Chapter 13
KENNA
Iwake up to the smell of coffee and the sound of Colt moving through a kitchen that doesn't belong to either of us.
The bedroom is small and sun-washed, and for a disoriented second I don't remember where I am.
Then the night comes back in pieces: the bourbon, the saltshaker, his body pressed against my back for one second longer than necessary.
The look on his face across the kitchen when he was deciding whether to close the distance.
The way he said 'get some sleep' like the words were costing him something he couldn't afford.
I press my face into the pillow and breathe and try to reorganize my priorities. Grant's evidence. The safety deposit box. Torres. The man making coffee on the other side of the wall is not the priority.
My body disagrees, but my body has been wrong about Colt before. Or right about him. The distinction between those two things stopped being clear somewhere around the third time he put his hands on me.
I dress and walk into the kitchen. He's at the counter with a mug, and he's already showered.
Which means the bathroom smells like him, which means I'll be brushing my teeth surrounded by his smell and trying to focus on federal law enforcement instead of the man who slept twenty feet away and didn't cross the hallway.
He looks up when I come in. His eyes drop to my mouth, hold for half a second, and then snap to the window. The recovery is fast. Not fast enough.
"Coffee's ready," he says.
"I can see that."
"Bank opens early on weekdays. We should move."
"Good morning to you too, Holloway. I slept great, thanks for asking. Really enjoying the ambiance of your friend's guest room. The decorative horseshoe above the bed is a nice touch."
His jaw works. The thing that might be a smile twitches at the corner of his mouth and dies before it can fully commit. "You always this chatty before coffee?"
"I'm always this chatty. You've just been too busy brooding to notice."
I pour a cup and lean against the counter across from him, and the kitchen is small enough that our knees almost touch. Almost. The almost did a lot of damage last night, and it's still doing damage this morning.
He's wearing a clean shirt and his hair is damp at the collar and the muscles in his forearms shift when he lifts his mug, and I catalog each detail because apparently, I have no self-control and no learning curve.
"You sleep?" I ask.
"Some."
"Liar."
He looks at me over the rim of his mug. His eyes are steady, but the shadows underneath them tell the truth his mouth won't.
"I slept enough," he says. "We should go."
He's right. The key is warm from my pocket where it's been sitting since Rainey handed it over, and every hour it stays out of that safety deposit box is an hour Merrick's lawyers could use to make everything disappear.
The drive to the bank is short and charged.
Colt drives the way he always drives, one hand on the wheel, the other resting on his thigh, and I watch the tendons in his forearm shift when he turns and remind myself that I have a federal case to build and a dead brother to avenge and absolutely no business thinking about what those hands felt like on my hips in the dark.
He circles the block twice before parking, checking sight lines and exit routes. "You think Merrick has people watching every bank in Albuquerque?" I ask.
"I think Merrick has people watching everything. I also think I'm probably being paranoid, and I don't care."
"Fair enough."
The moment the doors open, I walk into the bank alone.
Colt stays in the truck, positioned where he can see the entrance and the side exit, his phone in his hand and his body angled toward the building with the coiled stillness of a man who will cross that parking lot in seconds if anything goes wrong.
The safety deposit box is in the vault. The teller takes my key, matches it with the bank's second key, and leads me to a private viewing room. She leaves me alone with the box, and I lift the lid.
Inside, stacked with the meticulous organization of a man who knew exactly what he was building and who would need to find it, is Grant's entire case.
Photographs first. Dozens of them, printed on glossy stock and organized by date.
Vic Sutton crouching beside a pen at the Fort Worth event, a syringe visible in his right hand.
Vic drawing liquid from a small vial while a Thornton Livestock handler watches from a few yards away.
Hayes Merrick shaking hands with Dale Thornton at the VIP entrance to the Santa Fe arena, both men smiling for the camera, neither aware they were being photographed.
Financial documents next. Bank records, corporate filings, spreadsheets tracking prize money distributions against actual payouts. Shell company registrations in Nevada and Texas. Wire transfer records from Rusty Spur Capital Partners to Thornton Livestock to a series of numbered accounts.
