Chapter 15
KENNA
Iwake up in Colt's bed with his arm locked around my waist and his breath warm against the back of my neck. The first coherent thought I have is that I am in very serious trouble.
Not the Merrick kind. The other kind. The kind where you wake up with a man's body curved around yours and your first thought isn't about the case or the evidence or the federal investigation.
Your first thought is about the way he said your name last night, low and rough against your skin, and how you'd like to hear it again before you've finished your next breath.
I lie still for a minute and let myself feel it. The weight of his arm. The heat of his skin against my back. The slow, steady rhythm of his breathing. The soreness between my thighs that feels less like aftermath and more like a signature.
Then I ease out from under his arm, find my clothes on the floor, and pad into my adjoining room to grab my laptop and notes. There's work to do.
When I come back through the connecting door, he's awake. He's propped against the headboard with the sheet pooled at his waist, and the scratch marks I left on his back are visible when he reaches for the glass of water on the nightstand.
The marks are angry red lines, parallel tracks down each shoulder blade, and the sight of them does something to my stomach that has nothing to do with hunger.
"Morning," he says. His voice is rough with sleep.
"Morning." I hold up my phone. "I need to make a call."
"It's barely dawn."
"The woman I'm calling doesn't sleep like a normal person."
He watches me from the bed, and the way he looks at me is different from yesterday. Heavier. More settled.
Like something that was in question has been answered, and the answer is standing barefoot in his motel room holding a phone and wearing his shirt because hers is somewhere under the dresser.
"You're wearing my shirt," he says.
"I'm aware."
"Looks better on you."
"Everything looks better on me. That's not the compliment you think it is.
" I sit on the edge of the bed and pull my legs up, cross-legged, the phone in my lap.
"The call I need to make is to Sylvia Baker.
She's a journalist I went to school with.
National outlet. She's the right person to run this story. "
He sits up straighter. The sheet slides lower. I keep my eyes on his face through an act of will that deserves some kind of award.
"How much are you giving her?"
"Only what I can source independently. Financial analysis and public records. Nothing from Torres, nothing from Rainey, nothing from the safety deposit box."
"Smart."
"I know." I dial before I can talk myself out of it.
Sylvia picks up on the second ring. "Kenna Corbin." Her voice is alert despite the hour. Investigative journalists don't sleep like normal people. "You dropped off the map months ago. Your editor told me you quit."
"I did."
"You never quit anything. You once drove four hours in a tropical storm to fact-check a city council member's property records."
"This is bigger than property records."
"How big?"
"Murder. Fraud. Criminal conspiracy. Professional rodeo."
Silence. Then the click of a lamp, the rustle of sheets, a notepad being pulled from a nightstand. Sylvia is awake now.
I lay it out for her while Colt gets up and pulls on his jeans and starts making coffee with the motel room's sad excuse for a machine.
He moves around the room while I talk, and I track him in my peripheral vision the way I've been tracking him since the first day on this circuit, except now the tracking comes with sense memory.
The shoulders I'm watching are the shoulders my nails carved into last night.
The hands pouring coffee are the hands that fisted in my hair and tilted my head back.
The body crossing between the window and the bed is the body that pinned me to the mattress and took me apart with a patience I didn't know he possessed.
I lose my train of thought mid-sentence and have to restart. Sylvia doesn't comment. Colt glances over from the coffee maker with a look that suggests he knows exactly why I stumbled.
I give Sylvia only what I can independently source: the financial irregularities in prize money payouts across the Southwest Circuit, the pattern of suspicious injuries at events supplied by Thornton Livestock, the deaths of Tyler Brennan and Grant Corbin, the shell company structure, the circuit's own published records.
Everything I tell her comes from public records, my own financial analysis, and interviews I can attribute to named sources.
"I need on-the-record interviews," Sylvia says. "Background sourcing and financial documents get me an editor meeting. Named sources get me published."
"I have a source I'm working on. Quinn Gallagher. Team roper, Grant's former traveling partner. He's been carrying information about the financial fraud since before Grant died. He's scared, but he's close to agreeing to go on record."
"You're sure he'll come through?"
