Thirteen
CASS
The morning of the sting, I woke before dawn.
Sleep had been impossible—too much adrenaline, too many possible futures crowding my imagination. By the time the first gray light filtered through my windows, I’d given up pretending. I dressed quickly and went downstairs to find Brody already at the kitchen table.
He looked terrible—pale, red-eyed, clearly as sleepless as I was. But there was something different in his expression. A steadiness that hadn’t been there yesterday. A resolve.
“You can still back out,” I said, pouring coffee. “If this feels like too much—“
“It’s not too much. It’s exactly what needs to happen.” His voice was firm. “I’ve spent twelve months being scared. Twelve months letting these people control my life, make my choices for me. I’m done being that person. Whatever happens today, at least I’ll know I finally stood up.”
“I’m proud of you.”
The words came out before I could second-guess them. Brody looked startled, then moved—his eyes glistening in the early light.
“Yeah?”
“Yeah.” I reached across and squeezed his hand. “Mom would be proud too. She always said you’d do something special someday.”
He laughed, watery but genuine. “Taking down a criminal organization that’s been terrorizing Texas ranchers? I don’t think that’s what she had in mind.”
“Maybe not. But it counts.”
We sat together in the quiet kitchen, watching the sun rise over Henderson Ranch—the land our family had worked for generations, the legacy I’d spent years fighting to protect. In a few hours, we’d either save it or lose everything.
Walker arrived at eight, looking as exhausted as the rest of us but with a determination in his eyes that was almost reassuring. The surveillance van was already positioned at the rendezvous point, the backup team standing by.
“How are you feeling?” he asked Brody.
“Like I’m about to jump out of a plane without knowing if my parachute works.”
“That’s about right.” Walker offered a small smile. “But the ones who succeed are usually the ones who are scared enough to be careful and brave enough to act anyway.”
“Great. Scared and brave. I can do that.”
He walked Brody through the equipment one final time—the wire, the signals, the extraction procedures. I watched these two men who’d come into my life from such different directions, now united in common purpose.
“Your only job is to keep them talking,” Walker said. “Get names, dates, specifics. The more detail, the stronger our case. And if Vega gets suspicious—“
“He won’t. You’ve been doing this for months. There’s no reason for him to think anything’s changed.” Walker put a hand on his shoulder. “You can do this. I believe in you.”
Brody looked at me, and I nodded. “We both do.”
He took a deep breath, squared his shoulders. “Okay. Let’s get this done.”
The hours between sending Brody into the Rusty Spur and watching him walk out again were the longest of my life.
I sat in the surveillance van beside Walker, my body tense, eyes fixed on the monitors. Marcus was on his other side, coordinating with the backup teams. Everyone was quiet, focused, waiting for the moment when everything either came together or fell apart.
The audio came through crystal clear. Brody’s breathing, slightly too fast. The clink of glasses, country music from a jukebox that sounded older than I was.
I sat with my hands fisted in my lap, every muscle drawn tight, and bargained with a God I hadn’t spoken to since Mom’s funeral.
*Let him be okay. Whatever it costs, let him walk out of there.
* I’d spent my whole life being the one who fixed things, who stood between my family and disaster.
And now the only thing I could do was sit in a windowless van and listen while my baby brother walked into a room full of men who’d spent a year terrorizing him.
Walker must have felt me trembling, because his hand found mine in the dark between the seats and held on. I didn’t pull away. I held on back.
Then: “Brody! Over here.”
Carlos Vega’s voice. I felt Walker go still beside me—the man he’d been tracking for eighteen months, the middleman who’d helped destroy dozens of families. Finally.
Brody was good. Better than I’d expected. He kept his voice steady, played his part, fed them the false information about a ranch sale while drawing out details about the operation.
“The boss wants this to be the last big job for a while,” Vega said at one point, and I tensed. “After this, we’re going dark for six months. Too much heat lately.”
“Makes sense,” Brody said. “Better safe than sorry, right?”
“Exactly. Delgado doesn’t take chances. That’s why he’s been running this thing for five years without getting caught.”
Victor Delgado. The name they’d been chasing for two years. Finally spoken on a recorded line, in a context that would stand up in court. Walker caught Marcus’s eye, and Marcus nodded. We had what we needed.
The conversation went on another fifteen minutes—more names, more details, more evidence. By the time Brody made his excuses and headed for the door, we had enough to put away a dozen people for decades.
“I think we’re good,” Brody said, voice shaky with relief as he crossed the parking lot. “Please tell me you got all that.”
“Every word,” Walker said into the radio. “You did amazing. Now get out of there.”
I watched his truck pull away, watched the taillights disappear around the corner, and finally let myself breathe. I was crying—silent tears streaming down my face as the reality sank in. My brother was safe. The nightmare was ending.
“He did it,” I said, my voice cracking. “He actually did it.”
“He did.” Walker looked at Marcus, who was already coordinating with arrest teams across Texas. “Now we take them down. All of them.”
The van came alive around us—agents talking fast and low into radios, locations confirmed, teams moving into position across five counties on Walker’s word.
I watched him become someone I hadn’t fully seen before: calm at the center of the storm, decisive, every order clean.
This was who he was underneath the lies and the apologies.
A man who ran toward the thing everyone else ran from, who’d spent fifteen years making sure people like the Castellanos got their day even when it cost him everything soft in himself.
And then, in the middle of it, he reached over and gripped my hand once, hard, and said only, “Your brother’s a hero. You raised a hero, Cass,” before he was back on the radio.
I sat in that humming van with tears drying on my face and understood, with a clarity that frightened me, that I was still in love with him. That I’d never actually stopped. The lies had broken my trust, not my heart, and the two had turned out to be very different things.
That was a problem for later. Right then, I just held onto his hand and let myself believe, for the first time in weeks, that my family was going to be okay.