THUNDER

SHOTGUN SAINTS MC: KINGS OF THE ROAD

BOOK ONE

ELIZABETH KNOX

Thunder

This book is a work of fiction. The names, characters, places, and incidents are all products of the author’s imagination and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblances to persons, organizations, events, or locales are entirely coincidental.

Thunder. Copyright © 2026 by Elizabeth Knox. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission from the author, except in the case of brief quotations used in articles or reviews. For information, contact Elizabeth Knox.

Cover Design by Clarise Tan, CT Cover Creations

Photography by: Reggie Deanching, R+M Photo

Cover Model: Sean

Editing by Kim Lubbers, Knox Publishing

Proofreading by Beth Hale, Magnolia Author Services

Formatting by R. Epperson, Knox Publishing

TRIGGER WARNING

This book is intended for mature audiences only.

Thunder is a dark MC romance for readers 18 and older. It contains explicit sexual content, graphic violence, and mature themes. Please read with care.

Reader discretion is strongly advised. Please proceed only if you are comfortable engaging with dark romance themes.

TIMELINE NOTE:

This is best read after reading Presley’s novella, which is included in the Shotgun Saints MC: The Complete Series boxset.

I strongly advice for a better reading experience to pick up Presley’s novella within the set if you haven’t already.

Read it for FREE in Kindle Unlimited.

PROLOGUE

Thunder

A cane is a coward's third leg, and I hate the sight of mine leaning against the fence post while I stand here pretending I don't need it.

A little over three weeks out from the surgery, and I can hold myself up through a wedding if I lock the hip and don't think too hard about the twenty yards of gravel between me and my truck.

The doctors said walk.

They didn't say it wouldn't hurt like hell.

Every step out to this pasture rang up the side of my leg like a struck bell, and now I'm standing in the front row of Rogue's wedding, sweating through my good shirt and gripping a fence rail like an old man.

Meanwhile, the woman I'd give both legs to stand beside is forty feet away, where I'm not allowed to look at her.

So I look at the oak instead.

Phantom's daddy planted it when he was a boy, and it's stood over every important thing this family's ever done since.

Hay bales set in a half-circle underneath it, Marlena's quilts thrown over them so nobody's sitting on bare straw in their Sunday clothes.

Mason jars of black-eyed Susans and those little Mexican hat flowers on every bale, the ones Bex and Hadley pulled off the back acreage yesterday while I sat on a bucket and wasn't allowed to help carry anything.

A white runner down the middle of the grass from the pasture gate to the trunk.

It's a good day for it.

Late light comes gold across the pasture, the heat is backing off, the cicadas are winding down.

Marlena's in a chair at the front because she can't stand for long yet, her hand at her ribs where the bullet went in.

Phantom stands under the oak in a black shirt with his hands folded, looking out at all of us like a man counting his herd and finding it mostly whole.

We came close to burying more than we did five weeks ago, and every soul under this tree knows it.

It hums under a wedding like this one—the gladness has a blade in it.

We're not just happy. We're relieved all the way down to the ground.

Banshee's got his sling off, Bex on his arm.

Blaze holds his hat against his chest.

Spur and Dakota, Shadow with his hand spread wide on Grace's belly where the next Lyle boy's already making himself known.

Holt and Cash rode in from their chapters.

A little woman with Garrett's eyes sits front row in navy—the dead husband's mother, come to give her blessing to the man marrying the widow, and if that's not the bravest thing I've seen all year, I don't know what is.

The fiddle starts up on the porch of the main house.

Diesel comes first down the runner, that tough old shepherd with a leather pouch swinging off his collar and the rings tucked inside it.

Nash walks beside him with one hand flat on the dog's back.

The both of them took worse than I did that night, and here they come down the aisle like it never happened, boy and dog, and the sound that moves through the hay bales is half a laugh and half something wetter.

My own throat goes tight and I let it, because everybody's is.

Then the women come.

Bex. Grace on Shadow's arm. Dakota on Spur's, her hat off because you take your hat off at a wedding.

Then Hadley.

She walks up alone in cream lace that stops at her knee, boots underneath it, her hair down, loose over the scar at her temple she didn't try to hide.

Every man under that oak stands up.

I get myself up off the rail and onto my feet through a white spike of pain that I'd stand through ten times over, because you rise for a woman walking toward a man in front of God, and I'll be damned if my hip's going to be the reason I'm the one sitting when she passes.

She turns at the foot of the tree and the back of her dress shows the ink between her shoulder blades.

Property of Rogue.

Black script on sun-warm skin. Another breath moves through the bales.

I keep my eyes on Hadley.

I keep my eyes on Hadley because Hadley is safe to look at, and the person I want to look at is standing at the far edge of the half-circle in a green dress the same color as the one she wore the night she crossed a bar to say my name.

If I turn my head even a few degrees I'll find her, and if I find her, I don't trust my face to do what a Sergeant at Arms's face is supposed to do.

Rogue takes Hadley's hand.

Phantom starts to speak, low and steady, the voice of a man who's stood under this tree and buried people and married people and blessed babies born to this dirt.

I hear about half of it.

Something about how love isn't the soft thing people sell you, it's the hard one, the choice you make on the days it costs you.

Something about a woman who lost a good man and a man who spent his whole life waiting to be chosen, and how they found each other on the far side of everything that tried to break them.

That part hits the entire crowd.

It’s important to remember, and I make the mistake I swore I wouldn't make. I turn my head.

She's already looking at me.

Presley.

Across the whole clearing with the gold light in her red hair and her daddy's jaw set against something, looking straight at me the way she hasn't let herself in five weeks of Sunday suppers I've dodged and runs I've volunteered for just to keep from sitting at a table with her and pretending she's nothing to me.

For one second, neither of us looks away.

For one second, it's the two of us and forty feet of other people's happiness.

Her eyes go bright and her jaw works the way her father's does when he's holding something down.

Mine's doing the same, and I think—clear as anything I've ever thought—that should be us and it never will be.

She looks away first.

She has to, or I would’ve, and one of us being strong enough to break it is the only mercy in the whole moment.

Phantom says the words. Rogue says the words back.

He bends and kisses his wife, and the pasture erupts, hats in the air, Dakota's whoop cutting over the top of it.

Diesel’s barking at the noise, and I clap along with my cane hooked over my wrist because a man needs both hands to clap and I need one for the fence rail.

I smile because you smile at a wedding.

Then people start moving toward the barn where the food is, and the crowd swallows the space between me and her, and that's my window.

I take it.

I catch Rogue on the way past—get a hand on his shoulder, lean in over the noise. "Happy for you, brother. Truly."

"You're not stayin'?" He says it flat.

Rogue doesn't miss things. It's what makes him good and what makes him a problem.

"Hip's had enough. Gonna get off it before it quits on me in front of God and the chapters."

He looks at me a half second longer than the lie deserves.

Then he nods, because it's his wedding day and he's got a wife to feed, and he's not going to spend the moment digging at me. "Go easy on it."

"Yeah."

I go.

Sixty yards of gravel back to the trucks, and every one of them hurts.

I'm glad of the hurt because it gives me something to think about that isn't the green dress.

I don't look back to see if she watched me leave.

I already know she didn't.

She's better at this than I am.

She'll walk into that barn and eat cake and laugh with her sisters who aren't speaking to her and hold the whole thing together with that Lyle spine, and nobody will know she's coming apart.

She learned how to do that somewhere along the way and it's the saddest skill a person can have.

I get to the truck. Lean against the door and breathe through the worst of the hip before I trust myself to climb in.

Out past the pasture the fiddle's started up again, faster now, and I can hear the party finding its feet—my whole family, the only one I've ever had, celebrating a good thing under that old tree.

And me out here in the gravel, leaving it, because I can't sit in a room with the woman I want and keep lying about it.

I told her I wasn't done.

I told her she wasn't done with me either, and I meant it, and I've spent every day since doing exactly nothing about it but heal and hurt and going out on runs I volunteered for so I wouldn't have to watch her across a supper table.

I get in the truck. Sit there a second with my hand on the key and my bad leg stretched out stiff into the well.

There's a rattlesnake healing on the side of my neck that she hasn't seen yet.

Got it the week after she walked out my door—sat in a chair in Llano and let a man put her on my skin where I'd feel it every time I turned my head, because I'm a fool for her and I decided I'd rather wear the proof than pretend.

She hasn't laid eyes on it.

She will.

This ranch is too small and I'm too far gone for her not to, and when she does, she's going to know exactly what it means.

I'm not done.

I turn the key and the truck rumbles up under me.

I pull out slowly down the ranch road while my family dances behind me, and I make myself the same promise I've made every gray morning since she left.

I'm going to get her back.

Not today.

Today she gets to grieve what we can't have in a green dress at her friend’s wedding, same as me.

But she's mine, Presley Lyle, even if she doesn't know it yet—and I've never craved a single thing in my life the way I mean to earn the right to stand under that oak with her someday and not give a good goddamn who's watching.

CHAPTER ONE

Two Weeks Later…

Presley

Cattle don't care whose family isn't speaking to you.

That's the mercy of them, and it's why I'm out at the working pens a little after sunup instead of up at the main house where the coffee is, running a new group of bred heifers through the chute one at a time to check them against my book.

A heifer doesn't know I'm the reason her whole herd's owner won't look me in the eye at Sunday supper anymore.

She doesn't know my mother put a pair of shears in a woman and my father buried it, and I'm the one wearing the guilt for something I found out the same day everybody else did.

She just knows the chute is loud and the ground is strange, and she wants through it and back to her hay.

My job is to make that as easy on her as it can be while I get what I need.

I get what I need.

That's all the cattle ask of me and all I ask of them, and it's the cleanest deal I've got left.

I've got fourteen head to run and a clipboard balanced on the top rail and a travel mug of coffee going cold on the fence post.

I'm in the middle of reading a tag number back to myself when the next heifer balks in the alley and won't load.

A few weeks ago, I'd have had help out here.

Dakota would've been on the other side of the alley with a flag, running her mouth about something and pushing cattle at the same time, because Dakota can do six things at once and talk through all of them.

Grace would've swung by on her vet rounds and leaned on the rail and told me which of my bred heifers she liked the look of.

That's how it worked, the whole first stretch after I came home, the three of us circling the same pens, the same suppers, and the same last name.

For a little while I let myself believe I'd finally gotten what I spent twenty-two years not having.

Sisters.

A place.

A family that was mine by blood, not just the one good man who chose me.

Then the truth came out of a hospital room, and my mother's name was on it.

Now I run fourteen head alone at sunup because the alternative is asking one of them for help and watching them openly decide they don’t want to.

So I don't ask.

I've gotten good at not asking.

I run the cattle by myself, I keep my own book, I built the whole breeding program's records out of nothing but a laptop and a used desk.

Plus the four years of school nobody in this family thought a Lyle needed.

I do it without one of them in the room, because the work is the only thing left that didn't take a side.

She plants.

Sets all four feet and throws her head, and I click at her and wave the flag low and easy.

She still won't come, because a scared thousand-pound animal doesn't do anything on your schedule.

"She's eyeballin' the shadow on the ground," a voice says behind me. "Move to her off side, she'll come."

I know the voice before I turn.

Of course I do.

I'd know it in the dark, in a crowd, in my sleep—I spent months of my life learning the low gravel of it up close, and my body hears it before my brain gets a vote, the way it always has.

Thunder.

I don't turn around right away.

I give myself the half a second it takes to get my face right, and then I move to the heifer's off side the way he said, out of the shadow she's been staring at.

She blows out a breath and loads into the chute like she'd been planning to all along.

"Thanks," I say, to the heifer, to the fence, to anywhere but him.

"Didn't do anything. You had it."

Then I turn around.

He's leaning against the outside of the pen with his forearms on the top rail, favoring the left leg the way he does now, his cane hooked over the rail beside him.

He's not supposed to be out here.

There's no club reason for the Sergeant at Arms to be at my working pens at sunup, and we both know it.

I know neither of us is going to say it.

He looks better than the last time I let myself really look at him. There's color back in his face.

The beard's a little wilder, more salt in it than there was in the spring.

He's still too big for the space he's in, still takes up the whole rail, still watches me like weather coming.

"You're up early," he says.

"So are you."

I check a tag against my book so I don't have to hold his eyes.

"You're a long way from your cabin for a man who's supposed to be resting a hip."

"Doctor says move it or lose it."

There’s a moment of silence between us.

"Figured I'd move it out this direction."

"There's nothing out this direction but my cattle."

"I know what's out this direction."

I write the tag number down twice because I stopped hearing my own hand the first time.

He says things like that and doesn't lean on them, doesn't push, just sets them down between us and lets them sit, and it's worse than if he begged.

A man begging you can turn down.

A man who just tells you the plain truth and waits—that's harder to walk away from, and he knows it, and he's counting on it.

And his neck is bare.

That's what stops me.

The last I knew, he was wrapped and bandaged from the surgery and the shooting, gauze at his collar.

Now the wrap's gone, his collar's open against the morning heat, and the left side of his throat is bare to the light.

And it's not bare.

There's a rattlesnake on it.

I don't mean to walk closer.

My feet do it before I've decided anything, two steps to the rail, close enough that if I reached through I could touch him, close enough to read the ink that wasn't there in the spring.

It's coiled.

Small and dark and beautifully done, set right over the script that was already there, the words I read the first night in a bar and never said out loud.

The snake's wrapped around them now like it's guarding them.

Head up.

Ready.

The kind of thing that puts a man in the ground if he's fool enough to get close.

Little rattlesnake.

That's what he calls me.

Called me.

In my ear, against my throat, into my hair—rattlesnake, little rattlesnake— and here it is on his skin, permanent, healing, pink still at the edges of the black where the needle's barely finished with it.

He got it while we were apart.

He sat in a chair somewhere and let a man carve me into the side of his throat where he'd feel it every time he turned his head.

He did it after I stood in his cabin and told him we were done, after I walked out his door and cried in my truck in a hospital parking lot, after the whole thing came down around both of us.

He marked himself with me.

My eyes sting and I hate it, hate that my body's doing this at a set of working pens at sunup with a group of heifers watching.

I drag my gaze up off his throat and back to his face, and he's already looking at me.

He knows. He wanted me to see it.

It’s why his collar's open and his neck's bare in the August heat instead of buttoned to the chin.

"When?" It comes out rough.

"After."

One word.

He's not going to make this easy, or soft, or anything I could lean on.

That's not who he is and it's not what we are anymore.

"That's not fair," I tell him, and the words come out thin at the end where I can't hold them steady.

"No." He holds my eyes. "Didn't do it to be fair."

I step back from the rail.

I make myself do it, one step and then another, back into my own space where the clipboard is, and the chute is, and the work is, the work that doesn't care about any of this.

"You shouldn't be out here," I say.

"Probably not."

"There's no reason for you to be at my pens, Thunder."

"No." He doesn't move. "There's not."

And that's the conversation, right there, everything we're not saying stacked up in the space between two people who used to say everything to each other with no words at all.

He shouldn't be here. He came anyway.

I should tell him to leave.

I don't.

We stand in it, four feet and a fence rail apart, and the August sun climbs, and the heifer in the chute bawls to be let out, and neither of us moves for a second too long.

Then I turn back to my work, because it's the only thing I've got that's mine right now.

The only thing on this whole ranch that didn't get taken from me when the truth came out.

"I've got twelve more head to run," I say to the clipboard. "And I'm running them alone."

It's a dismissal, and we both hear it.

Behind me, the rail creaks as he takes his weight back off it.

I hear the soft knock of the cane finding the ground, the uneven rhythm of him moving off—step, cane, step, the sound of a man who used to move like a threat learning to move like a man who got shot.

I don't turn to watch him go.

I did that once already, at a wedding, in a green dress, and it ruined me clear through the night.

I run my twelve head.

I get through them clean, every tag checked against my book, every one of them where she ought to be in the breeding rotation.

By the time I'm done the sun's fully up, my shirt's stuck to my back, and I've almost got my breathing right again.

This is the part I know how to do.

I graduated for this.

Four years at A&M and a degree in animal science and a head full of expected progeny differences and calving-ease numbers and the whole long science of making a herd better, one careful pairing at a time.

I came home to build a program out of it—real seedstock, registered genetics, a Sharp Shooter Ranch brand that means something at a sale barn.

Pops handed me the reins on it before everything broke.

Before I became a stranger in my own family.

The work didn't break.

That's what I hold onto.

The cattle didn't stop needing me the day Dakota stopped speaking to me.

The heifers didn't take Grace's side.

The bull I picked out at Navasota doesn't know or care that my sisters look through me now like I'm made of the same lie our whole family's built on, and there's a comfort in that so deep I'd be ashamed to say it out loud.

I gather my book, my flag, and my now cold coffee.

Up the hill, the main house sits with its porch full of morning light.

I know if I walked up there right now, Mom would make me a plate and Pops would ask about the heifers and it would look, to anybody driving past, like a family.

I don't go up.

I haven't taken a meal at that house since the hospital.

I take them at my own cabin now—Hadley's old place, the Cross cabin, close to the barns and wired for the office I've been building—and I eat them alone with the radio on.

I tell myself it's because I'm busy, because the program's just getting started, because I've got so much work.

It's not because of the work.

It's because a family supper means sitting at a table with sisters who won't look at me and a father whose secret cost me both of them.

I'd rather eat a sandwich standing up at my own counter than perform being fine for people who broke my heart.

There's a particular loneliness to being frozen out by people you live two hundred yards from.

It'd almost be easier if they'd sent me away—if I'd had to leave the ranch, start over somewhere, grieve them clean.

Instead I see them every day.

I see Grace's truck at the vet barn and Dakota's horses in the arena and Mom's car up at the salon.

Every one of them is a door that used to be open and isn't anymore, and I have to drive past all of them to get to my own front step.

My whole family, right here where I can see it, and not one of them mine to walk up to.

I sling my things into the side-by-side and point it toward my cabin.

And I don’t look toward the back of the property, toward the second house past the barn, toward the man with a rattlesnake healing on his throat who came to my pens at sunup for no reason at all except that he's not done with me and he wanted me to know it.

I don't look.

But the whole ranch pulls in that direction the entire way home, the way water knows which way the ground falls, and I grip the wheel, and I drive, and I tell myself, the way I have every day for weeks, that missing a man and going back to him are two different animals, and I'm strong enough to keep them apart.

I almost believe it, too.

Right up until I catch myself touching the side of my own throat at a stop sign that isn't there.

My fingers pressed to the bare skin where his snake would sit if I were the fool who wore my heart where everyone could see it.

I put my hand back on the wheel.

I drive home to my empty cabin, and I don’t cry.

I count that as a victory, because these days I've learned to take the small ones where I can get them.

CHAPTER TWO

Thunder

My hip's already screaming at me by the time we hit the county line, and we've still got the better part of the day's ride to go.

I don't let it show.

That's what I have to do right now—not let the pain show—because the second Blaze or Spur clocks me favoring the bike, this becomes a conversation about whether the Sergeant at Arms ought to be on a run at all, and I'd rather ride all day on a bad hip than sit through that at a table.

