Chapter 21
TWENTY-ONE
KNOX
Nearly two hundred miles of empty highway and the tail car has been sitting four cars back since Ovando.
Maren clocks it before I say anything. She always does. "Silver sedan. Same one since the gas station."
"I know."
"Knox."
"I know." My hands tighten on the wheel. I've been running the math for six miles, watching it hold distance, watching it close it. Whoever's driving isn't trying to hide anymore.
It closes the gap outside Clearwater Junction, and I feel Maren go rigid in the seat beside me the second she reads it the same way I do. I brake hard and swerve toward the shoulder, forcing him to choose between backing off and closing the last of the distance blind.
He chooses wrong.
His front end catches our rear quarter panel and the truck lurches sideways across the centerline before I get the wheel back, gravel screaming under the tires.
Maren's head snaps toward the dash, but her hand doesn't find anything to grab fast enough.
We fishtail onto the shoulder in a wall of dust and come to a stop three feet from the ditch.
Silence.
The engine ticking.
Maren's hand at her mouth, blood on her fingers when she pulls it away.
Something in me goes very quiet and very cold.
I'm out of the truck before she's finished saying my name.
The sedan has stopped fifty feet back. Canadian plates, engine still running, two men inside deciding whether they made the right choice today. I cross the distance at a dead run and I am not thinking about Blackwater Ranch or Gideon or anything except the blood on Maren's hand.
I open the door and pull the driver out.
He doesn't get a chance to reach for anything.
I have him on the gravel with my knee in his spine before the passenger clears his door.
The passenger takes one look at what's happening to his partner and goes still, hands up, the universal language of a man who has just understood he picked the wrong car to hit.
"Paid to follow," the driver says, before I ask a second time. Fast. Desperate. "Paid to follow and photograph, that's it. You braked, I was too close, I didn't have room to react—" His voice cracks. "Nobody told me to hit you. Nobody said hurt her, I swear to God—"
"Who?" I ask. Quiet. My voice drops into the register I use right before something breaks.
"A contact out of Great Falls. Local. He does jobs for whoever pays. We don't ask who's behind him." His voice cracks again. "He knows your roads. Knows the ranch schedules. I don't have a name, I swear, he pays in cash and burner numbers—"
I take both their phones and the keys to the sedan and throw them into the trees. I tell them what happens if I see either of their faces in Montana again, and I mean every word of it in a register that doesn't need volume.
I watch them understand that I mean it.
Then I go back to Maren.
She's out of the truck, standing, one hand braced on the door, blood at her lip and the bruise already dark along her cheekbone. When I reach her, my hands aren't steady, not for the first time since a rodeo arena weeks ago.
"Let me look at you."
"I'm fine."
"Maren."
"I'm fine, Knox." But she lets me tilt her face into the light anyway, lets me check the cut at her lip, the swelling starting to close her eye. Her hands are shaking. Mine are worse.
"They weren't trying to kill us," I say. "Local subcontractor. Paid to watch, not to hit anything." My jaw is tight enough to ache. "That's the only reason you're standing here right now instead of in an ambulance."
"I know."
"I don't think you do." My voice comes out rougher than I mean it to. "I made that choice. I braked, I forced his hand, and you're the one bleeding for it."
"Knox." She puts her hand flat on my chest, right over the place her hand always finds when she needs to steady one of us. Usually me. "I'm here. Look at me. I'm here."
I look at her. Blood on her lip, a bruise already deepening into her cheekbone, and she is looking back at me steady and furious and alive.
I pull her in. No air between us, her face against my chest, my hand at the back of her head, and I hold her there until my heart stops slamming hard enough to feel it in my teeth.
She doesn't fight it. Her fingers curl into my shirt and she lets me have this, lets me have her, for as long as I need it.
When I finally let go, I check the truck. Tie rods, tires, the dent in the rear quarter panel where the sedan caught us. It'll hold.
I climb back behind the wheel and pull onto the highway with my hand on her thigh the entire rest of the drive. I need the contact more than she does.
We don't talk about McKenna for the last forty miles. There's nothing left to say that the blood on her lip hasn't already said.
The building the metadata pointed to is a wine bar now, which feels like the state of Montana laughing directly at us.
