Chapter 5 #3
“I know. That’s why I’m giving it to you.”
His jaw ticks, and for a moment I think he’s going to reach for my hand, and some reckless, starving part of me wants him to, wants it so badly my fingers curl against my own knee to keep from reaching first.
He doesn’t. Not yet. But his eyes stay on mine a beat longer than the conversation requires, and it feels like a touch.
My screen lights up on the console. A beat later, so does his.
Gideon. Group text, both our numbers, the kind of message my father only sends when he’s already decided the answer and is simply informing us of it.
Two days. Civil ceremony moved up. Press leak forced our hand. Sage, arrangements are made. You move in tomorrow. Holt wants that house secured before the ceremony, not after. Cruz drives you to the ceremony.
Every warm thing in the cab goes cold at once.
Dawson’s already looking at his own screen, jaw tightening with every line, and when he speaks his voice has lost every trace of the banter from ten minutes ago.
It’s stripped of anything warm now, the kind of voice that makes me wonder what it sounds like right before someone tells him something he needs to know, and the hair on my bare arms rises despite the heat still baking the truck’s dashboard.
“Say that name again,” he says. “The one you just told me about. Say it slow.”
“Cruz.” My mouth goes dry saying it a second time, now that it isn’t hypothetical anymore, now that it has a car and a route and a two-day countdown attached to it.
“Ricardo Cruz. Head of Blackwater security. Twenty-two years.” Dawson says it like he’s reading it off a manifest, each word set down separate from the last, deliberate in a way that makes it feel less like an answer and more like a warning.
“He taught Knox to shoot before Knox could drive. He carried your grandfather’s casket.
Your father trusts him with your life. Last night I had a scared man on a burner phone and a data entry error you sat on for three weeks, and that’s supposed to be enough to put a name like that in a sentence with a body in it? ”
“It isn’t enough. I know it isn’t enough.”
“It’s not about enough.” His hand tightens on the wheel, knuckles going pale.
“It’s about what happens if I say it out loud to the wrong person before I’ve confirmed it.
Knox already told me one of us doesn’t leave the room next time I say that name near your father.
He wasn’t exaggerating for effect. He meant it. ”
That hits harder than I expect it to. “Knox said that to you?”
“He warned me, which with your brother comes to the same thing. And I’d take it to him again.
That’s the deal we made, the two families actually talking instead of hiding things.
” He drags a hand down his face, and for the first time since I climbed into this truck he looks less like a man running calculations and more like one running out of them.
“So now I’ve got a dead informant, a stolen signature, a name I can’t say twice without risking a war I just spent fourteen months trying to end, and your father just handed you a chauffeur for your own wedding who might be the reason Robbie’s dead. ”
“He doesn’t know what you know.”
“He doesn’t know what either of us knows.
That’s the part that’s going to get somebody killed.
” He looks at me, and the controlled voice cracks just enough that I hear what’s underneath it.
“I need you to understand what I’m asking, Sage.
I am not asking you to accuse a man your family trusts with your life on the word of a dispatcher who’d have said anything to keep his daughter’s scholarship.
I’m asking you to get in a car with him in two days and give me a reason to believe you’ll come out the other side of that drive. ”
“You want me to spy on the man who might have killed Robbie?”
“I want you to survive a car ride with a man who might have. That’s the only version of this I care about right now.”
The cab goes quiet, nothing left in it but the two of us and the muffled hum of the parking lot outside the glass.
I think about Cruz teaching me to shoot the summer I turned twelve, patient in a way my father never had time to be, and I think about a truck idling on an access road with a dead man’s blood going tacky in the cab, and I can’t make the two pictures sit in the same head without something in me tearing a little.
“I’ll be careful,” I say, because it’s the only true thing I have to offer him right now.
“Careful isn’t a plan.”
“It’s the only one I’ve got until you give me a better one.”
He doesn’t argue that. He just reaches over, slow enough that I could stop him and don’t, and covers my hand where it’s gone white-knuckled against my own knee.
He doesn’t say anything else. He doesn’t have to.
The weight of his hand is doing the work his voice can’t afford to do right now, not with the ceremony two days off and a name neither of us can safely say twice.
My father just put me in a car alone with him.