Chapter 9
POV: Ember
The federal agents left at dawn with nothing but a half-empty coffee pot and a promise to return with more paper.
I watched their taillights disappear down the county road from the upstairs window and felt the last piece of the board click into place.
The warrant had been real enough—my name, my old aliases, a list of digital trails someone had carefully lit on fire.
It was also theater. Another pressure point applied by the same hand that had burned my parents’ faces out of a photograph and steered me into journalism like a knife into a ready wound.
There was only one stage large enough to force that hand into the open.
The wedding.
I found Colt in the kitchen. He had not slept.
The cut on his forearm was freshly bandaged.
Coffee went cold in his fist while he stared at the same stretch of gravel the agents had used.
When he heard my bare feet on the floorboards he turned, and the look on his face told me he already knew I had decided something he would hate.
“No,” he said before I opened my mouth.
“You don’t even know what I’m going to say.”
“I know that look. It’s the same one you wore the night you left.” His voice was low, scraped raw. “Whatever plan just finished forming in your head, the answer is no.”
I set my hands on the counter to keep them from shaking.
Strategic. Desperate. The heartbreak sat under the steel like a second pulse.
“The puppet master wants a public spectacle. Two families in one place. Cameras, witnesses, enough chaos to bury the real evidence under bodies. The engagement was his idea from the start. If I walk away now, he simply resets the board and waits for the next generation of children to orphan.
If I walk down that aisle, I can make him show his face to finish what he started.”
Colt’s jaw flexed. He set the coffee down hard enough that the liquid sloshed over the rim. “You’re talking about using yourself as bait.”
“I’m talking about ending it.” I met his eyes and refused to look away.
“The files I have are incomplete without him in the room. The burned photograph, the false intel, the way both syndicates have been bleeding for years—none of it convicts the man who designed it unless he is standing close enough to watch me say the vows.
The wedding is the only lever big enough to move him.”
Silence stretched. Outside, a rooster crowed like the world still ran on ordinary time. Inside, the air went thin.
Colt moved.
One second he was on the other side of the kitchen.
The next he had me pinned to the wall beside the refrigerator, both of my wrists caught in one of his hands above my head, his body a hard line against mine.
The impact knocked the breath out of me.
His free hand braced beside my head. His forehead dropped to mine.
When he spoke, his voice broke on the edges.
“I just got you back. You’re not walking toward that bastard.”
The words landed like a fist to the sternum.
Seven years of silence and distance and carefully tended hatred collapsed into the space between our mouths.
I could feel the tremor in his arm, the way possession and terror braided together so tightly he could barely breathe around them.
My own heart was trying to claw its way out of my chest.
I kissed him.
Hard. No permission asked. No softness offered.
Just the full weight of everything I had refused to send in those unanswered texts.
His mouth opened under mine with a rough sound that was more pain than pleasure.
For three heartbeats I let myself have it—the taste of him, the scrape of stubble, the desperate way his fingers tightened on my wrists like he could keep me here by force of will alone. Then I pulled back.
His eyes were black with want and fury.
“Then be ready when I call,” I said. My voice came out steadier than I felt. “One breath. That’s all you’ll need.”
I slipped sideways out of his hold before either of us could turn the kiss into something we would not walk away from. He let me go. That almost hurt worse than the grip.
The Blackthorn car arrived at 9:17 a.m. exactly as the encrypted message had promised.
Black sedan. Tinted windows. A driver who did not get out.
Rhett’s people, or the puppet master’s—there was no longer a meaningful difference.
I had showered, changed into clean clothes Jax’s wife had left for me, and braided my hair back so the cut on my temple showed like a declaration.
The hard drive sat in the lining of my jacket.
The empty place on my finger where the ring had been felt lighter and heavier at the same time.
Colt stood in the open doorway of the main house and watched me walk across the porch.
He did not speak. Neither did I. There were no more words that would change the shape of what came next.
Jax lingered near the truck with a rifle across his chest and a look that said he would start shooting if I gave the smallest signal. I shook my head once.
The driver opened the rear door without ceremony. I paused with one hand on the frame and looked back.
Colt had stepped off the porch. Dust rose around his boots.
The morning light cut across his face and showed every sleepless hour, every year he had spent sending words into the void, every ounce of the monster he had held back because of me.
He looked like a man watching the only thing that kept him human disappear down a road he could not follow.
I climbed in. The door shut with a solid, expensive thunk.
The car turned in a slow arc and headed for the county road.
Through the tinted glass I watched Colt’s figure shrink in the side mirror—boots planted, hands loose at his sides, the entire weight of the ranch and the war and seven years of unanswered texts resting on his shoulders.
He did not move until the dust of the driveway had fully swallowed the car.
Only then did I let my head fall back against the seat and close my eyes.
The plan was in motion.
The aisle was waiting.
And somewhere behind me, the cowboy I had just broken all over again was already preparing for the only breath that would matter.