Chapter 29
TWENTY-NINE
KNOX
Morning light comes harsh through the east windows now, the kind that shows every line on my father's face and doesn't apologize for it. We all look like we were ridden hard and put away wet. None of us slept, all of us still carrying yesterday on our skin.
Gideon's question is still sitting on the table between the coffee cups nobody's touched. What else are you hiding?
My mother doesn't answer it.
Gideon's jaw works. He doesn't push again. A man who's spent his life extracting information from other people knows exactly when pushing costs more than it buys, even from his own wife.
He's already moving past the moment, already folding Josephine's half-truth into the architecture of the meeting the way he folds everything, useful or not.
"A temporary alliance," Declan says. "Not a truce. Not forgiveness for generations of watching each other's backs while keeping our hands on our own knives."
"I never asked for forgiveness." Gideon's voice doesn't rise. "I asked for a shared enemy handled before it kills more of either of our people."
"Jacob's not dead," I say.
Both men look at me.
"He's not confirmed dead," I say again, flatter this time. "I have three men working the timber roads right now, while we sit at this table arguing about who apologizes to whom. That doesn't stop because the sun came up."
Nobody argues with that. Nobody's supposed to.
Under the table, Maren's hand is still in mine. I feel her thumb move once against my knuckles, small, grounding.
Declan and Gideon shake hands across the table like men closing a business deal, because that's exactly what this is, and I feel something in my chest that isn't relief. It's the weight of watching two men agree to cooperate without agreeing to anything real underneath it.
Gideon's eyes come to me next. Then to Maren. Then back to me.
"This doesn't change what I said last week," he says. Quiet enough that it's meant for the family, not the room.
"I know what you said."
"And?"
I stand up.
I don't plan it. My body decides before the rest of me catches up, chair scraping back, and I stand beside Maren instead of pulling away from her, my hand finding the back of her neck, except this time I do it in front of my father and hers, in full daylight, with nothing to hide behind.
"I'm not ending it," I say. "I already told you that once. I'm not telling you again."
Gideon's face doesn't move. That's the worst version of him, the one where nothing shows. I've spent thirty-one years learning to read the nothing anyway.
"Everyone at this table understands the risk," he says. "A Blackwater choosing a Sullivan publicly. That's not romance. That's a political position with consequences."
"I understand the consequences better than anyone in this room." I don't look away from him. "I've been counting them since the rodeo."
"Then you understand I haven't changed my position.
I'm simply choosing not to spend this morning repeating it.
" Gideon's eyes move once to Maren, flat and assessing.
The same look he'd give a contract he hadn't decided whether to sign.
"That's not agreement, Knox. That's patience. Don't confuse the two."
He doesn't wait for me to answer. He turns to Declan instead, already treating the subject as closed on his terms rather than mine.
Declan watches with the steady, assessing patience of a man deciding whether to intervene on his daughter's behalf and choosing, visibly, not to.
Maren doesn't need him to. She's sitting there with my hand on the back of her neck and her spine straight and her eyes on her father, not asking his permission either.
"Dad," she says. "I'm not asking."
Declan's mouth does something that isn't quite a smile. "No," he says. "You never do."
The meeting breaks apart the way meetings like this always break apart, in pieces, people peeling off toward phones and trucks and the parts of the day that don't stop for family reckonings.
Dawson catches my eye on his way out and gives me one short nod, which from Dawson Sullivan is practically an embrace.
Kathleen touches Maren's shoulder once and says something low I don't catch.
Josephine leaves without looking at anyone.
Then it's just us, morning sun cutting long across the floorboards.
I pull her against me before she can say anything. My hand finds the back of her neck again, my other arm coming around her waist, and she comes easy, her back against my chest, her head tipping to the side to give me room at her throat. I press my mouth there and feel her exhale, long and slow.
"You stood up for me in there," she says.
"I wasn't going to sit through that conversation."
"You could have."
"I could have done a lot of things." My mouth stays at her throat. "I'm done doing the version of this that keeps everyone comfortable."
She turns in my arms to face me. Her eyes are tired in a way I recognize. I'm wearing the same look. The aftermath of a car wreck, a kidnapping, and a war council all inside seventy-two hours.
"Finding you gone was the hard part. Everything after that was just work." I tighten my arm around her waist, hold her closer, and make sure she feels exactly how much I mean it. “I’d do the ride again tomorrow. I’d do worse than that tomorrow. Standing up to my father in that room wasn’t a choice I had to think about.
None of it is. You’re not a variable I weigh against the rest of my life anymore, Maren. You’re the only constant in it.”
For one second neither of us has to perform strength for the other. The meeting could have gone worse. Both patriarchs could have dug in. Instead, there's an alliance and her weight against my chest. Some of the tension finally starts to bleed out of both our shoulders at once.
"There's one more thing you haven't told me," she says.
I go still.
Not the kind of still I use in a negotiation. The kind she's learned to read off me now. The stillness of a man caught exactly where he doesn't want to be caught.
"I counted the pages," she says. "Four. I photographed six from that notebook alone.
That's before the stable stills. Before the account number you told me you didn't recognize.
" Her voice doesn't shake. It never shakes when it matters most. "I'm not asking you to hand it over standing here.
