"One and a half."
"Charming."
I wave the waitress over. Kenna orders a burger and a beer, then stacks her spreadsheets, laptop, and notebook into her messenger bag. "I'm putting this in the car before the food comes," she says. "I am not getting grease on three weeks of financial data." She's back in two minutes, sliding into the booth with her back against the wall and her eyes on the door, and I wonder when I started finding operational awareness so attractive.
We leave the diner around eight. The sun is already down, and the parking lot behind the restaurant is nearly empty, justa few cars belonging to the kitchen staff and the last couple finishing their meals inside. Kenna's rental is parked at the far end of the lot, under a light that's been out long enough for moths to stop circling it. My truck is two rows closer.
"Meet you back at the motel?" she asks, and the question carries a charge that has nothing to do with lodging.
"Right behind you."
She walks toward her car. I watch her go because I've developed a habit of watching her go, tracking the slow roll of her hips and the way she moves through space with the constant, low-grade alertness of someone who knows the ground beneath her isn't solid. The alertness is what drew me in. The hips are what keep me looking.
My phone buzzes with a text from a rider I've been trying to reach about Las Cruces. I pull it up, read the message, and I'm composing a reply when Kenna's voice cuts through the parking lot.
"Colt."
One word, but the pitch is wrong. It's flat and tight in the way that voices go when the body is processing fear faster than the brain can frame it.
I'm moving before I finish the thought. I cross the gravel, pass between the parked vehicles, and reach the spot where she's standing at the driver's side of her rental car with the door open and her body locked rigid.
The window is smashed. It's not cracked but truly smashed, with glass pebbled across the driver's seat and the floorboard.
Inside, the car has been gutted. Her laptop is gone, along with the leather messenger bag where she kept her printed spreadsheets, her interview recordings, and her backup files. The glove box is open and empty. The center console has been pried apart.
And on the passenger seat, placed carefully in the center like a calling card, sits a photograph.
The photo shows Grant in the Las Cruces arena dirt, face down, with the bull looming behind him and the scene frozen in the instant before Slade Carrick cleared the fence. It's printed on plain white paper, the kind you'd run through a home office printer.
One word is written across the bottom in black marker.
STOP.
My vision tunnels. The parking lot, the busted light, the last departing rigs, all of it drops away.
The rage hits my bloodstream like a chemical spill, a white-hot reaction that bypasses my brain entirely and goes straight to my hands.
I'm standing between Kenna and the open lot before I've made a conscious decision to move, my body angled to shield hers, my eyes scanning the shadows between the rigs and the tree line beyond the lot. Looking for movement. Looking for the person who did this and might still be watching.
"Get behind me," I say, and my voice comes out low and flat and nothing like a request.
"I'm not going to?—"
"Kenna. Behind me. Now."
She goes quiet. Not compliant, because Kenna doesn't do compliant, but smart enough to recognize that this isn't possessiveness. This is threat assessment from a man whose body has already decided that anyone who comes out of those shadows is going to have to go through him first.
After a full sixty seconds of scanning, the lot is empty. No movement, no engines, no figures. Whoever did this is long gone.
I turn back to the car. There's a cold, still place opening up behind my sternum that I recognize from the chute. The placewhere fear gets compressed into focus. Someone put a death threat six inches from where Kenna would have been sitting.
She picks up the photograph. Her hands are steady, which tells me more about her than anything she's said since the night we met. She studies the image, flips it over, and examines the paper.
"It's a standard inkjet print. Widely available. There's no watermark and no printer identification." Her voice is clinical and detached. The journalist is processing evidence while the person behind the journalist is holding herself together with both hands.
"They took everything," I say.
She nods, her teeth set together. "The laptop. The printed files. The financial data. My interview recordings with Quinn. My notes on the Thornton pattern. All of it."
