Chapter 9
NINE
SAGE
Dawson asks if I slept well, and I consider murder before coffee.
He’s leaning against the kitchen doorframe in a grey t-shirt gone dark with sweat, hair damp at the temples, shirt clinging to the broad line of his chest. Every muscle in his arms looks carved from lifting something heavy enough to hate him for it, and I know exactly what those arms feel like wrapped around me.
I spend one full, traitorous second wanting them there again before I remember I’m supposed to be irritated with him.
I heard the mudroom door click shut at five fifteen, quiet, careful, a man trying not to wake a wife who wasn’t asleep to begin with.
I’ve been a light sleeper my whole life.
I’ve been a worse one since we moved into this house, replaying a photograph I have no business still thinking about at six in the morning.
Dark hair trailing low, and I’d caught myself smirking into my own pillow before I caught myself doing it, wondering what my mouth would feel like wrapped around his thick, hard cock.
That was an hour ago, upstairs, alone. Standing here now with the real thing propped in my doorway, sweaty and smug and entirely too pleased with himself, is a different kind of problem altogether.
“Fine,” I say. “Perfect. Never better.”
“You didn’t sleep.”
“I slept great. I always sleep great after telling a man about a piercing I got in Nashville and then refusing to explain it.”
“You could still explain it.”
“I could also join the circus. Neither is happening today.”
He almost smiles, that maddening not-quite thing he does where one corner of his mouth commits and the rest of his face stays locked down like the smile has to clear security first. I turn my back on it and go straight for my espresso machine, the one piece of my old house I refused to leave behind, six hundred dollars of Italian steel that took me four months of a barista job at Cornell to save up for and several years of practice to actually deserve.
I pull the portafilter, tamp the grounds level and firm, twist it into the group head with a click that feels like the only competent thing I’ve done since I woke up.
Steam wand hisses. Milk spins into velvet under my hand without a single bubble, because some skills don’t leave you even when your dignity does.
“That’s a serious machine for a woman who claims she doesn’t need caffeine to function,” Dawson says, watching me from the doorway like I’m the most interesting thing that’s happened to him all week, which, given last night, is either a low bar or a very high compliment.
“I never claimed that. I claimed I slept great. Those are different lies.”
“You’re a barista.”
“I was a barista. The last two years of college.” After he tore my heart out and stomped on it, I needed a more distracting, fast-paced job to forget.
“Paid better than the library job and I got free coffee, which at the time felt like winning the lottery.” I pull two shots instead of one, because apparently my hands have decided he’s getting a cup whether either of us discusses it.
“I heard the bar drop on that bench three separate times through the mudroom door. Sounded like you were trying to bench-press your feelings out of your chest.”
“Working through a few things.”
“Which things?”
“The photograph you sent me just before midnight, mostly.” He says it level, conversational, like he’s mentioning the weather, and my whole neck goes warm before I can stop it. “The rest of the workout was just core.”
“You shouldn’t be maxing out a bench alone at five in the morning. No spotter, nobody even awake in the house. That’s how men end up on the news.”
“I’ve been lifting alone for years, Sage.”
“Doesn’t make it smart. Next time knock on my door. I’ll spot you.”
“You. Spotting me.”
“I have upper body strength you know nothing about.”
“I know plenty about your upper body strength.” His eyes drop, taking their time, and climb back up taking more. “I’m not opposed to testing it.”
I slide his cup across the counter harder than necessary. He catches it without spilling a drop, which is somehow the most infuriating part of the whole exchange.
“We’re not doing this before coffee.”
“You started it. Nashville, remember?”
“I regret everything.”
“You regret nothing. You just don’t want to admit it out loud.” His eyes hold mine over the rim of the cup, and a pull goes tight low in my stomach, nothing to do with caffeine. “This is good, by the way. The coffee. Genuinely.”
“I know it’s good. I made it.”
“There she is.”
I drink my own shot standing at the counter and refuse to acknowledge what that comment does to me, because sitting down across from this man at six in the morning feels like a decision I’m not ready to make twice in one week.
Both our phones buzz halfway through the second cup, Tate’s group thread lighting up mine and his together, same clipped rhythm as every message he’s sent since Robbie’s truck was found on the Corridor road.
