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He’s bigger in my cottage than he was in the mugshots—the scar on his cheek catching the morning light. He’s holding a knife—a six-inch fixed blade, full tang, plain edge, the kind you choose for reliability, not intimidation.

This is a man who has been running a grudge for long enough that it has become its own kind of motivation.

“Mr. Trafton.”

He clenches his jaw. The element of surprise was something he wasn’t counting on.

“You want to put that down.” He has a voice like someone performing calm over something that isn’t.

He thinks he’s threatening.

He is.

And he is not.

Because he brought a knife to a woman who owns a SIG and knows how to use it.

“I really don’t,” I say.

He takes a step toward me. Men like him always think a woman won’t shoot. Men like him are dumb.

“Where is Brooks?” he asks.

“Gone to get milk.” My hand is steady even though my heart is going faster than a racecar on the track.

“I got business with him.”

“Then you’re in the wrong place. This is my house.”

His teeth flash as he smiles. “You’re his business, so you’re mine.”

I hold his gaze.

I hold the gun.

I breathe the way my instructor taught me—steady, from the center. “This is over, Mr. Trafton. Jessup is done. High Mesa has withdrawn. There’s no case.”

He takes another step. “I don’t care about Jessup.”

This stopped being about the case for him when Mason left him on the ground in the Meadowlark Motor Lodge and told him to get out of Wildflower Canyon.

“He touched me, and now I get to touch what is his.” There is menace in his tone. A shiver crawls up my spine.

How the fuck long does it take to get milk? I hope to God that Eunice isn’t chatting Mason up.

“No, you don’t.”

He comes at me.

He’s fast.

I’ll give him that. He crosses the kitchen in under two seconds, and he’s bigger than me, and he has the physical confidence of a man who has never once in his life had a woman point a gun at him and mean it.

I mean it.

I don’t aim for center mass the way the range instructor taught me for stopping power. I aim lower because I am a lawyer and have thought about what comes after this, and what comes after this needs Trafton alive and capable of testifying and answering questions in front of a federal grand jury.

I shoot him in the leg.