Page 63 of Reluctant Bride

“Payment’s routed through a shell called Highline Consulting,” he says, pulling up a scan of a wire transfer old enough that the letterhead looks like it belongs in a museum. “Same year Mackenzie’s talking about. Six figures, to an account that traces back to A. Rourke. Just initials and a routing number somebody thought was untraceable back then.”

Knox is at the window with his arms crossed, watching all three of us with the diminishing patience of a man who has spent the whole day getting nowhere on the thing he needs. “That’s interesting,” he says, when Tate finishes. “It’s also not Cruz.”

“No,” I say. “It’s not.”

“I gave you until tonight.” Knox doesn’t raise his voice. He’s never had to. “That clock hasn’t stopped running because you found a more interesting name to chase.”

“I’m aware of the clock, Knox.”

“Then start acting like it.” He pushes off the window, and for a second the office feels a size too small for the three men, one fuming wife, and one federal agent. “Ashley Rourke doesn’t clear Cruz. She doesn’t put him back on your ranch and she doesn’t buy him one more hour. I need something that does, and I need it before Gideon decides twenty-four hours was generous.”

“Then let us work,” Mackenzie says, not looking up from her screen, in the focused tone of a woman who has clearly had this exact argument with Knox before and won it every time.

Knox doesn’t answer that. He just holds my eyes a second longer, the warning plain enough that he doesn’t need to say it twice and goes back to the window.

I stare at the wire transfer until the numbers stop meaning anything, and somewhere under the part of my brain that’s remembering shell entities and routing numbers, and the part still counting down whatever’s left of Knox’s patience, a much older, much uglier certainty starts to crack straight down the middle.

Sage already has a story about Ashley. She’s had it since the summer Ashley found us together and I ended things a week later without telling her why. What she got instead was Ashley’s arms around my neck at the fairgrounds, and she built the rest herself. Ashley wanted me, Ashley got me, and I let her.

She wasn’t wrong about the wanting. Ashley had been trying to get me to look at her since we were fourteen, sliding into every empty seat next to mine at every fundraiser and athletic event, like proximity alone might eventually work. I always believed she’d acted alone that summer, out of nothing but that old, ordinary wanting finally finding an opening. I let Sage believe the simple version because the true one had a piece in it I’ve never handed her. Ashley had something on me. That’s the part Sage never got.

I never once considered that Ashley might have been somebody’s tool. That the opening wasn’t found. It was built and handed to her along with the money.

“Dawson.” Sage’s voice, quiet, close. “You’ve gone somewhere.”

“I’m here.”

“You’re not.” She doesn’t touch me, and I feel the absence of it more than I’d feel her hand. “You look like a man reading his own obituary.”

“I’m reading somebody else’s.” I keep my eyes on the screen instead of her face. If I look at her right now she’ll see everything I’m not ready to hand her. “I thought I understood what happened back then. Turns out I only understood the part somebody wanted me to understand.”

“What does that mean?”

“It means there’s a piece of that summer I’ve never told you.” I say it plain, no dodge in it. Lying to her outright isn’t a thing I’m willing to do. “And I’m not telling it with your brother four feet away.”

She weighs it, and I watch her decide whether to push me right here, in front of Knox, Tate and Mackenzie. She lets it go. Not because she’s satisfied. Because she’s picking her ground, the same patience she described using on Cruz in that truck cab, and I know exactly what that patience means. She’s not done asking. She’s just choosing her moment.

“Fine.” She pushes off the doorframe she’d been leaning against, arms still crossed and holds the rest of it behind her teeth because Knox is four feet away pretending not to listen. The look she gives me on her way past could still strip paint. “Later.”

“Later,” I agree. Knox doesn’t look at either of us, which is a comment all by itself, and I feel the muscles across my back pull tight enough to ache before Sage even clears the doorway.

I go after her.

She doesn’t slow down for me, doesn’t acknowledge I’m there until we’re both inside her office down the hall and I’ve shut the door behind us. She drops into her chair and pulls a folder toward her without a word, and I take the chair across from her desk instead of leaving.

West knocks and enters without waiting ten minutes after that, laptop already open, a different kind of urgency on his face, the kind that means he’s found something that isn’t Ashley and needs somebody to care about it anyway. I didn’t know all my brothers were here this morning, working out of Blackwater offices.

“The cove camera,” he says. “The one with our asset tag. I’ve been running the authorization chain since the warrant mess, cross-referencing every credential that’s touched equipment checkout in the last six months.”

“And?”

“Same signature that moved Robbie’s truck. Same signature that forged the Cruz warrant through Foster and Reyes.” He turns the screen toward me, and it’s laid out clean, the checkout log for a piece of surveillance hardware that had no business sitting above a private cove that belonged to nobody but me and Sage. “One hand, three tools. Whoever this is doesn’t improvise. They reuse what already works.”

“That’s not comforting,” Sage says.

“It’s not supposed to be comforting.” West closes the laptop halfway, apologetic, like he wishes he had better news to deliver along with the bad. “It’s supposed to be useful. Whoever’s doing this isn’t a ghost. They’re a person with a pattern, and patterns are the one thing you can actually catch.”

I think about the boot prints at the fence line. The photograph timestamped hours before either father said a word about the house. The camera mount tucked into granite nobody should have found. Every piece of it stitched through with the same patient, methodical hand, and somewhere underneath the fear that thought should put in me, there’s something closer to relief.