Page 53 of Reluctant Bride

“Dawson.”

I look up. She’s still holding my wrist. She hasn’t let go of it, and she hasn’t said anything close to it’s fine or I’m not afraid either, and I notice both of those absences like a missing step on a staircase.

She presses my right hand over the gash on my left forearm. “Hold pressure. Come home with me,” she says.

I go.

We’re three steps toward the car when Mackenzie’s voice cuts across the yard, sharp enough that both of us turn.

“Dawson.” She’s crouched near the fence line, gloved, holding something up between two fingers. A knife, small, the blade stamped with a maker’s mark I’d know blind. Blackwater Ranch runs the same custom set Gideon’s had made for twenty years, one per foreman, engraved on the tang. “This is six feet from the blast seat. It wasn’t here when I did my first sweep twenty minutes ago, and I was standing on this exact patch of ground when I did it.”

Sage goes very still beside me.

“That’s not evidence,” Mackenzie says, before either of us can reach for the wrong conclusion. “That’s a plant. Too clean, too findable, sitting exactly where somebody wanted a fire crew to trip over it.” She bags it anyway, because that’s the job. “Somebody wants this pointed at your family too, Sage. Not just his.”

Behind us, Holt’s radio crackles, and I catch three words over the static that stop my legs from moving at all.

“He’s not alone.”

SEVENTEEN

SAGE

Dawson bleeds on my hands and doesn’t look away from the tattoo on my hip.

I’ve got the first aid kit spread across the kitchen table, needle threaded, his left forearm propped on a folded towel because he’s done this before and hates it exactly as much every time. The cut runs four inches from wrist toward elbow, ragged at the edges where the beam caught him instead of clean like the cut he opened on someone else an hour ago. That’s the detail I can’t stop circling. His knife made a decision. The beam just happened to him.

Holt’s text came in on the drive home. Second man. Tree line. Lost him at the county road. Got his name off the lift crew sign-in sheet. Nothing since. I read it once and put the phone face down on the counter, because the man in front of me is bleeding and the one Holt lost isn’t.

“Hold still.”

“I am holding still.”

“You flinched.”

He reaches past me for the bottle of whiskey I set out earlier, more habit than plan, and takes two long pulls straight from the neck before I’ve even got the needle threaded.

“That’s not anesthesia, Dawson. That’s a coping mechanism.”

“I didn’t flinch. I anticipated pain and my body responded rationally.” He says it deadpan, boardroom-calm, the exact voice he probably used on federal auditors, and it’s such a ridiculous sentence for a man who just drank like the needle was already in him that I almost laugh, which I think is the point.

“You made a noise.”

“Men don’t make noises. We vocalize tactically.”

“That was not a tactical vocalization, Dawson. That was a whimper.”

“I’m choosing not to fight you on this while you’re holding a needle.”

“Smart man.”

My hands are steadier than they have any right to be, steadier than they were an hour ago standing in that gravel watching him hold a knife like it belonged in his fist, and I think that’s a tell all by itself. The body knows the difference between danger and this. This is just thread and skin and a man who lets me hurt him a little because it’s the only kind of help he’ll take without arguing about it.

He watches my face instead of his own arm. He’s been doing that since we got home, since he peeled out of his bloody shirt in the mudroom and didn’t say a word about it, since I found the suture kit without being asked. These things you just know how to do when you grow up in a family that keeps its wounds off paper.

Nobody in this valley calls an ambulance for something a kitchen table can fix. My mother stitched Knox’s eyebrow shut at fourteen with fishing line and a bottle of whiskey he wasn’t allowed to drink from. Kathleen’s probably done the same for her five children more times than anybody’s counted. You go to the hospital when you’re dying. You go to family when you’re just bleeding.

“You’re staring,” I say.