Maren's split lip has stopped bleeding by the time we walk in, though the bruise is only getting worse.
The manager behind the bar gives her the kind of concerned look that makes her tell him she walked into a cabinet door before he can ask.
He remembers nothing about a records purge in 2019 except that it happened during a renovation, half the archive going into a dumpster behind the alley.
Maren gets his name, a number, and a promise to check with the former office manager, who apparently sells real estate in Kalispell now and hasn't answered a call from a stranger since 2021.
"Dead end," Maren says on the sidewalk, sun still hot despite the hour, her hand shading her eyes. "For today."
I look at her face. The swelling, the exhaustion underneath the composure, the way she's still favoring the side where she hit the dash.
It's past five. The drive back is three hours through the same stretch of highway where a man just put a car into ours, and I am not doing that with her hurt and the light going and whoever's paying that subcontractor still out there.
"We're not driving back tonight," I say.
She doesn't argue, which tells me everything about how she's feeling.
"Best hotel in the city," I say. "Top floor. Where would you stay?"
She looks at me for a second like the question doesn't belong anywhere near the day we've had, then answers anyway, naming a place without hesitation. The kind she'd know from years of friends' weddings and college graduations in this town.
I call. Give my name. Ask for the largest suite in the building. I don't negotiate or explain. The woman on the other end doesn't need a reason. Money moves fast enough on its own.
We check in at six, Maren's split lip already scabbing over, the bruise along her cheekbone gone the deep color of a storm.
Maren glances around the suite, taking in the size of it, then looks at me. "We don't have anything. No bags, no—"
"I know."
"You know."
"I know." I don't explain further. She narrows her eyes at me but doesn't push. She's learned by now that when I say I know in that tone, it means something is already handled.
We bathe together, the suite's tub big enough for two people who aren't in a hurry, and neither of us is, not yet.
I wash her hair, careful around the swelling at her cheekbone.
She lets me. She tips her head back and watches me from under her lashes, patient, the banter starting low and slow in the steam.
"You're staring," she says.
"I'm allowed."
I pull her back against my chest, her spine to my sternum, and my hands slide up to cup her breasts, thumbs finding her nipples, already hard as pebbles before I've done more than touch.
She makes a low sound and lets her head fall back against my shoulder.
I think about the creek. About wanting exactly this and having to settle for cold water and restraint.
Not tonight.
My hand slides lower, under the water, and I don't hesitate this time. One finger, slow, and she goes taut against me. A second, and her hips buck once, involuntary, water sloshing over the rim of the tub.
"Knox—"
"I’ve got you." I work her slow and deliberate, my mouth at her throat, and she's panting within a minute, her hand gripping my thigh under the water hard enough to bruise.
She turns her head and kisses me, deep, her tongue tangling with mine, and then she's twisting in my lap, straddling me, water surging around us. Her hand slides down between us, wraps around me, and she makes a sound of pure satisfaction against my mouth.
"God, you're hard."
"Always. When it's you."
She sinks down onto me slow, both of us going still at the moment we're fully joined, foreheads pressed together, water rising over the edge of the tub and neither of us caring in the slightest. She sets the pace, steady at first, her hips rolling in a rhythm that has me gripping her waist just to keep from losing myself too fast.
"Tell me," she says, breathless, against my jaw.
"You feel like nothing else on earth." My hands find her hips and guide her faster. "Tight. Perfect. Mine."
"Yours." She echoes it back, wrecked, her voice bouncing off the tile until it sounds like there are two of her, three, a chorus of her wanting me. "I'm yours, Knox—"
The pace turns frantic. Water sloshes over both of us, onto the floor, soaking the bath mat, and neither of us stops long enough to care. Her nails dig into my shoulders. I feel her tightening around me, the rhythm stuttering as she gets close, and I drop my mouth to her ear.
"Come for me, Trouble." Low. Certain. "Come on my cock. Hard."
She shatters. Her whole body locks around me, clenching in waves, my name breaking apart in her throat, and the sound of it echoing off hard tile is the single best thing I have ever heard in my life.
I follow her under, gripping her hips hard enough to bruise, spilling into her with her name on my own lips this time, both of us shaking, water gone still around us.
She collapses against my chest, boneless, and I hold her there while our heartbeats find each other again.