So I keep my line, keep my mouth shut, and I let the highway do what highways do, unspool out ahead of us flat and pale under a sky going white with heat.

I ride where I've ridden every mile since I got back on a bike a couple weeks ago.

The back.

I never used to ride in the back.

A Sergeant at Arms rides where he needs to, and where he needs to is usually up front with Phantom or swinging wide to watch a flank, because watching is the job and I’ve always been damn good at it.

Now I ride drag because it's the one spot where nobody's behind me to see how long it takes me to get a boot down at a stop.

And because if my leg quits on me at seventy, I'd rather take myself down than take a brother with me.

Blaze is up front.

He's got the VP flash on his cut and rides like he was poured into the seat, easy and loose, a big blond bastard who's never had a nervous day in his life as far as anybody can tell.

Spur's off his right shoulder.

The three of us, running up to Roan's charter with a saddlebag full of the paperwork two chapters don't trust to a phone, and it's a milk run, is what it is.

Simple.

The sort of thing you send three patched men on so it looks like nothing while it's really something.

Everything's something since the bunkhouse.

That's the part nobody brings up at church anymore, but every man in that clubhouse is carrying it.

We got hit at home.

On our own dirt, with our women and our kids in the house.

A man walked out of the dark and put bullets in Marlena, Banshee, and me, and damn near a kid.

The only reason we're all still breathing is luck, Bex, and a dog that took a round meant for Nash.

You don't come back from a night like that and ride easy.

You ride watching.

Which is how I catch it.

We're maybe forty miles out, a long empty stretch of two-lane with nothing on it but mesquite and heat shimmer, when the truck catches my eye.

Silver, newer, sitting a quarter mile back and holding there.

Not gaining. Not falling off.

Just sitting in that spot a vehicle sits when the man driving it wants to keep eyes on you without walking up your bumper.

I know that spot, I've driven that spot.

I've followed men from that exact distance more times than I could count back when following men was part of what Phantom paid me to do.

It holds through two curves and a straightaway.

Matches us through all three, that same clean quarter mile.

A civilian doesn't do that.

A civilian speeds up, slows down, turns off, gets bored.

A civilian lives his own life at his own pace and never once holds a perfect quarter mile off the back of three bikers for ten miles of empty road.

This truck holds it like it's on a rail.

I key the comm in my helmet.

"Blaze. Spur. Don't look. We've got a tail. Silver three-quarter-ton, quarter mile back, been on us since the Kimble line."

Up front I see Blaze's head not turn, which is exactly right, which is why he's VP.

"How sure?"

"Sure enough that I want a plate before we do anything else."

"Spur," Blaze says.

"Next curve, you're the mirror."

We run it clean.

On the next long left-hander, Spur drifts his line out just enough to bend his mirror back down the road, natural as anything, a man adjusting for a curve, and he holds it a half-second longer than he needs to.

"Partial," Spur says over the comm.

"Can't get it all from here. He's runnin' without a front plate, so I gotta get the back, and he's not gonna let me behind him."

"Then we make him show it," Blaze says.

We work him for six miles.

We have practice doing this. Been plenty of times we had to do it in the past.

But you can only do it with men who've run together countless times. It’s seamless.

No more talk than a word here and there over the comm, and even shot to hell and riding drag, I can still do this part.

This part lives in the body under the pain where the Firm can't reach and the hip can't take it.

We slow.

He slows.

We push it up to eighty and he lets the gap grow and then reels it back, careful, disciplined, and that discipline tells me more than a plate would—that's not a jealous husband or a bored kid.

That's a professional.

That hits me in my gut like a swallowed stone.

Because there's only one kind of professional who'd be sitting a quarter mile off the Shotgun Saints right now, and he wears no patch.

The last one of him walked into our bunkhouse and I've still got a piece of his work lodged against my hip bone.

Finally, coming into a wide spot where the two-lane opens to pass, Blaze makes his move.

He signals Spur up and the two of them slow hard and swing wide like they're turning into a gas station, and the silver truck has a choice—brake behind them and sit there naked, or commit and roll on past.

He rolls on past.

He has to.

And for the two seconds it takes him to clear us, Spur's got his eyes on the back plate and his lips moving, and I've got mine on the cab.

Ball cap.

Sunglasses.

Beard, maybe fake, maybe not.

Eyes front, never once turned our way, which is the tell—a curious man looks, a hunting man keeps his face forward and lets you look at nothing.

He rolls on down the road at a lawful five over and doesn't speed up and doesn't slow down and is gone over the next rise like he was never there.

"Got it," Spur says.

"Whole plate. Memorized it. Not writin' it down till we're stopped."

"Good man." Blaze's voice is flat and hard now, the easy gone out of it. "Thunder. That what I think it is?"

"I don't know what it is," I say, which is true.

"But I know what it moves like. And it moves like the last one."

Nobody says anything for a mile.

Then Blaze speaks up, "We finish the run. We hand off the paper, we act like nothing, and we bring that plate home to Phantom and Rogue tonight. Rogue'll know how to run it down."

"Rogue'll know," I agree.

Because Rogue's the one who brought this down on us.

Not on purpose.

No man chooses to have his old life come collect, but the Firm is Rogue's ghost, and Rogue's the only one of us who's ever sat on the inside of what's hunting us now.

If a silver truck is running our charter without a front plate, then the second man from the bunkhouse didn't crawl off and die somewhere.

He went home.

And he reported in.

* * *

Roan's clubhouse sits on the flat outside Lubbock, and we roll in tight and careful, three men who just got tailed forty miles and aren't in the mood to be surprised.

Roan meets us in the lot himself.

He's got Phantom's height and Phantom's way of reading a man's face before the man's said a word, and he takes one look at the three of us and says, "Who died?"

"Nobody yet," Blaze says.

"We picked up a tail comin' down. Lost him at the pass-through, but he was on us from Kimble."

Roan's jaw sets.

He was at the bunkhouse cleanup, same as the rest of us, close enough to this to know exactly what a professional tail means, and a charter president reads that in about a second and a half and likes the answer no better than we do.

"The Firm," he says.

Not a question.

"Maybe," Blaze says.

"Spur's got a plate. Rogue's runnin' it tonight."

"You'll call me the minute you know."

Roan takes the paperwork off Spur and doesn't so much as glance at it, because the paper was never really the point of this run, and everybody standing here knows it.

"And you'll tell my brother I said this doesn't get handled quietly. Last time we tried quiet, Marlena caught a bullet, and you caught two." His eyes flick to my leg, to the way I'm standing. "How's the hip?"

"Fine."

"Liar." But he says it gently, the way family says it. "Sit down before you fall down, Thunder. I'll get you boys fed for the road."

I don't sit down.

I don't sit down because if I lower myself into one of Roan's low clubhouse chairs, I'm not getting back up without a show of it, and I've taken all the looking-at-my-leg I can stand for one day.

I lean on a pool table instead like it's a choice, and I let the brothers eat.

My eyes stay on the door the whole time, because somebody on this run has to, and my body can still do that part sitting still.

Watching the door's about all I'm good for anymore.

I try not to let that thought get comfortable.

* * *

By the time we turn back toward home my hip is screaming with agony, and the ride home is a long negotiation between me and my own body about how much further it's willing to carry me before it makes a scene.

I win, but barely.

I always win, but it costs more every time, and there's a cold little voice in me now that's started asking how many wins I've got left before the leg stops taking the bribe.

I don't listen to that voice.

I get home a little before dark, ease the bike into the shed, and stand there a second with both hands on the seat, letting the leg get its story straight before I ask it to walk me to the porch.

Mama Lou's car is in the drive.

The kitchen window's gold and there's smoke off the grill out back, which means she's not only dropping off Raine, she's fed her and she's fed me too.

Something in my chest that's been clenched since the Kimble line lets go all at once at the sight of it.

Whatever's out there on the road tonight, it's out there.

In here it's my mother, my kid, and a supper I didn't have to cook.

"Daddy!"

Raine hits the screen door at a run and I get my feet set so she can slam into me without putting me on the ground.

I catch her up and swing her once even though my hip screams bloody murder about it, because you swing your kid, that's the deal.

I don’t care how much pain I’m in, I’m still her father.

"How was Grandma's?"

"We made a pie and I did two whole worksheets, and Grandma let me have a Coke with lunch, which she said not to tell you about." She's got flour in one braid. "But I'm tellin' you about it because keepin' secrets from your daddy is wrong."

"That's real big of you."

I set her down.

"Rat out your grandma first thing."

"Mama Lou," my mother calls from the kitchen, unbothered, sliding a pan onto the stovetop. "She gets to call me Mama Lou like everybody else and you get to hush about the Coke. Wash up, both of you. I made too much, so you're eatin' like you mean it, Thunder, you've gone thin."

I have gone thin.

Getting shot'll do that.

I don't argue with my mother about it because you don't win those either.

We eat at the kitchen table, the three of us, chicken off the grill and my mother's potato salad.

The kind of easy noise a house makes when there's a nine-year-old in it, and for a little while I let the road stay out on the road.

Raine talks enough for all three of us.

Mama Lou watches me eat with the happiness of a woman confirming her son isn't going to waste away on her watch.

My leg throbs under the table, and I ignore it, and it's the best I've felt all day.

Then Raine sets her fork down and gets a thinking look, and I know something's coming, because Raine at a dead stop is Raine loading up.

"Daddy, can Miss Presley come to dinner sometime?"

The table doesn't go quiet, because Mama Lou's too smooth for that.

She goes still over her plate and doesn't look at me, which is its own kind of loud.

"She helped me name my barn kitten," Raine goes on earnestly, building her case. "The gray one. She said his name should be Biscuit and she was right, he looks exactly like a biscuit. And she knows everything about horses and cows, and she said she'd show me how the cows get matched up for babies, the science part, and she never came to show me 'cause she's been busy."

There’s a moment of silence before she starts up again.

"Can she come? I miss her."

I miss her.

Two words out of a nine-year-old and they go into me deeper than anything the road did today.

Because I miss her too, and that's what I can't say.

I miss her at this table so bad it's a physical pain worse than the hip, and my daughter just laid it out plainly the way kids do.

She said the true thing none of the grown-ups are allowed to say, and she's looking up at me waiting for me to fix it like I fix everything else.

I can't fix this one.

"She's been workin' awful hard, baby," I say, and I keep my voice easy.

"Up before the sun, out at those pens all day. Runnin' a whole cattle program by herself is a big job. I 'spect by suppertime she's wore all the way out and just wants to put her feet up."

"Oh."

Raine considers this, and I think it’s a good enough answer for her, because nine-year-olds take you at your word when you love them right.

"Okay. Maybe when she's not so tired."

"Maybe then."

"I hope she's not too tired for too long." She picks her fork back up. "I like her. She's not fake-nice like some grown-ups. She's real-nice."

"Yeah," I say. "She is."

Across the table, my mother looks at me then, one long look, the look a woman gives you when she's known you your whole life and can read something off your face you'd swear you kept blank.

She doesn't say a word.

Mama Lou never needs the words.

But that look says I see it, son, whatever it is, I see it.

I hold her eyes and I don't give her anything back, because some loads you carry alone until you can't.

* * *

Raine's asleep by dark, and my mother's gone home.

I'm out on the porch with a beer I'm not drinking and my leg propped on the rail, and I let it all come back now that there's nobody to keep my face right for.

A silver truck on an empty road, running our charter, as disciplined as a soldier.

A plate number in Spur's head that Rogue's going to run tonight, and whatever comes back off it isn't going to be good, because good things don't tail three bikers for forty miles.

My daughter across a supper table saying I miss her about a woman I can't have, in a house on a ranch where a man I can't catch is watching us from the dark.

I used to be the one they sent into that dark.

I used to be the man other men worried about coming for them, the one Phantom pointed at a problem and stopped thinking about it.

Now I'm a man who wins a fight with his own hip to walk to his own porch, sitting in the light where anybody could see me, with everything I love in the world sleeping behind me in a house I'm not sure I could defend if it came to it tonight.

The Firm's still out there.

That's what the road said today.

And me—the Sergeant at Arms, the sword of this club—I can't run anymore, I can't chase, I can barely swing my own kid up off the porch without paying for it.

But I catch myself rubbing the rattlesnake on my neck, slowly, the way you press on a bruise to remind yourself it's real, and I think about a woman two cabins over who saw it this morning and walked closer before she caught herself.

She walked closer.

Broken hip, watched house, a ghost on the road and a family I can't fully guard. I've got a stack of problems tonight tall enough to bury a lesser man.

But she walked closer.

And a man works with what he's got.

CHAPTER THREE

Presley

Number 68 is off her feed, and there's only one vet on this ranch, and she's one of the sisters who won't look at me.

I stand at the rail of the sick pen a little after noon with the heifer in front of me, my phone in my hand, and the whole rotten math of my life laid out plain.

Sixty-eight's got a snotty nose and a cough, and she's gone dull around the eyes.

She’s standing off by herself with her head low, and I've been around enough cattle to know that's not a wait-and-see.

That's a get-somebody-out-here-today.

A first-calf heifer can go from off-her-feed to dead faster than you'd believe if it's gone into her lungs, and I've got a whole herd of them she could've breathed on.

So I've got two choices.

I can call the mobile vet out of Llano, a stranger, forty-five minutes out on a good day, and a hundred and eighty dollars before he's even looked at her, money the program doesn't have to throw around yet.

Or I can call my sister.

Grace is a ten-minute drive across the ranch, and she's the best large-animal vet in three counties.

She works our stock for family rates, which is to say, for nothing, and she’s also the woman who stood in a hospital hallway and told me she couldn't look at me because I've got my mother's face.

I look at Number 68.

She coughs, wet and deep, and it settles it, because I didn't build this program to let a heifer die of my own hurt feelings.

I call my sister.

It rings four times and I'm halfway to relieved that I'll get her voicemail when she picks up. "Presley."

Flat.

Not a question, not a greeting.

My name in her mouth like something she has to hold at arm's length.

"Hey." I keep it professional, because professional is the only door still open between us. "I've got a first-calf heifer off her feed, snotty, coughing, gone dull. Number sixty-eight out of the group I bred in the spring. I think it's gone respiratory, and I didn't want to wait on it."

A pause.

In the background I can hear her truck, the road noise, a country station turned low. "Temp?"

"Haven't got a good one on her yet. She won't let me close, and I didn't want to stress her worse before somebody who knows more than me put eyes on her."

Another pause, longer, and I know what's happening in it.

I know she's sitting at a stop sign somewhere on this ranch weighing the same thing I weighed.

A sick animal against the fact that coming out here means being near me, and I hate that I've become a cost my sister has to reckon with before she'll drive across her own ranch.

"Put her in the chute," Grace says finally. "Not the pen, the chute, so I can get a temp and listen to her without either of us getting kicked. I'm twenty minutes out. I'm finishing at the Dawson place first."

"Thank you⁠—"

She's already hung up.

I stand there with the dead phone against my ear a second longer than I need to, and I tell myself the sting in my eyes is the dust, the heat, and the worry over the heifer.

Not the fact that my sister used to end every call with love you, see you at supper, and now she ends them by not saying anything at all.

Then I put the phone in my back pocket and I go get Number 68 into the chute, because that part I can do.

I've got the heifer settled and the head gate set and a bucket of water she won't touch when I hear the side-by-side coming, and it's coming from the wrong direction to be Grace.

It's coming from the back of the property.

I don't turn around.

I've gotten good at not turning around.

But my whole body knows the sound of that specific engine because I've spent weeks training myself not to react to it.

A person can't train a pull that deep out of herself in a matter of weeks, no matter how hard she works at it.

"Miss Presley!"

Not Thunder.

His daughter, Raine.

She's off the side-by-side before it's all the way stopped, braids flying, boots hitting the dirt at a dead run.

She's got a barn kitten clamped under one arm in a way the kitten doesn’t love, and she's the best thing I've seen in weeks.

My heart cracks right down the middle at the sight of her.

"Hey, wild thing."

I crouch down to catch her because she's plainly about to launch, and she does, one-armed, the kitten squashed between us and yowling.

"Careful, careful, you're gonna squish Biscuit."

"His name is Biscuit!"

She pulls back, delighted, holding the gray kitten up like evidence.

"You were right, you were so right, he looks exactly like a biscuit, and everybody says so. Mama Lou says so, and Daddy says so, and even Nash says so and Nash doesn't even like cats."

"I told you." I scratch the kitten's chin and he forgives all of us instantly, the way kittens do. "Biscuit's a perfect name for a gray cat. What's he doing all the way out here at my pens, though? Kittens belong in the barn."

"I brought him to show you."

She says it like it's obvious, like of course you'd haul a kitten across a ranch to show a person, and something in my chest goes soft and terrible all at once. "'Cause you named him and you never got to see him get big. He's getting so big! And I wanted to show you my loose tooth, but it came out already at Mama Lou's, so I can't. But I saved it, it's in a baggie."

"You saved your tooth in a baggie."

"For the tooth fairy. Obviously." She rolls her eyes at my ignorance, nine years old and running the whole world. "Are you working? What's wrong with that cow? She looks sad."

"She's a little sick. My sister's coming to make her feel better." The word sister catches on the way out and I cover it. "You want to help me keep her calm till the vet gets here? You've got to be real quiet and gentle."

"I'm the best at quiet and gentle."

Raine is many things, but one thing she isn’t is quiet. But I love her for thinking it.

She helps me the way a nine-year-old helps, which is to say she talks the entire time and pets the heifer's nose with two fingers so soft it wouldn't wake a fly.

Number 68 settles a little with the small warm chatter of her, the way animals do around kids who mean them no harm.

And I let myself have it.

Ten minutes of this kid.

I know I shouldn't, I know every minute I spend with Raine is a minute closer to something I can't have.

But she's here and she's mine to borrow for a little while.

I've been so starved for somebody on this ranch to look at me like I'm not made of lies that I take it and don't feel bad about taking it.

"Miss Presley?" She's gone quieter now, petting the heifer, not looking at me. "How come you don't come to supper anymore?"

There it is.

Out of nowhere, the way the real questions always come from kids, sideways and sudden while they're looking at something else.

"I've been awful busy, baby." It's the same lie I've been telling myself. "Startin' up this cattle program is a big job."

"That's what Daddy said." She keeps petting. "I wanted to invite you to dinner. I asked him if you could come. But he said you were probably busy." A pause, her small hand smoothing down the heifer's nose. "Were you? Busy?"

And I don't know what to say to that, because the honest answer is no, baby, I wasn't busy, I've never once been too busy for you, and I can't say it, because saying it opens a door I've spent weeks nailing shut.

He said I was probably busy.

I turn that over while Raine pets the heifer, and it hits somewhere cold in me.

He didn't say he’d ask me.

He didn't say maybe.

He told his daughter I was busy, which is a way of telling her no without telling her no, and I don't know what to do with the fact that it stings.

That some stupid, starved part of me wanted him to want me at that table even though I've been telling myself for weeks that the last thing on earth I want is to sit in that man's kitchen.

