Chapter 34
THIRTY-FOUR
DAWSON
Erin ties a decent zip cuff for a woman who’s spent two years pretending she learned knots from a Girl Scout manual instead of the Army.
I’ll give her that much. Wrists behind the chair back, ankles lashed to the legs, tension checked twice like she cares whether I lose circulation before she’s finished whatever this is.
It’s my own restraint kit too, lifted straight off my belt sometime between the moment I reached the rollover site and the moment my radio went dead, which means somewhere under the outrage I’m supposed to be feeling, there’s a small, professional kind of insult.
I taught men how to use these zip ties on people who didn’t want to talk.
I never once pictured getting taught back.
“You’re quiet,” Erin says, checking the door to The Ledger’s lower archive room, the one Gideon keeps triple locked, the one Sage and I bled a hundred and fifty years of family lies out of a few weeks ago. “I expected more fight.”
“Fighting a woman who already knows every hold I know seems like a poor use of my afternoon.”
“Smart.” She crouches in front of me, elbows on her knees, studying my face like she studied that rifle at the fundraiser, patient, professional, nothing personal in it at all.
“I need you to understand something before this gets complicated. Nobody wanted you dead. If I wanted you dead you’d have been dead on that road an hour ago, easy shot, clean exit. ”
“Tell that to the rifle on the stables road.”
“That rifle was for whoever came to help her. You were supposed to still be at your desk.” She says it like a scheduling error.
“Comforting. Especially considering it’s the day after my own wedding.”
Her eyes flicker once, too fast for most people to catch. I catch it. A half second of something that isn’t professional at all, gone so fast she probably doesn’t know I saw it.
“I need you photographed. Alone, in this room, next to that letter.” She nods toward the shelf where the folder still sits, the one with Elias Blackwater’s handwriting curling faded and certain across a hundred and fifty year old page.
“A man caught tampering with the one document that proves his own family’s war was manufactured.
That story writes itself, Dawson. Nobody has to lie about a single fact. They just have to see the photograph.”
“Everybody’s still half convinced yours was built on paper instead of anything real.
” She almost approves, some small satisfaction flickering behind the professional mask.
“Give this town one photograph that says the paper marriage finally cracked, and it doesn’t just end you, Dawson.
It ends the whole idea that the truce was ever anything but strategy. ”
I set that aside instead of arguing it. Arguing gets me nothing.
Keeping her talking does, because every sentence she hands me is one more piece of how this works.
My hands are already working behind the chair back, slow, patient, testing the give in the plastic like Maren taught Finn and me both, years ago, at a kitchen table with a stopwatch and our father pretending not to watch.
Pull toward the hinge. Twist. Let the friction do what your fingers can’t.
“You knew this room existed,” I say, keeping my voice level, keeping her talking instead of moving. “You knew the letter was in it. Nobody outside this family walks into an archive this old and picks the right shelf on the first try.”
“I didn’t need to know what was on the page.
” Her patience shows, the same patience she used on a fourteen-year-old at the fundraiser.
“I run security for both ranches. I log every door that opens. You don’t need to read a letter to know it matters.
You just need to watch two people walk out of a locked room looking like their whole life cracked open. ”
The plastic gives half a centimeter against my wrist. Not enough. I keep working it, keep my face doing nothing at all.
“I built a story around exactly what your family handed me for free.” She stands, brushing dust off her knees, glancing at her watch. “You should be flattered. It’s a good story. Ends the alliance clean, no fingerprints, nobody left standing to ask who benefits.”
“Who does benefit?”
“Wrong question.” She checks the door again, and for one second, just one, something crosses her face that isn’t professional at all.
Tired. Bone deep tired, the look of a woman who’s been running a very long con on people she’s started liking more than the job wanted her to.
“I came out of the Army owing a number I was never going to earn my way clear of, and somebody paid it in one wire and has owned every hour of my life since. You’d have taken the same deal at thirty-one.
Everybody does. That’s the whole business model. ”
She sighs. “Right question is why you married the smartest woman in three counties and never once asked what she’d do if you disappeared instead of dying.”
