Chapter 19
NINETEEN
KNOX
The leather chair is pulled out, which means he wants me standing. I stand.
The printed photo sits on the desk between us. Maren and me on the cabin porch, the mountain at our backs, my hand at the small of her back. A clean lens. A patient angle.
My father looks at it for a long moment. Behind him, near the bookshelf, my mother stands without saying a word. She has been saying nothing since I walked in, which is its own kind of answer about what she knows and has decided not to say tonight.
"You're inside Sullivan operations." Gideon taps the photo once, like it's evidence at a trial.
"Their girl trusts you. Eight days and you know their route platform, their contact network, how they move when something goes wrong.
" He looks up. "And instead of using that, you're mooning over her on a porch where anyone with a long lens can find you.
Twenty years I spent building a son who doesn't make mistakes like this. Was I wrong about which son I built?"
"She's not an asset."
"No," Gideon says. "She's a liability wearing a pretty face, and you're the one who let her become one. Your brother would have known the difference." A pause, letting Holt's name do its work. "Your mother hasn't said a word since you walked in. Ask yourself why."
"Every person in your life either serves this family or threatens it." His voice stays even. "There is no third category. I taught you that."
"You taught me a lot of things."
"And you've used every single one of them." A beat. He lets it sit. "Including on her. Or is that the part you'd like me to forget you did?"
I have no answer for this because he's right. The difference between Gideon and me is not that I haven't used her. It's that I feel the weight of every time I did. He never has. He never will. That's supposed to be the difference. Standing here, it doesn't feel like enough of one.
"End it," he says. "Tonight. The families are already watching."
"The photo is McKenna pushing us into exactly this conversation." I pick it up from the desk and set it face-down. "Which means the right move is not to have it."
Gideon stands.
He doesn't raise his voice. He never raises his voice. But he comes around the desk and the room shrinks, and I hold my ground the way he taught me to, because backing up shows weakness.
"You're choosing her."
I step forward. "Ted Lowry gave Holt three names today.
" I watch something shift behind his eyes.
He holds it flat. "One of them worked for McKenna.
One of them has been inside our gate codes for eighteen months.
None of them connect to the Sullivans. Which means we've been looking at the wrong family. And McKenna knew we would."
Gideon sets both hands flat on the desk.
"You're choosing her," he says again, quieter this time, which is worse.
"I'm choosing the truth about who the enemy is. Those aren't the same thing." I hold his gaze. "But yes. I'm choosing her."
The door is behind me. I don't wait for dismissal.
I walk out.
Holt is in the hallway. He falls in beside me without a word, which is how I know he was listening. He positions himself outside conversations he's supposed to be missing. I've never once called him on it.
"The third name," I say.
"Still working it." He glances toward the closed study door. "Surveillance is escalating. Two cameras found on the north fence line this morning. Professional placement. They're not watching the cattle."
"They're watching the gate."
"They're watching who comes through it." A beat. "And who leaves."
I look at him. He looks back with the flat professional attention of a man who served three tours and came home to a fence line that turned out to be its own kind of war.
"Holt."
"Yeah?"
"Make sure Ted stays comfortable."
"He's comfortable." He says comfortable the way that means something else entirely.
I leave him in the hall and go.
She's still in the driveway.
Leaning against the hood of her truck with her arms crossed and the Blackwater main house lit up behind me.
She looks at me like she's already done the math and is waiting to see if I arrive at the same answer.
She doesn't say anything. She watches me cross the yard toward her in the dark and she doesn't move.
I stop in front of her.
"Well?" she says.
"I walked out."
She looks at me for a long moment. Then she pushes off the hood, gets in her truck, and starts the engine.
I follow her out the Blackwater gate and south down the county road, her taillights ahead of me in the dark. When we reach the Sullivan Ranch entrance, she pulls up to the keypad and punches in the code without hesitating. The gate swings open. She pulls through.
I pull through behind her.
Neither of us has said what that means. We don't need to.
She parks in front of her guesthouse and gets out without looking back. I park beside her and follow her inside.
