Page 70 of Reluctant Bride

“You’re bossy for a man who just spent five minutes complaining about the paperwork.”

“I’m not apologizing. I’m negotiating terms.”

I sink into water hot enough to sting the scrape on my forearm, and I let my head fall back against the tile, eyes closed, the day finally starting to slide off me an inch at a time. Dawson kneels at the edge of the tub instead of leaving, sleeves shoved up, and works shampoo through my hair with his fingers, patient, careful over the spot near my hairline that’s still tender under the gauze.

“You don’t have to do this.”

“I know I don’t.” His voice comes out like too much whiskey and smoke, dry and cracked. “I want to. Same way I wanted to put a bullet in the man behind that rifle. Different appetite. Same man.”

I don’t argue with him. I just let him.

The family meeting happens in the kitchen an hour later, tense voices, concerned looks at my blossoming bruises, cold coffee nobody’s drinking. Holt lays the phone out on the table like evidence at a trial, which it is.

“One contact,” he says. “Erin. Not a burner string. Her actual name, saved like they text each other about dinner plans.”

“That doesn’t mean what you want it to mean yet.” Mackenzie’s already got her laptop open, running the number against three different databases at once. “Could be professional. Security contractors talk to each other. Could be nothing.”

“It’s not nothing.” Tate doesn’t look up from his own screen. “I ran the recovered device against the ranch’s own security software, the stuff Erin herself installed. Whatever encryption’s on this phone matches her build. Not similar. Identical architecture.” He finally glances up, and whatever’s on his face isn’t good news dressed up nicely. “She wrote the tool being used to hide the exact conversation that just got two men killed trying to grab Sage.”

The room goes very quiet.

“Take her in,” Holt says. Final, no room in it for a counterargument, the same certainty he brings to a rifle he already knows will hit. “Tonight.”

“No.” I say it before I’ve fully decided to, and every head in the kitchen turns toward me. “Not yet.”

“Sage.” Knox, careful, the voice he uses when he thinks I’m about to make a mistake he loves me too much to let slide. “She had a hand in an ambush on your life.”

“We think she had a hand in it. We don’t know how deep, or who’s actually running her, or whether pulling her in now just tells whoever’s above her that we’re onto them.” I look around the table, one face at a time, making sure every one of them hears it instead of just waiting their turn to argue. “She thinks she’s my friend. She thinks nobody’s looked twice at her Army story or her rifle work or the fact that she’s been inside every room that mattered for months. Let her keep thinking it. Watch everything. Move on her the second we understand what we’re actually looking at, not a second before.”

Dawson doesn’t say anything. He just watches me lay it out, and I catch the exact moment his eyes change, recognition instead of worry, the look of a man realizing his wife just ran the same cold calculation he’d have run himself.

“She’s right,” he says. “A rushed arrest gets us a lawyer and silence. A patient one gets us the person who’s actually paying her.”

Holt doesn’t like it. I watch him not like it for a long five seconds, every protective instinct he owns screaming to move now, fast, before anything else happens to me. But he’s spent his whole life trusting my read on a room, and he trusts it now, even furious.

“Fine,” he says. “Quiet surveillance. But if she gets one more chance to touch anything that puts you in a car alone again, I’m not asking permission a second time.”

“Understood.”

Mackenzie slides a second folder across the table before anyone can dwell on it too long, the kind of interruption that feels less like timing and more like mercy.

“Cruz,” she says. “We’re releasing him tonight.”

Knox’s whole posture changes.

“The warrant’s authorization chain matches Robbie’s truck,” Mackenzie continues. “Matches the cove camera. Same forged Sullivan Transport credential, same falsified digital signature, run through the same three-relay burner pattern we’ve been tracking since the wedding. That’s not evidence against Cruz. That’s the same hand that’s been framing everyone all summer, and a defense attorney would shred the county’s case in about four minutes. And the basement inventory request under his name, nine days before the fire? Same pattern. Somebody pushed his badge token through the county portal from outside. Cruz was on the west pasture with Rae that whole afternoon.”

“So he’s clean.” Knox says it slow, like he’s been carrying the weight of doubting a man he’s trusted for twenty-two years and can finally set it down.

“He’s clean. He was never anything but a name that was easy to reach for.” Mackenzie closes the folder. “County’s dropping it tonight. I’d get him a ride home before the local news catches wind and makes it a bigger story than it needs to be.”

A knot I’ve carried since Cruz drove me to the courthouse finally lets go. I think about that drive, his hands steady on the wheel, the locked door where an answer should have been, and I still don’t know what was behind it.

“Too clean,” I say, mostly to myself. “I called it five days ago. I hate that I was right, and I hate more that somebody used a man like Cruz, twenty-two years of loyalty, and burned it for nothing.”

Holt’s truck is in the drive an hour later, and Cruz is standing on the porch when I open the door, hat in his hands, not coming in.

“Holt’s giving me a ride home,” he says. “Asked him to stop here first.”