"You and Wade." She repeats it with the specific inflection she uses when she thinks I'm being an idiot and wants me to hear the stupidity out loud. "Your plan for a potential ambush is two cowboys with their fists against people who carve death threats into trucks."
"My fists and my winning personality."
The sound she makes is half laugh, half exasperation, and it does something to the knot in my chest, loosens it just enough to let me breathe.
"No heroics," she says. "No going back for a fight you can't win. Promise me."
"I promise."
"Because the last time you told me you weren't going to do anything stupid, your definition of stupid had more flexibility than a yoga instructor."
"I'll be flexible about a lot of things tonight. Stupid isn't one of them."
I lean against the truck and call Wade. He answers on the sixth ring, his voice thick with sleep or bourbon.
"Holloway. It's barely morning."
"I need a favor."
"I'm hungover."
"You're always hungover. Pima County fairgrounds, nine o'clock tonight. Thornton wants to talk. Says he wants to flip."
The line goes quiet. When Wade comes back, his voice is clearer. "You believe him?"
"I believe he's scared. Whether that makes him honest or dangerous is what I need to find out."
"What do you need from me?"
"Watch the entrance. If I come out walking, we're good. If I come out running, follow my lead. If I don't come out, call the number I'm texting you. She's FBI."
"FBI." Wade lets that sit for a second. "This is bigger than I thought."
"It's bigger than any of us thought."
"Done." A pause. "Any one of us could have been next, Holloway. Every time I drew a Thornton bronc, I was rolling dice I didn't know were loaded. Tell me where to be and I'll be there."
"South side. Eight forty-five. Stay in your truck until I need you."
He hangs up, and I pocket the phone and let the adrenaline settle.
Across the lot, Kenna is carrying the camera around my truck for a second pass. She crouches by the driver's door, angling for the depth of the scratches, and the focused intensity on her face is the same expression she wears when she's building a case from financial documents.
Her mouth is set in a line that I want to kiss until it softens.
I push off the truck and walk to her. She straightens, and we're standing close enough that I can count the freckles across the bridge of her nose, which I've done before, which I'll do again, because counting Kenna's freckles has become the thing I do when I need to remind myself that some things in this world are still worth protecting.
"Done?" I ask.
"Documented. Every angle." She tucks her phone in her back pocket and looks at the damage on the door. "The cuts are deep. Whoever did this came prepared and took their time."
"That's comforting."
"I wasn't aiming for comfort. I was aiming for accurate."
"We're going to get through this," I say. "And then I'm going to find whoever did this."
"One crisis at a time, Holloway." She looks up at me, and the morning light catches her face, and even with a death threat on my truck and a meeting with a potential killer in thirteen hours, the pull toward her is constant and undeniable. "Now go buy me coffee from that sad excuse for a vending machine."
