Chapter 15 #2
I spend the downtime between events working the story with Sylvia.
We refine the financial analysis, adding two more years of prize money data that reveal the fraud goes back further than Grant discovered.
We map the shell company structure in a graphic that makes the money trail visible to a lay reader.
We interview additional circuit insiders who agree to speak on background, confirming details about Thornton Livestock's operations that corroborate Quinn's on-record testimony.
Colt appoints himself my shadow during all of it. He doesn't interfere with the work, but he's always there. When I meet a background source at a coffee shop in Tucson, he sits at the counter with a cup he never drinks, positioned between my booth and the door.
When a stock contractor I don't recognize lingers too close to me at an event, Colt materializes beside me before I register the man's presence, standing close enough that his shoulder blocks my body from view.
He doesn't say a word. He doesn't have to.
The contractor moves on. Colt's hand settles on the small of my back, guiding me toward the truck, and the heat of his palm through my shirt is a brand I feel for the rest of the afternoon.
At night, the adjoining door stays open now. Not closed. Not unlocked. Open. Neither of us comments on the change.
My phone rings late on a weeknight, and the number on the screen is the one I've been dodging for weeks.
Dax.
I glance at the connecting door. Colt is in the shower. I can hear the water running.
I answer.
"Before you say anything," Dax says, "I know where you are. I know what you're doing. And I know who you're doing it with."
My stomach drops. "Dax—"
"I'm not finished." His voice is ice over gravel, the cold fury that Dax wears the way other people wear aftershave. "You went onto the Southwest Circuit. Under Mom's maiden name. With fake press credentials. And you didn't tell me."
"How did you—"
"I called your landlord when you stopped answering my texts.
She told me you'd broken your lease and left Austin.
Took me a few days to track you to a rodeo grounds in New Mexico.
After that, a press credential search with McEnroe turned up the rest." His voice goes flatter.
"Mom's maiden name, Kenna. You really thought I wouldn't figure that out? "
"I couldn't tell you."
"Bullshit. You didn't trust me."
"I didn't trust you to let me do it."
The silence on the line is the kind that has claws.
"Grant is dead, Kenna. Our brother is dead…”
“You think I don’t know that?”
Ignoring me, he continues, “And you decide to walk into the same operation that killed him, alone, without telling the one person on this planet who would have burned the whole thing down to keep you safe."
"That's exactly why I didn't tell you. You would have shown up and blown my cover in the first five minutes."
"I would have—" He stops. Breathes. The control it takes him to stop mid-sentence tells me he's been rehearsing this call for days and I just knocked him off his script.
"You're not wrong. I would have made a scene.
I would have made several scenes. And Grant's killer would still be walking around free because I don't have the patience for the kind of long game you're running. "
"Then you understand."
"I understand and I'm still furious." A beat. "Holloway. You're with Holloway."
"I'm working with Holloway."
"That's not what the circuit gossip says."
"Since when do you listen to circuit gossip?"
"Since Quinn Gallagher called me saying he’d heard rumors about the article and told me everything, including the part where Grant's little sister is sharing a motel room with Grant's best friend."
"It's complicated."
"Kenna."
"Yes. It's serious."
Another silence. Longer. I can hear him processing the information with the same intensity he brings to a bareback draw, calculating the angles, measuring the risks.
"If he hurts you, I'll kill him. That's not a figure of speech."
"If he hurts me, I'll handle it myself. That's not a figure of speech either."
The faintest sound that might be a laugh. "God, you sound like Grant."
"Somebody has to."
"I'm coming to the circuit," he says. "Not now. Not to interfere. But when this is over, I'm transferring in. Whatever Grant found, whatever he started, it's not finished. And I'm not sitting on the sidelines while my sister finishes it alone."
"I'm not alone."
"I know. You've got Holloway. But he's not family." The word carries weight. Dax means it the way Corbins mean everything: as an absolute, a line drawn in bedrock. "I'll stay out of your way until you tell me otherwise. But I'm coming."
He hangs up. No goodbye. Dax does nothing with grace and everything with conviction, and the absence of a farewell is its own kind of promise.