Maybe he doesn't want me there.

Maybe the rattlesnake on his neck and the visit to my pens was the whole of what he had in him, and the actual day-to-day of me, the supper-table me, the me his daughter wants—maybe that's more than he's asking for.

I hate how much that thought hurts.

I have no right to it.

I'm the one who ended it.

I'm the one who said no more lies and walked out his door.

"I was pretty busy," I tell her, and my voice comes out steadier than I feel. "But it was real sweet of you to want to invite me."

Raine goes still for a second.

Then she looks up at me with Thunder's dark eyes in a nine-year-old's face, and she says the one sentence that takes the ground out from under me.

"I think my daddy misses you."

Everything in me goes still.

"He hasn't said it or anything," she goes on, matter-of-fact, back to petting the heifer like she hasn't just reached into my chest and closed a fist. "Daddy doesn't say stuff like that. But he just looks sad a lot. Since a while ago. He looks at his phone and doesn't call anybody and then he looks sad, and one time I asked him what was wrong and he said nothin', baby but it was a lie, I could tell, 'cause his voice went funny."

She shrugs, a small terrible shrug. "I think he misses somebody. And you used to come around, and now you don't, and he got sad right around then. So."

So.

All of it laid out by a nine-year-old with a kitten under her arm, the plain sum I've been refusing to add up, done for me in the sun at a sick pen while a heifer coughs.

He looks sad.

He got sad right around when I stopped coming.

I have to look away from her, out across the pasture at nothing.

I breathe through the burning behind my eyes so I don’t cry in front of this child, because if I start I won't be crying about a heifer and she's too smart not to know it.

That's when the second engine comes.

Two of them — Grace's truck rolling up the ranch road, and behind it, further back, slower, the low rumble of a bike easing across the property.

He's come for his daughter.

Of course he has.

She took off across the ranch on a side-by-side with a kitten, and Thunder doesn't let Raine get more than a holler away from him these days.

Not since the bunkhouse, not with whatever's got the whole club riding tight and watchful lately.

Grace gets to me first.

She parks and gets out, and she's all business, vet bag in hand, ballcap pulled low, and she gives Raine a real smile because Grace's ice was only ever for me.

Then the smile's gone when she turns to the chute, and it's just the heifer and the work. "Let's see her."

I hold Number 68's head while my sister works, and Grace is good.

She's so good, gentle and quick and sure, thermometer and stethoscope and her hands reading the animal like a language she was born speaking.

We don't talk except about the heifer.

Temp's up.

Lungs are junky on the left side.

Early pneumonia, caught in time, treatable, a shot of Nuflor and Banamine, and watch her closely for forty-eight hours.

It's the longest I've stood next to my sister since the hospital.

We were getting good at being sisters.

That's the part nobody understands about what got taken from me.

It wasn't a lifetime of closeness that broke, it was the brand-new bond we'd only just started building after I came home a Lyle.

The sisterhood I waited twenty-two years for and got to hold for exactly one season before my mother's sins put a wall down the middle of it.

And I can't even be angry at Grace for the wall.

That's the cruelest part.

She lost her mother twice and found out from a text, and I've got the face of the woman who did it.

If I were her I don't know that I'd be able to look at me either.

So I hold the heifer's head and I don't say any of the hundred things on my mind.

I let my sister work in silence, and I take what I can get, which is twenty minutes of standing close to somebody I love who can't love me back right now.

"You caught it early," Grace says, drawing up the shot, and it's the closest thing to a kind word she's given me in weeks. "Another day and we'd be talking about whether we could save her. You did right, calling me."

"Thank you."

I want to say more.

I want to say, Grace, please, I didn't know, I found out the same day you did, I would never— I've wanted to say it a hundred times—but her walls are up, and the heifer's between us, and Raine's right there, and this isn't the moment, there's never a moment.

"Really. Thank you for coming."

She gives the shot. She doesn't look at me.

And behind us, the bike goes quiet.

Thunder doesn't come to the rail.

He stays back by his bike, one boot on the ground, giving the vet room to work and giving me—I don't know what he's giving me.

Distance.

Cover.

A choice.

He stays back where I don't have to deal with him, and somehow that's worse than if he'd walked right up, because it's considerate.

I don't want him to be considerate, I want him to be the cold, dangerous man I can stay angry at.

"Raine," he calls, easy. "Let's let Miss Presley and Miss Grace work, baby. Bring the cat."

"But—"

"Raine."

She goes, because she minds him, hugging me hard around the neck one more time first. "Bye, Miss Presley, feel better cow!" Then she trots off toward the bike with Biscuit yowling his displeasure to the whole county.

And for one second, as she goes, I let myself look at him. He's already looking at me.

Of course he is.

He's got his hat pushed back and the rattlesnake dark on his throat in the noon light and that steady weather-coming stare fixed on me across forty feet of dirt.

He doesn't wave and he doesn't smile and he doesn't say a word.

He just tips his chin at me.

Once.

The smallest thing.

Then he gets his daughter loaded and his own busted body back on the bike, and they ride off.

He looks sad, Raine said.

I get in my truck after Grace is gone and Number 68 is dosed and settled in the quarantine pens for the next couple of days.

I sit there in the heat with my hands on the wheel, and I think about a man who told his daughter I was probably busy, and got sad right around when I stopped coming.

The same man who rode all the way out here just to collect a kid he could've trusted to drive a side-by-side two hundred yards home.

He didn't have to come himself.

He wanted to see if I was out here.

And the worst part, the part I can't say out loud to anyone, not even the dashboard—the worst part is that when he tipped his chin at me, something in my chest lifted like a field lark going up.

For one whole second I forgot every good reason I have to stay away from him.

One second.

Then I remembered all of them, every last one, and I started the truck and drove home to my empty cabin.

But it took me that whole second.

And it's getting harder, not easier, to find them.

CHAPTER FOUR

Thunder

Pride's a hell of a painkiller right up until it isn't.

That's the lesson I'm about to learn again, and I'm going to learn it the hard way, because I'm forty minutes into rehanging a gate I've got no business touching, and I'm too stubborn to quit while I've still got the legs to walk away from it.

The gate's on the corral by the far barn, the heavy pipe one that sagged its hinges last winter and never got fixed because there was always something worse we had to handle here on Sharp Shooter Ranch.

It's a two-man job on a good day.

I'm doing it alone at the tail end of a morning that already took more out of me than I let on to anybody.

Phantom's got the whole club stretched thin watching for a silver truck that hasn't shown again, and every hand on this ranch is doing the work of two.

I'll be damned if the Sergeant at Arms is the one man standing around holding a cane while his brothers sweat.

So, I've got the gate up on my shoulder, and a hinge pin in my teeth and my weight braced wrong.

All of it fucking wrong, and I know it is even as I'm doing it.

I set my feet to lift the last inch.

And my hip goes.

It doesn't hurt at first.

That's the trick of it, the cruel little mercy of it, the leg just quits, the way a rope quits, all at once with no warning, the muscle around that hunk of bullet fragment deciding it's done taking orders.

One second I'm holding sixty pounds of steel gate at shoulder height.

The next my left leg isn't under me, and the gate's coming down, and I'm coming down with it.

I get a hand out.

Catch the corral rail.

It's the only reason the gate doesn't take my foot off, because I get enough of a twist on it to send it crashing sideways into the dirt instead of straight down onto my boot.

Then I'm down on one knee in the dust with my bad leg splayed out useless behind me and the pain arriving all at once now, roaring up from the hip like the fragment's caught fire.

I don't make a sound.

Twenty years of getting hurt taught me that much.

But I'm down, I'm all the way down.

I can't get up, and for one long ugly second I understand exactly how far I've fallen from the man I was—a man who used to put other men on the ground and now can't get himself off it.

Then I hear the truck door.

Of course.

Of fucking course she's here.

The one person on this whole ranch I'd have crawled into the barn to keep from seeing this, and here she comes at a dead run across the lot with her braid flying and her face gone white, and there's nothing I can do about it because I'm on my knees in the dirt like a shot horse.

"Thunder—" She hits the ground beside me, hands already on me, on my shoulder, my arm. "Don't move. Don't you move, let me look at you⁠—"

"I'm fine."

"You're on the damn ground."

"I'm restin'."

"You aren’t resting, you—" Her voice cracks, and she stops, and her hands are shaking where they've got hold of my arm, and I clock that even through the roar in my hip.

She's scared.

Not annoyed, not exasperated.

Scared clean through.

"God, Thunder, the gate could've—your leg is—can you feel your foot? Can you move it?"

"I can move it."

I do, to prove it, and it screams, and I keep my face flat.

"Fragment shifted. It does that. It'll settle."

"It'll settle." She says it like a curse. "You're out here hanging a two-man gate by yourself on a hip full of shrapnel, and you want to tell me it'll settle."

She gets under my arm before I can tell her not to.

I want to tell her not to.

I open my mouth to tell her not to, because the last thing on this earth I want is Presley Hutchins-Lyle taking my weight like I'm an old man who fell in the shower.

She looks at me with her jaw set in that Lyle line and says, "Don't. Don't you dare tell me you've got it. Let me help you up or sit here in the dirt till your mama drives by, those are your choices."

So, I let her help me up.

God help me, I let her, because the alternative is worse, and because some part of me that I'm not proud of has been starving for weeks for exactly this.

For her hands on me, her body against my side, the warm familiar weight of her fit up under my arm where she used to fit for entirely different reasons.

We get me vertical.

It takes both of us and it's ugly.

By the time I'm up, I've got sweat standing on my forehead and my breath coming hard through my nose.

She's breathing hard too, and we're pressed together in the dirt by a fallen gate with her arm around my back and my arm across her shoulders.

Both of us don’t say anything for a second.

She's smaller than the job.

That's what gets me, standing there leaning on her more than I want to be.

She's a hundred and twenty pounds of ranch girl with a two-hundred-forty-pound man's weight half on her, and she's not buckling.

She's got her boots planted and her arm locked across my back and she's holding me up through pure stubborn will.

There was a time not long ago I could've picked her up over my head with one arm.

The world turns you around fast.

"There's a stock tank behind you," she says finally, quietly. "The turned-over one. Sit down before you fall down."

Second person today to tell me to sit down before I fall down. Roan yesterday, Presley now. A man might start to take it personal.

I sit.

She crouches down in front of me in the dirt, and she runs her hands down my bad leg, professional and quick, feeling along the hip and down the thigh the way she'd check a horse that came up lame.

I let her, and I hold still under her hands, and I don't say a damn word.

She's good with her hands.

Always was.

I've got reasons to know it that have nothing to do with a busted hip.

I shove every one of them down where they belong, because she's kneeling in the dirt trying to figure out if I've done myself permanent damage, and it'd be a low thing to be thinking about her mouth right now.

"It's not the joint," she says, half to herself. "You'd be screaming if it was the joint. It's the muscle. It seized around the fragment and dumped you."

She looks up at me, and her hand's still on my thigh, warm through the denim, and she seems to realize it the same second I do, and she doesn't move it.

"You could've broken your neck, you know that? A gate that size comes down the wrong way, and it's not your hip we'd be talking about."

"I know."

"Then why, Thunder?" It comes out raw. "Why are you out here doing this alone? You've got a whole club of men who'd hang that gate in ten minutes. You've got a cane. Why in God's name are you⁠—"

"Because I can't be the man who holds the cane."

It comes out flatter and harder than I mean it to, and it shuts her up.

I look away from her out across the lot because it's easier than looking at her face while I say the rest.

"I've been the Sergeant at Arms of this club for years," I tell her.

"You know what that is? It's the sword. Phantom points, I go. Somebody threatens this family, I'm the one who walks into the dark and makes it stop, and I've been that man so long I don't know how to be any other kind. It's not a job. It's my purpose."

The gate lies in the dirt where it fell. I don't look at it.

"And a few weeks ago a man walked into our bunkhouse and I couldn't stop him. Took a bullet trying and it wasn't enough, and now I've got a piece of him living in my hip, and every morning I wake up and find out all over again that the sword's got a crack in it."

My jaw works.

"Club's stretched thin right now. Real thin. Somethin's comin' and every man's pulling double, and I'm out here provin' to a fence gate that I can still pull my weight because if I can't do that, Presley, if I'm not the sword anymore, then I don't rightly know what I am."

She's gone very still, crouched there in front of me. "You're a father," she says quietly.

"Yeah." That one I can answer. "That's the one thing left I know I'm still good for. My girl, and this club. Those are the two things I'd crawl to that gate on both broken legs for."

I finally look at her.

"The club's my whole life, Presley. It and Raine. That's all I've had for years and it's been enough." And here's where I should stop.

Here's where a smart man stops, a man protecting himself, a man who remembers she ended it and walked out his door and told him no more lies.

I know exactly where the edge of the cliff is.

I've known the whole time.

I say it anyway.

"The club, and my daughter." I hold her eyes. "And now you."

She doesn't move.

The words sit there in the hot noon air between us, three of them, and now you, the closest I've come to saying all of it out loud.

They hit her as hard as a slap, her lips parting, her eyes going bright, her breath catching somewhere in her chest.

"Thunder—"

"I'm not askin' you for anything." I keep my voice low. "You made your choice and I heard it. I'm not takin' it back for you and I'm not gonna stand at your pens beggin'. But you asked me why I'd break my own body rather than sit still, and that's your answer. Because the two things that were my whole life turned into three somewhere back in the spring, and one of them won't look at me anymore, and a man'll do a lot of stupid things with his hands when the rest of him's got to keep distracted."

Her eyes have gone wet now, full and shining, and one breaks loose and cuts a clean line down through the dust on her cheek, and she doesn't wipe it away.

"That's not fair," she whispers.

Same thing she said at the pens. Same three words.

"You can't just—you can't say things like that to me. Not when I'm trying so hard to⁠—"

"To what?"

"To not want this." Her voice breaks all the way. "Do you have any idea how hard I'm working to not want this? My family fell apart, Thunder. My sisters won't look at me, my whole life cracked down the middle, and the one thing I know—the one thing I've got left to hold onto—is that I can't add one more secret to the pile. I can't. And then you go and get a rattlesnake put on your neck, and you say what you just did, and you make it so hard."

I get a hand up. I shouldn't.

My hip's on fire and I've got no business moving, but I get my hand up off my knee, and I bring it to the side of her face, and I catch that wet line with my thumb, and she doesn't pull back.

She leans into it.

Barely, the smallest press of her cheek into my palm, her eyes falling closed.

It's the first time I've touched her since a hotel room in the spring and it goes through me worse than the fragment ever did.

We're close now.

She's crouched in the dirt between my knees and I've got her face in my hand and her breath's gone shallow, and her mouth is right there.

Close enough that I can see the freckles the sun's brought up across her nose, close enough that all I'd have to do is lean, just lean, six inches and I'd have her mouth back after all these weeks of nothing.

She knows it too.

Her eyes come open and drop to my mouth and come back up.

For one second we hang right there on the edge of it, both of us, her hand fisted in my shirt at my chest and my thumb at her cheekbone, and the whole ranch has gone silent around us.

Then she pulls back.

She does it slowly, but she does it—takes her hand out of my shirt, sits back on her heels, and puts eight inches of hot air between her mouth and mine.

She presses the back of her wrist to her lips like she's holding something in.

"I can't," she says. "Not because I don't—" She stops. Shakes her head. "I can't, Thunder. Nothing's changed. Everything that was true when I walked out your door is still true."

"I know it is."

"Then you have to let me go get someone to help you up to the house."

She's already standing, already putting the ranch back between us, already reaching for the steady voice she runs her whole life with.

"You need ice on that hip, to stay off it, and you need to not hang any more gates by yourself, you stubborn, impossible⁠—"

"Presley."

She stops.

"Thank you," I tell her.

"For stoppin'. For gettin' under my arm. I know how difficult it must’ve been for you. Not just physically, speakin’."

She looks at me a second longer, and there's something breaking behind her face that she's not going to let me see finish. Then she turns and heads for her truck to go find me a set of hands that isn't hers.

She goes.

And I sit there on an overturned stock tank next to a gate I couldn't hang, with my hip screaming, and I think, clear as the noon sky, that I got closer just now than I have in weeks.

She leaned into my hand.

She had eight inches and a clean shot at walking away, and she spent one whole second looking at my mouth first.

A man works with what he's got.

And what I've got, sitting in the dirt with a broken-down body, and a cracked sword, and a family coming apart at the seams, is a woman who's working as hard to stay away from me as I am to earn her back, which means we're both pushing on the same locked door.

Sooner or later one of us is going to stop pushing.

I intend to still be standing there when she does.

CHAPTER FIVE

Presley

Thunder didn't come to supper, and that's how I end up making the worst good decision of my life.

It's a bunkhouse night, the whole club and half the old ladies packed into the big room for Bex's chili and too much noise.

I only go because staying home alone in my cabin feels worse than being frozen out in a crowd.

I sit at the end of the table where Grace doesn't have to look at me and I eat what I can, and watch the door.

He never came through it.

Blaze said something to Spur, not meaning anything by it, just talk over the cornbread. "Thunder's holed up. Says his hip's got him laid out. Told him to eat and he told me where to put it."

A laugh.

"Raine's at Lou's with that little girl from her class, so he's ridin' the pain out alone, stubborn son of a bitch."

Ridin' the pain out alone.

I lasted about twenty minutes after hearing them talk about him.

I told myself it was nothing.

I told myself I check on hurt animals all the time, that a man who dumped a gate on himself two days ago needs someone to check on him.

I told myself a lot of things on the drive to the back of the property.

Not one of them was true, and some part of me knew it, because I put on lip balm at the stop sign that isn't there.

His truck's in the drive and the cabin lights are low.

He doesn't answer when I knock.

That's what does it.

That's what takes it from a bad idea to a locked-in one, because Thunder always answers.

Thunder's a man who knows where every person on this ranch is at all times, and a Thunder who doesn't answer his own door tells me something’s wrong.

"Thunder?"

I try the knob. It's unlocked.

"It's me. You didn't come to supper, I'm just⁠—"

"In here."

His voice comes from the back of the cabin, rough, and under the roughness there's something I've never heard in it before.

"Presley. Don't—" A pause. "Hell. Back here."

I follow it down the hall past Raine's room with the horse posters to the big bathroom at the end, the one he built out when he redid the cabin, and I stop in the doorway.

He's in the tub.

The big jetted one, sunk into the tile, full of steaming water gone still because the jets have shut off on their timer.

He's sitting in it up to his waist with his forearms braced on the sides and his jaw tight.

His face gone gray at the edges with pain, and he looks up at me with an expression I’ve never once seen on this man.

He's embarrassed.

"Ran a hot bath for the hip," he says flatly. "Heat's supposed to help the muscle. Seemed real smart about an hour ago."

His jaw works. "Can't get up out of it. Leg won't take the push and there's nothing to grab that'll hold my weight. Been sitting here in cooling water like a damn beached whale waitin' on the water to give me back some give."

I should laugh.

Any other night I might.

