Chapter 23
TWENTY-THREE
KNOX
A traitor inside Rimrock narrows the suspect list and widens the damage.
I've got Tate's file open on one side of my desk and Holt's handwritten timeline on the other. The two of them are saying the same thing in different handwriting, and I don't like what they're saying.
Maren is standing at my desk with her arms crossed, reading the Forest Service gate log upside down because she memorized it on the drive over and is now just confirming she got it right.
She has been doing that all morning. Memorizing things at a glance and then double checking herself like she doesn't trust her own certainty, which is the single most Sullivan thing about her.
"Someone with clearance to touch personnel records," Dawson says. He's come to stand at her shoulder to read the same page.
Dawson Sullivan standing in my office is not a thing that has ever happened.
Holt breaks the quiet first, because Holt has never once let silence sit longer than it needs to.
"I've got a source who confirmed the equipment yard scan wasn't standard maintenance access.
Whoever used it walked straight to the north server room.
No detour. No hesitation." He says it flat, the register he uses for things he doesn't want followed up on.
"Didn't volunteer where I got that. I'm not going to. "
Dawson doesn't ask. I watch him not ask, watch the question form behind his eyes and then get set aside on purpose. He understands exactly what kind of answer he'd get if he pushed, and he'd rather not know the shape of it.
"We ran the shipping manifests against the corridor logs," he says instead.
"Found two records that were adjusted after the fact.
Not deleted. Adjusted. Timestamps changed to move a truck off a route it was actually on.
" He says adjusted the same careful way Holt said didn't volunteer, phrasing built to let the rest of us not ask who did the adjusting or on whose authority.
I don't ask.
For a few agonizing seconds, four of us sit around a desk in a room built by a man who taught me to break wrists before I could drive, and none of us says the thing sitting in the middle of the table. That we are the children of two criminal empires.
That Holt has a source who extracts information in ways none of us are going to examine out loud. That Dawson just admitted, without admitting it, that Sullivan Transport falsifies its own records when the situation calls for it.
That I am running a fourth name through Ted Lowry's confession using methods Maren has never once asked me to describe in detail, because she already knows, because she was raised close enough to violence to recognize its shape even when it wears a different family's face.
Maren catches my eye.
She isn't horrified. She isn't thrilled either. Most people flinch from that kind of math. She doesn't, and I still haven't gotten used to how little it seems to cost her.
"McKenna didn't build this network." I sit back. "McKenna found it. Already built. Already trusted. And decided to use it."
Nobody argues with that, because nobody has a better read.
I stand and cross to the window.
"Ted's fourth name," I say. "Someone with years of ranch access. That's consistent with what we're building here."
"Do you have it?" Maren asks.
"Not yet." I look at her. "Holt's running it down clean. I'm not handing you a name I can't back yet."
"You said that about the notebook too."
"And I was right to." I hold her gaze. "I'll give you the name the second it's real. Not before."
She studies me a beat longer than she needs to, the way she does when she's deciding whether to push. Then she lets it go. She doesn't love the timing. She trusts the man giving it to her anyway, and I feel the weight of that every time she hands it over.
Dawson clears his throat. "If we're doing this. Actually doing this. Sharing real information instead of circling each other." He looks between me and Holt. "I want it understood that this doesn't leave this room. Not to Declan. Not yet."
"Same," I say. "Not to Gideon."
Holt's mouth does something that isn't quite a smile. "Didn't think I needed to say it."
"You didn't," I tell him. "I did. For the room."
Maren looks at her brother, and something passes between them that's entirely wordless, Sullivan shorthand built over thirty years of watching each other survive the same house. Dawson nods once. Whatever he was going to object to, he sets it down.
We work another twenty minutes. Cross-reference the equipment yard scan against Corbin Reyes's actual employment dates, against the county records office visit, against three Blackwater personnel files Holt pulls without asking anyone's permission because Holt doesn't ask permission for things that are already his to access.
By the time we're done, we have a shape without a name, three data points forming the outline of a person none of us can see clearly yet.
Dawson moves to leave first. Shakes my hand at the door, which is not a thing Dawson Sullivan has ever done, and says, "Call if the fourth name comes in before we talk again." I say I will and we both know it's the truth for the first time in the history of our families' arrangement.
Holt peels off toward the barn without a word, already back on his phone, already working whatever thread he's not telling any of us about.
Which leaves me and Maren in the hallway.
I've been in a room with her for the better part of an hour and haven't put a single hand on her the whole time. My palms have been itching since she leaned over my desk to read that gate log.
That ends now.
I back her against the wall outside my office, slow enough that she has every chance to stop me. She doesn't take it. I plant one hand flat on the wall beside her head, then the other, boxing her in.
She tips her head, watching me come, that same assessing look she gave the evidence twenty minutes ago, like she’s deciding whether I’m worth the same attention.
"Ask me how long I've been like this." I press my groin against her stomach.
Her breath catches. "Knox."
"Since you leaned over my desk and made me watch you read upside down." Low. Certain. "Do the math."
Her hands land flat on my chest instead of pushing me off, which tells me everything her mouth isn't saying yet.
"We're at Blackwater Ranch," she says, low, amused, not remotely stopping me. "In a hallway."
"I know exactly where we are."
"Your father's study is forty feet from here."
"I know that too." I tip her chin up. "Doesn't change anything I'm about to do."
I kiss her the way I've been wanting to since she walked into that meeting and out-argued three grown men without raising her voice once.
"Well," Holt says, from somewhere behind me.
I don't move fast enough. I don't move at all, actually, because stopping mid-kiss for my brother rounding a corner has never once been a priority of mine and isn't becoming one today.
Maren laughs against my mouth, breathless, not remotely embarrassed, and I finally pull back far enough to look at Holt, who has the bored expression of a man who has seen worse things than his brother kissing a Sullivan in a hallway and isn't going to pretend otherwise.
"Forgot something," Holt says, holds up a folder, and walks past us into my office without further comment, which is Holt's version of extreme discretion.
Maren's still laughing when my phone rings.
Wyatt's name on the screen. Not a text. A call, which Wyatt almost never does, because Wyatt texts about everything short of a house fire.
I answer.
"Knox." His voice comes through wrong. Too fast, too flat, the sound of a man holding himself together by main force.
"Search and rescue pulled out of the county line search an hour ago.
No sign of him past where they found the truck.
No trail, no camp, nothing." A breath that isn't steady at all.
"It's been four days, Knox. Nobody's seen him.
Nobody's heard from him. They're talking about switching this to a recovery search instead of a rescue. "
The hallway goes very quiet.
Maren's hand finds mine.
I look at her, and she's already reading it off my face before I've said a single word, already understanding exactly what this means layered on top of everything we just spent an hour building in that office.
A trusted name. Years of access. Someone standing close enough to both families to be forgotten.
"Wyatt," I say. "I'm on my way."
I hang up.
Jacob Mercer is missing.