Page 105 of Reluctant Bride

“Dawson. Look at me.”

“Through and through,” I say, or think I say. “Missed the bone.”

“You’re pale. Dawson.”

The yard blinks out. One second, maybe less, just black, and then her face swims back in, closer than before, both her hands locked on my jaw like she caught me going somewhere and dragged me back by force.

She’s shouting for Holt over her shoulder while she tears the sleeve off my shirt, cinching it hard above the hole with a knot Rae taught her before she could ride, and the pressure drags a sound out of me I’d deny under oath. Her hands don’t shake once while she ties it. They start the second the knot’s done.

“You put your body in front of a gun.”

“That’s what it’s for.”

“Don’t you ever do that to me again.” She presses her forehead to mine, fierce and fast, no time for the kiss I can see she wants to give me. “Stay awake and argue with me, Sullivan.”

“Which part?”

“All of it.”

Holt gets a shoulder under my good arm and hauls me upright like he’s done it before, which he has, just never for me. My knees take a second to agree. The yard swings once and settles.

“Truck,” Holt says. “Now.”

I catch the rest in pieces on the walk. Tate calling across the gravel that Erin’s truck is empty except for a locked case, a full box of 1962 county files inside it. Sage answering without letting go of me, telling him to check the prefix on the labels against the page from the blast site. Tate, a beat later: “It matches.” Mackenzie behind us, clipboard already out. “She built the security system. Every badge in both families ran through her. The knife at the blast site is going to come back to her prints, and so is the metadata in your federal filing, Dawson. Her build, same as the ambush phone. The Bureau will have it withdrawn by Monday.” Then, quieter, like a note to herself: “The 1987 account goes in a drawer. It’s waited this long. It can wait until you’re stitched.”

An indictment I’ve carried since noon turns back into what it always was, somebody else’s lie with my name on it, and I don’t even have the energy to feel it lift. I just know it’s gone.

Sage stops long enough to hand the Ledger folder to Knox. “It goes back tonight. Where it belongs.” Then she’s climbing into Holt’s back seat beside me and clamping her hand over the knot.

Cruz’s truck passes us on the ranch road going in. He takes one look at Erin in cuffs by the gate, one look at me through the window, and lifts two fingers off the wheel. His shoulders drop for the first time since his name came out of a terrified dispatcher’s mouth.

“You let yourself get cuffed to a chair,” Sage says, quiet, keeping me talking. “You were free and you sat there.”

“You knew?”

“Maren told me the stopwatch story years ago. I knew the second your radio went dead you’d be out before we reached you.” Her hand tightens over the knot. “I was terrified anyway.”

“Didn’t stop you riding at an armed woman.”

“Terrified’s never stopped me from anything, Dawson. That’s the whole point of me.” Her other hand finds my jaw and turns my face toward her. “Eyes open. I mean it.”

I try. The truck hits the cattle guard, and the world goes grey at the edges and stays that way the rest of the drive, her voice the only thing in it with any color left.

Holt gets me into a kitchen chair before my legs finish deciding for me. Sage cleans the wound thoroughly and dresses it with gauze to let it drain for a day before stitching it. Whiskey for me, silence for her, Cricket supervising from the doorway. Nobody says the word hospital. Nobody ever has. Luckily, we never run out of meds for this level of pain.

It’s only once the dressing’s taped and Holt’s gone out to the porch to give us the room that she finally sits down across from me, takes my good hand, and turns the wrist over in the light. Skin scraped raw and dark with dried blood where I worked the tie against itself for the better part of an hour, the mark of it circling like a bracelet.

“I’ve had worse,” I say. “About an hour ago.”

“That’s not the point and you know it.” She presses her mouth to the raw skin, right where the plastic bit deepest, gentle in a way that undoes me faster than the whiskey is managing to. “You freed yourself, just in case I didn’t get to you. For me.”

“For us.” The color’s coming back into the room one shade at a time. “Watching that horse come off the tree line, Sage, I’ve never been more terrified or more in love with you in my life.”

“I’ve loved you since I was twenty and had no business knowing what that word meant yet.” Her voice breaks on it, and she lets it. “I am not spending whatever’s left of our lives learning to survive losing you twice.”

Later, on the porch, dusk sliding gold and slow behind Broken Sky Mountain, my arm strapped tight against my ribs in a sling, I hand her the folder before I let myself think too hard about doing it.

“What’s this,” she says, already opening it.