But there's nothing funny about the gray in his face or the careful way he's holding himself so the hip doesn't spasm.

There's nothing funny about how much it’s killing this man to tell me he can’t get up.

"Okay." I'm already rolling my sleeves. "Okay, we'll get you up. Let me⁠—"

"You don't have to look at me like⁠—"

"I'm not looking at you like anything." I crouch at the side of the tub. "You want to get decent first, or you want out? Because I can step out and you can wrap a towel, or we can skip the part where you pretend I've got delicate sensibilities."

His mouth twitches, the first crack in the gray. "It's nothin' you haven't seen before, rattlesnake. My place, my tub. I don't have a modest bone left in my body and you know it better than most."

Rattlesnake.

He hasn't called me that to my face in a while.

It goes down my spine warm and I hate that it does. I cover it by reaching for his arm.

"Fine. Give me your arm. On three you push with the good leg and I pull, and we do it slowly."

He gives me his arm.

His hand closes around my forearm, and mine around his. His skin's hot and wet from the water and his grip is still strong even now, even wrecked, and I brace my boots on the tile and set my weight back.

"One. Two⁠—"

My boot slides on the wet tile.

It's slick as glass where the water's splashed, and my heel goes out from under me on three.

Instead of hauling him up I pitch forward, and there's a half-second of pure stupid physics where I know exactly what's about to happen and can't do one thing to stop it.

I go into the tub.

Not gracefully.

One knee cracks the tile edge and the rest of me goes over the side and into the water and into him.

Right into his lap, a full-grown woman in jeans and boots landing in a bathtub on top of a wounded man.

Water sheets up over the side and soaks the floor and my shirt's instantly plastered to me and my hair's in my face.

And I laugh.

I can't help it.

It punches out of me, half a shriek and half a laugh, the absurdity of it, the two of us jammed in a tub with my boots still on and water everywhere.

For one second everything I've been white-knuckling since the hospital lets go at once.

It cracks right open.

I'm laughing with my forehead dropped against his wet shoulder and his chest is moving under me and I realize he's laughing too, low and rough, the first real laugh I've heard out of him since before the bunkhouse.

"You're supposed to be pulling me out," he says into my wet hair.

"Shut up, I slipped⁠—"

"Boots in the tub, Presley."

"I know where my boots are—" I lift my head to argue and his face is right there.

And neither one of us is laughing anymore.

The water's around us and my hands are flat on his chest.

His eyes have gone dark and dropped to my mouth, and the laugh dies in my throat and turns into something with a lot more weight, and I know.

I know, clear as anything—that if I kiss him right now I don't get to take it back.

I've spent a month building a wall out of every good reason.

My family.

The lie.

One more secret in a house already drowning in them.

All of it real, all of it still true, every brick of it stacked up between what I want and what I let myself have.

And the wall doesn’t survive his hand coming up out of the water to cup the back of my neck.

He doesn't pull me down. That's what undoes me.

He doesn't force it, he just holds the back of my neck in his big wet hand, warm and heavy, and he waits.

His thumb moving slowly along my jaw, giving me the half-inch of choice, letting me be the one who closes it or doesn't.

I close it.

God help me, I close it.

I lean down the last inch and I kiss him, and the second our mouths meet the two months goes up like dry grass.

He kisses me like a man who's been starving and just got told he's allowed.

One hand's fisted in my wet hair and the other bands around my lower back and drags me full against him, and I go.

I stop fighting all of it at once, I kiss him back just as hard with my hands sliding up onto his head, and the water sloshing between us.

He tastes the same.

He tastes like every night I told myself I was over him, and a sound comes out of me against his mouth that I couldn't stop if I tried.

"There she is," he growls against my lips. "There's my girl. Knew you were still in there."

"We shouldn't⁠—"

"Too late." He bites my bottom lip, not gently. "You're in the tub, rattlesnake. You made your choice when you put your boots in my water."

He gets my soaked shirt up and over my head and throws it somewhere with a wet slap.

His mouth is on my throat, my collarbone, working down, and his beard drags rough over my skin and I arch into it.

His hand comes up and closes around the side of my throat, thumb at the hinge of my jaw, the old familiar span of it, not squeezing, only holding, only owning, and my whole body remembers what that means and goes liquid.

"Still?" he asks, rough, checking, because even now, even wrecked and starving, he checks. "Two taps, same as always. You tell me."

"Still," I breathe.

"Yes. Don't you dare stop."

He gets my bra off and his mouth closes over my nipple and then his teeth.

I cry out and grab his head and he does it again, a rough graze that shoots straight down through me.

His hand still spanning my throat and his other hand working my jeans open under the water.

Wet denim does not want to come off.

I have to climb up out of his lap and peel them down and kick a boot off and lose my balance.

I grab the towel bar, and it's clumsy as hell.

He watches me the whole time with his eyes black and his chest heaving, one big hand wrapped around himself under the water.

When I finally get free of the last of it and turn back to him he says, low and dark, "Get back here and get on me."

"Your hip⁠—"

"Presley." His voice drops into the register that never once failed to move me. "I didn’t wait this long to have you climb back out of this tub. Get on me. I'll fuck you if I want to, and I want to, and my hip can take it up with management in the morning."

I get back in.

I straddle him carefully, both knees sinking into the water on either side of his thighs.

My hands on his shoulders. He's hard and thick against me and I have to stop and breathe for a second at the sheer overwhelm of it.

The fact that I'm here, that I let myself be here at all, that after all this time I've got my knees around this man in a bathtub and I want it so bad my hands are shaking.

"Look at me," he says.

I do.

And his face has gone soft and fierce all at once.

Dark eyes locked on mine, and he brings his wet hand up and lays it along my cheek exactly the way he did in the dirt by the gate, and this time I don't pull back.

"You're mine," he says.

Not a question.

"You've been mine since the Chicken and you're mine right now and you're gonna be mine after. Say it."

"Thunder—"

His hand slides back to my throat.

Gentle.

A promise, not a threat.

"Say it."

"I'm yours." It comes out broken and true and it cracks something open in my chest even as I say it. "God help me, I'm yours, I never stopped⁠—"

And he lifts me by the hip with one strong arm and brings me down onto him and we both groan.

Whatever I was going to say next is gone.

He sets the pace even from under me.

That's how he's always been.

Even like this, even the one whose body failed him, he's the one controlling it.

One hand on my hip guiding me down onto him slowly and deep ,and the other back around my throat.

His eyes never leaving my face, telling me how to move, how to take him, how good I'm doing, filthy, low, and constant.

"That's it. That's my good girl. Take all of it."

The water sloshes over the sides in waves and neither of us cares.

I've got my hands braced on his shoulders and I'm riding him slow because slow is what his hip allows.

Slow turns out to be its own kind of unbearable, deep and grinding and endless.

He uses his hand on my throat to pull me down to his mouth.

Thunder bites my lip and licks me and pulls back just to watch my face.

"Missed this." His voice is wrecked. "Missed you. Missed this tight little—" He groans as I clench around him.

"You feel me? You feel what you do? Pretending you didn’t want me and you still come apart on me the second I get inside you."

And that's when I see it.

Up close.

His head tipped back against the tub, his throat bared under my hands, and there in the low light is the rattlesnake.

Dark and coiled on the side of his neck, still healing at the edges, and beneath it the script I read a lifetime ago in a bar and never said out loud.

He marked himself with me.

I put my mouth on it.

On the snake, on the ink he carved into himself while I was busy hating him.

He shudders underneath me, his hand tightening on my hip hard enough to bruise, and I understand all the way down what it must’ve felt like for this closed-off man to wear me where the whole world could see.

"Presley." My name comes out of him like it hurts. "Keep doin' that and I'm not gonna last, and I need you there first."

He gets his hand between us.

His thumb finds me and he works me exactly the way he's always known how, rough circles in time with the slow deep grind of him inside me.

His other hand leaving my throat to band around my back and hold me together, and the coil in me pulls tighter and tighter until it's almost too much.

"Let go." His mouth at my ear. "You've been holdin' on so tight for so long, rattlesnake. Let go. I've got you. I've got you."

And I do.

It breaks over me so hard my vision goes white at the edges and I clamp down around him and cry out into his shoulder.

He curses and grabs my hips with both hands and drives up into me through it, chasing it, and two, three strokes later he goes rigid underneath me and follows me over with my name in his teeth and his forehead pressed to my collarbone, his whole big body shaking.

For a long moment neither of us moves.

The water's gone lukewarm and there's more of it on the floor than in the tub.

My knees are going to have bruises and his hip is going to make him pay dearly for this and I don't care about a single thing.

Because his arms are around me and his heart’s slamming against my chest and I feel, for the first time in so long, like I'm not standing in the wreckage of my life alone.

Which is the fucking problem.

"Hey." He tips my chin up. His face has gone gentle in a way almost nobody on this earth gets to see. "Where'd you go just now?"

"I'm right here."

"You went somewhere. I felt it." His thumb strokes my jaw. "Talk to me."

And I want to lie.

I want to stay in this warm wrecked bathroom with this man and not say what's sitting cold in my chest even now, even wrapped around him with him still inside me.

But I've had enough lies to last me a lifetime.

"Nothing's changed," I whisper.

"That's where I went. We just—Thunder, I did the one thing I swore I wasn't going to do, and none of the reasons I swore went away. My family's still broken. You still lied to me. I'm still—" My voice catches. "I'm still going to have to walk out of here and go back to being a person who can't have this."

His arms tighten around me.

"Or," he says, low, "you stop walkin' out."

I don't answer.

Because I don't have one, not a good one, not something that doesn't scare me worse than the wall I just knocked down, and he knows me well enough not to push it.

He gathers me against his chest in the cooling water, his chin on my wet hair, his heartbeat slowing under my ear.

He holds me like a man who waited and finally got his hands back on the one thing he wasn't willing to lose.

I let him.

One more minute, I tell myself.

One more minute and then I'll figure out what I've done.

But I already know, the way you know a storm's coming by the color of the sky, that I'm not going to figure it out tonight, and maybe not for a long time, and that whatever happens now I stopped being able to stay away from this man somewhere around the moment my boots hit his water.

The wall's down.

And God help me, standing in the rubble, all I feel is relief.

CHAPTER SIX

Thunder

Her side of the bed's cold by the time I wake, and I knew it would be before I reached for it.

That's the kind of woman she is.

She stayed—first time in her life she ever stayed in this cabin, first time she let herself sleep in my bed with her truck sitting in my drive for God and Mama Lou and anybody else to see—but she was gone before the sun cleared the ridge, slipped out from under my arm without waking me, which takes some doing because I don't sleep hard anymore and haven't since I was shot.

She got past me anyway.

I lie there a minute in the gray light with my hand flat on the cold sheet where she was, and I take stock the way I do every morning now.

Trying to figure out what my body's going to do to me for the privilege of getting up.

The hip's a disaster.

No surprise there.

I fucked a woman in a bathtub last night on a hip full of shrapnel two days after I dumped a gate on it, and my body has notes.

The whole left side of me has locked up overnight into something that feels less like a joint and more like a fist.

When I shift to sit up, a bolt of it goes down my leg bright enough to steal my breath.

Worth it.

I don't even have to think about that part.

There’s no version of last night I'd trade back to save myself this morning.

She came to my door and she fell in my tub, and she said I'm yours with her mouth on the snake I wear for her, and my sorry hip can bill me whatever it wants.

I smell it before I make it all the way down the hall.

Bacon.

Eggs.

Coffee gone a little past its best but still warm on the burner.

I come around into my own kitchen leaning hard on the counter and find a plate on the stovetop covered over in aluminum foil, and a note propped against the coffee pot in her quick, slanted hand.

I stand there and read it twice.

Nothing's changed.

But you're no good to anybody facedown in a pen, and I know you're planning to work today no matter what I say.

So eat.

All of it.

And STAY OFF that hip or so help me. — P

Nothing's changed.

She wrote that.

Right there at the top, first thing, nothing's changed, and then underneath it she cooked me a full breakfast and covered it so it'd keep warm and left me orders to eat all of it and mind my leg, which is the single most married-sounding note a woman ever left a man she's pretending she isn't with.

I read it a third time, and I catch myself doing something I haven't done in weeks.

I'm grinning like a damn fool in an empty kitchen.

Because here's what she doesn't know she's telling me, my cautious rattlesnake, my girl who thinks she left me a note about breakfast.

A woman who's really walking away doesn't cook.

A woman who's done doesn't stand at your stove before dawn frying eggs she's not going to be there to watch you eat.

She can write nothing's changed at the top of the page all she likes.

Everything under it says the opposite, and she's too honest with her hands to lie the way she lies with her mouth.

I eat all of it.

Every bite.

After all, my woman gave me an order.

I find her a couple of hours later out at the quarantine pens.

I shouldn't be driving the side-by-side one-handed with a travel mug in the other, but the hip won't let me on the bike today, and I'll be damned if I sit in that cabin all morning.

So I roll out slow across the property and there she is, exactly where I figured, up at the far pen with the sick heifer.

Number 68's looking better.

Head up, eating, none of that dull hang to her she had a few days back.

Presley's leaned on the rail watching her eat with the satisfaction of a stockman whose sick one's turning the corner.

She doesn't hear me over the heifer until I've almost rolled up on her, and when she turns and clocks it's me, her whole face does a complicated thing—glad, then guarded, then something caught in between that she can't quite lock down.

"You're supposed to be off that hip," she says, instead of good morning.

"I'm sittin' down." I nod at the side-by-side under me. "This is me takin' it easy."

"That's not what—" She stops.

Shakes her head. Her eyes flick down to the mug in my hand and back up. "Did you eat?"

"Every bite. Ma'am." I let that sit a second. "Best breakfast I've had in a while. You want to tell me why the woman who made it was gone before I could say thank you?"

Her jaw sets.

There it is, the Lyle line, her daddy's exact stubborn line, and God help me, even that turns me on at this point.

"Because if I'd stayed for breakfast it would've been a thing," she says. "It would've been you and me at your table like—" She gestures, helpless, at the whole idea of it. "And that's not what last night was."

"That's exactly what last night was."

"Thunder—"

"I'm not gonna do the dance, Presley," I say it easy, but I say it plain, because I'm too old and too tired and too shot-up to play coy with the one thing I want. "I'm no good at pretendin' and I'm done tryin'. So here's where I'm at, and you can do whatever you want with it."

She goes still against the rail.

"I can't fight this," I tell her. "I quit tryin' somewhere around the time you fell in my tub, and if I'm honest, I quit a long while before that. I'm not built to want a woman halfway. And I've got eyes, rattlesnake—I watch you work yourself half to death out here every day tryin' to outrun the same thing, and you're losin' the same way I'm losin', so let's the both of us quit pretendin' we're winnin'."

Her eyes have gone bright. She doesn't say anything.

"It doesn't have to be a secret," I go on, gentler now. "That's the part you keep gettin' stuck on, like the only two choices are hide it or blow up your whole life. There's a middle. We go slow. We figure it out a piece at a time, quiet, on our terms, nobody's business till we say it is. I've kept harder secrets than you, and I've kept 'em longer, and I'm tellin' you it can be done without it eatin' you alive. We can make this work. I've done a lot of hard things in my life. This wouldn't even crack the top ten."

"And when my father finds out his Sergeant at Arms has been—" Her voice drops. "You know what he'd do."

"I know exactly what he'd do." I hold her eyes. "I've thought about it more than you have, I promise you that. And I'm still sittin' here."

She looks away from me, out at the heifer, and for a long moment the only sound is Number 68 pulling hay and the far-off drone of somebody running a tractor down by the hay barn.

I let her have the quiet.

You don't rush a skittish thing.

First rule of working anything worth working.

"I can't give you the daylight," she finally says. "Not yet. I can't sit at a Sunday supper and have you pass me the potatoes in front of my whole family and pretend that's normal. I'm barely holding what's left of me together as it is, and if it came out right now, on top of everything with my mom and my sisters—" She shakes her head. "It'd be the thing that finished me off. I need you to hear that."

"I hear it."

"But." She turns back to me, and there's something set in her face now, something decided, and my chest goes tight watching her get there on her own. "Raine asked me to dinner. A few days ago. I told her I was busy, and I've felt like garbage about it every day since, because that little girl has never once been anything but sunshine to me, and I lied to her to protect myself."

She takes a breath. "So I'll come to dinner. Tonight. I'll bring it, even, so you stay off that hip. Me and you and Raine, at your place, where nobody's watching and nobody can make it into something it's not ready to be."

It takes everything I've got not to let her see what that does to me.

Because she thinks she just offered me a consolation prize.

She thinks she said no to the big thing and softened it with a small one.

She has no idea she just handed me the whole game, because she doesn't know men like me, doesn't know that a woman offering to feed my kid at my table is worth ten Sunday suppers and a hundred passed bowls of potatoes in front of Phantom.

Daylight I can wait for.

This. My girl and my daughter and a meal at my table. This is what I want, and she just walked herself right up to it and offered it like it was less.

"Raine'll lose her mind," is all I let myself say.

"Yeah?"

"She's been askin' about you since the day you named that cat." I shift on the seat, and the hip bites, and I don't care. "Bring whatever. She'll eat anything that isn't a vegetable and she'll talk your ear clean off. Fair warning."

The smile Presley gives me then is the first real one I've gotten from her in a month, small and crooked and worth more than she knows, and she covers it fast by turning back to the pen.

"Go home and ice that hip," she says. "I mean it. If you're limping worse than usual tonight I'm leaving the food and going home."

"Yes, ma'am."

"I'm serious, Thunder."

"I know you are." I put the side-by-side in gear. "It's one of about four hundred things I like about you."

I make it about halfway back to the cabin before the good mood runs into what's been sitting under all of it since yesterday.

I passed Spur on the way out this morning, down by the clubhouse, and he flagged me and leaned in the side-by-side window with his voice low even though there wasn't a soul around to hear.

Rogue ran the plate.

Comes back to a rental out of an outfit in Dallas that doesn't exist if you dig two layers down—a shell, a cutout, the kind of paper trail that isn't a trail at all because somebody built it that way on purpose.

Which tells us exactly nothing and everything at the same time.

A regular man's truck comes back to a regular man.

That silver three-quarter-ton comes back to a company that evaporates when you touch it, and there's only one kind of person who drives vehicles registered to ghosts.

The Firm didn't send us a bill collector.

They sent us a professional, and then when we made him, he didn't run—he just melted back into paper and quiet, and quiet from those people is worse than loud.

Loud you can see coming.

Quiet means they're still deciding what we're worth to them, and how much of the ranch they had time to photograph before Spur bent his mirror down the road.

I think about that silver truck sitting a quarter mile back, patient as death.

Raine was at Mama Lou's, thank God.

But she won't always be.

Most nights my little girl's asleep down that hall, and a man with a ghost on his roads doesn't get to lose himself like that, doesn't get to stop watching, not even for a woman, not even for one hour in a hot bath.

That can't happen again.

Not while there's a ghost on our roads.

But that's a problem for tonight, for after, for the part of my brain that never really shuts off no matter how much I might wish it would.

