The ache in my chest is complicated. Part grief, part gratitude, part the bone-deep exhaustion of a woman who has been running on rage and coffee and stubbornness since the morning they buried her brother.
Colt presses his lips to the top of my head. Unhurried. Public.
"Let's go," he says.
"Where?"
"Hotel. Food. Sleep."
"You left something off the list."
"Several things. All requiring a locked door and more energy than I currently have." The heat behind the exhaustion is a low flame.
We begin to make our way to the exit. The arena noise has faded to the hum of ventilation and the distant clang of stock pens being secured for the night.
The parking lot is quiet. Colt's truck sits under sodium lights, the new rear window from the Kingman shop still cleaner than the rest of the glass.
He opens my door. I climb in.
He stands there for a moment, one hand on the frame, and the way he looks at me carries the weight of everything we've been through and everything still coming.
"Don't stop," he says. "Whatever comes next. Don't stop."
The words are blunt and simple and so completely him that they hit harder than any speech would. I hook my fingers into the front of his shirt and pull him forward until his forehead touches mine.
"I haven't stopped yet," I say. "Not planning to start."
His mouth is inches from mine. I can feel his breath, warm and steady, and the proximity is its own kind of torture because I know what that mouth can do and the parking lot is not the place.
His hand comes up and cups the side of my face, his thumb tracing the line of my jaw, and the restraint of not closing the distance thrums between us like a guitar string pulled tight.
"Drive, Holloway. I'm starving, exhausted, and you have a rain check I intend to collect before this night is over."
His hand drops from my face. Slowly. Like releasing something he's not sure he wants to let go of.
"Yes ma'am."
"I told you not to call me that."
"You also told me you're starving and exhausted. That's two conflicting priorities."
"Feed me first. Then we'll talk."
He closes my door, walks around to the driver's side, and we pull out into the Las Vegas night with Merrick in a federal holding cell and the circuit stretching behind us like a road we've traveled in the dark so long that the city lights feel like another country.
I roll down the window. The desert air is warm and dry, and for the first time since that last phone call with Grant, the air I'm breathing doesn't taste like grief. It tastes like the start of something, which is the problem. Merrick is in custody, but he has lawyers. Expensive ones. And the smuggling corridor Thornton died trying to expose is still running.
Tonight we got the arrest. Tomorrow the real fight starts.
18
COLT
Merrick's lawyers are exactly as expensive and exactly as ruthless as Torres predicted.
Weeks after Merrick's arrest at the South Point Arena, the pre-trial deposition takes place in a conference room at the federal courthouse in Albuquerque. The defense team fills one side of the table like a wall of tailored wool and legal pads and the predatory calm of people whose hourly rate could cover a month of my mortgage. Merrick brought a full bench to a deposition that concerns two witnesses and a case file Torres could recite from memory.
The lead defense attorney is a woman named Whitfield. Silver hair, narrow glasses, a voice that could file down rebar. She arranges her legal pad at a precise angle to the table edge, uncaps her pen with the same deliberate care I've watched surgeons use with scalpels, and starts with me.
