He shrugs, but there's nothing casual about it. "Quinn doesn't miss," he says simply.
"The records?" I ask.
"Enough to hold him." He holds my gaze. "That part is done, Jace."
I nod, feeling the weight of it shift. Not disappear. Shift. The way a load changes when someone finally puts a hand under the other end.
Wade appears at Brooks' shoulder. Luke comes around the side of the chute a moment later, hands in his pockets, wearing the expression he gets when he's figured something out and is choosing his moment carefully.
"The draw sheets," Luke says. "I went back through all three rodeos tonight, not just Caldwell." He pauses. "Every ride that went wrong this season had the same handler on the gate."
"Dusty's man," I say.
"That's what I thought too." Luke looks at me steadily. "But Dusty didn't hire him. Colt did. The handler has been on Colt's payroll for two years."
The air between us goes still.
"Dusty ran the long game," Luke continues. "Colt ran the operation. The gates, the ropes, the person outside Riley's house. Colt Ramirez has had hands on every piece of this from the beginning."
I stand with that.
All season I watched Colt, then shifted focus to Dusty when the evidence pointed there, treating them as separate threats on parallel tracks. They weren't parallel. They were layered. Dusty's history providing the motive, Colt's precision providing the execution.
Two men. One plan.
Colt is still out there. Still free. Still standing in the clear with his reputation intact, nothing connecting him to any of it except a handler on his payroll and four years of careful misdirection.
Wade reads my face. "We'll get him."
"Tonight?" I ask.
"Not tonight," Brooks says. "But soon."
I look out across the grounds toward the sponsor tents where Colt was working the crowd earlier. Easy smile. Clean hands. The picture of a champion with nothing to hide.
He thinks he's safe.
He's wrong.
He just doesn't know it yet.
I feel Riley beside me before I see her, her hand finding my arm the way it does now, certain and without ceremony.
"It's not over," she says. Not a question.
"No," I answer. "But we're close."
She nods once, her jaw set, her eyes steady on mine. She doesn't ask me to promise her anything. She doesn't need to.
She already knows I'll finish it.
That's enough for tonight.
Chapter twenty-two
All In
Riley
