"You said yes. What does that make you?"
"The woman who's going to marry a cowboy who proposes in rodeo arenas and thinks that's romantic."
"Is it?"
She kisses me again. "It's the most romantic thing anyone has ever done. Tell anyone I said that and I'll deny it."
The announcer leans into his microphone. "Ladies and gentlemen, your Southwest Circuit Champion Bull Rider, Colt Holloway, and his fiancée, Kenna Corbin."
The roar rolls through the Thomas & Mack like thunder through a canyon, and I hold her as we stand in the arena dirt and feel the ring on her finger catch the overhead lights.
Kenna heads back to the stands to grab her notebook and her hat, and I let the crowd and the cameras swallow the moment while my gaze drifts past the celebration to the edges of the competitor area where the Finals carry a different weight.
Behind the chutes, Slade Carrick leans against a panel, watching with the still, contained expression he wears like armor. He was at Las Cruces. He pulled Grant from the arena. He's carried that silence for months.
Our eyes meet. He holds the contact, then gives a single nod, the kind of acknowledgment one man offers another when words would cost too much.
Then he turns and walks toward the exit, moving through the crowd with the fluid invisibility of someone practiced at not being noticed. He's out the door before anyone can ask the questions he's not ready to answer.
Whatever Slade is carrying is bigger than witness guilt. The circuit isn't done revealing its secrets.
At the bar overlooking the competitor area, Wade sits alone with a whiskey. He lifts the glass toward me when our eyes meet. The gesture is loose and unsteady, and it tells me everything about where he is right now.
The man who drove his truck into a storage yard as my backup with clear eyes and steady hands has been dissolving since, undone by the divorce, the scandal, the revelations about the circuit he devoted his career to, new reasons to avoid sobriety stacked on top of the old ones.
A competitor bumps Wade's elbow passing behind him, and the shift is instant. His shoulders square, his free hand closes into a fist on the bar top, and the look he turns on the guy has enough menace in it to clear a radius. The competitor backs off with both palms raised. Wade watches him go, then uncurls his fist one finger at a time and goes back to his whiskey like nothing happened.
But I saw the speed of the change, the violence coiled under the drunk, and it worries me more than the drinking does.
The woman pouring doesn't bother asking if he's had enough. She already knows the answer.
He needs help, the kind I'm not equipped to give and that he's not ready to accept. I hold his gaze and make a mental note to check on him tomorrow, knowing he'll tell me he's fine and I'll know he's lying.
The circuit grinds down the men who ride it. Wade is proof. So was Grant. I'm still cataloging the damage when a voice behind me cuts through the noise.
"Holloway."
I turn. Dax is standing at the edge of the competitor area with dust on his jeans and a fresh bruise forming along his jaw from his bareback ride. He scored well for his first Finals, and the competitive fire hasn't dimmed.
"Congratulations," he says, the word polite and thin. "I hear you're marrying my sister."
"She said yes."
"She would." His eyes cut to Kenna across the competitor area and back to me, and there's a flicker of somethingprotective in the look that I recognize because I wear it every time another man stands too close to her. He's sizing me up the way I'd size up anyone who put a ring on someone I loved. The difference is I don't need his approval, and we both know it.
He's got Kenna's same sharp, assessing look, but where hers carries warmth alongside the blade, his carries the flat, cold weight of someone who's been angry for a long time and stopped pretending otherwise.
"The trial is over," he says. "Merrick's convicted. But Merrick didn't act alone."
"I know."
"Thornton is dead. But the smuggling corridor is still there. The infrastructure doesn't disappear because you convict one man. Somebody is still running cargo in those livestock transports, and nobody is looking at the people above Merrick."
"Torres has a task force?—"
"Task forces move at the speed of bureaucracy. Meanwhile the system that created Merrick is still running, and if nobody tears it out by the roots, somebody else steps into his chair and the whole thing starts over." He holds my gaze. "I didn't transfer to this circuit for the competition, Holloway. I came to finish what Grant started. The question is whether you're done or whether you're willing to keep going."
I look across the competitor area at Kenna, who's standing with two other riders, her left hand moving as she gestures, the ring catching the light. Grant rode a drugged bull to get evidence. Tyler drew a Thornton bull at Fort Worth and never walked out of the arena. Flint lost his son and spent years in silence. Thornton tried to flip and took bullets in a storage yard.
