Page 103 of Reluctant Bride

She swears under her breath, pulling back before her fingers ever reach the plastic, phone to her ear instead, and whatever comes through it drains something out of her face fast. “When?” A pause. “That’s not thirty minutes, that’s now.” Another pause, shorter. “I’m moving him.”

She pockets the phone without ever finishing the cut.

“Change of plan,” she says, still too rattled to look twice at anything. “We’re moving you. Now.”

“Where?”

“Somewhere with better light.” She crouches to cut the tie at my ankles with the same knife instead, quick, practiced, the same efficiency she brought to a rifle at the fundraiser, her hands not quite as steady as they were a minute ago. She snatches the leather folder off the shelf on her way past it, tucking it under one arm without breaking her grip on the gun. “On your feet. Move.”

I stand slow, keeping my wrists crossed behind me how they’ve been sitting for the last twenty minutes, the broken tie still looped loose enough to pass a glance but not a second look. She doesn’t take a second look. She’s watching the door, the timeline collapsing in her head, not the nine inches of plastic doing nothing at all around my wrists.

“You’re going to walk me out through the equipment yard,” she says, gun low but steady, the kind of grip that means she’s done this before and hates that it’s me on the other end of it. “There’s a truck parked behind the near stable. We drive out the south gate onto the Corridor road.”

The near stable.

That means passing within sight of half of Blackwater’s working hands on a Sunday afternoon, and worse, it means passing close enough to Cruz’s usual rounds that a woman he already doesn’t trust is betting her whole plan on him not looking up at the wrong second. Bold. Or desperate. Maybe both.

“You’re gambling Cruz doesn’t see you,” I say.

“Cruz doesn’t see anything right now. West isn’t the only one who can loop a feed.” Something almost like pride moves behind her voice. “This stretch of camera’s been playing the same four minutes on repeat since before I ever cuffed you to that chair. Whoever’s watching the monitors sees an empty yard.”

She marches me up the narrow stone stairwell first, out of the cool dark of the archive room and into a hallway that still smells like a hundred and fifty years of paper, and then through the heavy door at the top into full daylight. The sun’s climbed high and hot while I sat cuffed in the cold, somewhere close to three in the afternoon, and it takes my eyes a second too long to adjust, which she notices, gun pressing lower into my back until I move again.

She walks it like she’s walked it before, past the equipment shed, along the back fence where the grass hasn’t grown back from last month’s construction trench, easy and practiced, a woman who’s clearly rehearsed this exact path in her head a dozen times before she ever needed to walk it for real. Cruz’s truck sits empty outside the near stable, and she steers wide of the open bay door, careful, patient, gun never once dipping out of position.

We reach her truck without a single ranch hand looking up.

She marches me into the passenger seat, keeps the gun low across her own lap where a hand at the wheel could still find it fast, and pulls out onto the ranch road toward the south gate.

Sage would never come at this the obvious way. She talks a half ton horse through a gate by giving it somewhere else to put its temper. She reads a locked door instead of forcing it. She buried my road in a hearing room instead of a fistfight.

If I know my wife at all, and God, I know my wife completely, she already knows which gate this truck is heading for.

The south gate comes into view at the end of the ranch road, chain link and hard afternoon light, and it’s shut. Not open and unmanned like most Sundays. Shut, barred, a length of cable strung taut across the frame that wasn’t there yesterday.

Erin swears under her breath and hits the brakes.

“Somebody closed the Corridor,” she says, more to herself than to me.

I don’t know who or why, not yet, but I know what it means. Somebody on the outside is already three steps ahead of this truck, and Erin just found out the hard way.

Erin’s radio crackles once, static and nothing, and her whole body goes rigid beside me.

“Say something,” she says, into the dead air. “Say something now.”

Nothing answers.

“Don’t move.” Her voice has lost every trace of the composure she walked into that archive room with. “Don’t make a single sound while I deal with this, or I stop caring how clean I wanted this to be.”

She throws the truck into park, gun coming up as she climbs out to deal with the cable herself, and that’s when I hear it. Not another truck. Not a voice.

Hooves.

Briar comes off the tree line at a dead run, Sage low over her neck, reins loose the practiced way she rides when she’s already decided the horse knows the plan better than she does. She’s not shooting. She’s not shouting a command. She’s steering the whole animal straight between Erin and the truck door, closing the one route Erin had left.

Erin swings the gun toward the horse.

“Don’t,” I say, and for the first time since she cuffed me, my voice comes out with something underneath it that isn’t calm at all.