The tension in Colt's body is visible. Every muscle, every tendon, pulled against the restraint like a bull behind a gate.
I put my hand on his forearm under the table. The contact is brief and hidden from Torres, and the muscle beneath my fingers is coiled tight as a spring. He doesn't pull away. He doesn't look at me. His breathing slows by half a degree.
"She's right," I say. "Grant built this case to be used the right way. If we go rogue, Merrick walks. If we let Torres build it, Merrick spends the rest of his life in a cell."
His jaw works. A muscle in his cheek pulses. Then his arm shifts under my hand, and his fingers find mine beneath the table and squeeze once, hard, before letting go. The contact lasts two seconds. It says more than the hour of conversation that preceded it.
"What do you need from us?" he asks Torres.
"Stay on the circuit. Keep your heads down. Don't contact Merrick, Thornton, or anyone associated with the operation. Don't discuss this investigation with anyone outside this room." Torres collects the documents. "I'll need formal statements from both of you. Detailed timelines, everything you know, everything you've seen. Ms. Corbin, your financial analysis will be usefulas supplemental documentation. Mr. Holloway, your phone records from the night Grant called you are critical."
"You'll have them," I say.
Torres opens a drawer and pulls out a recorder. "Let's start now."
Colt goes first. Torres records his statement in the same conference room while I wait in the hallway, and the waiting is its own kind of exercise. I sit in a plastic chair under fluorescent lights and think about what he's saying in that room. The phone call from Grant. The dying words relayed through a young rider. The weeks of chasing leads and hitting walls and calling an FBI agent who wouldn't pick up. I know the story because I've lived alongside it, and knowing he's in there alone with the telling makes the hallway feel longer than it is.
This man drove to Las Cruces when Grant told him to stay away. He didn't get there in time, and he's been carrying that failure like a wound he won't let close.
He's been fighting this fight alone since the night his best friend died, and the fact that he's sitting in a federal conference room cooperating with a process that moves at the speed of bureaucracy when his instinct is to solve problems with his fists is the most heroic thing I've ever watched someone do.
It is also, inconveniently, incredibly attractive. The restraint. The discipline. The way he channels all that barely leashed fury into something productive instead of destructive. I've seen what happens when he stops restraining himself, and the memory of it makes me press my back harder against the hallway wall and breathe through my nose like a woman trying to remember where she is and why.
When it's my turn, I sit in the chair that's still warm from Colt's body and give my statement with the same flat precision. Torres records everything: the financial analysis, the trail from Rusty Spur Capital Partners to Thornton Livestock, the shellcompanies, the prize money fraud, every detail I've uncovered since I walked onto the Southwest Circuit under a name that wasn't mine.
When I finish, Torres turns off the recorder and sits back. The mask of professional detachment she's been wearing slips for a moment, and underneath is a woman who has been working this case from a position of powerlessness for months, watching riders get hurt and knowing she couldn't stop it without the evidence she now holds.
"Thank you," she says. "Tell Mr. Holloway the same. Grant would be proud of what you've both done."
The words hit me in a place I wasn't guarding. I press my thumbnail into my finger and hold.
We walk out of the FBI building into late afternoon sunlight. The parking lot is warm, the asphalt radiating heat, and the Sandia Mountains glow pink against the eastern sky.
Colt opens the truck door and stops. He stands there, one hand on the frame, looking at the mountains. His shoulders are down for the first time all day, the tension finally bleeding off now that the walls aren't watching.
"That was the hardest thing I've ever done," he says. "Sitting in that room and handing Grant's case to someone else."
"I know."
"I wanted to walk into Merrick's office with those text messages and make him read them while I decided what to do with my hands."
"I know that too. I was sitting next to you having the same fantasy, except in mine I was holding a recorder and a pen because my version of violence involves a byline."
His mouth twitches. "Remind me never to piss off a journalist."
"You've been pissing off this journalist since the day we met. I've got enough material for a very unflattering profile."
"You going to write it?"
"Depends on whether you keep making me coffee in the morning. The unflattering profile drops significantly in priority when caffeine is involved."
He looks at me, and the late light catches the angles of his face, the scar across his nose, the shift in his eyes that moves between storm and steel depending on what he's feeling. Right now it's something softer than either of those, something that looks a lot like the expression he wore across the kitchen last night when he was deciding about those two steps.
"You did good today," he says. "The bank. Torres. All of it."
The compliment lands in a place I wasn't guarding. Praise from Colt, who sat in a federal conference room vibrating with the effort of not destroying something, who squeezed my hand under the table and said more with that grip than most men say in a year.
"You did too," I say. "Sitting still in that room for hours when every part of you wanted to be somewhere else, doing something louder. That took more than muscle."
