Chapter 8
EIGHT
KNOX
The access log shows an intrusion through a Sullivan Transport IP. Clean, credentialed, someone who knew exactly which door to walk through, and I'm building the thread backward when my phone rings.
"My laptop camera just turned on by itself." Maren's voice is careful. Controlled. The voice of a woman who is afraid and has decided to be angry about it instead.
Every civilized thought leaves my head.
"Pack what you need," I say. "I'll send you the gate code."
Silence.
The silence of a woman doing the math on what I just said and everything it means. I let it sit. I don't push. Pushing her has never once worked and I know better.
"Knox."
"You've been watched for hours. Your search history is exposed. Whoever is in that system knows exactly what you've been looking at and who you've been calling." I pause. "I have better security than you do right now. That's the only reason I'm asking."
It's not the only reason and we both know that.
Another silence. This time shorter.
"Twenty minutes," she says.
I go to the study to tell Gideon before he hears it another way.
He's been in there since dinner, which means he's been thinking, which means the conversation is already finished before it starts. He looks up from the desk when I come in.
"Maren Sullivan is on her way," I tell him. "Her system was breached. Camera accessed remotely. I have better security than she does right now."
He looks at me for a long moment. "The surveillance came through Sullivan systems."
"I know. I pulled the log."
"That either means they did it, or someone wants us to think they did."
"Also know that."
"Having her here gives us a position." His voice stays even. "She trusts you. That is the closest we have ever been to the inside of their operation."
"She's not leverage," I say.
The silence that follows is the kind Gideon uses instead of raising his voice. In the three seconds it lasts, I feel the entire weight of nineteen years old and an equipment barn and a man who didn't come back to Rimrock.
"Everyone is leverage," he says. "That's the first thing I taught you."
I walk out.
I'm watching the gate camera feed when her headlights sweep the end of the drive. The gate swings open. She sits there three seconds, engine idling, before she pulls through. I watch every yard of her approach.
That three-second pause is going to cost me.
She's parked near the front steps when I go out to meet her. Laptop bag over one shoulder, chin up a half-inch too high, taking in the main house with the kind of controlled stillness that means she's working hard to look unbothered.
She knows exactly where she is. Blackwater land. Enemy territory, even now. The only tell is the way her hand tightens once on the bag strap before she lets it go.
I look at her first. All of her. Red dress, sandals, hair loose around her shoulders and slightly wrecked.
She left in a hurry and it shows. I take my time getting back to her face.
I've had her once and my body has decided that constitutes a permanent condition.
She's standing on my land and I'm already half-hard.
She looks at me. "You gave me the gate code."
"I did."
"That's not nothing."
"No," I say. "It's not."
The mountain light is lighting up her silky hair, pink and gold from the peaks catching the last of the sun.
She knows what it means that she's here. We both do. She doesn't need me to say it.
"Show me the log," she says.
I bring her inside.
Dark hardwood, timber framing, the stone fireplace arch visible through to the great room.
My mom keeps white and cream roses on the entry table and their scent mixes with the warm night air off the open windows, green and full, the full weight of July in the foothills. Maren goes still just inside the door.
I watch her take it in. The scale of it, the bones of it, the way this house was built by people who planned to stay.
The Sullivan place is newer, cleaner lines, more glass.
This is timber and stone and a hundred years of decisions about what mattered.
Different philosophy. Same cameras. Same gates.
She misses nothing.
"Traditional," she says finally.
"We're traditional people."
Her mouth curves. "Your mother's garden smells incredible."
"Don't tell her that. She'll talk to you for an hour about soil pH."
A real smile, quick and unguarded. Then she's following me down the hall, reading everything she passes.
My office is at the back of the main house, past the kitchen.
Floor-to-ceiling shelving, a desk that's been in the family since before I was born, a window facing west toward the mountains.
I set her up at my desk with a secondary monitor and the ranch's encrypted network, then go make coffee I don't need so I have something to do with my hands.
When I come back she's made herself completely at home.
This is a problem.
Sandals kicked off, one foot tucked under her, reading glasses on, scrolling the access log like she's been sitting in this chair her whole life.
