Then he pulls back just enough to look at me. His expression has shifted into something I recognize. I've seen it in the arena. Thatparticular quality of focus that means he's made a decision and everything in him is aligned behind it.
"I have to ride," he says. His voice is low and even and full of the kind of honesty that doesn't dress itself up. "Not because I'm reckless or because I don't understand what's at stake. Not because what you just said doesn't matter to me more than anything else in this room right now." He pauses, making sure I'm with him. "I have to ride because it's the only play we have left."
I start to speak and he shakes his head gently, not cutting me off but asking for his moment.
"The evidence is gone," he continues. "Whatever Brooks finds in the financial records, whatever Luke pulls from the circuit data, it's going to take time we don't have. When Dusty finds out how much we know, he could disappear the same way the evidence did. He's been doing this for twenty years, Riley. He knows how to vanish. He knows how to rebuild somewhere else under a different arrangement with different people and leave nothing behind."
He searches my face. "Dusty doesn't know what I found in those records before they were taken. He doesn't know what I photographed or what Brooks is already working from. He is not aware that we know it's him and not Colt at the center of it."
I am listening to every word, even the ones I don't want to hear.
"The rodeo is the one place he has to be," Jace says. "Contractors, riders, handlers, the people he's been running this with, they'll all be there, and a man who has spent twenty years in the shadows doesn't know how to not show up to the thing that built him. That's his blind spot." He looks deep in my eyes.
"That's the only window we have." He pauses. "And I'm the only one who can open it. I'm the one he's been watching, managing and keeping pointed in the wrong direction. The last thing he's going to expect is for me to walk into that arena knowing exactly what I know. I will be ready for whatever he decides to do about it."
His hands are still holding my face, steady and warm. I feel the logic of it moving through me even as every instinct I have resists it.
"You're using yourself as bait," I say.
"I'm using myself as the one variable he can't account for," he answers. "There's a difference."
I want to argue that distinction but I can't find the clean line between them that would make the argument hold. That might be the most frustrating thing about loving someone who is smarter about certain things than you are.
"And the riding?" I ask. "Is that part of it or is that just Jace McCallister being unable to walk into a rodeo without climbing on a bull?"
Something shifts in his expression. Something that in another moment might almost be a smile. "Little of both," he admits, with the honesty I have come to understand is one of the things I love most about him.
I let out a breath that has been sitting in my chest since he said he had to go.
I haven't won this argument.
I knew before I started it that I wasn't going to.
But I said what needed saying. He heard it and he told me the truth in return, and maybe that is the best version of this conversation that was ever available to us.
We stay like that for a long moment, his forehead against mine, the kitchen quiet around us. I let myself have it, the closeness, the warmth of him, and the particular safety of being held by someone who doesn't require you to be okay when you aren't.
I am not okay.
I understand everything he said and I believe it and I know he's right about the window and the timing. The fact that Dusty Rhodes has spent twenty years being underestimated and used it like a finely sharpened tool. None of that understanding makes the fear sitting in my chest any smaller or any easier to carry.
That's the thing nobody tells you about loving someone who walks toward danger as a matter of principle. It doesn't get easier with understanding. Understanding just means you can't argue with it anymore, which leaves you alone with the fear and nowhere to put it.
I pull back slightly and look at him, really look, at the jaw, the eyes, the hands that have become as familiar to me as anything in my life over these past weeks. I do the thing I have been doing since the night I decided to stop running from this. I let myself feel the full weight of what he means to me without immediately looking for the exit.
"I hate this," I tell him, because he deserves the honest version and not the managed one.
"I know," he says.
"I understand why you have to do it. I support it and I am going to be standing in that arena watching every second of it," I continue, "I am going to hate every single moment from the time you climb into that chute until the time you walk back out of it in one piece."
"In one piece," he repeats, like he's accepting the condition.
"That's not negotiable," I say.
"Understood."
I search his face for the thing I need to find there before I can fully let this go, the certainty, the quality he has of being completely present in whatever he's doing that I have come to rely on more than I ever planned to rely on anything about him. I find it, the same way I always find it, sitting right at the surface, not performed or constructed but simply who he is.
