COLT
Months later, the Southwest Circuit comes to Las Vegas for the Finals, and everything is different. The Thomas & Mack Center is sold out. The arena is packed with people who came to watch bull riding and stayed for the story, because the story blew a hole through the industry's floor and forced everyone standing on it to look down.
The fallout hit fast and kept hitting. Congressional hearings. Licensing reform. A complete gutting of circuit governance that left nothing of Merrick's architecture standing. The Southwest Circuit that exists today was rebuilt from scorched ground, and every new rule, every independent oversight board, every mandatory transport manifest reeks of an organization that learned the hard way what festers in the dark.
Merrick's trial concluded weeks ago. Guilty on all counts. Sentencing is pending, but Torres built a case so airtight that even Whitfield's objections bounced off it like rubber rounds. More charges are stacking in other states as the smuggling operation keeps unraveling, each thread pulling loose another piece of an infrastructure that ran cargo in livestock trailers across state lines while riders bled in the dirt above them.
Torres got promoted and assigned to the task force investigating the deeper conspiracy. Rainey is in Colorado, back behind a camera, shooting landscapes instead of evidence. Flint came forward during the trial, sat in a federal courtroom and told his story, and the man who stopped answering his phone put his name on the record where it mattered.
The morning before the Finals, I'm on the porch of the ranch house with coffee and a view of the Davis Mountains and the woman who's turned my spare bedroom into a war room.
Kenna writes the way she does everything: all in. The desk I built for her from salvaged barn wood is buried under manuscript pages, interview transcripts, and sticky notes in handwriting so precise it looks typeset. She's been working on the book for months, a chronicle of the investigation, of Grant, of the circuit's reckoning.
She writes in the early hours before the sun clears the ridge, and some mornings I wake up to the sound of her keyboard and the smell of the coffee she's already brewed and the quiet, focused energy of a woman building something permanent out of everything we almost lost. I'll stand in the doorway watching her work until she feels me there, and the look she gives me over her shoulder, half-annoyed and half-wanting, is better than the coffee.
She doesn't write about us. She told me once that the book is Grant's story, and the parts that belong to her and me stay between us.
I don't argue. Some things are better kept off the page.
The ranch has changed since she moved in. The bones are the same. The house still smells like cedar and stone, and the horses still come to the fence when they hear my truck, and Emmett still makes himself scarce when I'm home. But the details have shifted in ways that are smaller and harder to name: a pair of her boots by the door, a coffee mug with a chipped handle that shebrought from Austin and refuses to replace, the laptop charging on the kitchen counter, the sound of her voice on the phone with Sylvia carrying through the open window while I feed the horses.
Her things in my space. Her scent on my sheets. Her toothbrush next to mine like it belongs there, because it does.
I've been carrying a ring for weeks. I bought it in Marfa, at a jeweler who works out of a converted gas station and makes everything by hand. The band is hammered silver, the stone set low and flush, the kind of ring a woman can wear while she's typing or arguing with a federal agent or climbing over a rodeo fence, and the kind Kenna won't take off.
I haven't asked yet. I've had the question sitting behind my teeth for just as long, waiting for the moment that matches the weight of what I'm asking.
This morning she comes out onto the porch with her coffee and sits in the chair beside mine, wearing one of my flannels unbuttoned over a tank top, the hem hitting her mid-thigh. She didn't ask to borrow it. She never asks. She just takes, and the sight of my shirt on her body does something territorial to my chest that I stopped fighting a long time ago.
"You nervous?" she asks. She means the Finals.
"About riding? No."
"About something else?"
She's watching me with those eyes. Grant's eyes, the ones that narrow when she's calculating and go wide when she's caught something I'm trying to hide. Months of living with this woman, and I still can't keep a secret from a face that reads mine like a stock draw sheet.
"I'm thinking about the ride," I say.
"Liar."
"I'm thinking about several things. The ride is one of them."
"And the other things?"
"Are none of your business until I decide they are."
Her mouth curves. "Mysterious. That's new for you. Usually you just scowl until the truth falls out."
"I don't scowl."
"Colt, you have a resting scowl the way other people have a resting heartbeat. It's involuntary and constant."
"You love it."
"I tolerate it. There's a difference." She takes a sip of coffee and looks at the mountains, and the morning light catches the freckles on her cheekbone and the faint lines around her eyes that weren't there when she walked onto the circuit. The investigation put them there. The trial deepened them. The book is smoothing them out, slowly, the way the writing smooths out everything she carries.
"Grant would have liked this," she says. She means the porch, the coffee, the mountains, the quiet. She says it without the sharp edge the name used to carry, and the change in her voice when she talks about her brother is one of the things that tells me this is going to hold.
