Chapter 1 #3
I go. I make myself go, spine straight, chin up, and I don’t look back, and the fact that I have to make myself is the whole humiliating truth of the last fourteen months in one tack room.
Near the bar, a woman I don’t recognize, mid-thirties, easy posture, is talking down a very tense-looking security tech about a credential that flagged twice at the gate, the kind of flag that means someone tried to walk in tonight without clearance and got caught doing it.
I watch her solve it in under four minutes, calm and precise, cross-referencing a list on her phone without once raising her voice, and the tech walks away looking like she just personally saved his job.
“Erin Van Ness,” Mackenzie says, appearing at my elbow with two glasses of champagne and handing me one. “Contractor. Does security consulting for half the ranches in the valley now. She’s the reason nobody’s getting shot tonight.”
“I like her already.”
“Everybody does. That’s sort of her whole thing.”
I let that sit as a compliment, because tonight I don’t have room in my head for it to be anything else.
My father finds me at the edge of the tent, away from the music, where the string lights give out and the dark starts. Gideon Blackwater does not do casual conversation. He does agenda items with a drink in his hand.
“Walk with me.”
I walk with him, because I always walk with him, because that is the shape our whole relationship has taken since I was old enough to understand what our name buys and what it takes.
I know why he wants to talk. We’ve known for two months, since the night of Knox and Maren’s engagement party, on the Sullivan’s lawn, when he pulled me aside without a word and Declan did the same to Dawson on the other side of the yard.
We both came back into that party wearing the same stunned, flattened expression, neither of us able to look at the other for the rest of the night.
My father never explains why he does these things at weddings and galas instead of a Tuesday afternoon in his office.
I’ve stopped expecting him to. I think he likes an audience he doesn’t have to name.
I think it’s harder for me to make a scene surrounded by three hundred witnesses in their finest attire.
My father has never once passed up a strategic advantage in his life, including against his own daughter.
“You have a date,” he says, no lead-in, like we’re mid-conversation instead of continuing one that’s been open for two months. “September 21st. Declan and I agree the corridor fight has gone on long enough. It’s bleeding both families more than a wedding will.”
“You could’ve told me that over the phone.”
“I could have.” He doesn’t pretend otherwise. “But there’s more, and I wanted your face when I said it.”
“You’ve had two months to decide there’s more, and you’re telling me during my brother’s wedding.”
“You did it beautifully back when you buried that corridor, by the way. I’ve never been prouder of a single hearing in my life.
” He means every word, and the sincerity stings worse than an insult would have.
“That fight has become a liability neither family can afford to keep feeding, which is why you’re marrying him in September instead of never.
Your brother married for love, and I’m glad of it.
But love didn’t settle an easement, and it didn’t stop the two of you from bleeding both families for fourteen months while somebody in this valley watched for exactly that kind of crack. ”
“And if I say no?”
“Then somebody else runs point on Blackwater’s legislative contracts, and you explain to your mother why the one fight that could have ended didn’t.” He lets that sit exactly as long as he wants it to. “But the wedding was never the whole conversation.”
The tent behind us is warm and sparkling and full of people I love. Out here it’s just my father’s voice and the cold that comes with hearing your life get rearranged again, the same way it happened once before, eight years ago, in a summer I don’t let myself think about on purpose.
“Then finish it,” I say. “What exactly am I agreeing to?”
He gives me his ledger look. Assessing. Already three moves ahead.
“You’re agreeing to live in the old boundary house.
Learn his routes and his contracts, what Sullivan Transport actually moves, where it’s exposed federally.
You bring it home. Paper only, Sage. Whatever this marriage becomes on paper, it doesn’t become anything else.
I watched your brother fall for a Sullivan and lose half his usefulness to sentiment. I won’t watch it happen twice.”
“You want a spy in his house,” I retort.
He doesn’t blink.
“I want a Blackwater in his house. Whether that’s the same thing is up to you.”
Across the tent, past the string lights and the dancing and my brother’s brand new, blindingly happy marriage, I see Declan Sullivan lean in close to his own son’s ear.
Dawson’s face goes still, a mirror of whatever mine is doing right now.
We are being handed the same sentence in the same breath, and neither one of us is going to be allowed to warn the other.