Page 9 of Reluctant Bride

“That’s why we need the clause,” I say, and my voice comes out steadier than I have any right to expect.

“I know,” he says, and drags a calloused hand back through his hair, dark and a little too long at the front for a man who’s supposed to have his whole life managed down to the minute.

Neither of us says the rest of it. That knowing didn’t stop either one of us from wanting it anyway. That some wounds don’t close just because you’ve built a very thorough contract around the scar tissue. That eight years ago I was good enough to love in the dark and not good enough to keep in the daylight, and today, apparently, I’m suddenly good enough to marry, and the only thing that changed in between is what my last name is worth to the people who get to decide these things for me.

I sit back down. I pick up my pen. I sign my name on the last page like it’s just paperwork, because if I let it be anything else I will not survive this house.

My phone buzzes against the table. Tessa. Blink twice if you need extraction. I don’t answer it. Dawson’s phone buzzes a second later, and he glances at it, huffs out half a laugh, and turns the screen toward me. Finn’s sent him a photo of a billboard off Highway 89, a divorce attorney’s grinning face above the words Life’s Short. Lawyer Up.

“Your brother has a gift,” I say.

“My brother has a phone and no impulse control.”

I almost smile. I catch myself doing it and stop.

We finish the last page in silence that’s neither comfortable nor hostile, some new thing I don’t have a name for yet, and I’m reaching for my keys when his phone rings again, actual ringing this time, not a text, and the bare urgency of it makes him go still before he even looks at the screen.

He answers. Doesn’t say his name. Just listens.

I watch his face do the thing I remember from the summer I learned to read every version of it, the stillness that isn’t calm, the stillness that’s a held breath waiting to find out how bad it’s about to get.

“Where,” he says. A pause. His knuckles go white around the phone. “How long ago?”

Another pause, longer this time, and whatever he hears drains the color out of his face, a look I haven’t seen on him since he was twenty-four years old.

He hangs up. Sets the phone on the table like it might go off again if he moves too fast.

“That was Mackenzie,” he says. “The informant missed his check-in.”

“People miss check-ins, Dawson.”

“Not this one. Not ever.” He stands, already reaching for his keys, already somewhere else in his head, calculating routes and distances like I calculate legislative votes. He scrawls his signature across the last page without even looking at it, the pen barely down before he’s moving again. “They found his truck twenty minutes ago, parked off the Corridor access road.”

“Then he’s close. That’s good, isn’t it?”

He looks at me, and whatever’s behind his eyes now isn’t the man who just agreed to every clause I wrote to keep myself safe from him.

“His truck’s running,” he says. “He isn’t in it.”

FOUR

DAWSON

The truck is still idling when I find it, and the blood in the cab is already tacky.

Not wet. Not fresh. Tacky, which puts it somewhere between an hour and three, and I know that timeline better than other men know their own birthdays. It’s not a skill I ever wanted. It’s one I have anyway.

Robbie Vásquez’s truck. Maren fought to get him rehired eight months ago, and I never made her explain why it mattered so much. He’s driven for us since he was twenty-five. He has a sister in Conrad who almost buried him once already and a habit of bringing his dispatch partner a second coffee without being asked. I know exactly who he is. That’s what makes standing here worse than it would be for a stranger.

The access road smells like diesel and pine and underneath it, copper. Holt’s already crouched at the open driver’s door when I get there, gloves on, saying nothing, which from Holt passes for a eulogy. Mick, Sullivan Transport’s yard foreman, stands a few feet back with his phone flashlight angled into the cab like he’s hoping the light will change what’s in it. It doesn’t.

“Cause?” I ask.

“Not here.” Holt doesn’t look up. “He was killed somewhere else. Somebody drove the truck out here after and parked it running, like he’d just stepped out. This was staged.”

That takes planning. That takes somebody who knows this road, this timing, this family’s blind spots.

That takes somebody who works for us.