The late light catches the auburn in her hair and she looks like she belongs there.
My father would call her leverage. Standing in the doorway looking at her, I can't make that word fit.
I stand there two seconds longer than I should.
"Sit anywhere," I say.
She doesn't look up.
She reaches out and takes the mug from my hand without looking. Sips. Goes still for half a second.
"You made it right," she says.
"Nell's has been making it that way for you since you were nineteen. Splash of cream, half a sugar. I pay attention."
Something warm crosses her face that she doesn't manage fast enough. Then she's back on the screen.
I pull a chair from the corner and sit beside her.
This close, I can feel the warmth off her. The red dress against her knee is three inches from my thigh and I am aware of every one of those inches while she works.
She moves through the access log the way she moves through a room.
No wasted motion, no asking for direction, and inside eight minutes she's found a thread I'd have spent another hour on.
Credential owner, employment history, shift overlap.
A secondary IP from a Canadian subnet that appears twice.
She taps the screen before I've finished reading the line.
"That address. Not Sullivan infrastructure."
I lean in. My shoulder against her good one now.
"No. It's not."
"Dead credential used to get in, then access passed to an external address. Whoever held that login either sold it or had it taken." She pulls her glasses off and turns her head and we're closer than either of us planned. "McKenna."
"Maybe."
"Stop saying maybe." Her eyes hold mine. "The records I was reading disappeared while I was in them. My camera came on. There's a Canadian subnet inside a Sullivan system with no business being there." A beat. "Say it."
"McKenna," I say.
She turns back to the screen. I don't.
We work it together. She pulls every access entry with that subnet, I cross-reference against the shipment timeline, and what builds between us is a picture that's been forming for months.
Small intrusions. Patient. Someone moving through both families' systems, reading, mapping, leaving almost nothing behind.
The Sullivan access is the first real fingerprint.
Either they got sloppy or they wanted us to find it.
I'm not sure which is worse.
The intrusions predate the shipment and the driver by three months.
That’s the thing I don't say out loud. If someone was already inside Sullivan systems that long ago, then the rodeo wasn't the beginning.
I've been treating Whiskey Girl going sideways as a separate problem.
Looking at the timeline now, I'm less certain of that. The thread is there, but it’s not tight enough. I'm not handing it to her yet.
By nine I push back from the desk. She's been at it two hours straight and probably hasn't eaten since morning. I go to the kitchen, open the refrigerator, and put together what's there. Aged cheddar, prosciutto, sourdough from the bread box, grapes, the good olive oil. Caymus. Two glasses.
She looks up when I set the tray on the desk.
"You didn't have to do that."
"Eat something." I hand her a glass.
She looks at the board, looks at me, picks up the prosciutto, and doesn't say anything else about it. She eats, I watch her sideways, and feel something shift in my chest that sits lower and heavier than anything I want to name right now.
We finish most of it. Both glasses of wine. She's back on the shipping log, still standing after pulling a fresh page from the printer, leaning across me to point at a timestamp on the upper monitor. Her hair sweeps forward and the ends of it brush my jaw.
I want to wrap it around my fist. Pull her head back. Put my mouth on her throat and stay there.
I catch her wrist instead.
She goes still. Her pulse jumps under my fingers.
"Knox." Very quiet.
"I know."
I turn my head. She turns hers. Close enough that I can see the color her eyes go in low light.
"We shouldn't," she says, but doesn't pull her wrist back.
"You said that last time."
"I meant it last time."
"Did you?"
A pause. "No," she says. Then she closes the distance.
I stand.
The first kiss is careful for about three seconds and then it isn't. I pull her around to face me, hands in her hair, and she makes a sound against my mouth that breaks something loose that I've been holding in place all evening.
Hours of her heat beside me, her shoulder against mine, her scent, the sound of her voice when she found something in the data.
I've been hard since she walked through my front door and I am done pretending otherwise.
I pull back.
She's breathing hard, lips parted, eyes on mine. I hold her gaze and walk to the office door, unhurried, and turn the lock. The click of it is loud in the quiet.
When I turn around, she's still watching me. I cross the room, take her hand, and walk her to the couch along the far wall.