I'm asking you to stop deciding for me what I get to carry. "
I could deflect. I've done it before, clean and easy. A lie that costs me nothing to tell and everything to have told. I look at her face instead and don't do it.
"You don't have to tell me today," she says, quieter now. "But you have to tell me."
"I will."
"I know."
She says it like she already believed me before I said it, which is somehow worse than if she'd doubted me, because it means she's decided to trust the promise before I've proven I'll keep it.
I press my mouth to her temple and hold her there, her back against my chest, quiet except for boots somewhere out on the porch and the low murmur of trucks starting in the yard.
Soon, not today. But not soon enough that the waiting has already started to feel like a debt.
She starts to move out of my arms. I turn her around instead.
"Maren."
She stops.
"I love you." I say it flat and certain, the way I say every single thing that matters most, and it costs me more than she'll ever know to hand it over with my father's boots still audible on the porch.
No speech built around it, because a speech would make it about me saying it instead of her having it.
"I've known since a rodeo arena a decade ago.
I'm done making you wait for the words too. "
Something moves across her face, open and cracked wide, something she has never once let show in a room with witnesses, and for three full seconds the woman who negotiates from the dirt doesn't have a single word.
"I love you too." Steadier than either of us expects. More certain than I've ever heard her be about anything. "I have for longer than I'm going to admit while you're looking that smug about it."
"I'm not smug."
"You're insufferable." But she's already pulling me down by the collar, and the kiss she gives me is the closing of a negotiation neither of us intends to reopen.
I stand there in the morning light holding the only thing I have ever wanted for myself instead of for this family and think: worth it.
All of it. Every consequence still coming.
Holt finds us in my office a few minutes later.
The couch is still there against the far wall, and my body reacts before my brain does. A fast, inconvenient pull low in my gut at exactly the wrong moment, given who just walked through the door.
He doesn't announce himself the way other people announce themselves.
He's just there, in the doorway, holding a folder that's gone soft and warped at the corners like it's been wet more than once.
Something in the set of his shoulders tells me before he says a word that this isn't good news dressed up as anything else.
"Found this in the root cellar cache," he says. "Second location. Jacob had more than one."
"Where?"
"Old homestead foundation, half a mile past the line cabin. Under a false floor panel." Holt's voice stays calm, economical, the register he uses for things that matter too much to dress up. "He built it to survive a search. Wanted it found by the right people, not the wrong ones."
He hands the folder to me. Maren steps in close enough to read over my shoulder, and I feel her go rigid the second I open the cover.
The first page is handwritten, Jacob's cramped fast script, worse than in the video, worse than anything we recovered from the flash drive. Names. Dates. A list of account numbers I don't let myself read closely yet because reading them closely means admitting how many of them I already recognize.
Across the top, underlined twice, hard enough that the pen tore the paper in two places.
FOR THE FBI IF I'M DEAD.
Nobody says anything for a long moment.
"He knew," Maren says finally. Quiet. "He knew it might come to this and he built a version of the truth that could survive him."
Holt's jaw works once. "There's a contact number inside. Federal. Financial crimes division out of the Salt Lake field office." He says it the way he says everything that costs him more than he'll admit. "Someone's going to be landing in Rimrock. Once this file finds its way to the right hands."
I look at the folder in my grip. At the underlined words that turn a missing man's fear into an instrument nobody in either family is ready for.
"And when they land," I say, "somebody's going to have to keep them alive long enough to do their job."
Holt doesn't answer right away.
He doesn't have to. I already know exactly which brother is about to spend the next chapter of this family's war standing between a federal investigator and every reason McKenna, or somebody worse, might want that investigator gone before they've finished their first cup of coffee in Rimrock.
Holt looks at the folder one more time. Then at me.
"Guess I better clear my calendar," he says, and walks out.
I stand there with the folder still open in my hands.
I close it. Set it on the desk, next to the couch where none of this started but somehow all of it ends up circling back to anyway.
Maren doesn't say anything. She doesn't have to. Her hand finds mine again, fingers lacing through, and I look down at where the folder sits now, at a missing man's fear turned into a weapon nobody in this family asked for.
Then I pull her into me, her back against my chest, her hand still laced through mine, and for one long moment neither of us looks at the folder at all.
"Whatever's coming," I say, against her hair, "you're not doing it without me. Any of it."
"I know."
She turns fully to face me, the pendant catching the light at her throat, small and gold.
That single stone throwing off a spark every time she moves.
Her eyes have gone the color they only go for me, soft and unguarded, trust sitting right there on the surface where I can watch it happen.
Then something else moves underneath it, slower, hungrier.
The look she gets when she's already decided what happens next and is simply waiting for me to catch up.
"That's the part I finally believe," she says.
I glance at the door. Holt's long gone. “Let me show you that you’re not doing it without me.”
"Knox, we have a file that says FBI on it sitting three feet away."
"The file will still be there in thirty minutes."
She looks at me for exactly one second, running the calculation the way she runs everything, and then a slow smile starts at the corner of her mouth.
"Thirty minutes." She raises an eyebrow. "You must have elaborate plans for me."
"I've had plans for you since before you walked in here this morning."
"Confident."
"Accurate." I pull her toward the door. "Ask me again in thirty minutes which one I was right about."
She laughs, low and real, and lets me pull her out of that office and past the folder and past every reason I could find to stay if I wanted one.
I don't want one.