She’s gone out the door before I can answer that.
I keep working the cuff.
Maren’s voice comes through the radio Erin left clipped to her own belt, close enough that I catch every word of it through the door.
“Sheriff Aldridge is asking about road closures on the Corridor for the third time this week.” Maren, calm, bright, the exact voice she uses on federal auditors who think they’ve found something. “I told him it’s insurance inspection overflow. He wants to send a deputy out to check personally.”
“Stall him.” Erin’s voice, tighter now than it was in the room with me. “Two hours. That’s all I need.”
“He’s not going to wait two hours, Erin. He’s got Finn’s name all over the closure logs and he already thinks something’s off. I can give you thirty minutes before he drives out here himself with a warrant he doesn’t need because he’s the county sheriff and this is a county road.”
“Then give me thirty minutes.”
“I’m already giving them to you.” A pause, warm and lazy, Maren playing a woman who has no idea her whole family’s counting on this exact conversation. “You know how it is, keeping two men happy at once. Sheriffs and Sullivans. Exhausting work.”
The plastic gives another half centimeter.
I stop pulling and start twisting instead, wrist against wrist, patient, working it like a horse instead of a lock, and the tie finally splits with a small, ugly snap that sounds like the loudest thing that’s ever happened in this building.
I don’t stand up.
That’s the part that lands hardest, sitting here with my wrists free behind the chair back and a door I could clear in four seconds, listening to Erin’s footsteps pace on the other side of it, and choosing not to use either.
I could take her the second she opens that door.
I’ve done worse to better men with less warning.
I could end this whole operation myself, right here, and hand Sage a clean story with no risk left in it at all.
I don’t move.
Because the whole reason any of this still works is that I bet everything on a woman who’s never once needed me to save her from a locked room.
I bet it the day I married her, and harder the day she stood in Knox’s office and told her own father the spy condition was over, and made it stick without raising her voice once.
Taking Erin down alone right now takes away the one thing Sage asked me for after the ambush on the stables road: to let her be the reason they try again, on her terms instead of theirs.
So I hold the broken tie shut behind my back, wrists crossed like they’re still bound, ankles still lashed to the chair legs where she left them, and I wait for the door.
Erin comes back in with her phone already raised, framing the shot she’s clearly been planning since before she ever cuffed me to this chair, the letter’s shelf catching the edge of the frame behind my shoulder.
“Hold still,” she says, lowering the phone. “This part doesn’t need to hurt. It just needs to look right, and right now it doesn’t. Nobody buys a man tampering with evidence while his hands are behind his back.”
She sets the phone down and reaches for the folding knife at her belt instead, crouching toward my bound wrist, close enough now that one more second puts her hand directly on a tie that’s already been split clean in half for the last ten minutes.
Her phone rings on the shelf behind her.
She swears under her breath, pulling back before her fingers ever reach the plastic, phone to her ear instead, and whatever comes through it drains something out of her face fast. “When?” A pause. “That’s not thirty minutes, that’s now.” Another pause, shorter. “I’m moving him.”
She pockets the phone without ever finishing the cut.
“Change of plan,” she says, still too rattled to look twice at anything. “We’re moving you. Now.”
“Where?”
“Somewhere with better light.” She crouches to cut the tie at my ankles with the same knife instead, quick, practiced, the same efficiency she brought to a rifle at the fundraiser, her hands not quite as steady as they were a minute ago.
She snatches the leather folder off the shelf on her way past it, tucking it under one arm without breaking her grip on the gun. “On your feet. Move.”
I stand slow, keeping my wrists crossed behind me how they’ve been sitting for the last twenty minutes, the broken tie still looped loose enough to pass a glance but not a second look.
She doesn’t take a second look. She’s watching the door, the timeline collapsing in her head, not the nine inches of plastic doing nothing at all around my wrists.
“You’re going to walk me out through the equipment yard,” she says, gun low but steady, the kind of grip that means she’s done this before and hates that it’s me on the other end of it. “There’s a truck parked behind the near stable. We drive out the south gate onto the Corridor road.”
The near stable.