Right now I've got a hip to ice and a house to make halfway presentable and a nine-year-old to break the news to.

I do that last part the second Mama Lou drops her off, because I can't hold it in and honestly I don't want to. "Raine. C'mere a sec."

She comes, kitten under her arm, braid coming loose, giving me the wary look she gives me when she thinks she's in trouble for something she hasn't been caught for yet.

"You're not in trouble." I lower myself down onto the couch carefully, so we're closer to eye level. "I got news. Miss Presley's comin' to supper tonight. Here. She's bringin' the food and everything."

For a second she just stares at me like she's making sure she heard it right.

Then she detonates.

"She's COMING? Tonight? To OUR house?" She's up on her toes, Biscuit protesting loudly. "Is she gonna see my room? Can I show her the tooth I saved? Daddy, she likes cows and horses and everything, we gotta—I gotta clean my room, is she gonna sit by me, what's she bringing⁠—"

"Breathe, wild thing."

"I am breathing!"

No, she isn’t.

She's vibrating in place like a struck fence wire, lit up brighter than I've seen her since before the whole ranch went dark and tense and careful, and watching my kid come alive like that over the idea of that woman at our table does something to me I don't have a clean word for.

"Go clean your room, then," I tell her, rough around the edges. "Since you're so worried about it."

She's gone down the hall at a dead run before I finish the sentence, hollering something at the cat about company coming.

Presley shows up at six with two grocery sacks and a foil pan.

Raine meets her at the door like she's the second coming.

I hang back in the kitchen doorway and let it happen, because there's nothing for me to do here but watch, and watching is suddenly the best job I've got.

My girl takes Presley by the hand, just grabs it, the way kids do, no permission asked, and hauls her down the hall to show her the clean room and the saved tooth and the cat who did, in fact, get big.

Presley goes, laughing, letting herself be dragged, and the sound of the two of them carries back to me while I lean on the counter and try to keep my weight off the bad leg.

Supper's chicken and dumplings, and it's good, and Raine talks the entire time exactly like I warned her she would.

She tells Presley about school and about Nash and about how she's decided she's going to be a large-animal vet now, like Miss Grace, except also a barrel racer, and possibly the President.

Presley takes every word of it dead serious, asks follow-up questions, treats a nine-year-old's rambling like it's the most interesting thing she's heard all week.

She's good at this.

Better than good.

She leans in and she listens, and she teases Raine right back, and my kid blooms under it like a plant that finally got put in the window.

I don't say much. I don't need to.

I sit at the head of my own table with my hip aching and my daughter glowing and a woman across from me who keeps catching my eye and looking away, and I think that this is what I've been missing and couldn't name.

Not the sex, though God knows I missed that too.

This.

The full table.

The noise.

The kid and the woman and a hot meal I didn't cook alone.

"Daddy, you're not eating," Raine informs me. "You're just looking at everybody."

"Man can look at his supper."

"You're not lookin' at your supper." She rolls her eyes at Presley, conspiratorially. "He's being weird. He's been weird all day."

"Has he?" Presley doesn't look at me when she says it, but her mouth curves. "Weird how?"

"Good weird. Like Christmas weird." Raine shrugs and goes back to her dumplings. "I like it better than the sad weird."

And there it is.

Out of the mouth of a nine-year-old again, the truth nobody at the table was going to say.

Presley's smile falters just a little and she busies herself with Raine's glass.

I look down at my plate so nobody has to deal with my face.

Later, after Presley's gone home—after Raine hugged her at the door for a solid ten seconds and made her pinky-promise to come back, I tuck my kid in and she catches my hand before I can turn out the light.

"Daddy. Is Miss Presley gonna come back?"

"I think so, baby. If we're good to her."

"I'm always good to her." Deeply offended. Then, quieter, already half asleep: "I'm glad she came. You didn't look sad the whole time. Not even once."

I sit on the edge of her bed a minute after she goes under, and I don't trust my own voice, so I don't try to use it.

There’s a ghost on the roads.

A secret with a fuse on it.

A family of mine that doesn't know the half of what's coming.

And I haven't felt this good in longer than I can rightly remember.

A man takes the wins where he finds them.

Especially the kind that clean their room without being asked twice.

CHAPTER SEVEN

Presley

For a couple of nights running now I've told myself I'm not going to do this, and now I've ended up crossing the dark ranch to his door.

Tonight I don't even bother with the lie.

I wait until my own cabin's gone too empty and too big around me, until the loneliness of it sits on my chest heavy enough that driving to the back of the property in the dark feels less like a choice and more like gravity.

Then I get in my truck and I go, headlights off the last stretch out of habit I'm not proud of, and I let myself in the way he told me to, through the mudroom door he leaves unlocked for me now.

That ought to scare me more than it does.

For me.

He leaves a door unlocked for me.

Somewhere in the last week we stopped being a secret I was ending and turned into a habit I'm keeping, and I can't for the life of me find the moment it happened.

The cabin's dark and warm and smells like him.

Down the hall, Raine's door is shut, a night-light glowing soft under it, the cat a gray lump on the floor outside her room where he sleeps every night now like a guard dog.

I toe my boots off at the door so I don't make a sound.

And I go to Thunder's room, where he's awake, propped up against the headboard with his phone dark on the nightstand, waiting for me like he knew I'd come.

He always knows I'll come.

"Raine's out cold," he says low, before I can ask. "Went down at eight, slept every night this week straight through. But the walls in this place are thin, rattlesnake."

His eyes travel down me, slow, and my whole body answers before my brain does. "So, you're gonna have to be real quiet for me. Can you do that?"

"I'm always quiet."

His mouth curves in the dark. "You are the furthest thing from quiet I have ever put my hands on, and we both know it. Get over here."

I go.

I climb up onto the bed and into his lap, careful of the hip out of habit even though it's better this week, and he lets me settle there.

Then he just looks at me a second, one hand coming up to push my hair back off my face, and the look on him strips me down worse than his hands ever have.

Because this is the part that changed.

Back in the spring it was all heat and rules and no feelings stamped on everything we did.

Now he looks at me like this, steady and wide open, and there's no rule left to hide behind, and it terrifies me more than the choking ever could.

"There she is," he murmurs. "You gonna let me have you tonight?"

"Yes."

"Then give me your hands."

He reaches over to the nightstand and takes up his belt, the wide worn leather one he had looped over the bedpost, and my breath goes short before he's even touched me with it.

"This okay?"

Always the question.

Even now, even with his voice gone dark. "Same as before. Two taps and I stop, everything stops, no questions. You remember?"

"I remember." My voice isn't steady. "Yes. Do it."

He loops the belt around my wrists, snug, practiced, and draws my arms up over my head and anchors them to the slat of the headboard.

The second I test it and find I can't move my hands the whole rest of me goes molten.

He knows what it does to me.

He's always known.

He gets me stretched out under him and I'm helpless and it quiets the part of my brain that never stops running. The part that's been screaming about my family and the secret and everything I can't fix, and for once, bound to his headboard in the dark, that voice just—goes silent.

"There it is."

He watches my face change. "That's my girl. All that noise up there finally shut off?"

I nod, because I can't talk.

"Words, rattlesnake."

"Yes." It comes out cracked.

"It's quiet. You made it quiet."

"That's what I'm for."

He kisses me, deep and unhurried, and then he settles his weight over me and I feel exactly how much better the hip is this week.

How much more of him there is when he's not fighting his own body.

God help me I've missed this, the sheer size of him, the way he cages me in and takes his time.

He works me over slowly.

That's the cruelty of the forced quietness—he knows I have to stay silent, so he makes it as hard as he possibly can, drags it out, his mouth on my throat and my breasts and lower, his beard rough on the inside of my thigh, and every time a sound tries to climb out of me he stops and waits until I swallow it back down.

"Quiet," he breathes against me. "You wake my kid, this ends. You want it to end?"

I shake my head frantically, wrists pulling against the belt. "Then keep it in."

And then his mouth is on me and I have to.

I have to keep it in, biting down on my own lip, turning my face into my bound arm, while he takes me apart with his tongue slow and merciless, praising me the whole time in that low filthy voice, “good girl, that's it, look at you holding it in for me, so pretty when you're trying not to scream,” until I'm shaking and soundless and right at the edge.

And he stops.

Pulls back.

Leaves me hanging there, wrecked and silent and furious, and I could cry with how bad I need it.

"Not yet," he says, and there's the dominance, all the way back now, no wound in it, just a man who's decided he owns every second of this. "You come when I say. That's how tonight works."

When he finally pushes into me I have to bite the meat of my own arm to keep from crying out.

He feels it, feels me clamp down, and he groans low against my ear and goes still a second to get himself under control.

Then he sets a pace that's nothing like the tub—this is him healed enough to take what he wants, deep and hard and deliberate, one hand coming up to close around my throat, thumb and fingers at the sides, that familiar grounding pressure that pulls me down to nothing but him and this.

"Feel that?" His voice is wrecked and quiet at my ear. "That's me. That's us. No rules on it this time, nothin' in the way, only you and me and the truth of it. You're mine, Presley. Say it."

"I'm yours."

A breath, barely sound at all.

"Again."

"I'm yours, I'm yours⁠—"

His hand tightens just so, and his hips drive into me.

He keeps me pinned and bound and full of him.

I’ve never in my life felt so completely held and so completely undone at the same time.

The belt bites my wrists.

His weight crushes me down.

And under all the filth and the force there's something so tender running through it that my eyes sting even as my body climbs.

"You can let go now." His thumb strokes my jaw. "Quiet as you can. Come on my cock, rattlesnake, let me feel it. I've got you."

I break apart without making a sound.

It's the hardest I've ever come and the quietest, forced inward with nowhere to go.

He follows me a few strokes later with his face buried in my neck and his groan swallowed against my skin.

We lie there after in the dark, both of us shaking, his heart slamming against mine, his weight a warm anchor holding me to the earth.

He unbuckles my wrists after and rubs the feeling back into them, slowly, pressing his mouth to the faint red marks the belt left, and neither of us says anything for a while.

This is the part I'm not ready for.

The after. The tenderness.

The sex I could always tell myself was just sex, but this—him cradling my wrists and kissing where the leather bit, checking me over like I'm something precious—this is the part that's going to wreck me when it all comes apart.

Because it is going to come apart.

That's what I can't ever quite forget, even here, even now.

"Stay till the alarm," he murmurs into my hair. "Slip out before Raine's up. I know the drill by now."

"Yeah."

"One of these days you won't have to."

I don't answer that. I can't.

He knows I can't, and he lets it go, and he pulls me in against his chest and I let myself have a few hours of pretending, the way I do every night now, the way I swore to Mitch's ashes I'd never let myself do with a man in this life again.

I'm getting really good at pretending.

It's starting to scare me how good.

* * *

Grace comes out to the pens the next afternoon to check on Number 68.

I didn't call her this time.

She texted me first, said she was on the ranch anyway and would swing by and take a look.

I stood there holding my phone a full minute after because Grace texting me first isn’t something that's happened since the hospital.

Small.

But it landed in my whole chest.

She's warmer today.

Not warm.

Not us-from-before, not love you see you at supper.

But she gives me a real nod when she gets out of the truck, and she asks how my week's been like she halfway wants to know.

When she looks the heifer over she talks me through what she's seeing instead of working in silence.

"Lungs sound clean now." She straightens up, peeling off a glove. "You did good with her. But I'd give her another couple days in quarantine, away from the herd, before you turn her back out. Just to be safe. No sense risking the whole group over a few days' patience."

"Yeah. Okay. Thank you, Grace."

"It's my job."

But she says it without the ice, and she lingers a second at the rail instead of heading straight for her truck, and I know my sister well enough even now to know when she's got something sitting on her she can't decide whether to say.

"Presley." She keeps her eyes on the heifer. "Has Dakota talked to you?"

My stomach drops. "Dakota doesn't talk to me. You know that."

"Right."

A muscle works in her jaw. "Well. She's—there's a problem, and I don't even know why I'm telling you, except you already know the worst of it, so—" She stops and starts over, lower.

"That investigator. The one Dakota hired back in the spring, before we knew. Back when we still thought Mom just up and left." Her eyes flick to me, weighted, and I understand she's choosing every word around what neither of us will say out loud at a cattle pen in broad daylight. "She called him off months ago. Or she thought she did. He called her again last week."

The whole world goes still and cold around me.

"Called her for what?" I manage. "She told him to stop."

"He didn't stop. He's the type that can't. Says he turned up some record that didn't sit right, a loose end he can't leave alone, and he wants to keep going. On his own dime, even. Like it's a puzzle he's got to finish." Grace's jaw is tight enough to crack. "Dakota's beside herself. She can't exactly tell him why to quit, can she. Can't say a word about why. So she just keeps telling him to drop it, and he just keeps not dropping it."

She doesn't have to spell it out.

She knows I know, and I know she knows, and we stand there on either side of the rail both holding the same unspeakable thing.

Because a paid man with a grudge and a loose thread, pulling on the disappearance of a woman who supposedly drove off and left no trace, doesn't find a runaway wife living her best life in Arizona.

I have to grip the top rail so my hands don't shake where Grace can see them.

Because I know exactly where she went.

He finds a body.

And a body finds my father.

And my mother.

And every man who put her in the ground.

Grace is still talking.

I make myself hear her through the roaring in my ears.

"—keep telling her to let it die, that some men lose interest if you starve them long enough, but you know Dakota. Once she's decided something she can't leave it alone. She's got it into her head that she has to be the one to manage him, steer him, keep him pointed anywhere but⁠—"

Grace catches herself, glances at me, clamps back down. "Anywhere but the right direction."

She shakes her head, and for a second the ice is all the way gone and she just looks tired, and scared, and like the sister I was starting to have before everything broke. "I keep thinking about that day. What we all found out. And then I think about that man out there with a shovel's worth of curiosity and no idea what he's actually digging toward—" She stops hard. "Never mind. I shouldn't have said anything. Not to you, of all people. It's not your problem."

It's not your problem.

It is so much my problem that I can hardly breathe around it, and I can't tell her a single piece of why.

Because here's what I don’t think my grieving sister, standing at a cattle pen in the afternoon sun, understands.

If that investigator finds what he's looking for, it doesn't just hurt Mom and Pops.

It takes down four men who buried her. It takes Blaze, Spur, and Banshee. And it takes Thunder.

Thunder, who I let back in.

Thunder, whose belt marks are still faint on my wrists under my sleeves right now.

Thunder, who dug that grave with his own hands and told me flat out he'd do it again, and who I climbed into bed with last night anyway because I've stopped being able to stay away from him.

I'm in love with one of the men that investigator could send to prison.

And protecting him—protecting all of them—means protecting the exact cover-up that turned my sisters to strangers and made me a ghost in my own family.

It's a trap with no clean way out of it, and I see all of it standing right there at the rail, every ugly angle laid out plain.

If the truth comes out, my mother goes to prison for a killing she did to save her own life, and my father goes with her for hiding it.

Blaze and Spur and Banshee go for helping, and Thunder goes for all of it, and Raine loses the only parent she's got.

If it stays buried, we all keep carrying it, the way we've been carrying it, my sisters knowing what happened to their mother and never able to say it, chasing off a hired man they can't tell the truth to.

Everybody guarding the same grave for the rest of their lives, and me standing in the middle of it exactly like Pops did, keeping the secret I hated him for keeping.

Either way somebody I love ends up destroyed.

And I'm the only person on this whole ranch standing in the gap between the two, holding a secret I never asked for, that I found out the same day everyone else did, that has somehow become mine to keep.

"You okay?" Grace is looking at me funny. "You went white."

"I'm fine." The lie comes easy. God, they all come easy now. "Just—it's a lot. Mom. All of it. I hate that Dakota's stuck dealing with that man at all.."

"Yeah." Grace picks her bag back up. "Me too."

She heads for her truck, and then she stops, and she doesn't turn all the way around, but she says it over her shoulder, quiet, like it costs her.

"It was good talking to you. Even about this."

There’s a moment of silence.

"I've missed—" She doesn't finish it.

Just shakes her head and gets in her truck and drives off toward the vet barn.

I stand there at the rail with a healing heifer and a belt mark under my sleeve and the whole sky falling on me slowly.

My sister missed me.

She almost said it.

That's the closest crack of daylight I've had in that direction since everything shattered, and any other day I'd be crying happy tears into the water trough over it.

But all I can think, watching her taillights go, is that I'm carrying a secret now that's so much worse than the one that broke us.

I know where the body is. I know who put it there.

And I'm in love with one of them, because she loves her mom and pops, and she loves the other guys too, because they're all family.

I get in my truck and I sit there a long time before I trust myself to drive.

And for the first time since I climbed into that bathtub, I let myself wonder if loving Thunder isn't just going to cost me my family.

It might be what helps me bury the truth right alongside him.

CHAPTER EIGHT

Thunder

Most of my life I didn't have much to lose, and I'll tell you, it made me a hell of a lot braver than I am now.

That's the trade nobody warns you about.

You spend years as a man with a daughter and a club and not much else, and you tell yourself that's lean, that's hard, that's the price of the life.

Then one spring a redheaded girl crosses a bar to say your name, and a few months later you're sitting in your own truck outside church with your hands tight on the wheel because for the first time in longer than you can remember you've got a full hand of things that can be taken from you, and the taking's already started.

Phantom called church for noon.

He doesn't call church for noon on a weekday unless something's wrong, and every man rolling into the lot knows it.

The mood in the clubhouse when I come through the door is the flat quiet of men waiting to find out how bad.

I take my chair.

Sergeant at Arms sits at the head table's right hand, always has, and I lower myself into it, being as careful as I can, so my hip doesn’t make a show of anything.

Phantom stands at the head of the table and puts both hands flat on the wood and lets the room go still.

"Dakota's investigator called her again," he says. "Last week."

And just like that, the temperature in the room drops ten degrees.

He gives us all the details as blunt as can be, because Phantom doesn't dress up bad news, never has.

The man Dakota hired back in the spring—back when she still thought her mama had run off, before any of us knew the truth was going to come clawing up out of the ground—that man never fully let go of the job.

He's the kind that can't.

He pulled a record somewhere, a discrepancy, some loose thread in the story of a woman who supposedly drove off into a new life and left no trace, and it snagged him, and now he's pulling.

"He's talking about Big Spring," Phantom says.

Nobody moves.

Everybody at this table who needs to understand that sentence understands it.

Big Spring is where the ground is.

Big Spring is the word that turns a missing-persons cold case into four men with shovels and a president who gave the order.

There are exactly five people in this room who put their hands on that night, and every one of us goes very still when the word lands.

Me.

Spur.

Banshee.

Blaze.

And the man at the head of the table who told us to.

"How close is he?" Spur asks. His voice is flat, handler-flat, the voice he uses when he's already running the angles.

"Not close. Yet." Phantom's jaw works. "But close enough that I'm not gonna sit here and pretend it's nothin'. A man like that, with a thread and a grudge and no sense to leave a thing buried—" He stops. "He keeps pullin', he doesn't find Jolene livin' it up in Arizona. We all know what he finds."

