Page 10 of Reluctant Bride

I don’t say that part out loud. I don’t have to. Holt’s jaw does it for me.

“Route log.” I cut the thought off before it finishes, because if I stand here chewing on the somebody, I’ll lose the only hour I’ve got before this scene gets contaminated by every well-meaning idiot with a badge and a theory. “Whose authorization moved this truck out of the yard tonight?”

Mick pulls up the manifest on his phone, and I watch his face do the thing faces do right before somebody has to tell you something they’d rather not.

“Yours,” he says.

The word lands and doesn’t move. I don’t flinch, because flinching in front of two men I need functioning in the next ten minutes is a luxury I don’t get, but inside I go very still and very cold, same as watching my dad turn his glass at the wedding, except this time it’s aimed at me instead of coming from him.

“My code hasn’t touched dispatch in six days.” I take the phone from him and check it myself, because trust and verify aren’t the same word, even between us. “I’ve been buried in the Blackwater contract renegotiation.”

“I know.” Mick doesn’t blink. “Your code cleared this route at twenty to midnight. Digital signature, badge scan, the whole chain. It’s clean. It’s also not you.”

Somebody used my name to move a dead man through my own company.

“Pull the terminal logs.” I’m already moving toward the truck. “Every dispatch station that touched a route tonight. I want a name in an hour.”

The Sullivan Transport dispatch office before five in the morning is fluorescent and empty except for the hum of servers and one very awake, very frightened man named Curtis Ames. Six years on terminal four, and he’s about to learn none of it buys him anything tonight.

I sit across from him. I don’t raise my voice. I’ve never needed to.

“Curtis.” I say his name like I’m reading it off a form, because to me, right now, that’s what it is. “Your terminal issued the authorization that moved a dead man’s truck twenty-two miles tonight, under my digital signature. Walk me through how that happened.”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about.” His voice cracks on know, which tells me everything the words don’t.

Holt stands behind him, arms crossed, saying nothing, because Holt understands that some men only need one person in the room reminding them how the story ends if they choose wrong.

I don’t reach for anything sharp. I don’t need to. I reach for the zip cuffs sitting in my jacket pocket instead, standard restraint kit, nothing that draws blood, and I secure his wrists to the arm of the chair in one motion so practiced it barely registers as a threat at all. That’s the whole design of it. No object in this room is built to hurt him. That’s what makes it worse.

“Your mortgage is eleven days late.” I keep it conversational, like the grain report. “Your brother’s border crossing permit renews next month, and it’s currently flagged for secondary review, which I could resolve with one phone call or make permanent with another. Your daughter starts at Montana State in the fall on a scholarship that a very small committee controls, a committee that has taken donations from my family for fifteen years running.”

I let that sit.

“None of that is a threat.” I hold his eyes so he understands I mean it. “I’m just telling you what you have, Curtis, and what you stand to lose, because I think you’ve forgotten those two things aren’t the same, and right now the gap between them is all that matters.”

His breath goes ragged. His eyes cut to Holt, then back to me, hunting for the version of this conversation where somebody yells and it’s easier to hate them for it. I don’t give him that version.

“A man is dead.” My voice never changes pitch, not once, the whole point of it. “A man who was helping clear my family’s name, and somebody used mine to bury him. I need the phone number that authorized your override, and I need it before I finish this sentence.”

He gives it up in under a minute. A number with no name attached, routed through three burner relays before it dies somewhere in a system Tate will spend the next six hours trying to unbraid. And one word, dragged out of him like it takes a rib to say it.

“Cruz.” The name comes out of him like it’s tearing on the way. “I was told never to say that name. Ever. To anyone.”

“Thank you.” I mean it.

He starts crying after the thank-you. Not before.

I stand. I don’t look back at him. Holt cuts the zip cuffs on his way past and doesn’t say a word either, which from Holt is a mercy.

Sullivan Transport’s main building is quiet this time of night except for one lit office on the second floor, Maren’s, and I bound up the stairs because some conversations don’t survive one step at a time.

Knox is already there when I walk in. Of course he is. Married two days and he still shows up at his wife’s office at five in the morning because Maren texted come now and Knox Blackwater has never once in his life ignored a text like that.

He’s leaning against her desk, jacket off, sleeves shoved up, looking like a man who was asleep an hour ago and isn’t pretending otherwise. Maren sits on the edge of the desk beside him, arms crossed, already reading the tension on my face before I say a word. She’s spent thirty years reading rooms full of men who’d rather she didn’t.

“Tell me,” Knox says. Nothing in front of it. He learned that from somewhere, probably the same place Gideon learned it, and for one disorienting second I think about how much these two families have in common underneath the war they keep insisting on.

“Informant’s dead.” I don’t sit. This isn’t a sitting conversation. “My authorization moved his truck through our system. It wasn’t me. Somebody forged my credentials and used a dispatcher to cover it.”