Chapter 20
COLT
Months later, the Southwest Circuit comes to Las Vegas for the Finals, and everything is different.
The Thomas & Mack Center is sold out. The arena is packed with people who came to watch bull riding and stayed for the story, because the story blew a hole through the industry's floor and forced everyone standing on it to look down.
The fallout hit fast and kept hitting. Congressional hearings.
Licensing reform. A complete gutting of circuit governance that left nothing of Merrick's architecture standing.
The Southwest Circuit that exists today was rebuilt from scorched ground, and every new rule, every independent oversight board, every mandatory transport manifest reeks of an organization that learned the hard way what festers in the dark.
Merrick's trial concluded weeks ago. Guilty on all counts.
Sentencing is pending, but Torres built a case so airtight that even Whitfield's objections bounced off it like rubber rounds.
More charges are stacking in other states as the smuggling operation keeps unraveling, each thread pulling loose another piece of an infrastructure that ran cargo in livestock trailers across state lines while riders bled in the dirt above them.
Torres got promoted and assigned to the task force investigating the deeper conspiracy.
Rainey is in Colorado, back behind a camera, shooting landscapes instead of evidence.
Flint came forward during the trial, sat in a federal courtroom and told his story, and the man who stopped answering his phone put his name on the record where it mattered.
The morning before the Finals, I'm on the porch of the ranch house with coffee and a view of the Davis Mountains and the woman who's turned my spare bedroom into a war room.
Kenna writes the way she does everything: all in.
The desk I built for her from salvaged barn wood is buried under manuscript pages, interview transcripts, and sticky notes in handwriting so precise it looks typeset.
She's been working on the book for months, a chronicle of the investigation, of Grant, of the circuit's reckoning.
She writes in the early hours before the sun clears the ridge, and some mornings I wake up to the sound of her keyboard and the smell of the coffee she's already brewed and the quiet, focused energy of a woman building something permanent out of everything we almost lost. I'll stand in the doorway watching her work until she feels me there, and the look she gives me over her shoulder, half-annoyed and half-wanting, is better than the coffee.
She doesn't write about us. She told me once that the book is Grant's story, and the parts that belong to her and me stay between us.
I don't argue. Some things are better kept off the page.
The ranch has changed since she moved in.
The bones are the same. The house still smells like cedar and stone, and the horses still come to the fence when they hear my truck, and Emmett still makes himself scarce when I'm home.
But the details have shifted in ways that are smaller and harder to name: a pair of her boots by the door, a coffee mug with a chipped handle that she brought from Austin and refuses to replace, the laptop charging on the kitchen counter, the sound of her voice on the phone with Sylvia carrying through the open window while I feed the horses.
Her things in my space. Her scent on my sheets. Her toothbrush next to mine like it belongs there, because it does.
I've been carrying a ring for weeks. I bought it in Marfa, at a jeweler who works out of a converted gas station and makes everything by hand.
The band is hammered silver, the stone set low and flush, the kind of ring a woman can wear while she's typing or arguing with a federal agent or climbing over a rodeo fence, and the kind Kenna won't take off.
I haven't asked yet. I've had the question sitting behind my teeth for just as long, waiting for the moment that matches the weight of what I'm asking.
This morning she comes out onto the porch with her coffee and sits in the chair beside mine, wearing one of my flannels unbuttoned over a tank top, the hem hitting her mid-thigh.
She didn't ask to borrow it. She never asks.
She just takes, and the sight of my shirt on her body does something territorial to my chest that I stopped fighting a long time ago.
"You nervous?" she asks. She means the Finals.
"About riding? No."
"About something else?"
She's watching me with those eyes. Grant's eyes, the ones that narrow when she's calculating and go wide when she's caught something I'm trying to hide. Months of living with this woman, and I still can't keep a secret from a face that reads mine like a stock draw sheet.
"I'm thinking about the ride," I say.
"Liar."