He finds all of us.

He finds the end of everything.

I sit there and I do the one thing a Sergeant at Arms is never supposed to do at his own table, which is stop thinking about the club for a minute and think about myself.

Because here's what that grave holds for me now, and it's a lot more than it held a season ago.

A season ago, if this went bad, I would lose my freedom and my club, and my daughter gets raised by my mother while I do twenty-to-life.

That was always the deal.

I made my peace with it the night I picked up the shovel.

You do what protects the family and you carry the risk, that's the job, that's what it means to be the sword.

But it's not just that anymore.

Now there's a woman two cabins over who finally stopped running from me.

Now there's a full table and a kid who doesn't look sad and a life I let myself start wanting when I had no business wanting anything.

And all of it—every piece of it I clawed back this last month—is sitting on top of a grave out past Big Spring that a stranger with a laptop is about to start digging up.

I could lose her before I ever really had her.

That's what sits in my gut through the rest of church, cold and heavy, while the brothers talk options that aren't really options.

And it's worse than just me, is the part I keep circling back to.

If this grave comes up, it doesn't only take the five of us who put her in it.

It detonates Presley's whole family all over again—Marlena in cuffs, Phantom in cuffs, the sisters watching both their father and Marlena hauled off, the papers, the trial, the town.

Presley's been clawing her way back toward Grace an inch at a time, texting about a sick heifer, standing close at a cattle pen.

All of that turns to ash the day a stranger finds a body, and she'd be right back to a ghost in a family that's not so much fractured anymore as flattened.

I finally get her back, and the same thing that could take me could take everything she's got left too.

If I lose, I don't lose alone.

Not anymore.

Then Rogue speaks up, and it gets worse.

"While we're layin' out threats," he says, and something in how he says it makes every head turn. "I've been sittin' on this till I was sure. I'm sure now."

He puts his phone on the table and slides it to the center.

I lean in with the rest of them, and my blood goes to ice.

It's a photograph.

Long lens, grainy, shot from distance.

And it's Bex, Grace, and Dakota, and Grace's belly round with the baby, standing in the church parking lot at what looks like last Sunday's supper.

Somebody was parked far enough off to need a telephoto lens to take it, and close enough to catch every face clean.

"There's more," Rogue says, scrolling, flat and grim.

"The kids at the swimming hole. Mama Lou's car outside the school. Waylon in the yard."

He stops on one and doesn't turn it around and I'm glad, because I don't want to see which of ours it is. "They're not watchin' the clubhouse anymore. They're watchin' our families. Buildin' a book on who we love."

"The Firm," Blaze says.

Not a question.

"The Firm."

Rogue takes his phone back.

"Hartley's people don't forget, and they don't forgive a man walkin' away, and now they know exactly where to put the knife if they decide they want to. This isn't surveillance anymore. This is a target package."

Photographs of our kids.

An investigator pulling a thread on a grave.

I sit at that table with a busted hip and a stack of other men's cameras pointed at everything I love, and I’ve never in my life felt less like the sword and more like a man standing in a doorway with his arms spread, trying to cover too many people with a body that can't even hang a gate anymore.

Church breaks with no answers, the way it does when the problems are bigger than the night.

The brothers filter out to their bikes and their families and whatever they do to sit with news like this.

I stay behind because my hip's stiffened up from sitting and I'd rather work it loose before I try to look normal walking out.

So I'm still in the clubhouse when Shiver comes through the door.

I forgot he was coming.

Word was he'd ride over from the Reapers Rejects to see his sisters—Grace and Dakota both here for church day, and Shiver doesn't get down this way as often as he'd like, and blood's blood even when the family's cracked down the middle.

He's Phantom's oldest, though you'd never make them for father and son unless you knew.

Where Phantom's gone soft and heavy with the years, Shiver's all lean hard angles, road-worn, that Reapers Rejects MC cut on his back, and he moves through the clubhouse like a man who grew up in it, because he did.

Grace and Dakota are at a table in the corner.

He goes to them.

And I should leave.

I know I should leave.

But my hip's got me pinned to my chair another minute, and the clubhouse is quiet, and I can't help but hear.

"—not blaming Marlena or Presley," Shiver's saying, low, his big hands wrapped around a bottle he isn't drinking. "I need you both to hear me on that. Whatever she did, she did with a knife comin' at her. That's not on her. That's never been on her."

"Then who?" Dakota asks, and her voice is raw in a way I've never heard from her. Dakota who's all sharp edges and quick mouth.

"Who do I get to be mad at, Shiver, because I gotta be mad at somebody or I'm gonna come apart⁠—"

"Dad." Simple. Flat. "You get to be mad at Dad. For the cover-up. For lettin' us all think she abandoned us when he knew, when he could've—" His jaw flexes. "That's the part I can't forgive. Not the killin'. The lie. The years of the lie."

Grace says something too low for me to catch, and Shiver's face does something complicated.

"You want to know the part that eats me?" he says. "She was textin' me. Those last few weeks. Middle of the night, stuff that didn't track, gettin' more and more—wound up. Paranoid. Sayin' things about Dad and Marlena that didn't make sense. I told her she needed to see somebody. Get on somethin' to level out. I told her—" His voice cracks, just slightly, and he covers it with the bottle.

"I told her we'd figure it out. And then she was gone, and I spent two years thinkin' she took off because I didn't do enough, didn't call enough, didn't drive down and drag her to a doctor myself. Two years of that. Turns out she didn't leave at all. Turns out I couldn't have saved her from what actually happened no matter what I did."

The two of them go quiet.

And I sit ten feet away with my hands around a coffee gone cold.

I understand that I’m eavesdropping on the exact grief I helped cause, and there's a shovel in my history that put that woman in the ground.

Her son is sitting right there wrecked over her, and I’m not sure he knows I'm one of the reasons.

The sisters go not long after—Grace to get off her feet, Dakota trailing her, the two of them folded together the way grief folds people.

It strikes me even through my own guilt that at least the two of them have found their way back to each other in all this.

It's the third sister who's alone in it.

Shiver doesn't leave with them.

He comes to the bar instead, and he drops onto the stool two down from where I've finally gotten myself upright, and he signals the prospect behind the bar for two, and the kid pours two whiskeys and sets them down.

I look at our prospects, Ford and Buckley. "Go wash the bikes out front. Both of you. Take your time."

They know an order when they hear one.

They're gone in ten seconds, and then it's just me and Shiver and two glasses of whiskey in an empty clubhouse.

We drink the first one without talking.

That's the way with men like us.

You don't rush it.

He pours the second himself from the bottle the prospect left.

"How's my baby sister doing, Thunder?" He says it easy. Casual. Eyes on his glass, not on me.

But there's nothing casual about Shiver, never has been, and the question lands exactly where he aimed it, which is straight through the center of me.

I could play it.

I could say which one, or fine, I guess, or any of the dodges a man keeps in his pocket for exactly this.

But this is Shiver, and I've got too much respect for him to insult him with it, and something about the whiskey and the photographs and the grave and the grief I just watched makes me tired of dodging.

I let out a breath that's half a laugh. "Nothing could ever get by you."

"No." He turns his glass slowly on the bar. "Nothing ever could. Ask my mother." A moment of silence, dark and self-aware, and then he lets it go. "You didn't answer me."

So I don't dodge. "She's strugglin'," I tell him, honestly, my eyes on the bottles behind the bar. "All of it's hittin' her hard. Harder than she lets on, and she doesn't let on much. Your sister's freezin' her out over a thing she didn't do, findin' out what she found out the same day everybody else did, and carryin' all of it by herself out there because she won't ask a soul for help."

I turn the glass.

"She's the strongest person I know, and she's about half a step from breakin', and there's not a damn thing I can do about most of it."

Shiver's quiet for a long moment.

"Most of it," he repeats.

"Most of it."

"But not all of it."

I don't answer that.

Which is its own answer, and we both know it.

He nods slowly, like something got confirmed that he already knew, and he doesn't push.

He doesn't get up in my face about it the way an angrier man might over his baby sister and a man my age with my history.

"She could do a lot worse," is all he says, finally, "than a man who'll sit here and tell me the truth when he could've lied. Reckon she's already surrounded by enough liars."

He tosses back the last of the whiskey and sets the glass down softly. "You hurt her, that's different. That's a conversation you and me have with our hands. But you're not, are you? You're one of the few things holdin' her up right now."

"Tryin' to be."

"Then we're good." He stands, claps me on the shoulder once, hard, a brother's hand. "Take care of her. Somebody in this family better."

He's gone before I can say anything back, out into the afternoon toward his bike, and I sit there alone in the empty clubhouse with two empty glasses and a whole world of trouble.

I finish my drink slowly.

An investigator pulling on a thread that ends at a grave I dug.

A shadow outfit photographing my daughter at the swimming hole.

A grieving man who just gave me his blessing to love a woman I helped orphan of her peace, and doesn't know it, and would take that blessing back so fast if he ever found out what my hands have done.

And under all of it, the same cold thing that's been sitting in my gut since church.

For years, I was the sword.

Point me at the threat and I go, and I was good at it, and it never scared me much because I never had enough to lose to be scared.

Now I've got everything to lose, and the threats are coming from three directions at once, and my body can't run down a single one of them.

A man learns what he's made of when he's got something to protect and no way to protect it.

I'm about to find out what I'm made of.

And God help me, so is she.

CHAPTER NINE

Presley

Number 68 gets her clean bill of health on Tuesday morning, and by that afternoon I've helped bring a baby into the world, and somewhere in between the two my sister starts to come back to me.

It doesn't happen the way you'd imagine it.

It happens at the pens, of all places, the same rail where Grace and I have done our circling for weeks, where the heifer that nearly died became the one neutral thing we could both stand near.

She's meeting me to sign off on turning 68 back out with the herd—a vet thing, an official thing, a reason to be in the same square of dirt without either of us having to call it what it is.

She's huge now.

Braxton's due any day, and she's carrying low and miserable in the August heat, one hand at the small of her back the whole time she looks the heifer over, and I keep asking if she wants to sit.

She keeps waving me off because Grace Lyle does not sit down on a job.

"Lungs are clear," she says, straightening with a wince. "Gut's good, she's back on full feed. Turn her out whenever you want, she's earned it."

A ghost of something that's almost the old warmth. "You did right by her, Presley. Start to finish."

"Learned from the best."

She doesn't answer that, but she doesn't ice it either, and that's the dance we've been doing—a step closer, then a careful hold.

It's more than I had a month ago.

I've learned to live on crumbs.

Then her face changes.

It's not subtle.

One second she's leaned on the rail and the next she's gone very still and very white, and her hand comes off her back and grabs the top rail, knuckles going pale.

"Grace?"

"That's—" She breathes through something. "That's not a Braxton-Hicks."

"What do you mean it's not⁠—"

"I mean my water just broke, Presley."

She says it with the calmness of a woman who's done this before and is already somewhere far ahead of me.

She looks down at the dark spreading on the dirt at her boots and back up at me, and for the first time in weeks, she looks me dead in the eye and there's nothing cold in it at all.

"And they're already three minutes apart, which means this one's coming fast, and the men are all on that run, and Shadow's an hour out at least, and I need you to not panic."

"I'm not panicking."

"You're panicking a little."

"I'm panicking a lot, but I'm trying to keep my shit together⁠—"

That surprises a laugh out of her, and then the laugh turns into a grimace as another one hits.

She grips my arm hard enough to leave marks, and I stop being scared all at once, because there's no room for it.

She needs me.

That's the whole world for the next little while—my sister needs me, and there’s no one else here.

I get her to my truck and I get on the phone.

Shadow's number goes straight to voicemail, which means he's somewhere out of signal on that run, wherever the run is, whatever it's about. The men rode out before dawn, tight-jawed and armed, and nobody told the women a word.

I've had a low bad feeling in my gut about it all day that I don't have time for now.

I leave a wrecked voicemail.

I text him.

I text Dakota, who at least is in town.

And then I do what I don't let myself think about too much.

I call Thunder.

He picks up on the first ring, because of course he does, because Pops benched him off the run for the hip, and he's been prowling the ranch all day like a caged animal hating every second of being left behind.

"Presley."

"Grace is in labor. Her water broke, contractions are three minutes apart, Shadow's unreachable on the run and I've got to get her to Kerrville now and I'm scared I can't⁠—"

"Where are you?"

"The quarantine pens."

"Two minutes." No wasted words. "Get her in your truck, passenger seat reclined, I'm coming.

I'll drive, you stay with her. Two minutes, rattlesnake."

He hangs up. And the relief that goes through me is so total it scares me almost as bad as the labor did.

He's there in ninety seconds, truck sliding up in the dust, and he's out and moving before it's fully stopped despite the hip, despite everything.

The sight of him, big and steady and calm, undoes some knot in my chest I didn't know I was holding.

He gets Grace loaded like he's done it before.

Maybe he has.

Nine years of Raine, a whole club's worth of babies.

He reclines the seat and gets her buckled and says something low to her that makes her huff a pained laugh.

Then he looks at me over the hood for one second, one single second, and everything he can't say in front of my sister is right there on his face.

I've got you.

I've got you both.

Then it's gone behind the calmness of a man handling a crisis, and he's behind the wheel and I'm in the back leaning over the seat with my hand in Grace's, and we're flying down the ranch road toward the highway.

He drives like the professional he used to be before his body broke—fast and smooth and utterly in control, taking the curves so Grace doesn't feel them.

He talks to her the whole way in that low steady voice, telling her she's doing fine, telling her first babies lie about being fast and this one's showing off, telling her Shadow's going to be there and if he's not he'll answer to Thunder personally for missing it.

Grace laughs, swears, and breathes and crushes my hand.

I watch the back of Thunder's head and his hands sure on the wheel, and I think, God help me, in the middle of my sister's labor, how much I truly, irrevocably love him.

* * *

Kerrville's ER takes her back fast.

And then it's the part nobody warns you about, the sudden stop, the fluorescent waiting, the way a hospital swallows the person you love behind doors you can't follow through.

Except this time they do let me follow, because Grace grabs my hand as they're wheeling her back and says, "She's coming with me" in a voice that doesn't leave room for argument.

A nurse looks at me, and I look at Grace, and something enormous happens in my chest.

She wants me in the room.

The sister who couldn't look at me for a month wants me in the room when her son is born.

I look back once at the waiting area as they wheel us through.

Thunder's already got Waylon—Bex must have run him over, or Mama Lou, somebody handed him off in the chaos—no, it's Thunder alone, lowering himself into a plastic chair with a two-year-old on his knee and his bad leg stretched out straight.

Waylon's already fascinated by his beard, and the last thing I see before the doors close is the Sergeant at Arms of the Shotgun Saints making a serious face at a toddler to keep him from crying.

Then the doors swing shut, and there's no more time for anything but Grace.

I won't ever forget it.

Two hours, hard and fast and primal, Grace gripping my hand and the bed rail and cursing Shadow's name and then, right at the end, going somewhere quiet and far away inside herself the way I imagine women have since the beginning of time, and then⁠—

A cry.

Thin and furious and brand new.

Braxton Lyle-McCrae comes into the world red-faced and screaming with a full head of dark hair.

They put him on Grace's chest and she breaks, my composed unflappable sister just breaks wide open sobbing and laughing at once.

I'm crying, and the nurse is smiling, and I’ve never in my life been so glad to be exactly where I am.

"He's perfect," I tell her, wrecked. "Grace, he's perfect, look at all that hair⁠—"

"Shadow's gonna lose his mind that he missed it." But she's laughing when she says it, kissing that tiny furious head. "You were here, though."

She looks up at me, and her face is stripped all the way down, no walls left, nothing but exhaustion and love and the ghost of everything we lost.

"You were here, Presley. You didn't have to be, after how I've—" Her voice cracks. "You helped me. You stayed. You held my hand and you didn't let go."

"I'll never not be here." It comes out fierce, truer than anything I've said in weeks. "Whatever else is broken. I'll always come when you call. Always."

She reaches out with the hand that isn't cradling her son, and she takes mine, and she holds it.

For the first time since a hospital hallway a lifetime ago, my sister holds my hand because she wants to and not because she's in pain.

The ice doesn't melt all at once.

But it cracks.

Right down the middle, it cracks, and something starts flowing through that I'd given up on ever feeling again.

Shadow makes it forty minutes after, tearing through the doors gray-faced and road-filthy and frantic.

I slip out to give them the room because some moments belong to a husband and wife and a brand-new person and nobody else.

The waiting room's filled up while I was gone.

Bex is there now, and she's got Waylon on her hip, feeding him crackers, which means Thunder handed him off.

Dakota's there, sitting apart with her arms crossed and her face doing complicated things—she gives me a look when I come out, and it's not warm, but it's not the flat wall it's been either.

"He's here?" she asks. "Everybody's okay?"

And when I tell her yes, healthy, screaming his head off, something in her shoulders comes down, and she nods at me.

Just once.

It's not much.

From Dakota, it's practically a hug.

And on the far side of the room, leaning against the wall with a vending machine coffee he isn't drinking, is Shiver.

I don't know when he got here.

But he pushes off the wall when he sees me and crosses over, and for half a second I brace, because I've learned to brace, because family coming toward me lately has mostly meant getting hurt.

Shiver opens his arms. "C'mere, baby sister."

And I go.

God, I go, I walk right into my big brother's arms and he wraps me up, road dust and leather and the faint smell of the whiskey he must've had waiting somewhere.

He holds on tight and says into the top of my head, "You did good today. Heard you drove her in yourself."

"Thunder drove."

"Heard you didn't leave her side." He pulls back and holds me at arm's length, and Shiver's got our father's eyes but none of our father's lies in them, and he looks at me steadily. "I need you to hear somethin', and I need you to actually hear it, not just nod. Are you ready?"

I nod. Then, because he said not to just nod: "Yeah. I'm ready."

"None of this was ever your fault." He says it slow and plain, like he's laying each word down where I can't miss it. "Not one piece of it. You didn't kill anybody. You didn't bury anybody. You didn't spend two years lyin' to your own kids. You found out the same day the rest of us did and you got treated like you held the shovel, and that's not right, and I've been meanin' to say so for weeks."

His jaw works. "I'm sorry it took me this long. Grace and Dakota, they'll get there, they're just hurtin' and you've got the face that reminds 'em. But me? I never once blamed you. I want you to know that. You've still got one sibling who never let go of your hand."

And I lose it.

I cry into my brother's chest in a hospital waiting room, ugly and grateful and a month's worth of held-together finally coming apart at the seams.

He just holds me and lets me, one big hand on the back of my head, rock steady.

"There it is," he murmurs. "Been holdin' that a while, huh?"

"You have no idea."

"I got some idea."

He lets me cry it out, and when I finally pull back and wipe my face he hands me a napkin from his pocket, and he watches me put myself back together with a look I can't quite read.

And then, quiet, just for me. "He treatin' you right?"

Everything in me goes still.

"What?"

"Thunder." Shiver says it easy, like he's commenting on the weather, but his eyes are sharp on my face.

