Page 5 of Reluctant Bride

It wasn’t restraint. It was strategy wearing restraint’s clothes, which is the only kind of restraint I’ve ever managed to be any good at.

Mackenzie finds me by the trailers, when the band’s slowed and half the guests have started hunting for their car keys. She’s got the look she gets when she’s spent several hours doing federal work inside somebody’s wedding and hasn’t slept in longer than either of us wants to discuss out loud.

“Walk with me.” The same three words I’d bet Gideon used on Sage, near enough that I wonder if every conversation that matters in this family starts with an order to relocate somewhere quieter, so nobody has to hear how badly things are about to go.

We end up past the trailers, far enough that the band turns into something you feel through the ground more than hear.

“Robbie Vásquez surfaced again,” she says. “One of your dispatchers. He’s been quietly working with me for about a year, feeding me anything that looks off. He’s not informing on either family, Dawson. He’s helping me prove somebody’s using real Sullivan and Blackwater paperwork to build a case that was never true in the first place. He’s given us something new.”

“New like helpful, or new like a problem?”

“New like somebody’s building a case against both your families out of records that actually exist.” She crosses her arms, running the same read on me she runs on everyone, hunting for tells I’ve spent a career training out of my own face. “This isn’t fabricated evidence. That’d almost be easier to fight. This is real documentation, arranged to point somewhere it never used to point. Somebody’s taking true things and turning them into a lie with a straight face, and Robbie’s the only reason we’re not still calling it a coincidence.”

“Who?”

“Don’t know yet. But whoever it is knows Sullivan Transport’s internal routing well enough to make it airtight, and knows Blackwater land use well enough to braid the two families’ feud right through it without anyone spotting the seam.” She looks past me, toward the tent, toward the lights and the laughter and the whole valley that has no idea what’s circling it. “Watch for anything that feels built instead of found. Contracts that got signed too easy. Routes approved without the usual friction. Anybody showing more interest in your father’s business than their job title accounts for.”

“You think it’s somebody close?”

“I think it has to be.” Even, like everything she says that scares her most. “This isn’t outside knowledge. It’s inside knowledge, dressed up to look like an accident.”

I think about the dispatch terminal. About how many hands touch a Sullivan Transport route before it ever reaches my desk. About how easy it’d be for somebody I trust to nudge one line item a hair to the left and let the rest of the machine do the damage for them.

“I’ll watch for it.” Not a promise. A fact. Watching is the one skill nobody’s ever had to teach me twice.

Mackenzie nods, satisfied, and heads back to find Holt, leaving me with the horses and a party winding down into the hour where everyone’s either drunk enough to be honest or sober enough to start regretting it.

My phone buzzes.

I pull it out expecting Holt, or my father calling me back to finish a conversation I have no interest in finishing tonight.

It’s neither. Unknown number. No name, no photo, nothing to tell me who’s on the other end before I open it.

I open it anyway.

A photograph loads first. The boundary house, sitting quiet out past the northern fence line. Timestamped this afternoon, hours before anyone told me where we’d be living, the slant of the light low enough to hit the porch rail in a way that catches on something old in me I don’t have room to name right now. Whoever took this stood close enough to the property line to get the shot clean. Whoever took this knew, this afternoon, before either father had spoken a word to either of us, where this marriage was going to land.

Under the photo, one line.

She’ll like it there again.

I read it twice. Then a third time, slower, like the words might rearrange themselves into something less like a threat if I give them the chance.

They don’t.

I look up, past the tree line where Gideon walked his daughter, toward the tent where my father still sits where I left him, turning his glass in slow, satisfied circles, already certain he’s won something tonight.

Whoever sent this knew about that house before anyone said a word about where we’d live.

Which means somebody’s been watching us a lot longer than either family has.

THREE

SAGE

I bring a folder to my own kidnapping.

That’s not technically what this is, but the boundary house sits far away from the main houses, against the tree line that nobody would hear me scream, and Dawson Sullivan opens the door before I’ve finished parking, which means he was watching for my car, which also means he’s been standing at that window doing exactly what I’ve been doing the whole drive out here: rehearsing.