"If he hurts me, I'll handle it myself. That's not a figure of speech either."
The faintest sound that might be a laugh. "God, you sound like Grant."
"Somebody has to."
"I'm coming to the circuit," he says. "Not now. Not to interfere. But when this is over, I'm transferring in. Whatever Grant found, whatever he started, it's not finished. And I'm not sitting on the sidelines while my sister finishes it alone."
"I'm not alone."
"I know. You've got Holloway. But he's not family." The word carries weight. Dax means it the way Corbins mean everything: as an absolute, a line drawn in bedrock. "I'll stay out of your way until you tell me otherwise. But I'm coming."
He hangs up. No goodbye. Dax does nothing with grace and everything with conviction, and the absence of a farewell is its own kind of promise.
I set the phone down and stare at the ceiling. The shower cuts off in the next room. Colt's footsteps cross the tile.
He appears in the doorway with a towel around his waist and water still tracking down his chest. The scar across his ribs catches the low light, and the muscles in his stomach are still tight from the heat of the shower.
I've mapped every ridge and valley of that torso with my hands and my mouth, and the sight of him still hits me like a fist to the nervous system. I force my gaze up to his face, and the look he gives me says he caught exactly where my eyes were and is saving it for later.
"Who called?" he asks.
"Dax."
His eyebrows lift. "And?"
"He knows everything. Where I am, what I'm doing, who I'm doing it with."
"That last part bother him?"
"He threatened to kill you."
His mouth pulls into something that isn't a smile. It's sharper than that, the look of a man who considers threats a language he's fluent in. "He's welcome to try." He leans against the doorframe and crosses his arms, and the muscles in his forearms bunch in a way that makes my mouth go dry and my train of thought derail entirely. "He coming?"
"After. He says he's transferring to the circuit."
"Dax on the Southwest Circuit." He says it like he's tasting the words and finding them complicated. "That'll be interesting."
"That's one word for it."
He pushes off the doorframe and heads back into the bathroom. I hear the rustle of him pulling on clothes and remind myself that I have work to do that doesn't involve following him in there.
The big and harder problem is Quinn.
It takes several phone calls and days of silence before he agrees to meet Sylvia. Each call follows the same pattern: he picks up, listens, tells me he's not ready, and hangs up. The last time, he doesn't say he's not ready. He asks, "Where and when?"
He almost doesn't show anyway.
I'm sitting in the back booth of a diner outside Tucson with a recorder on the table and two cups of coffee going cold when my phone buzzes. Quinn's number. My stomach drops.
"I'm in the parking lot," he says. His voice sounds the way it did behind the trailer in Amarillo, tight and thin and fighting itself. "I've been sitting out here and I can't make myself open the door."
"Take your time."
"If I take any more time, I'm going to put this truck in reverse and drive back to my rig and pretend this never happened." A pause. The sound of a breath pulled through teeth. "Grant would be so pissed at me right now."
"Grant would understand."
"Grant would call me a coward to my face and then buy me a beer and tell me to get my shit together." A sound that might be a laugh if it had more air behind it. "He did that once, actually. After Tyler died. I told him I didn't want to know what he'd found, and he looked at me like I'd kicked his dog. Bought me a Shiner and said, 'Quinn, you're a coward, but you're my coward, and when you're ready to stop being one, I'll be here.'"
