close enough that I can smell the cedar soap she borrowed from my shower bag this morning.
My body is a traitor. Even now, even with the truth sitting between us like a live wire, some part of me is tracking the rise and fall of her breathing and the heat coming off her skin and wanting to close the distance that my brain is screaming at me to maintain.
I stare at her.
She's Grant's sister. The woman I've been falling for, the woman who doesn't ask permission before she takes up residence somewhere I didn't plan on letting anyone in, is the sister of the man whose death I carry like a stone in my gut.
I slept with Grant's sister.
The bunkhouse comes back to me in a rush I can't stop. Her voice breaking on the word 'yours' while I was buried inside her. The way she held onto me after like I was the only solid thing in a world that kept shifting. The scratch marks she left on my back that I wear like a badge.
All of it happened while she knew exactly who she was and exactly who I was, and every moan, every whispered word, every moment where I thought I was seeing the real her was filtered through a lie so complete that I don't know which parts to trust.
She said 'I'm yours' with her brother's face hidden behind a fake name.
And the worst part, the part that makes me want to put my fist through the drywall, is that she's right.
What happened between us was real. The chemistry, the trust, the way her body answers mine like we're speaking a language neither of us learned. All of that was real.
Everything it was built on was a lie.
I want to tell her to get out. The words are right there, loaded and ready, and every part of me that's burning with the betrayal wants to point at the door and watch her walk through it.
But she's Grant's sister. And Thornton's people want her handled the same way they handled Grant.
"I'm not going to tell you to get out or go your own way," I say, and the words taste like gravel.
"Not because I've forgiven you. Because you're in danger, and because Grant would haunt me from the grave if I let anything happen to his little sister.
So we stay in this together. But don't mistake that for forgiveness. "
"I'm not," she says quietly. "And I wouldn't have left even if you'd told me to." She holds her ground, all five feet seven inches of stubbornness and secrets, standing in a kitchen in the middle of nowhere with the same steel in her spine that got her onto this circuit in the first place.
The steel in her spine is the same steel that made me want her the first night in Amarillo, and the fact that I can feel that pull even now, even with her brother's name on my tongue and the betrayal burning a hole through my gut, makes me angrier than anything she's actually said.
"You can be furious. You should be furious.
But the investigation isn't about us, and the evidence on this table doesn't care about our personal disaster.
Merrick is still operating. Thornton's people are still threatening me.
Rainey is still out there with evidence that can put Grant's killers in prison. "
"Don't say his name like that."
"Like what?"
"Like he's a case file and not the brother who raised you."
The words land like a slap. She takes them without blinking.