Terminal trace confirmed. Three relay points, all burner, all dead ends on their own.
But the timing pattern’s consistent. Whoever routed the credentials through Curtis’s station has done it before.
Old logs show two smaller anomalies in the last six months that nobody flagged because nothing came of them. This time something did.
Dawson reads his own screen at the same time, close enough that I catch soap and sweat and the last of his workout still clinging to him, and his whole face shutters, and he goes somewhere in his head I can’t follow.
“Two anomalies nobody caught,” he says, half to himself. “Which means it’s not the first time somebody’s used my credentials as a key. It’s just the first time it mattered enough to trace.”
My own phone lights up a second later, separate thread, Mackenzie this time.
Recovered a partial cloud backup off the informant’s personal account before whoever killed him tried to scrub it.
Most of it’s corrupted. What’s left references a command layer above whoever’s been working the local end, somebody Robbie never identified by name, just a title.
He was building toward something bigger than local corruption.
I think he knew there was a person above the person we’ve been chasing.
I hand Dawson my phone without a word. He reads it twice, a muscle ticking once at his jaw.
“A command layer,” I say. “That’s not Cruz acting alone. That’s somebody running him.”
“Somebody running the whole thing from above.” He hands the phone back, and a cold current slides in behind his eyes, the kind of quiet I remember from the truck three days ago, right before he asked me to say a name I still can’t say without my stomach dropping.
“Which means Knox was right to tell me to sit on that name until I’ve got real proof.
Not a scared man’s confession. Not a data entry error. Proof.”
“Mackenzie’s people don’t have a name?”
“If Robbie was right before he died, Mackenzie might not even have the right building.” His fingers brush mine as he lets the words settle, and even now, even with a dead informant’s ghost sitting on the counter between us, that brush travels straight through me like it always does.
“Which means whoever’s behind this has been patient enough to stay invisible through two smaller mistakes and one dead informant. That’s not panic. That’s discipline.”
“Comforting.”
“I told you I wasn’t trying to comfort you.
” He sets his empty cup in the sink, rinses it himself without being asked, and the sight of a Sullivan rinsing his own cup in my kitchen chips one more brick out of the wall I’ve been rebuilding since the courthouse.
“Get changed. I want to ride the Corridor and see the sightline from ground level instead of a photograph. If somebody’s been watching this house long enough to know which afternoon light hits the porch just right, I want to know how close they had to stand to get it. ”
“That’s not a romantic invitation.”
“It’s the only kind I’ve got today.” He’s already at the door, pulling his damp shirt over his head one-handed, and I refuse, on principle, to watch the muscles in his back do what they do while he does it. I fail almost immediately. “Ten minutes, Blackwater.”
“It’s Sullivan. Legally.”
“Ten minutes, Sullivan.”
He says my new name like he’s testing the sound of it, and a reckless answer kicks up in me, louder than it should be at six in the morning.
Rae has both horses saddled by the time we reach the barn, Bravo already restless under Dawson’s tack, Briar standing with her ears pinned in a way that means she’s decided this morning is beneath her.
Rae looks between us once, quick, assessing, the same look she gives a horse before she decides whether it’s sound enough to ride. Whatever she sees, she doesn’t say a word about it. Just hands me Briar’s lead and goes back to coiling rope like the silence isn’t a verdict.
That’s worse than if she’d said something.
Briar fights me at the gate the second we reach the Corridor, head tossing, back legs dancing sideways, the exact temper she’s had since Gideon bought her as a yearling nobody else wanted.
I don’t fight her back. I let the lead go loose in my hand and turn her in a wide half circle instead, giving her somewhere else to put all that refusal until the gate stops being the enemy and starts being the only interesting direction left.
She walks through it twenty seconds later like it was her idea all along.
Dawson’s watching me the whole time from Bravo’s saddle, a thought I can’t read working behind his eyes.
“What?” I say.
“Nothing.” He nudges Bravo forward to fall in beside me. “I just watched you talk a half-ton animal into doing what you wanted without raising your voice once.”
“She’s not stupid. She just needed a better idea than the one she came in with.”