Chapter 4
FOUR
KNOX
She's already there when I arrive.
Not just there. Running it. Maren Sullivan at the head of the conference table with a coffee in a to-go mug, laptop open, three printed documents laid out in a row like exhibits, and the expression of a woman who arrived early on purpose and wants me to feel it.
I feel it.
"You're late," she says.
"It's six fifty-eight."
"I said that wrong. You're not early." She pulls out the chair directly across from hers. Not beside her. Across. "Sit."
I sit.
She pushes a document across the table without preamble. I read her notes before I read the document because her notes tell me more about how she thinks than the manifest does.
She started at the output and worked backward to the breach.
So did I. Last night. Alone. With information I haven't decided whether to share.
"Route management platform," she says, turning the laptop to face me.
"Whoever altered the manifest had real credentials.
Logged in from an IP registered to Sullivan Transport's main office, made three changes, and logged out in under four minutes.
" She taps the access log on screen. "Thirty minutes before the truck left the yard. "
"Who does the login belong to?"
"A dispatcher named Hollis Greer. Nine years with us." A pause with a shape to it. She picks up her pen, clicks it once, sets it down. "He called in sick the morning of the haul."
"Convenient."
"I thought so."
She opens another screen and leans forward over the keyboard.
The collar of her top shifts and I see the bruise at her collarbone, blooming purple-yellow from yesterday's fall.
I have replayed it four times since last night.
Her in the dirt. My hands on her before I had permission, finding the injury, staying longer than they needed to.
Every time I land on the same problem: my hands remember the shape of her ribs and I can't make them forget.
She catches me looking.
I don't move my eyes fast enough. Didn't try to.
"It's fine," she says. Clipped. The voice of a woman who has already decided she's not injured and doesn't need anyone to confirm it.
"That's not what I was thinking."
Her pen stops clicking. "What were you thinking?"
I look at the bruise one more time. Then I look at her. "I was thinking about the person who put it there."
Something shifts behind her eyes. She's looking at me the way people look at a man when they realize the quiet is not the same thing as calm.
"When I find them," my voice drops to the register I've only ever used right before I hurt someone, "you won't need to ask what happened."
She holds my gaze for two full seconds. She doesn't lean back. Doesn't blink. Doesn't do any of the things people do when they hear that voice.
Something inside my chest that I have kept locked for fifteen years shifts, and I feel the bolt slide, and I cannot put it back.
Then she sets down her pen, and when she speaks again her voice is steady, but the rhythm has changed, just slightly, and I hear it.
"You have the Blackwater copy of the original manifest?" she asks.
I open my folder and slide it across. She takes it without touching my hand, which tells me she knew exactly where my hand was. I note it and say nothing.
She sets both copies side by side. Her pen clicks twice in the silence, the rhythm of a woman thinking, and I have been in enough negotiations to know when someone is deciding whether they believe what they're holding. She's deciding.
"Three line items changed," she says. "Weight, route checkpoint, arrival window. The weight change matters most. It reclassifies the cargo type." She taps the page. "That reclassification changes which scale stations the truck stops at. It bypasses two of them."
"Which two?"
"Mile thirty-four and the border approach at mile twelve." She looks up. "The ones with cameras."
I hold her gaze. My jaw is tight and I'm aware of it.
Aware that I'm running the secondary route map in my head, the one she doesn't know about, the one that connects to things I can't hand a Sullivan across a conference table.
I lean back in my chair because leaning forward would put me closer to her and closer is not the direction my discipline can afford right now.
"The Blackwater shipment records," she says. "I need to see the original cargo documentation. What was actually in that truck before the manifest was touched?"
"Cattle."
"Cattle and what else?"
I look at her.
She holds my stare. Doesn't blink. Doesn't shift. The patience of a woman who has spent years in rooms full of men who underestimate her and has learned to outlast every single one of them.
"Cattle," I say again. "High-grade registered stock. Twelve head, Angus-Hereford cross, transport documentation filed with the state." I slide the Blackwater cargo record across. "See for yourself."
