He knew what she was doing. She was pulling him out of the spiral, away from the pain in his arm and the cold calculation running in the back of his mind. She was giving him something to hold onto that wasn't a weapon or a wound or a threat assessment.
And she was doing it for herself, too—replacing the sound of gunfire with the sound of water sloshing in a canoe and two people laughing who didn't know yet how badly things were about to go wrong.
"The sunset that night," she said, quieter now. "Do you remember that?”
They'd sat on the dock, her between his legs, leaning back against his chest. She'd been sketching the mountains across the lake in the last of the light, and he'd watched her hands move across the page while the sky turned every color the world had to offer. She'd fallen asleep against him with charcoal dust on her fingers and her hair smelling like sunscreen.
He'd sat there for an hour after dark, holding her, listening to the water against the pilings, thinking, This is it. This is what the rest of my life looks like.
He'd bought the ring a week later.
"Yeah," he said. "I remember."
She was quiet again, but the silence was the warmer kind, the kind that didn't demand anything. She'd given him the memory, and he'd taken it, and now it sat between them alongside all the other things that lived in the space between what they'd been and what they were now.
His arm hurt. The road stretched ahead. Somewhere out there, Blake was making choices that would get people killed, and a professional marksman was still searching for them, and the cartel was recalculating, and none of it was over.
But for three blocks, driving through a neighborhood where someone still hadn't taken down their Christmas lights, Mack let himself remember what it felt like to be the man on that dock. The one who thought the future was simple. The one who didn't know yet what it cost to love someone in a world that was determined to take them away.
The rendezvous point was a church parking lot on the north side of town—empty in the late afternoon sun and shielded from the main road by a row of bare cottonwoods. Grizzly was already there.
The former Ranger himself was standing beside the driver's door, hands in his jacket pockets, looking for all the world like a guy waiting for someone to arrive for a late lunch.
But Mack saw the way his eyes tracked their approach, noted the slight shift in his posture as he clocked the damage to the SUV—the fractured windshield, the blown side window, the pockmarks in the metal.
His eyebrows went up. He said nothing.
"Thanks for this,” Mack said, stepping out. The cold air hit his arm and the wound announced itself fresh. He kept his face neutral.
"Garrett said you needed wheels." Clive “CB” Briggs was twenty-eight and built like a heavyweight boxer. His grandfather and then his father had led the Canon Outlaws biker gang. CB had escaped the gang and went into the military. Now, he worked for SPS.
His eyes went to the blood on Mack's jacket, then to Alyssa, who was climbing out of the passenger side, Mack's jacket swamping her frame.
"Alyssa Bennett," Mack said. "She's the principal."
"Ma'am." CB nodded at her.
“Thanks for your help,” she said. “Mr.?”
“Call me Grizzly,” he said with half a smile.
“Grizzly,” she repeated. “Got it.”
They transferred gear quickly—go-bag, med kit, sat phone, Alyssa's bag. The SUV would sit until Garrett could pick it up later and take it to the garage for repairs. CB was riding with them to the courthouse.
"Claire's got a marshal on the east entrance," Mack told him. "You'll take the corridor outside the meeting room. Nobody in or out without my say."
"Copy."
Mack opened the passenger door for Alyssa. She paused, one hand on the frame, and studied him, as if reassuring herself that he was okay.
"I'm fine," he said, before she could ask.
“You’ll tell me if you’re not, right?”
He held in an exasperated sigh. “Of course.”
She climbed in, and CB didn’t hide his smile.