Page 67 of Reluctant Bride

The drive to the stables takes ten minutes on a good day. I make it four before the whole world behind me fills my mirror at once, grey and enormous and coming in far too fast to be anything but a decision somebody already made.

The impact throws my head sideways before I even register the sound of it, one crack of metal on metal, and then the airbag punches into my face like a fist made of pure pressure, powder and heat and the sharp electrical smell of something that shouldn’t be burning. My ears fill with a ringing loud enough to swallow everything else in the world. Somewhere underneath it, glass gives.

I come out of the fuzzy white slowly. I’m unclear with what exactly happened. I sit in the wreckage of my car around me and bring my fingers to my head. Blood. It makes me slightly nauseous.

It feels like a long time and then my door wrenches open.

A man’s shape fills the frame, dark against the last of the daylight, something long and metal already swinging level with my chest, and I can’t pull a full breath past the airbag still deflating against my sternum, can’t find a single one of the words my mouth always has ready before anyone else in the room does.

Cricket doesn’t wait for words.

She comes off the back seat in one clean line, teeth already bared, and she’s airborne before the man even registers she was in the car at all.

TWENTY-TWO

DAWSON

“—hit her, he hit her car, crashed into—” The kid on the north gate comes apart on Holt’s radio before he’s even keyed it all the way in, and the room breaks in every direction at once.

I don’t remember deciding to move. I remember Knox’s chair hitting the floor behind me, Holt already through the doorway with the radio still crackling in his fist, boots hammering the porch boards ahead of mine. Three trucks fire up in the yard within seconds of each other, mine first, then Knox’s, then Holt cutting across the gravel at an angle that’s going to save him maybe ten seconds and asks nothing of him to try.

I see the wreck before I see her. The Range Rover spun sideways across both lanes, rear end caved around the bumper, glass thrown bright across the road like something spilled instead of shattered. The grey Silverado crumpled into that bumper, no plates, the same truck that sat idling behind us at the fundraiser, engine still running, one headlight blown and staring at nothing.

I clock the second truck parked up the shoulder before I’ve even braked, a shape behind the wheel that doesn’t move right. Something long catches the light across the door frame, barrel or scope, close enough to guess and too far to be sure, and I don’t wait around to find out which.

I stand on the brake. The truck skids crooked across the shoulder and stops, and I take the shot from the seat, one elbow braced on the door frame, the rifle I keep behind the bench for coyotes and worse already up. Call it eighty yards. The windshield takes the round clean, and the shape behind it slumps sideways and doesn’t come back up, whatever he was holding gone from view before I’ve finished exhaling.

I don’t feel anything doing it. My hands don’t shake. My pulse doesn’t spike. Some old, trained part of me just does the math, range and drop and windage, like a freight route, and pulls the trigger with the same certainty I’d sign a shipping manifest. That’s the part I’ll sit with later, once there’s time to sit with anything.

I’m on foot before the engine’s off, and Cricket’s already locked onto the second man’s thigh at Sage’s door, every ounce of red heeler dug in and refusing to let go no matter how hard he swings his free arm trying to shake her off. He’s still got the door half wrenched open, a tire iron gripped in his other fist and forgotten mid-swing while he fights her, and those seconds of him fighting a dog instead of watching me close the distance is all I need.

I don’t draw a weapon. I use the door.

I slam it into him with everything I’ve got, catching him between the frame and his own ribs, and I feel something give under the impact that isn’t the truck. He goes down hard, dog still locked onto his leg, and I’m on him before he finishes falling, my knife already out of my belt and moving with no hesitation in it at all. No shake. No rage. Just the quiet, practiced work of a man who has done this before and knows exactly how long it takes.

It’s over in four seconds. Maybe five.

I sit back on my heels in the gravel, knife still in my hand, and wait for my body to catch up to what it just did. It doesn’t. There’s no wave of horror coming for me like there was in the yard yesterday. No shaking hands. No knife I couldn’t make myself put down. Just the ordinary, terrible stillness of a man who did this well, kneeling in blood-flecked gravel, understanding for the first time that doing it well isn’t the same thing as being broken by it.

Cricket finally lets go. She sits, chest heaving, blood on her muzzle that isn’t hers, and looks up at me like she’s waiting to be told she did good.

“Good girl,” I tell her, and mean every syllable of it.

“Dawson.”

Sage’s voice, from the cab, thin and furious and alive. I’m already there.

She’s got blood at her hairline, dark and already tacky, a scrape running the length of one forearm where the airbag didn’t quite catch her in time. She’s shaking hard enough that her teeth are chattering despite the July heat still baking off the gravel, and she’s already trying to climb out under her own power before I get a hand under her arm.

I don’t let her climb. I take her face in both hands instead, careful, gentle, tilting it toward what’s left of the daylight so I can see the cut at her hairline clean.

“Hold still.”

“I’m fine, Dawson.”

“Hold still anyway.” My thumbs frame her jaw, and I watch her pupils, even and matched, watch her track my finger when I move it in front of her eyes. No concussion. No slur in her voice, no delay in her focus. My hands are steadier doing this than they were pulling a trigger, and I hate how much that tells me about what rattles me and what doesn’t. “Follow my finger. Good. Again.”

“You already checked. I’m not concussed. I’m just bleeding a little and extremely done with today.”