"He told me the guilt is eating him alive. His exact words were, 'Grant and Tyler are dead because nobody spoke up.' He's not there yet, but he will be. I'll get him there."
Colt sets a mug of coffee on the nightstand beside me. Black, no sugar. He doesn't interrupt, doesn't hover, doesn't try to insert himself into the conversation.
He sits in the chair by the window and cleans his bull rope with the same quiet focus he brings to everything.
But the focus isn't on the rope. His hands move through the familiar routine without looking, and his eyes are on me.
Steady. Unhurried. The same way he watches me from across the chutes, cataloging every shift in my expression, every tell I don't know I'm giving.
Me on the phone building a case while he works his gear a few feet away, tracking me like I'm the only thing in this room worth his attention. The domesticity of it hits me somewhere unguarded. So does the heat behind it.
This is what it would look like. The two of us, building something. Not just an investigation. A life with someone who understands that the work matters, that the work doesn't stop, and that the person doing the work still needs coffee brought to them without being asked.
"I need the financial documents," Sylvia says. "Everything you've got on the prize money discrepancies, the shell companies, the altered payouts. And I need it sourced to your analysis, your name attached. You're the journalist who found this."
"I'm Grant's sister first. The journalism is how I got here."
"Even better. Sister of murdered rider investigates her brother's murder and circuit corruption when the authorities won't. That's the lead."
We spend the next hour building the story architecture.
Sylvia will handle the writing and the editorial process.
I'll provide the documentation, the sourcing, and the emotional core.
We agree on a timeline: Sylvia needs a couple of weeks to verify, write, and get legal clearance from her outlet's attorneys.
I hang up and look at Colt. He's still in the chair, the bull rope coiled in his lap, watching me with an expression that carries last night's intensity at a lower temperature.
"That sounded like it went well," he says.
"Sylvia's good. She's thorough, she's fast and she doesn't scare easy."
"Sounds like someone else I know."
"Flattery won't get you out of buying me breakfast, Holloway."
"Who said anything about getting out of it?" He stands and pulls a shirt on, and I watch the scratch marks disappear under cotton with a pang of something I refuse to call possessiveness. "There's a diner down the road. You can tell me the plan over eggs."
We eat breakfast at a formica counter with our knees touching under the bar and my notebook open between the saltshaker and the ketchup.
He eats like a man who burned a significant number of calories last night and doesn't bother being subtle about it. I eat like a woman who has a federal case to report on and a story to build, and a cowboy's thigh pressed against hers under a diner counter.
"I still say Torres won’t like it," he says between bites.
"And as I said before, she doesn't have to like it, but it will help her in the end.
"And if Merrick comes after you personally?"
"Then I'll have a very pissed off bull rider standing between me and whatever he sends." I take a sip of coffee. "Unless you've got somewhere else to be."
"Nowhere else I'd rather be." He says it flat and final, in the voice he uses when he's done discussing something because the answer was always obvious.
His hand finds my knee under the counter and squeezes once, brief and hard. The gesture is the same one he used under Torres's conference table, and it carries the same weight: everything he won't say packed into the pressure of his fingers.
The next couple of weeks are a controlled burn.
The circuit moves to Tucson, and we go with it.
Colt rides, accumulating points and maintaining his position at the top of the standings.
The circuit identity he's built, the unstable, grief-stricken rider with a death wish, gives way to something more dangerous: a focused, calculating competitor with a purpose behind every ride.
The other riders notice. The change is too sharp to miss. Colt isn't fighting the bulls anymore. He's working with them, reading their patterns, anticipating their moves, riding with the technical precision of the athlete he was before Grant's death rewired him for self-destruction.
Wade comments on it at the chutes. "You stop wanting to die, Holloway?"
"Started wanting to win," Colt says. "There's a difference."
"Hell of a difference." Wade takes a pull from the flask he thinks nobody notices. "Wish somebody would explain it to me."
The exchange is brief, and Wade drifts away with the loose, unsteady gait of a man who's been drinking since noon. I file it away. Wade is spiraling in the way that riders spiral on this circuit, quietly and publicly at the same time, and nobody's asking the right questions about why.