Page 5 of Captive

“Not until I know who was listening to it.”

She looks at me the way she looked at that certificate, taking it apart before she decides what the whole of it means. “You don’t have the authority to make that decision.”

“I have the responsibility for getting you out of this field.”

“Those aren’t the same thing.”

She’s right. It doesn’t change the next five minutes.

I key the emergency switch in Hector’s truck. It connects by satellite to an outside dispatch service, and I give them the coordinates, the shots, the dead cattle, one man injured. I give them the safest gate for the ambulance.

“Tell her a veterinarian is being removed from this site without her consent,” Sofia says.

I hold the switch and look straight at her. “Dr. Rios is uninjured and will not remain at the exposed location.”

“Tell her where you’re taking me.”

I let go of the switch. “No.”

“Then you’re hiding me from the police.”

“Yes.”

I don’t dress it up. I could say it’s temporary, or it’s for her own good, and some of that might even be true. I’ve watched Russell put good reasons on orders for most of my life. I know what that looks like from the inside. I’m not going to do it to her while she’s standing in front of me.

At nineteen, I was sleeping in a truck that belonged to a man I no longer worked for. Calvin McCall put my name on a payroll and gave me a bunk that didn’t disappear when the branding crew went home. He taught me that keeping it meant being the man who acted before everybody else finished deciding whether the work was clean.

Russell took that lesson and sharpened it. Fences cut at night. A driver persuaded to forget a road. A debtor shown how close our cattle could graze to his house. I learned to take the order first and sort out right from necessary once the gate was closed behind me.

That reflex reaches for Russell’s words now. The forged paper, the dead cattle, the rifle. There’s just enough truth in his message to make obeying it feel responsible.

I have never used it to take a woman.

“Fourteen C has to move before we do,” Sofia says. “Is the treatment shed through that lane?”

The panel corridor runs west to the old line camp without crossing a road. “It is.”

“She walks if she chooses to stand. Nobody ropes her, pushes her, or puts her on a trailer.”

“You heard her,” I tell the crew.

The cow rocks forward and gets her back legs under her on the second try. Sofia walks at her shoulder, talking low, watching the animal’s breath instead of the brush where a rifle might still be. I take the exposed side and watch the brush for both of us.

Halfway there, a red cow hits the crossover gate behind us. The pin jumps and the gate swings across the lane.

Sofia turns toward the sound. I catch her around the middle and pull us both against the side of Hector’s truck a half second before steel slams where her head was.

For one breath, her back is fitted to my chest and my hand spans the front of her waist. She’s warm through her work shirt and furious and alive, and her pulse is beating against my wrist.

Want hits me like a kick.

It doesn’t ask about the timing. It doesn’t care that I’ve just decided to take her somewhere she hasn’t agreed to go. My body has already made up its mind about how she fits against me, and it isn’t interested in anything else I have to say.

I let go and step back before the gate finishes its swing. “You hit?”

“No.” She checks the cow before she checks herself. “Your truck is.”

“It’ll recover.”