"You saw the exchange with the stock contractor." His jaw tightens slightly. "I was there. I watched you watch it.
Dusty said you were too green to understand what you were looking at and I told him he was wrong." quick silence. "Dusty didn't listen."
"So when the Miller land came up," Brooks says from behind me, working it through out loud the way he does. "You realized it was going to Jace specifically, you didn't see a problem. You saw an opportunity."
Colt looks at Brooks, something measuring in it. "Frame the witness," he says, like it's the most logical thing in the world. "Bury the evidence on his land, tie the operation to his return to the circuit, make him the story instead of us." He pauses. "It almost worked, and when you showed up with Riley, my old girlfriend on your arm, I was determined to take you down."
"Almost," Wade says, and the single word from Wade carries a weight that fills the entire back lot.
"Dusty got greedy," Colt continues, something shifting in his tone, and I realize he's doing what cornered men do, redirecting, putting distance between himself and the parts that cost the most.
"The planted evidence, coming after your family, that wasn't my call. That was Dusty protecting himself."
"The gate handler was yours," I say.
He doesn't answer.
He doesn't have to.
"The handler was yours," I repeat, steady and certain. "Every gate that stuck. Every rope that slipped. That rider at the second rodeo who went down hard and ended up in the hospital, that was on you. Your doing.
I take one step toward him. "Don't stand here and separate yourself from Dusty's choices when your choices put riders on the ground."
The composure cracks again, deeper this time.
Because that's the part he can't reframe. Not the money or the fixed draws or the twenty years of carefully constructed lies, but the riders.
The men who got hurt on gates his man tampered with while he stood in the crowd with his champion smile. His spotless reputation and his easy way of making everyone around him feel like they were looking at something worth trusting.
That's what it costs him.
I can see it.
The investigator's vehicle pulls into the back lot, headlights cutting through the dark, and Colt watches it come with the expression of a man watching the last door close.
He looks back at me.
"For what it's worth," he says quietly, "you were always the best rider on that circuit."
I look at him for a long moment.
"That's not worth much right now," I answer.
The investigator is a woman named Carver.
Late forties, compact, the kind of still that comes from years of reading rooms and deciding how much of herself to put into them.
She shakes Quinn's hand first, then Brooks, then looks at Colt with the particular quality of attention that makes it clear she already knows everything about him that matters and is here for the formalities.
Colt knows it too.
I watch him recalibrate in real time, the lawyer request already made, the composure back in place, the champion persona reasserting itself with the practiced ease of a man who has been performing under pressure his entire adult life.
He straightens his shoulders. Evens out his breathing. Puts the easy back into his expression the way you put on a coat.
It doesn't fit the same way anymore.
Carver asks him to step away from the equipment shed and he does. Moving with her toward the far side of the lot. Quinn flanking him on the other side, and I watch them go with the particular feeling of something winding down that has been running too long and at too high a cost.