She goes to the kitchen table and sits. Sets her phone on the surface between us, unlocks it, and turns the screen so I can read it.
The notebook. Every page photographed in sequence. The columns of initials and amounts and dates. The page near the middle, the account number, the two letters.
She doesn't say anything, just lets me look.
I look up.
She's watching me with the patience of a woman who decided before I walked through her door how this conversation was going to go and is simply waiting for me to arrive at where she already is.
"When?" I ask.
"Tonight. Your glove box, while you were inside." She takes the phone back. "I put it back exactly where I found it."
"I know."
"How?"
"Because you're a Sullivan and Sullivans don't burn evidence. They hold it." I pull out the chair across from her and sit. "And because you're looking at me like a woman who has already decided what she's going to do with it."
Something moves in her eyes. Something colder than anger and more precise.
"What else?" she demands.
Two words. The full inventory of everything I haven't handed her.
"The stable footage the night we reviewed it together. I redirected your attention away from one frame." I hold her gaze. "You already screenshotted it before I noticed. You knew." I set both hands flat on the table. "That's what I'm giving you tonight."
"That's not everything."
"No."
She looks at me for a long beat. The math runs behind her eyes and she lets me watch it run.
"You chose your family over me," she says, "before you ever chose me over your family. I need to know which one you're actually doing."
I look at her across the table. The notebook photos on her phone. The kitchen light throwing her face in half shadow, the color of her eyes impossible to read from here.
I get up and I go around the table.
She comes off the chair before I've cleared the corner of it.
She shoves me back against the refrigerator, one hand flat on my chest. The impact is solid and my left side lights up.
I don't move away from it. I let her hold me there.
She stands in front of me in her flannel shirt with her chin up and her eyes dark and she is the most formidable thing I have seen in my life.
Her hands go to my shirt, the stain at the left side gone rust-brown the way blood does when it dries.
She unbuttons it from the collar down, slow, taking her time because she has decided to take her time and there is nobody in this room who is going to change that.
I stand against the refrigerator with my hands at my sides and I let her.
She spreads the shirt open. Looks at me like she looked at the footage, the notebook, every piece of evidence she's collected and decided what to do with. Not hungry. Assessing. Taking inventory and making me feel every second of it.
"Maren."
"Don't." She traces one finger down the ink on my chest, unhurried, like she has all night. "Don't say a word."
She pulls the shirt off my shoulders and drops it. Then she steps back and reaches for the hem of her own shirt.
I stop breathing.
She pulls it over her head and drops her bra to the floor.
The kitchen light finds her bare skin and I stop pretending I'm in control of anything.
She watches me watch her. The look on her face when she catches it is the look of a woman who knows precisely what she's doing and intends to keep doing it.
She puts both palms on my chest and walks me backward through the dark hallway into her bedroom. The west-facing windows fill the far wall, the Rockies black and silver under the stars, enough light to see her by without needing anything else.
She pushes me down onto the edge of her bed and stands over me.
I look up at her and every control I own is gone, which is what she came in here intending to prove.
She slides her jeans down, hooks her thumbs in her panties, and steps out of both.
She looks down at me in the low light and I make a sound low in my throat.
I get my boots off. She watches me do it, arms crossed, and I get my jeans off too, and she watches that as well without offering to help, which is its own kind of devastating.
Then she pushes me back flat on the bed and starts moving down my body.
Her mouth at my throat first. My collarbone.
The center of my chest, the ridge of my sternum, and I exhale hard through my nose because her lips are warm and she is taking her time and I am already in serious trouble.
She drags her mouth down my stomach and I feel every nerve ending I own light up in sequence. My hand finds her hair.
Then she veers to the inside of my thigh and I groan out loud, low and helpless, and she hums against my skin like she's satisfied with that answer.
She stays there long enough that I have to close my eyes. Long enough that I am actively bargaining with myself. Her mouth moves, warm and deliberate, tracing inward by degrees, and I tighten my hand in her hair and say something that comes out mostly as her name and partly as a groan.
Then she takes me into her mouth and my whole body arches off the mattress.