The way she flinched, barely, almost invisibly, every time I said Grant's name with the casual possessiveness of a man who considered Grant his loss and nobody else's.
She let me have that. She sat across from me and listened to me claim her brother's death as my personal tragedy, and she didn't say a word.
In the bunkhouse. I told her nobody touches you, and I meant it with everything I had. I meant it about Merrick, about Thornton, about every threat on this circuit.
I didn't know I was also talking about Grant's little sister, the one person in the world he would have killed me for touching.
And the way she looked at me after, in the dark, with the blanket pulled up and the night pressing against the windows.
I thought she was looking at me. She was looking at the man who was supposed to protect her brother and didn't.
She's Grant's sister.
The woman who set my world on fire is the last living piece of the best friend I ever had, and every single moment between us was built on a foundation of deception so complete that I don't know which parts survive the truth.
And my body doesn't care. That's the part I can't make peace with. I know who she is now. I know every word out of her mouth for the last several weeks has been wrapped in a lie.
I still want her. I can still feel the ghost of her pressed against me, the way she fits into the curve of my body like she was engineered for the space.
The wanting hasn't stopped. It just has teeth now.
I turn onto my side. Through the open doorway, I hear her breathing. She's not sleeping. She's just breathing, keeping herself together in the dark the same way I am.
Two people who loved Grant, tearing each other apart over the wreckage he left behind.
Creede is six hours north. Rainey is somewhere at the end of that drive. The investigation doesn't stop because two people can't stand to be in the same room.
I close my eyes and listen to Kenna breathe through the open door, and the quiet between us does more damage than the yelling did.
11
KENNA
As the sun begins to rise, I pad out of the bedroom and take a seat at the kitchen table. I'm working the Creede lead on the new laptop we bought to replace the one stolen, while he sleeps on the couch in the next room.
Or pretends to sleep. The couch springs groaned in the small hours, heavy and deliberate, and the silence that followed was the kind a man manufactures when he's restless and decides to stop moving before he puts his fist through the drywall.
We haven't spoken since the argument. The last thing he said to me was'you don't understand a goddamn thing,'and the last thing I said to him was that he could process his anger while we drove to Creede or he could process it while he stood in the kitchen being useless, and neither of us has opened our mouth since.
So here we are. Two people who can barely look at each other, about to drive most of the day through the Colorado mountains to find a woman who holds the key to everything.
I pull up the photography forum and recheck the metadata. The studio in Creede is still operating. Its website updated a few days ago with a gallery of aspen tree portraits, and the EXIF datamatches the location. Rainey Weathers, or whatever she's calling herself now, is still there.
The floorboards groan behind me. I keep my eyes on the screen, but my body registers him before my brain does. The displacement of air. The faint trace of cedar soap and leather that I've started associating with safety and recklessness simultaneously, because nothing about Colt fits into a single category.
He moves through the kitchen without a word. He fills the coffee maker, measures the grounds, and hits the button. I track the motion in my peripheral vision because apparently some part of my nervous system didn't get the memo that we're at war.
His forearms are bare below rolled sleeves, the ropework scars catching the early light. The tendons shift under his skin as he works, and I know what those forearms feel like braced on either side of my head. I know the weight they can hold and the control they can exercise. The knowledge is a lit match in a room full of gasoline, and I snuff it out before it can catch.
He doesn't sit down. He leans against the counter with his coffee and looks at the mountains through the window above the sink. The posture is casual except for the set of his shoulders, which are locked in the way of a man who is physically restraining himself from turning around and finishing a conversation that neither of us would survive.
I wait for the accusation, the cold stare, the next volley in a war I started by lying and he escalated by caring. Instead, he sets a mug of coffee in front of me. Black, no sugar, the way I take it, which he learned during mornings in motel rooms and truck stops. The gesture is small and precise, and my stupid, traitorous heart lurches at the domesticity of it.
"The studio is still active," I say, because logistics are the only safe language we have left. "I confirmed the location earlier."
He takes a slow drink. "How far?"
"Most of the day. Faster if you drive the way you usually do."
