My mind does the thing it does when something is unresolved, turning it over and over the way you turn a stone in your hand, feeling for the edge that doesn't fit. The place where the shape of it doesn't match what it should be.
The person outside the house tonight wasn't trying to hide.
That's the part that keeps nagging.
Every other move Colt has made has been careful, calibrated, designed to look like something else until you get close enough to see the intention underneath it.
The sabotage at the rodeo looked like equipment failure. The note in the trailer could have been anyone. Even Hadley, what happened with Hadley at the rodeo, was engineered to look like a lost child and nothing more.
So why send someone to stand outside my house and make enough noise to be heard?
I stare at the ceiling and let the pieces move the way they've been moving all night, and somewhere around the time the moon shifts past the window and the shadows in the room change angle, it lands.
This was not a warning. It was a distraction.
Someone wanted us awake and reactive and focused on the house, focused inward, focused on each other, while something else happened somewhere we weren't looking.
My stomach drops. Our land. They are distracting me from our land.
I reach for my phone on the nightstand, careful not to wake Riley, and pull up the trail camera app I installed on the property a few weeks ago after the first round of sabotage, the one I set up and mostly forgot about because nothing had triggered it.
Three alerts within the last ninety minutes
I sit up slowly, angling the screen away from Riley's sleeping face, and open the first image, then the second, then the third. Then what I find looking back at me from the grainy night-vision footage turns everything I thought I understood about this situation completely inside out.
Because it isn't Colt in those images.
It's someone I trusted.
And now I know this was never just about the land.
It was about setting me up to take the fall for all of it.
Chapter eighteen
Are We Safe
Riley
Iwake up to an empty bed and the sound of voices carrying down the hall, low and serious in a way that tells me before I'm fully conscious that something has shifted overnight and it isn't small.
Jace's side of the bed is cool, apparently he's been up for a while, and whatever pulled him out of sleep was significant enough to keep him from coming back.
I lie there for a moment in the gray early light doing the thing I always do when I don't yet have enough information to act on, taking stock, listening, letting what I can hear tell me what I can't see.
Two voices, maybe three, all male. His brothers don't show up before sunrise without a reason.
I can hear the timber of it even from here, that particular register men use when the information is serious and the conversation has already moved past shock into something more deliberate.
I dress quickly and move down the hall, stopping to check on Hadley first out of habit, finding her still deeply asleep with her arm thrown over her head the way she's slept since she was an infant
Something about the normalcy of it, the simple uncomplicated peace of a five year old who doesn't know yet that the world shifted again overnight, steadies me enough to keep moving.
The kitchen is full of McCallisters.
Brooks looks up first and whatever serious thing he was about to say gets set aside for half a second. "Morning, Riley," he says, with the quiet steadiness of a man who understands that courtesy doesn't stop because the situation is complicated.
"Morning," Wade says from beside him. Even with the tension coiled in him the way it is, he manages something close to a nod that carries genuine warmth in it.
