Eleven
WALKER
She was willing to listen. Two words on a screen that felt like oxygen after drowning.
I didn’t sleep. I lay in my motel room counting water stains and rehearsing conversations that would probably go nothing like I planned. When the first gray light came through the curtains, I was already dressed and driving.
Cass was waiting on the porch, just as she’d been the first day I arrived. But everything else had changed. The hostility was gone, replaced by a wariness that was also somehow an invitation.
“Coffee?” she asked.
“Please.”
She led me to the kitchen table and sat across from me, hands wrapped around her mug. “Talk.”
I’d planned a careful speech. Looking at her face, all my preparation evaporated.
“Brody’s not a criminal,” I said. “Not the way you’re thinking. He’s a victim. About a year ago he witnessed something at an auction—a brand being altered, paperwork forged. He figured out what was happening and made a terrible decision.”
“He tried to blackmail them.”
“Yes. And they turned it around on him.” I spread the documents I’d brought across the table.
“They created a paper trail that makes him look like a full participant. If he tries to go to the police, they use all of it against him. Make him look like the mastermind instead of a scared kid in over his head.”
She moved through the documents, and I watched understanding dawn—the realization that her brother wasn’t evil, just stupid and scared and too proud to ask for help.
“Why didn’t he tell me?” Her voice cracked.
“Because he was ashamed. Because he’d spent his whole life feeling like the family screwup, and this was proof. Because he thought he could fix it himself and spare you.”
“That’s not how family works. You don’t protect people by shutting them out.”
“I know. And I should have told you the moment I figured it out. That’s on me, not him.”
“Why didn’t you?”
The question I’d been dreading. The one with no good answer, only honest ones.
“Because I was scared,” I admitted. “Scared of losing you. Scared of watching you look at me the way you’re looking at me now.
I told myself I was waiting for more evidence.
But the truth is, I was being a coward. I was so desperate to hold onto what was growing between us that I convinced myself a few more days wouldn’t matter. ”
“A few more days of lying to my face.”
“Yes.”
She was quiet a long moment, the morning sun climbing higher, painting stripes of gold across the table. I could hear the ranch waking up around us—the ordinary sounds of a world that kept turning no matter what happened to the people in it.
“What do we do now?” she asked finally.
“We take down the ring. All of it. And we clear your brother’s name in the process.” I leaned forward, willing her to see my sincerity. “I have a plan. It’s risky, but it could work.”
“Tell me.”
So I laid out the sting operation—the recorded meeting, the cooperation agreement, the chance for Brody to transform from victim to witness. I held nothing back, because I was done hiding things from her.
“You want my brother to wear a wire,” she said slowly. “To walk into a meeting with people who’ve been threatening him for a year and pretend everything is normal.”
“I want to give him a way out. The only way out I can see. If something goes wrong, we get him out. Extraction team three minutes away, agents positioned with clear sightlines. He won’t face it alone.”
She studied me for a long moment, her expression unreadable. I felt like I was standing on the edge of a cliff, waiting to find out if I’d fall or fly.
“I need to talk to Brody,” she said. “This has to be his choice. And Walker?” She met my eyes, and there was something hard in her gaze—but also something else.
Something that might, eventually, become trust again.
“If you ever lie to me again—about anything—we’re done.
Not just the investigation. Everything.”
“I understand.”
I rose to leave, then paused at the door. There was something else I needed to say, even if it didn’t matter to her anymore.
“Cass. I love you. I know that doesn’t fix anything. But it’s true, and I wanted you to know.”
She didn’t respond. But she didn’t throw me out, either.
For now, that was enough.