She takes it. Reads. Her front teeth catch her full bottom lip while she works through the numbers, dragging it slowly, and she has no idea she's doing it.
If she knew, she would stop, and if she stopped, I could think again.
I want to taste that lip. I want to put my thumb on it and pull it free and replace her teeth with my mouth.
I look at the window and I breathe once through my nose and I do not move.
"The cargo documentation is clean," she says.
I come back from wherever I just was. "I know."
"Cleaner than it needs to be for a standard haul." She sets it down. "Someone put work into this paperwork before anything went wrong. Not your operations team." She angles it toward me. "Look at the certification date."
I look at the date.
"Filed four days before the haul," she says. "Before the manifest was altered. Before the GPS went dark. Someone cleaned your cargo record before they touched ours." She lets that sit. "They were building the board before the game started."
She's right. And the certification date connects to a Blackwater account that processed a payment forty-eight hours before the filing, an account I found on ranch servers at two a.m. and copied to a drive that is currently in my glove box and not on this table.
I locked the file, wiped the access log, and was back in bed by three.
"You're saying the planning started earlier than we thought?"
"I'm saying someone expected us to be sitting exactly here, comparing exactly these documents, and they cleared their tracks before we started looking." She reaches across for the cargo record at the same moment I reach for it.
Her fingers are close enough that I can see the silver ring on her right hand, a small dent on the inner band from years of wearing.
The distance between her knuckle and my thumb is nothing, is less than an inch, and I feel the paper pulling between us like a current running through the grain.
Neither of us lets go. The room shrinks to the width of that page and the sound of her breathing and the heat coming off my own skin in a way I cannot control.
She looks up from the page.
Her eyes come to mine and stay.
Then she does something I have watched and returned to more times than I will ever admit: she decides.
I can see it happen. Maren Sullivan deciding is not a slow thing.
It's a door opening. It's a key turning.
She sets the page down on her side of the table, pushes back her chair just enough, and stands.
She walks around the table to my side.
I don't move. I don't breathe. A whole lifetime of knowing this woman and understanding the exact distance we were supposed to keep, and she is closing it in a Sullivan Transport conference room at seven in the morning with her annotated manifests laid out around us like evidence.
She stops in front of me. I'm still seated and she's standing and she looks down at me with that expression, the one she uses when she has already won the argument and is deciding whether to be gracious about it.
She is not being gracious.
"Maren." Her name in my mouth comes out low and flat, the warning register, the last responsible thing I have left.
She looks at my mouth.
I reach for her.
I catch her face in both hands, the way I’ve been imagining myself doing, and her hands grab the front of my shirt and she closes the last of the distance before either of us has any business closing it.
The kiss breaks something. Not gently. The way a window breaks, all at once, the pressure and then nothing between us, and I feel the sound she makes against my mouth in the base of my spine.
I stand. The chair scrapes back. She tips her chin up and I bend to meet her, hands in her hair, tilting her head back. Ten years of not doing this comes out in the kiss. Every time I looked away, every time I kept my hands where they belonged. I cannot close it back down.
She makes another sound and I lose the last calculation I was running.
I get her onto the table.
Papers go. I don't look at them. I look at her, flushed, chest rising fast, hands still twisted in my shirt, and I don't examine what that does to me. Not now.
I find her mouth again, her jaw, the soft skin below her ear, and pull her shirt over her head.
Dark lace bra. The sight of her hits me like a fist, full and perfect, and my cock kicks hard against my jeans.
I press my mouth to the bruise at her collarbone, carefully. She goes still. I feel her exhale.
Then I get her jeans off in two moves and stop being slow about anything.
She lifts her hips without being asked. A decision not a reflex.
Underneath is the matching lace, dark and ruined already.
I knew it would be. I press my thumb against the fabric and she makes a sound that I know I'll be returning to for a long time.
I pull the lace aside and put my mouth on her and she moans, low and unguarded.
Her hands go to my hair. Not gentle. I don't need gentle. I need the sounds she's making and the way her thighs tighten and the fact that she says my name like a warning she's already given up on. I take my time.