I don't move. Kenna can handle Whitfield. Kenna can handle anyone.
But the restraint costs me something physical, a heat coiling through my gut that has nowhere to go, and I sit on that bench and direct it into the only productive channel available, which is memorizing every crack in the plaster ceiling and imagining Whitfield's face when the jury sees the evidence.
They'll go after Kenna's identity. The false name. The deception. They'll paint her as a vigilante driven by personalvengeance, a grieving sister who embedded herself on the circuit with fake press credentials and a predetermined conclusion.
What they won't be able to explain away is the evidence. The financial analysis that traced shell companies across four states. The photographs from Rainey documenting every step of the operation. Quinn's testimony. Flint's written statement. The safety deposit box in Albuquerque that held everything Grant built with his life. Merrick's lawyers can attack our character. They can't attack the math.
Kenna built a financial case from motel rooms and truck stops with a laptop and a grudge. Every spreadsheet cross-referenced, every transaction traced, every shell company mapped to its parent entity. I've watched her work. I've sat across from her while she walked me through the numbers, her fingers tracing columns of data with the focus of a woman who treats accuracy like a personal religion, and even I could follow the money from Merrick's accounts through Thornton Livestock and out the other side.
A U.S. Marshal walks past with a file box. A clerk pushes a cart stacked with documents. The courthouse keeps moving while Kenna sits in that conference room and fields questions about her dead brother from a woman whose client ordered his murder.
Kenna emerges a long time later. Her face is composed, but her hands are doing the thing they do when she's spent, opening and closing at her sides, fingers stretching like they're releasing something they've been gripping too hard.
Her hair has loosened from the clip she pinned it up with this morning, dark strands falling against her neck, and the impulse to reach over and tuck them back is so strong I have to shove my hands in my pockets.
"How bad?" I ask.
"They tried the vigilante angle. Then the emotional instability angle. Then the compromised-by-romantic-entanglement angle." She falls into step beside me. "Your name came up seventeen times."
"What can I say? I'm popular."
"You're their favorite weapon. The violent, unstable bull rider who corrupted a grieving sister into a personal vendetta."
"Did they use the word corrupt?"
"They used manipulated. I corrected them."
My jaw tightens. "I heard."
"You heard that through the door?"
"I heard enough. How did you correct them?"
"I told Whitfield that if she wanted to see what manipulation looked like, she should review her client's financial records, because I wasn't the one who built shell companies in four states to launder prize money through ghost competitors." She pushes through the courthouse doors into the New Mexico sunlight. "Whitfield didn't like that."
"I bet she didn't."
"Her pen stopped moving. I counted the seconds."
The woman fights legal teams the way she fights everything, with data and precision and composure sharp enough to make the other side realize too late that they've underestimated her.
We cross the parking lot without talking, the New Mexico sun pressing down on our shoulders after hours of fluorescent chill. At the truck, Kenna leans against the passenger door and tips her face to the sky, eyes closed, soaking in the warmth like a woman who's been in a cold room too long.
The sun catches the line of her throat, and I track the shadow that pools in the hollow above her collarbone. My mouth wants to be there. Courthouse parking lot, broad daylight, not even remotely the time or place, and the thought doesn't care about any of that.
"I need a break," she says. "From depositions, lawyers, fluorescent lighting, everything that involves a conference table and a recording device."
"What do you need?"
She opens her eyes. Looks at me. The look has layers, some of them appropriate for public and some of them decidedly not. "Open road. Quiet. You."
"I can do that."
"And food. I haven't eaten since six this morning."
"In that order? Or simultaneously?"
"You figure out the logistics. I'll sit here and be grateful."