"Saw how he came outta that truck when you got here. Saw how he watched them doors after they took Grace back, like half of him wanted to go through 'em after you. Man watches a woman like that, it means somethin'."

A pause. "So. He treatin' you right?"

I open my mouth to deny it.

It's right there, the reflex, the lie I've been living behind for weeks.

But this is Shiver.

Shiver who just told me he never let go of my hand. Shiver who's got no lies in his eyes.

"You can't tell anybody," I whisper. "Shiver, I mean it, nobody, it would⁠—"

"I know what it would." His face doesn't change. "I've known somethin' was there since I sat and had a drink with the man. I'm not askin' to make trouble. I'm askin' as your brother whether the man who's got his hands on my baby sister is worth a damn."

He waits. "Is he?"

"Yeah." It comes out cracked and certain. "He is. He's the best man I know, Shiver. He's the only thing holding me up right now."

Shiver nods slowly, that same slow nod I don't know how to read, and something in it settles.

"Then that's between you and me," he says. "For as long as you need it to be. But Presley—" He glances toward the waiting room doors, toward where I came from, toward a man with a busted hip who drove my sister to the hospital and made faces at a toddler to keep him calm.

"A thing like that doesn't stay secret forever. Things done in the dark come to light. You'd know that better than anybody in this family." His voice gentles. "Just don't let it come out in the worst possible way. Get ahead of it. You've all had enough secrets blowin' up in this family to last three lifetimes."

He leaves not long after, kisses the top of my head, tells me to call him, actually call him, not disappear again.

And I stand there in the waiting room in the aftermath of it all, a nephew born, a sister's hand in mine again, a brother's arms.

A secret spoken out loud for the first time to someone in my own blood, and across the room, Thunder catches my eye.

He's back in the plastic chair, hip stretched out, and he can't come to me and I can't go to him, not here.

Not with Dakota ten feet away and Bex watching and the whole tangle of my family in this room.

So we don't.

We just look, one long look across a hospital waiting room, and he tips his chin at me the barest inch, and I know exactly what it means because I've learned his whole language by now.

You okay?

And I find, standing there, that for the first time in a very long time the answer is something close to yes.

The men are still out there somewhere doing whatever the club sent them to do, and the low bad feeling's still sitting under my ribs.

And on top of it all, there's a grave out past Big Spring and a stranger digging toward it and a whole world of trouble I can't fix.

But my sister's got her son. My brother's got my back.

And the man I love drove us through it and is sitting across the room guarding us all with a body that can barely hold itself up.

The dark's still coming.

But we're not as alone in it as we were this morning.

And I'll take that.

After the months I've had, I'll take that and be grateful.

CHAPTER TEN

Thunder

She tells me she wants my name on her skin on a Sunday, lying in my bed with the afternoon light coming gold through the blinds, and I think for a second I've misheard her. "Say that again."

"You heard me."

She's propped up on one elbow, hair loose and wild, wearing one of my shirts and nothing else, and there's a look on her face I've come to know—the Lyle look, the one that means she's already decided and she's just informing me of the outcome.

"I want ink. Two pieces. And I want you there when I get them."

Braxton's two weeks old now.

Grace has been letting Presley hold him, letting her come by, and the thaw's put something back in Presley I hadn't seen since spring—a lightness, a steadiness, like a woman remembering she's allowed to want things.

She smiles more.

She stays later.

Twice now she's fallen asleep in my bed on a night Raine was home and had to do the dawn scramble out the mudroom door, and both times she laughed about it instead of going cold.

This is the best stretch of my life and I'm not fool enough not to know it.

But this.

"What kind of ink?" I ask, careful, because a man learns to step carefully around a good thing.

"A rattlesnake." She says it softly, and her hand comes up to my throat, to the coiled snake healing there, the one I put on myself in the worst weeks of my life when I thought she was gone for good.

Her fingers trace it. "Here." She touches her own ribs, left side, over the bone. "To match yours. You wear my name where the world can see it. I want to wear yours."

And that alone nearly takes the legs out from under me.

Because the importance is there, isn't it?

I marked myself with her in the dark, half out of my mind, not expecting to ever get to touch her again, and now she's lying in my bed in the gold light asking to answer it.

To make it two. To wear the snake I call her, the way I wear it for her.

I could give her that. I want to give her that so bad my chest aches with it.

"That's one," I manage. "You said two."

She holds my eyes. And here it comes, I can feel it coming, the other shoe.

"Property of Thunder." She says it steady, no flinching. "Across my lower back."

I sit up. I can't help it.

It moves me too much and in too many directions at once, and I have to sit up and scrub a hand down my beard and take a breath.

A rattlesnake on her ribs is a love letter, but Property of Thunder is something else entirely, and we both know it.

"Presley."

"Don't." She sits up too, my shirt sliding off one shoulder. "Don't you dare give me a speech about how it's too much, or too fast, or how I don't know what I'm⁠—"

"I'm not." I take her hand, because I need to be touching her for this. "I'm not gonna tell you that. You know exactly what a property tat means in this world, you’ve been in this world long enough to tell. You watched Hadley get Rogue's across her back. You know it's not jewelry. It's the most serious claim there is."

I turn her hand over in mine.

"Which is why I gotta ask you somethin' and I need the true answer, not the one that keeps the afternoon nice."

Her jaw sets, but she nods. "Are you doin' this for us?" I hold her eyes. "Or are you doin' it at your father?"

She goes still, and I watch what I’m asking shake her.

I know I've hit something because Presley's a terrible liar with the people she loves and the truth crosses her face before she can stop it.

"Both," she says finally.

Quiet.

Honest.

"Is that— can it be both?"

"Talk to me."

She pulls her hand back, wraps her arms around her knees, and for a second she's not the steady stockwoman who ran a whole breeding program through the worst summer of her life.

She's just a girl who got handed a wrecked family and a pile of secrets she never asked for.

"My whole life, the past couple of years has been things happening to me," she says. "I found out who my real parents were—didn't choose it. Found out my mother killed a woman—didn't choose that either. Got frozen out by my sisters for something I didn't do, and had no control over. Found out the man I was falling for helped bury the body. Every single piece of it landed on me, and I just had to stand there and take it."

Her voice tightens. "And yeah. Yeah, Thunder, some part of me knows that if my father ever finds out about us, he's gonna try to end it. He's gonna stand there and act like he gets a say in who I love, like he gets to protect me right out of the one good thing I've got left, after everything his secrets cost me. And some part of me wants it already done when that day comes. Permanent. On my skin. So he can rage all he wants and it won't matter, because it'll already be true and there won't be a damn thing he can do to undo it."

She looks up at me, eyes bright and fierce.

"But that's not the biggest part," she says. "That's the part that makes me feel strong instead of scared, so it's the part that's easy to say out loud. You want the real one?"

"Always."

"The real one is I love you."

The first time she's said it in those exact words.

"And for once since I’ve been on Sharp Shooter Ranch, I want to choose something. Not have it happen to me. Choose it. With my eyes open, knowing every reason it's a bad idea, and do it anyway because it's mine. You're the one thing I picked. And I want to wear that."

Her voice cracks. "Is that— does that make it okay? That it's for you and also a little bit for me, to prove to myself I still get to want things?"

And there's nothing left in me that wants to argue.

Because I know exactly what she's talking about.

I've spent my whole life being pointed at things by other men.

The one time I ever chose purely for myself was a snake on my neck in the dark, and here she is wanting the same medicine, the same proof that a person who's had everything done to them can still do one thing on purpose.

"Yeah," I tell her, rough. "Yeah, rattlesnake. It makes it okay."

I pull her in.

"But we do it right," I say into her hair. "Not here, not with anybody from the ranch. I know a guy. Rafe, up in Brownwood, did most of my sleeves years back. Knows the life, knows what a property tat is, knows how to keep his mouth shut. He's not a Saint and he's got no love for your daddy's charter one way or the other. It stays between him and us."

"When?"

"How's tomorrow?"

The smile she gives me could power the whole Hill Country.

* * *

Rafe's shop sits above a saddle repair place off Main, and he takes one look at Presley walking in under my arm and one look at my face and doesn't ask a single question he doesn't need the answer to.

That's why he's still the man I trust with this.

I’ve known him for two decades, and he's never once needed a thing explained twice.

"Ribs first," he says, when she tells him the plan. "Ribs hurt like the devil, best to get 'em while you're fresh. Snake on the ribs, script on the low back."

He looks at me. "You drawin' the snake or am I?"

"You draw it. I'll tell you where it's wrong."

He laughs, because that's how it always went with my sleeves.

He gets Presley set up on her side on the table with her shirt off and a towel and her ribs bared.

I pull a stool up by her head where she can hold my hand and look at me instead of the needle.

She's brave about it.

Of course she is.

The first pass of the needle over the ribs makes her breath hiss out sharp, and her hand clamps down on mine.

I lean in close and give her my eyes and my low voice, the same tools I use on her in the dark, because pain's pain and I know how to walk her through it.

"Breathe for me. There you go. In through the nose."

"It—fuck—it burns⁠—"

"I know it does. Ribs are the worst of it. You're doin' beautiful." I press my forehead to her temple while Rafe works. "Look at you. Takin' it like it's nothin'."

"Says the man—ow—who's not getting stabbed a thousand times a second⁠—"

"I've got a bullet in my hip, darlin', don't talk to me about⁠—"

She laughs, and it jostles her, and Rafe growls at both of us to hold still, and it's—God, it's good.

Even here, even with her hurting, it's the kind of good I stopped believing I'd get.

Her hand in mine, her smart mouth going, and a snake taking shape on her ribs that means she's mine and knows it and chose it.

I watch the rattlesnake come up out of her skin line by line, coiled and dark, twin to the one on my throat, and something in my chest I don't have words for goes tight and full.

It does something to me I wasn't ready for, watching it.

I've wanted this woman since a bar in the spring, wanted her in every way a man can want, and I thought I knew every shade of it.

But this is new.

Watching my mark go into her, permanently, watching her choose the pain of it and hold my hand through it and never once flinch off the decision, it lights something in me that's older and darker than desire.

Something possessive down to the root.

Mine, the snake says, coming up on her ribs.

Mine, in her skin now, in her blood, for good.

And the animal part of me that I keep chained up most days is pacing its cage and pleased.

She catches it on my face. Of course she does. She reads me better than anyone alive.

"You like it," she says, breathless, half a question.

"I more than like it." My voice comes out rough enough that Rafe pointedly studies his needle. "We'll talk about how much when there's not a third party holdin' a machine to your ribs."

Her pupils go wide and dark, and she bites her lip.

Rafe says, to the ceiling, "Y'all are gonna make me finish this real fast."

The low back is easier on her, or she's just further in now, floating on the endorphins the way you do once the body gives up fighting the needle.

I stand back for that one so Rafe's got room, and I watch the letters come up one at a time across the small of her back, black and clean and permanent.

Property of Thunder.

My road name.

On a Lyle.

On her.

Inked into her skin where it'll be till she's old and gray, a claim I have no earthly right to and can't for the life of me make myself refuse.

I think about her father.

I won't pretend I don't.

I think about Phantom finding out—because Shiver's right, these things always come to light—and I think about him seeing this, my name on his youngest daughter's body, done behind his back, permanent before he ever got a say.

It's going to make everything worse when it breaks.

It's going to turn a betrayal into a brand he can't scrub off.

And I find I don't care the way I should.

Because she's right. It'll already be our reality.

Whatever he does, however he rages, however hard he tries to protect her right out of the best thing either of us has got, it'll already be inked, already chosen, already ours.

Some things you can't undo once they're done.

I know that better than any man alive.

I've got one buried out past Big Spring.

This one, at least, is a thing done in the dark that I'm glad of.

Rafe wraps her up, both pieces, and gives her the care talk she's not listening to.

I pay him double and grip his hand, and he tells me quietly, just for me, "She's a good one, brother. Don't wreck it."

Like he can read my whole life off my face. Maybe he can.

In the truck she rides pressed against my side the whole way home, careful of the fresh ink, glowing.

"Let me see it again," she says at a stoplight, and pulls the collar of my shirt aside to look at my snake, and then twists to catch her own ribs in the visor mirror.

The two of them matched, hers and mine, and the look on her face is pure fierce joy.

"Now we match," she says.

"Now we match."

"He's gonna lose his mind." She says it almost dreamy, and I know she means her father.

I know she's picturing the day, and it should scare me more than it does.

"When it all comes out. He's gonna absolutely lose his mind."

"Probably." I pull her hand to my mouth, kiss her knuckles, keep my eyes on the road.

"Let him. You're already mine. Ink says so."

That night, after, when she's stretched out easily on her stomach so the fresh ink can breathe and I'm tracing the air just above Property of Thunder because I can't stop looking at it, she falls asleep mid-sentence, wrung out and marked and safe in my bed.

And I lie there in the dark and let myself have the truth of it.

This is the happiest I’ve ever been.

A woman I've got no right to, wearing my name and my snake, sleeping in my bed while my daughter sleeps down the hall.

A family stitching itself slowly back together around her.

The best stretch of days I've known in a life that hasn't handed me many.

And every bit of it is sitting on top of a fuse.

Because there's still a grave out past Big Spring.

Still an investigator pulling a thread toward it.

Still a shadow outfit with a lens trained on everyone I love, and a run last week that came back quiet and grim with the men not saying much about what they found.

Still a father who's going to find my name on his daughter's back one day and take it as the declaration of war it half is.

The dark's coming.

I've spent my whole life watching for the dark.

I can feel it out there past the good, patient as that silver truck, waiting for its moment.

But she's here now.

Marked and mine, and choosing it with her eyes open.

And a man who's spent his whole life bracing for the worst can be forgiven, just once, for lying still in the dark and letting himself have the best while it lasts.

It won't last. Nothing does.

I hold on to it anyway.

CHAPTER ELEVEN

Presley

Dakota texts me for the first time since the truth came out, stopping me cold in the middle of the feed aisle.

Breakfast tomorrow. We need to talk.

I read it four times standing there with a fifty-pound bag of range cubes over my shoulder, sure I've got the wrong Dakota, sure it's a mistake, sure the next text is going to be ‘sorry, meant that for Grace.’

But it isn't.

The next one comes a second later.

The diner across from the ranch. 8am. Grace too. It's important.

And then, after a pause long enough that I can picture her thumbs hovering, hating it:

Please.

Dakota Lyle doesn't say please to me.

Hell, Dakota hasn't said much of anything to me since a hospital hallway where she looked at my mother's face on mine and turned to stone.

So I stand there in the feed store with my heart going sideways, and I text back the only thing there is to text.

I'll be there.

* * *

The diner across from the ranch has been there longer than any of us, a low cinderblock place with vinyl booths and a coffee pot that never stops.

It's the kind of spot where half the county eats breakfast so nobody looks twice at three of Phantom Lyle's kids taking the big corner booth.

I get there first, because of course I do, because I've been ready since six out of pure nerves.

Grace comes in second, Braxton in a carrier and Waylon walking beside her.

She sets Braxton’s car seat in the booth beside her, and she gives me a real smile and a "hey, you" that steadies me some.

Then Dakota.

She stops just inside the door when she sees me, and for a second the old stone flickers across her face, the reflex of a woman who taught herself to hate the sight of me.

Then she pushes it down, visibly, with effort, and she comes and slides into the booth across from mine and says, stiff as a fence post, "Thanks for comin'."

"Course."

"Where's Shiver?" Grace asks.

Dakota sets her phone in the middle of the table and hits a button, and my brother's voice comes out of it, tinny and warm. "I'm here. Ridin' shotgun in my own kitchen. Y'all order yet? Get me a coffee in spirit."

We order like we're feeding an army, because that's what you do when you're about to talk about something nobody wants to talk about—you bury it under food.

Belgian waffles, a short stack, sausage and bacon both, a mess of scrambled eggs, hash browns, a basket of biscuits with gravy on the side.

The waitress doesn't blink.

The table fills up with more than four people can eat and we all pick at it, and the phone sits in the middle with Shiver breathing on the other end, and for a few minutes we just... eat.

Pass the syrup.

Comment on the food.

Dakota cuts Grace's sausage without being asked because Grace has got a fussing newborn on her arm, and it's such an ordinary sisterly thing that it puts a lump in my throat.

For a while we don't talk about why we're here at all.

Grace tells a story about Waylon flushing one of Shadow's socks down the toilet and the plumber's face when he fished it out.

Dakota laughs so hard she has to put her coffee down, and Shiver's voice off the phone demands to know why nobody sends him this kind of material.

For a few minutes it's almost like it used to be, back before the spring, back when I was still drunk on the miracle of suddenly having sisters at all.

I'd forgotten this part.

In the months since the freeze-out I'd let myself forget that before it all broke, we were good.

That having sisters, after twenty years of being an only child talking to my daddy's ashes, was the best thing that ever landed in my lap.

We lost all of that in an afternoon.

And sitting here now, watching Dakota wipe laugh-tears off her face and reach over to jiggle Braxton's foot, I understand exactly how much I've been starving, and exactly how careful I have to be not to let it show.

If I let them see how badly I've missed this, I might not stop crying long enough to get through what we actually came here to do.

Grace catches me watching. She doesn't say anything.

She just bumps my knee with hers under the table, once, and goes back to her eggs, and it's the smallest thing, and it nearly finishes me.

Then Dakota sets down her fork and wipes her hands and says, low, "Okay. I'm gonna say it."

The table goes quiet. Even Braxton, like he knows.

"The investigator won't stop." Her jaw is tight. "I've called him off four times. Told him the family's moved on, told him to drop it, told him I don't need him anymore. He won't. He says—" she glances around, drops her voice further, "—he says he found a discrepancy in the timeline he can't let go of. That the story of where Mom went doesn't hold up. And he's right, it doesn't hold up, because it's not true, because we all know exactly where she⁠—"

She stops. Breathes. "He's going to keep pulling until he finds something. And we all know what's out there to find."

Nobody says the word. We don't have to.

It sits in the middle of the table next to the syrup, that shallow patch of ground out past Big Spring, and every one of us can see it.

Grace speaks up then, quiet, rocking Braxton without looking down at him. "I've gone back and forth on this more times than I can count," she says. "Part of me wants it all out. The truth, finally, no more secrets, let the law sort it and let the chips fall. I'm so tired of what the lie's already cost us."

She looks at her sons, then at each of us. "But then I look at them. I think about Waylon and Braxton growing up with their granddad in prison, and Marlena too, the whole family torn up in the papers, everybody in three counties knowing our business. And I think about Mom."

Her voice thins.

"She died a long time before her body went into the ground. She wasn’t the woman who raised us. She lost herself when Pops moved on. She let it consume her. Putting Dad in prison doesn't give her back. It just makes a second tragedy out of the first one."

She swallows. "So I'm in. God help me, I'm in. We bury it."

"So here's where I'm at," Dakota goes on, and her voice shakes just slightly, "and I hate it. I want you all to know I hate it so much I could scream. But I've been up every night for two weeks turning it over, and there's only one way this ends that doesn't end with Dad in prison."