I set the phone down and stare at the ceiling. The shower cuts off in the next room. Colt's footsteps cross the tile.
He appears in the doorway with a towel around his waist and water still tracking down his chest. The scar across his ribs catches the low light, and the muscles in his stomach are still tight from the heat of the shower.
I've mapped every ridge and valley of that torso with my hands and my mouth, and the sight of him still hits me like a fist to the nervous system. I force my gaze up to his face, and the look he gives me says he caught exactly where my eyes were and is saving it for later.
"Who called?" he asks.
"Dax."
His eyebrows lift. "And?"
"He knows everything. Where I am, what I'm doing, who I'm doing it with."
"That last part bother him?"
"He threatened to kill you."
His mouth pulls into something that isn't a smile.
It's sharper than that, the look of a man who considers threats a language he's fluent in.
"He's welcome to try." He leans against the doorframe and crosses his arms, and the muscles in his forearms bunch in a way that makes my mouth go dry and my train of thought derail entirely. "He coming?"
"After. He says he's transferring to the circuit."
"Dax on the Southwest Circuit." He says it like he's tasting the words and finding them complicated. "That'll be interesting."
"That's one word for it."
He pushes off the doorframe and heads back into the bathroom. I hear the rustle of him pulling on clothes and remind myself that I have work to do that doesn't involve following him in there.
The big and harder problem is Quinn.
It takes several phone calls and days of silence before he agrees to meet Sylvia. Each call follows the same pattern: he picks up, listens, tells me he's not ready, and hangs up. The last time, he doesn't say he's not ready. He asks, "Where and when?"
He almost doesn't show anyway.
I'm sitting in the back booth of a diner outside Tucson with a recorder on the table and two cups of coffee going cold when my phone buzzes. Quinn's number. My stomach drops.
"I'm in the parking lot," he says. His voice sounds the way it did behind the trailer in Amarillo, tight and thin and fighting itself. "I've been sitting out here and I can't make myself open the door."
"Take your time."
"If I take any more time, I'm going to put this truck in reverse and drive back to my rig and pretend this never happened." A pause. The sound of a breath pulled through teeth. "Grant would be so pissed at me right now."
"Grant would understand."
"Grant would call me a coward to my face and then buy me a beer and tell me to get my shit together.
" A sound that might be a laugh if it had more air behind it.
"He did that once, actually. After Tyler died.
I told him I didn't want to know what he'd found, and he looked at me like I'd kicked his dog.
Bought me a Shiner and said, 'Quinn, you're a coward, but you're my coward, and when you're ready to stop being one, I'll be here. '"
My throat closes. That's my brother down to the bone. Patience wrapped around an insult wrapped around loyalty so fierce it could stop your heart.
"He's not here," Quinn says. "But you are. And you’re the reporter. And I've been carrying this for months, and it's eating me alive."
"Then come inside."
The line goes quiet. I watch the parking lot through the window, and after a long count, a blue dually's door swings open. Quinn climbs out, shoves his hands in his pockets, and walks toward the diner entrance like a man walking toward his own sentencing.
He slides into the booth across from me. His eyes land on the recorder. His jaw tightens.
Via phone video, Sylvia introduces herself.
She's good at this, warm without being soft, professional without being cold.
She explains the process, the timeline, and the legal protections.
Quinn listens with his hands wrapped around his coffee mug the way a man holds something he's afraid he'll drop.
"Before we start," Quinn says, and his voice has gone rough. "I need to say something that isn't for the article."
Sylvia glances at me. I nod.
"Grant Corbin was my friend. He was the funniest, bravest, most stubborn son of a bitch I ever rode with, and he died because he believed the truth mattered more than his safety.
" Quinn's throat works. "Tyler Brennan believed the same thing, and he's dead too.
I've spent months being afraid of ending up like them, and I'm done.
I'm done being afraid of the people who killed my friends.
Grant and Tyler are dead because nobody spoke up, and I'm not going to keep my mouth shut while the people responsible walk around free. "
He looks at me. His eyes are wet and his hands are steady.
"Turn it on," he says.
I hit record and Sylvia says she has done the same thing,.