Page 58 of Reluctant Bride

He takes half a step back from the doorframe. Not toward the room. Away from it, angling his own body a few degrees closer to the exit behind him, the kind of adjustment a man makes without deciding to make it, muscle memory built out of rooms that went bad fast.

I’ve seen Holt stand still in a hallway with a bleeding man on the other side of a locked door and not move a muscle. I’ve watched him clear a barn with a rifle in a dead run without his pulse changing his voice. Tonight, standing eight feet from me in a room full of people who trust both of us, he puts himself half a step closer to a door.

That punches somewhere I don’t have a name for.

Sage sees it too. I catch it happen on her face before she gets it back under control, the same flicker she gave the boot prints at the Corridor gate, the same one she gave the too-clean evidence against Cruz. She’s not looking at Knox right now. Knox’s suspicion is old news, brotherly and loud and easy enough to argue with.

She’s looking at Holt.

I’ve watched the two of them stand at the edge of a hundred rooms together and say nothing, some quiet current running between them that skips right past Knox, past blood politics, past whatever the rest of us are doing at the center of the party. I don’t know the whole shape of it. I know Holt’s never once flinched in front of her, not at a body, not at a threat, not at anything in the two years I’ve watched them orbit each other like they’re the only ones in the room who remember being the quiet ones.

Watching him take that step back from me guts her. I watch it happen and have no way to reach her.

“He asked if I was afraid of him,” Sage says, so quiet that it’s almost missed.

It’s not quiet enough. I hear it. Holt hears it. Knox goes very still by the wall.

“A few hours ago,” she says, still not looking at me, eyes on her brother instead. “After the bombing. I told him I didn’t think so. I told him I was afraid of how little it would take.”

“Sage.” My voice comes out rougher than I want it to in front of an audience.

“I’m not saying it to hurt you.” She finally looks at me, steady, none of the armor she wore at the boundary house negotiating table nine days ago. “I’m saying it because Holt needs to hear that I already had this conversation with you, and I’m still standing here. That should count for something in this room.”

Holt’s eyes move from her to me and back, recalculating something I can’t read from the outside.

“It counts,” he says finally. “It doesn’t erase what I saw.”

“I’m not asking you to erase it.” I hold his eyes, and for the first time since I walked into this building, I let him see how much the last three days have taken out of me, no bravado, nothing managed. “I’m asking you to help me find out who’s spending my name like currency before they spend it on something neither of us can walk back from.”

Holt doesn’t answer right away. He looks at Mackenzie’s laptop, at the warrant still glowing on the screen, at the notary stamp from an office I’ve trusted for eleven years.

“Foster and Reyes doesn’t just hand out signatures,” he says finally. “Somebody there had to believe the paperwork was legitimate enough to stake their license on it.”

“Which means somebody handed them a story good enough to survive a licensed attorney’s due diligence,” Mackenzie says. “That’s not amateur hour. That’s patient.”

“That’s the same patience that had somebody photographing the boundary house before either father ever told us out loud where we’d be living,” Sage says. She looks at her father for the first time since I walked in. “This isn’t Cruz’s patience, Dad. Cruz doesn’t have access to Sullivan’s outside counsel. He barely has access to his own case file right now.”

Gideon doesn’t answer that directly, which from him is as close to agreement as the room’s going to get tonight.

Knox releases a breath I didn’t know he’d been holding, and his shoulders come down, not trust exactly, but the absence of the hostility he walked in wearing.

“I’m not clearing him,” Knox says. “Not tonight. Not off a theory about an attorney’s office.”

“I’m not asking you to,” I say. “I’m asking you to hold him where he is and let Mackenzie run the paper trail before either family does anything that can’t be undone.”

“And if the trail comes back to Sullivan Transport after all? Somebody inside your own walls who meant it?”

“Then I hand you that person myself and I don’t ask you to be gentle about it.” I mean every word. “I’ve spent a year building something with you I’m not interested in losing to somebody’s frame job. If it turns out to be real, it stops being a frame job and starts being a problem I clean up personally.”

Knox studies me a long moment, the same assessing look Sage gives a hostile witness, inherited or taught, I’ve never been sure which.

“Twenty-four hours,” he says. “Mackenzie gets the trail. If it points at Cruz clean, he stays. If it points somewhere else, we talk about what happens to him next.”

“Twenty-four hours,” I agree.

Holt still hasn’t come off the door. When I look at him again, he gives me a short nod, more concession than agreement, the kind of nod a man gives when he’s decided not to draw a line tonight but hasn’t decided to erase the one he already drew either.

“For what it’s worth,” he says, and I can hear what it takes out of him to say it, “I don’t think it’s you. Not the whole way you. I think there’s a version of you that I haven’t met yet, and I’d like to keep it that way.”