"I'm thinking about several things. The ride is one of them."
"And the other things?"
"Are none of your business until I decide they are."
Her mouth curves. "Mysterious. That's new for you. Usually you just scowl until the truth falls out."
"I don't scowl."
"Colt, you have a resting scowl the way other people have a resting heartbeat. It's involuntary and constant."
"You love it."
"I tolerate it. There's a difference." She takes a sip of coffee and looks at the mountains, and the morning light catches the freckles on her cheekbone and the faint lines around her eyes that weren't there when she walked onto the circuit.
The investigation put them there. The trial deepened them.
The book is smoothing them out, slowly, the way the writing smooths out everything she carries.
"Grant would have liked this," she says. She means the porch, the coffee, the mountains, the quiet. She says it without the sharp edge the name used to carry, and the change in her voice when she talks about her brother is one of the things that tells me this is going to hold.
"He'd have said the coffee is too weak and the view is wasted on a man who can't sit still."
"He'd have been right about the coffee." She leans her shoulder against mine. "He'd have been wrong about the rest."
I put my arm around her and pull her closer than the chair arms want to allow, my hand settling on her bare thigh where the flannel has ridden up.
She settles against me with the automatic ease of a woman who knows exactly where she fits, and the heat of her skin under my palm makes me consider skipping the Finals entirely.
The velvet box presses against my awareness from inside the gear bag hanging on the porch rail. Tonight, in the dirt, in front of the whole circuit, I'm going to ask the question.
But that's tonight. Right now is the porch and the coffee and the woman, and Grant's voice in my memory saying Look after my sister. Don't let her do anything stupid.
I'm trying. She doesn't make it easy.
The drive to Las Vegas takes most of the day.
Kenna rides with me, her laptop open, her feet on the dash, her boots kicked off somewhere on the floorboard.
She edits chapters while I drive, reading paragraphs aloud and asking my opinion, which she then ignores with a confidence I've stopped finding offensive and started finding attractive.
The Finals carry a different energy than any other event on the circuit.
The Thomas & Mack hums with it, a low-frequency vibration that starts in the parking lot and builds through the concourse and hits full volume behind the chutes.
This is where seasons end and careers are defined, and the men and women who made it here carry themselves with the specific tension of people who know tonight counts more than any night before it.
I'm behind the chutes with rosin on my hands and a draw slip that reads like a gift, a Coalson bull named Freight Train with a left-spinning high kick that rewards commitment and punishes hesitation.
I've been riding like this all season, focused and technical, competing the way I competed before Grant died, when the point of getting on a bull was to get off it standing instead of proving I deserved to be under it.
The standings show me at the top by a comfortable margin. The championship is mine if I ride tonight. The math doesn't matter as much as what I plan to do after the ride, but the math is nice.
Kenna is in the stands, not in the press section she used to hide in. She dropped the fake credentials and the cover story and the last of the lies months ago. She's a few rows behind the chutes, wearing a black hat and the grin she saves for when she thinks I'm not looking.
A notebook sits in her lap because old habits don't die. She's taking notes on the circuit's new governance structure for the book she's writing, the one that started as an investigation and turned into a chronicle of what happens when people who love a sport decide to tear it apart to save it.
She catches me looking and raises one eyebrow. The expression says focus on the bull and I'll be here when you're done and something filthier that she'll deny later.
I touch the brim of my hat. She rolls her eyes. The whole exchange takes seconds and resets my entire nervous system.
Earlier in the program, I watched Dax Corbin ride in the bareback round.
He drew a rank horse and matched it with the coiled, reckless energy of someone who rides like he's got nothing left to protect.
He transferred to the Southwest Circuit with a chip on his shoulder and a score to settle that goes deeper than the standings.
He's good, better than good. He rides with raw fury, treats every eight seconds like a personal war, and the other bareback riders have already learned to give him space behind the chutes.
The small velvet box in my gear bag presses against my awareness like a second heartbeat.