Page 56 of Thunder

"When it all comes out. He's gonna absolutely lose his mind."

"Probably." I pull her hand to my mouth, kiss her knuckles, keep my eyes on the road.

"Let him. You're already mine. Ink says so."

That night, after, when she's stretched out easily on her stomach so the fresh ink can breathe and I'm tracing the air just above Property of Thunder because I can't stop looking at it, she falls asleep mid-sentence, wrung out and marked and safe in my bed.

And I lie there in the dark and let myself have the truth of it.

This is the happiest I’ve ever been.

A woman I've got no right to, wearing my name and my snake, sleeping in my bed while my daughter sleeps down the hall.

A family stitching itself slowly back together around her.

The best stretch of days I've known in a life that hasn't handed me many.

And every bit of it is sitting on top of a fuse.

Because there's still a grave out past Big Spring.

Still an investigator pulling a thread toward it.

Still a shadow outfit with a lens trained on everyone I love, and a run last week that came back quiet and grim with the men not saying much about what they found.

Still a father who's going to find my name on his daughter's back one day and take it as the declaration of war it half is.

The dark's coming.

I've spent my whole life watching for the dark.

I can feel it out there past the good, patient as that silver truck, waiting for its moment.

But she's here now.

Marked and mine, and choosing it with her eyes open.

And a man who's spent his whole life bracing for the worst can be forgiven, just once, for lying still in the dark and letting himself have the best while it lasts.

It won't last. Nothing does.

I hold on to it anyway.

CHAPTER ELEVEN

Presley

Dakota texts me for the first time since the truth came out, stopping me cold in the middle of the feed aisle.

Breakfast tomorrow. We need to talk.

I read it four times standing there with a fifty-pound bag of range cubes over my shoulder, sure I've got the wrong Dakota, sure it's a mistake, sure the next text is going to be ‘sorry, meant that for Grace.’

But it isn't.

The next one comes a second later.

The diner across from the ranch. 8am. Grace too. It's important.