"So, he's alive."
"He's alive. He's lost his ranch, his operation, thirty-two men, and every piece of leverage he ever had over the Kincaids." Amara finally drinks. "And he's going to spend whatever's left of his life being hunted by a man with more money and more patience than he's got. That's not the ending you wanted."
"No."
"It's not the one I wanted either." She looks at me sideways. "You want the truth? I'd rather have him breathing and running than dead and finished. A dead man can't tell me who else was in that ledger. There's a ring out there still buying and still selling, and Wendell Trask has been in bed with those people for twenty years."
I watch the fire.
"You think he knows them," I say. "The ones who took Lashes."
"I think he's paid them." Amara sets the bottle down on the stone. "Those women didn't fall out of the sky. La Nada bought inventory from somebody. And when my uncle's people finally put a hand on Wendell Trask, I think he's going to be a very talkative old man."
Lashes comes and sits on my other side about an hour later.
She doesn't have Hope.
There's a woman at the far end of the yard with the baby up on her shoulder, dark red hair, laughing at something Kelsey said, and Hope's patting at her face with both hands.
"Scarlett." Lashes says it before I ask. "Came down with Damon's people. She's staying a few days to help with the women."
"She's good with the baby."
"She's good with everybody." Lashes says it a hair too fast, then puts her eyes back on the fire.
I let it go by.
We sit there a while.
"They're going to be okay," she says finally. "The eleven. Not all at once and not for a long time, but they're going to be okay. Ruby's already fighting three of them over who does the dishes."
"Yeah."
"So say the rest of it." She still doesn't look at me. "You've had a face on you all night."
I pick a stick up off the ground and turn it over in my hands.
"I'm not finished," I say.
"No."
"We took the women off that property." My voice comes out level. "They didn't walk to Cochise County on their own, Lashes. There's a supplier. And the day that supplier hears Trask went under, they'll sell to somebody else and start filling new doors somewhere I've never heard of."
Lashes doesn't say anything.
"And you were bought," I say. "From the same kind of people. Maybe the same actual people. We don't know yet."
"We don't know yet." She says it slow. "But Imani's got the ledger. And Amara's uncle is going to get his hands on Trask eventually."
"And when he does, Trask talks."
"He talks a lot." Lashes turns and looks at me, and her jaw's set. Her eyes have gone bright and hard in the firelight. "I've had one name in my head for years. One. Never got it, because the man who could've given it to me went into a hole in Colombia and didn't come out. And I've spent years telling myself it was over because they got me out."
"It's not over."
"It's not close to over." She puts her hand out, palm down, and I lay mine on top of it. "You in?"
"I'm in."