Then the text message screenshots. Printed on plain paper, timestamped, between a number identified as Thornton and an unknown contact.
The messages use code that is barely coded at all: "The gray needs handling at the Tucson draw.
" "Make sure the one in chute 4 runs hot.
" "Problem rider in the 12 slot. Take care of it. "
One message, dated days before Las Cruces, reads: "Corbin won't stop. Handle it."
I sit in the viewing room and hold that piece of paper in both hands, and the clinical distance I've been maintaining cracks down the center.
Handle it. Two words that authorized my brother's murder. Written in a text message between two men who treated Grant's life as an operational inconvenience, a problem rider in the wrong slot, a line item to be managed and closed.
My vision blurs. I blink hard, twice, and the paper comes back into focus. I want to fold it into a small, sharp point and drive it through Hayes Merrick's eye.
Instead, I photograph everything before I disturb it. Every page. Every print. Every document. I need a complete digital record of exactly how the contents were stored in case anything happens to the originals once they leave the vault.
When I finish, I close the safe-deposit box, putting it back before locking it away. Then I walk out of the bank carrying the originals in a plain canvas bank bag the teller provided when I explained I needed a secure way to transport sensitive documents.
Colt is exactly where I left him. I climb into the truck and set the bag between us, and the weight of it fills the cab like another passenger.
"All of it?" he asks.
"All of it. Photos of Vic with the animals. Photos of Merrick with Thornton. Financials, shell company records, wire transfers. Text messages between Thornton and an unknown number ordering specific riders to be targeted."
I pull out the text message printout and hand it to him.
He reads it. His face goes blank, the way a face goes when the emotion behind it is too large for features to contain. His hands hold the paper steady, but the tendons in his forearms are pulled taut enough to cast shadows.
I've watched those hands wrap a bull rope and steady a spooked horse and cradle my jaw in the dark. Right now they look like they want to tear something apart at the molecular level.
"Handle it," he reads aloud. "Days before Las Cruces."
"That's a murder order, Colt. Written in a text message. Timestamped. If we can identify the unknown number, it's a direct link between the order and the execution."
He folds the paper carefully and hands it back.
His knuckles are white. The controlled precision of the fold, the way he makes each crease exact when what he wants to do is crumple the paper and drive to Merrick's house and feed it to him, tells me everything about the war happening behind his face.
"Torres," he says. "Now."
I call Torres from the truck. She picks up on the second ring, which surprises me, because Colt has been calling this woman for weeks and she hasn't returned a single message.
When I identify myself as Kenna, Grant Corbin's sister, and tell her I have the evidence package assembled by Rainey Weathers, the silence on the other end lasts a beat too long.
"How fast can you get here?" she asked.
"We're in the parking lot."
The FBI field office in Albuquerque is a multi-story brick building on Luecking Park Avenue, sandstone and brown brick with a southwestern facade that almost makes it look like it belongs here.
Almost. The flagpoles and the boulders lining the manicured lawn give it away.
Government landscaping always looks like someone tried too hard to make authority feel approachable.
Agent Torres is smaller than I expected.
Five-four at most, with dark hair pulled back tight and a face that gives away absolutely nothing.
She's wearing a navy blazer over a white button-down, no jewelry, no makeup beyond the basics.
She looks like a woman who decided a long time ago that her appearance was the least interesting thing about her, and she was right.
She meets us in a conference room on the third floor, closes the door, pulls the blinds, and sits across from us with her hands folded on the table.
"Mr. Holloway." She looks at Colt with an expression I can't read. "I've received your messages."
"All of them?"
"Every single one. I didn't return them because I had nothing to offer you. No evidence, no witnesses, no case I could take to a prosecutor. Responding to tell you that would have been unkind, and I don't enjoy being unkind."
"You could have at least said that." Colt's voice is level, but the energy coming off his body is anything but.
He's sitting in a federal conference room with his hat on the table and his shoulders squared and his boots planted flat on the floor, and the stillness of him is deceptive. I've seen bulls stand this still in the chute. Right before the gate opens.