"We lie to him," Grace says quietly.

"We lie to him." Dakota nods. "I give him a story so complete he's got no thread left to pull. I tell him I found her myself. I made contact. She's alive, she's fine, she was out of the country the whole time, Mexico, someplace, somewhere with bad cell service and no reason to call home, and she doesn't want to be found, and the family's made peace with it, and the case is closed. Final payment, thank you for your service, we're done."

Shiver's voice comes off the phone, heavy. "You think he'll buy it?"

"He'll buy it if I sell it right. He wants to close it too, deep down. Nobody wants to be the man who kept digging on a family that asked him to stop."

Dakota's eyes come up, and they land on me, and there's something raw in them. "But I need us all agreed. Because if we do this, we're—" She can't finish it.

"We're doing what Dad did," I say.

It comes out of me before I can stop it, and the table looks at me, and I hold Dakota's eyes because somebody has to say it out loud.

"We're doing exactly what Dad did," I say again, quieter.

"We're burying it. We're lying to protect the people we love. Every ounce of the hate we've been carrying for him this whole time, for covering it up, for keeping the secret, and we're about to pick up that same shovel."

My throat's tight. "I'm not saying don't. I'm saying let's at least be honest with each other about what we're becoming, because I don't think I can stand one more lie in this family that we don't at least tell each other the truth about first."

The silence stretches.

And then Dakota—Dakota, who hasn't looked at me with anything but stone in months— lets out a broken little breath and says, "God. You sound just like him. The good parts of him."

She scrubs a hand under her eyes. "You're right. That's exactly what we're doing. And I've spent months hating him for it and hating—" She stops. Looks at me.

Something in her face finally, finally cracks all the way open. "Hating you. For having her face. For being the proof of what he did. And you didn't do a single thing except get born to the wrong people, and I took it out on you because you were safer to hate than he was."

"Dakota."

"No, let me—" She holds up a hand, and her eyes are streaming now, silent and furious at herself.

"I owe you this, and I've owed it for months. I'm sorry, Presley. What we did to you, freezing you out, treating you like you killed our mother—you lost as much as we did that day. You found out your whole life was a lie same as us. And you lost your sisters on top of it, and that part's on me and Grace, and it wasn't fair, and I'm sorry."

Grace's hand finds mine under the table.

And across a diner booth loaded with waffles going cold, my sister Dakota looks at me and stops being a stranger.

"I don't know how to fix it fast," she says, wiping her face. "I'm still—I'm a mess, I'm angry all the time, I'm not gonna be normal overnight. But I don't want you frozen out anymore. I want my sister back. If you'll still have us after how we've been."

"Are you kidding?" My own face is wet now. "Dakota, I've been dying out here. Yes. God, yes."

Braxton picks that exact moment to let out a squawk, breaking us all open into wet laughter, and Shiver's voice comes off the phone roughly, "Y'all are cryin' in a diner without me. This is exactly why I hate bein' the one on the phone."

Grace hands me the baby without asking.

She just passes him across the table into my arms, warm and furious and impossibly small.

It's the first time she's let me hold him outside a hospital room, and I know exactly what she's saying by doing it.

Waylon picks up his little plastic fork and chows down on more food, all while we’re emotional.

I hold my nephew against my chest and he settles, the way babies do when there's nowhere left to fall.

Dakota watches me do it with something soft and broken open on her face.

For one suspended minute the three of us are just sisters at a table with a baby and a toddler, and the dead woman, the grave, and the men on the run are all a hundred miles away.

I want to freeze it here.

This exact minute.

Before we do what turns us into our father.

But minutes don't freeze, and Braxton starts rooting at my shirt, looking for something I can't give him.

Grace takes him back to nurse while Waylon stays with us, and the warmth drains out of the booth by degrees as we all remember why we came.

We pull ourselves together over cold hash browns, and then it's time, and we all know it's time.

Dakota picks up her phone, takes Shiver off speaker, and stands.

"I'm gonna go do it now," she says. "Before I lose my nerve. Y'all—just—be here when I get back."

She walks out to the diner lot, and through the window we watch her.

She stands by her truck in the morning sun with the phone to her ear, and we can't hear a word, but we can see all of it.

The way she squares her shoulders, the way she starts talking with her free hand moving, the way she nods at whatever he's saying, wipes her eyes once, laughs at something, a real-sounding laugh she's pulling up from nowhere to sell it.

My sister is out there in a gravel lot lying through her teeth to save our father, my mother, and four men who buried a body, and doing it so well it breaks my heart.

Grace and I don't talk.

We only watch her, Grace's hand still in mine, Braxton snuffling between us, Waylon still chowing down on food, and I think about how strange it is that the worst thing our family ever did is what's finally pulling us back together.

Through the glass, Dakota goes still. Listens a long moment.

And then she nods, once, hard, and lowers the phone and just stands there a second with her back to us.

When she turns around and walks back toward the diner, her face is wrecked and lighter all at once, and I know before she says it.

"It's done." She drops into the booth and puts her face in her hands a second, then comes up. "He bought it. All of it. Said—" a shaky laugh, "—said he was glad it turned out to be nothing sinister, that most of his cases don't end happy. Wished me well. Closed the file."

She exhales like she's been holding it for as long as she’s been mad at me. "It's done. He's gone. He's not looking anymore."

Nobody cheers.

It's not that kind of win.

But Grace reaches across and squeezes her hand, and Shiver's voice off the phone says quietly, "You did good, Dakota. You protected this family. Mom would—" he stops. "She'd understand. Whatever else, she'd understand us kids lookin' out for each other."

We sit with it a minute, the four of us, with what we just became, keepers of the same secret that broke us.

I don't feel clean.

I don't think any of us do.

But I feel, for the first time in months, like I'm on the inside of my family instead of frozen out of it—even if the price of the ticket was picking up the shovel.

We linger over the wreckage of breakfast until Braxton's fussing turns serious and Grace has to go. Waylon is an easy little guy, as happy as can be.

There are hugs in the parking lot that would've been unimaginable a month ago, Dakota holding on to me a beat longer than I expect and muttering, "I'll call you, I mean it," and then they're gone, and I'm standing in the diner lot in the full morning light feeling scraped out and stitched back together at the same time.

I go back inside before I leave.

"Can I get a to-go order?" I ask the waitress. "Two of the big breakfasts. Waffles, sausage, the works. And a short stack with extra syrup for a picky nine-year-old."

Because Thunder's still getting around slowly in the mornings, the hip at its worst before he's moved on it, and Raine's a bear before school.

It'd be a kindness to drop breakfast by so neither of them has to cook.

That's what I tell myself.

The truth is bigger and I carry it out to the truck with the warm styrofoam boxes.

The truth is that an hour ago I sat in a booth and helped my family bury the last thread that could've sent Thunder to prison.

I did it without a single second of hesitation, and part of the reason my hands were so steady is that every time I pictured that investigator finding what's out past Big Spring, I didn't just see my father in cuffs.

I saw Thunder.

I saw Raine growing up visiting her daddy through glass.

I chose him.

Again.

In a diner booth, quiet, without anyone knowing what I was choosing.

And now I'm bringing him waffles like it's nothing, like I'm only a girl being sweet to a banged-up man and his kid, when the truth is I'd bury a body myself before I'd let anyone take either one of them from me.

I drive to the back of the property with breakfast going cold on the seat.

Today I protected the people I love, and I got my sister back over cold waffles, and I'm bringing the man I love and his little girl a hot breakfast on a hard morning.

Today the dark stayed buried.

I'll take the day.

I've learned to take the days.

Thunder opens the door before I knock, hair a mess, hip stiff, and his whole tired face changes when he sees the boxes in my arms.

Raine shrieks, "Miss Presley bought breakfast!" from somewhere inside.

I step into the warmth and the noise of the only place that's felt like home all year.

Nobody in this cabin knows what I did this morning.

That's the deal now. That's who I am now.

A girl with a family stitched back together on one side and a body buried on the other, standing right in the middle, holding it all together with both hands.

Just like my father.

I set the waffles on the table and kiss Raine's head and let Thunder pull me in against his side, and I don't say a word about any of it.

I'm getting so good at not saying a word.

CHAPTER TWELVE

Thunder

My daughter has been conducting an investigation, and this morning she presents her findings. "Daddy."

Raine sits across from me at breakfast with the serious face she gets when she's been thinking hard about something, cereal spoon paused halfway. "I found four hair ties that aren't mine. And they're not Grandma's because Grandma doesn't wear the little clear ones. And there's a girl toothbrush in the bathroom that's purple. And the coffee creamer in the fridge is the vanilla kind and you drink yours black."

I set my cup down real careful. "Is that so?"

"Mm-hm."

She takes a bite, chews, watches me with those dark eyes that don't miss a thing, my eyes in her face. "And Miss Presley's truck is here a lot. Early. Like before-school early."

She lets that hang there like a little prosecutor. "So."

"So," I say.

"So is Miss Presley your girlfriend or what?"

I've faced down armed men with less of a dry mouth.

There's a whole calculation a man does in a half-second like this—how much a nine-year-old can hold, how much of the truth is safe, how much a slip at school could cost when the whole thing's supposed to be a secret.

But I've never once lied to Raine, not the real kind of lie, and I'm not about to start over a hair tie.

"Would that bother you?" I ask her. "If she was?"

Raine considers this with the gravity of a Supreme Court justice.

"No," she decides. "I like her. She helps me with my cow project and she doesn't do the fake voice grown-ups do. And she makes you not sad."

She points her spoon at me.

"But if she's your girlfriend, she should come to my birthday, and also you can't be weird about it."

"I'm never weird."

"Daddy. You're a little weird."

She goes back to her cereal, case closed, the whole earth-shaking matter settled to her satisfaction. "You don't have to tell me if it's a secret. I'm really good at secrets. I never told anybody about the window."

"What window?"

"Exactly," she says, and I decide not to pull that thread before nine in the morning.

Mama Lou comes for her at noon, because Saturday's their day and has been Raine's whole life.

The two of them baking, running errands, or watching their shows, and my mother gives me a look on the porch that says she's done her own investigating and reached her own conclusions and is choosing, for now, to keep them to herself.

"You look good, son," is all she says, Raine's overnight bag over her shoulder. "Rested. Haven't seen that on you in a long while."

"Sleepin' better."

"Mm." She pats my cheek like I'm still ten. "Sleep. Sure. That's what we're callin' it."

And she's gone down the steps before I can say anything, cackling to herself, Raine already in the car hollering about what kind of pie they're making.

The cabin goes quiet behind them.

And I stand on my porch on a golden Saturday afternoon with the whole place to myself and a woman two cabins over that I get to go find, and I think a man could get used to this.

A man could get downright careless about how good this is.

I already have, if I'm honest. We both have.

Her hair ties are in my bathroom, her creamer's in my fridge, and my kid's running a detective agency, and not one of us has been half as careful lately as we were in the spring.

Can't bring myself to care today.

Today's too good.

* * *

I find her in the main barn, where I figured, because Presley at loose ends on a Saturday means Presley working.

She's got the big sliding door open to the afternoon light and a folding table set up in the alley with her laptop and a mess of papers spread out.

EPD sheets, breeding charts, and a herd book gone soft at the corners.

She's chewing the end of a pen with her boots up on a hay bale and her brow furrowed at a spreadsheet.

She's so beautiful concentrating that I stand in the door a second just to look at her before she knows I'm there.

"I can feel you staring," she says without looking up.

"Can't help it. You're a sight." I roll the side-by-side slowly, the bed of it loaded with what I've hauled out. "Figured you skipped lunch again. You always skip lunch when you're deep in numbers."

That gets her to look up, and her whole face changes when she sees what I've brought.

Because I didn't bring her a sandwich.

I brought the good cooler and the folding chairs and the whole spread—cold chicken and potato salad, a couple of Mama Lou's leftover biscuits, two beers sweating in the ice, and the little battery lantern because the light'll go before we're done.

"Thunder." She's half laughing. "Did you bring me on a date? To the barn?"

"Brought supper to a woman who forgets to eat." I start unloading, ignoring the way my hip complains about the twisting. "If it turns into a date, that's on you."

We eat in the barn alley with the door open to the dying light, sitting in two folding chairs with the cooler between us for a table, and it's the best meal I've had in a month even though it's leftovers off paper plates.

She tells me about the numbers—which cows are throwing the best calves, which bull she wants to bring in next season, the paint mare she's got her eye on—and I actually follow it, because I ran stock my whole life before the club took the front seat, and there's a particular pleasure in watching a woman be that good at something.

She knows her animals.

She knows the science behind the animals.

She lights up talking about it in a way she doesn't light up about much else, and I could listen to it all night.

"You're doing that thing again," she says, catching me.

"What thing?"

"Looking at me like I hung the moon because I explained heritability estimates."

"Maybe you did." I take a pull of my beer. "Prettiest anybody ever made cattle genetics sound, I'll tell you that."

She throws a biscuit at me.

I catch it and eat it, and she laughs, and the sound of it goes through me warm.

"This is nice," she says after a minute, quieter, looking out the open door at the last of the daylight going pink over the pasture.

"I don't think I've just... sat. In weeks. Months, maybe. There's always a fire to put out. A cow to doctor, a sister to worry about, a secret to keep." She tips her head back against the chair. "I forgot you're allowed to just eat cold chicken in a barn with somebody and not be running from anything."

"That's the whole idea." I reach over and tuck a loose strand of hair behind her ear. "You spend so much of your life takin' care of everybody else, Presley. The herd, your sisters, my kid, me. Somebody ought to bring you supper once in a while and make you sit down for it."

She catches my hand before I can pull it back, turns her face into my palm, presses a kiss there.

"Nobody ever has," she says against my skin.

"Before you. Not once."

And that hits me somewhere deep, because I know it's true.

She was raised by a good man who loved her, but he's gone now, and she came into this family a grown woman with nobody whose whole job was just her.

Well.

She's got somebody now.

The light goes gold, then blue, and I click on the little lantern, and somewhere in there the easy quiet turns into something with more weight to it.

She's watching me rub my hip without meaning to, the way I do at the end of a day.

"How is it?" she asks. "Really. Not the answer you give the club."

I think about dodging.

Then I don't, because that's the deal with her now, the whole point of her.

"Better," I say. "Real slow, but better. PT's helping. I can get through most of a day now without it puttin' me on the ground." I flex the leg out, feel the fragment pull. "But I want to ride, Presley. Not the bike, I'm back on the bike. A horse. I haven't been up on a horse since before the bunkhouse and I miss it worse than I can say. Grew up on horseback. Feels like a piece of me's just... parked."

"So get back on one."

"Can't yet." And it galls me to say it, but I do. "Doc says the hip's not ready for what a horse asks of it. A green colt spooks, I come off wrong, I could undo everything, maybe worse. So I wait. I hate it, but I have to wait."

I look at her. "Spent my whole life bein' the man who could do anything the club needed, physically. Learnin' to tell my own body no and mean it—that's the hardest work I've done in years."

She reaches over and takes my hand.

"You'll ride again," she says, simple and certain. "You're doing the patient thing now so you get all of it back later. That's not weakness, Thunder. That's the smartest kind of strength there is."

She squeezes. "I'd know. I run a breeding program. Patience is the whole job."

I don't have words for what that does to me, so I do what I do instead of words.

I stand, and I pull her up out of her chair by the hand she's got in mine.

I walk her back into the deeper dark of the barn where the light from the lantern goes soft, and I back her up against a support post and kiss her slow and deep.

She melts into it with a little sound that undoes me every single time.

"Barn," she murmurs against my mouth. "Anybody could⁠—"

"Everybody's at supper. Raine's at Mama Lou's. Nobody's comin' out here." I get a hand in her hair, tip her head back, work my mouth down her throat. "And I've been wantin' to lay you down in the hay since the second I saw you chewin' that pen. Let me have you, rattlesnake. Slow. We got all night."

She stops arguing.

It's different tonight, and we both feel it.

Not the desperate claiming of the tub, not the quiet we had to be on the edge of my bed with Raine down the hall.

This is slow and settled, a man and a woman who've stopped running at each other and started to just... have each other.

I lay her down on a horse blanket over the straw and I take my time undressing her in the lantern light.

I trace the rattlesnake on her ribs with my mouth, my mark on her, and then lower to the script on her back that says she's mine, and she shivers under every pass.

I'm stronger tonight than I've been.

I can hold myself over her now, take more of my own weight, move her how I want her, and there's a deep satisfaction in getting a piece of that back, in being able to cover her body with mine and feel her go soft and open underneath me.

The hip still talks. It always talks.

When I settle between her thighs there's a bright pull of it that I have to breathe through, and she feels me go still and reads it instantly.

"Let me," she starts, moving to shift us.

"No." I press her back down, gently. "I've got it tonight. I want it like this. I want to be the one over you."

I roll my hips and we both groan. "Pain's just along for the ride, darlin'. It doesn't get a vote when you're lookin' at me like that."

I take her slow and deep on a horse blanket in my own barn while the last light dies outside.

One hand laced with hers up over her head, the other under the small of her back arching her up into me, and I watch her whole face the entire time because I can, because it's mine now, because she gave it to me.

There's a strength coming back to me tonight that I've been missing since the spring, and I feel it in every place our bodies meet.

Months ago I couldn't have held this position, couldn't have taken my own weight on the bad leg long enough to do this right.

Tonight I can.

Tonight I set the pace and hold it, moving in her deep and unhurried, feeling her come apart in slow degrees under hands that finally do what I tell them again.

The hip burns the whole time, a hot wire down my left side with every stroke, and I ride it the way I've learned to ride all of it now, breathing through the worst of it, refusing to let it take this from me.

Some things are worth the pain. This is at the top of a short list.

"I love you," she says, wrecked, at the edge of it. "God, Thunder, I love you⁠—"

"I know it." I press my forehead to hers. "I know you do. Feel it every time you look at me."

My voice goes rough. "Let go, Presley. I've got you. Always got you."

She comes apart under me with my name on her lips, and I follow her over a few strokes later, buried deep.

Her legs locked around me and her arms around my neck and the hip screaming and none of it mattering at all, because this—her, here, mine, the whole warm weight of her wrapped around me in the straw—this is the closest thing to peace I've ever known.

After, we lie tangled up on the blanket, sweat cooling, her head on my chest right over the heartbeat that's hers now whether she knows it or not.

"We should get dressed," she says, not moving.

"Should."

"Somebody really could come out here."

"Yeah, they could."

I don't move either.

I stroke her hair and stare up at the dark rafters, holding the best thing I've ever had against my side and let myself, for one more minute, be a man with everything.

It's later, driving her back to her cabin on the side-by-side under a sky gone thick with stars, that the other thing settles back onto me.

Because as good as tonight was, as far as we've come, there's a piece of me that never fully stands down, and it's the piece that remembers what came back on that last run.

The men still won't say much about it.

But I know how Rogue's face goes when he thinks nobody's watching, and I know we didn't find what we went looking for, and I know the Firm is still out there somewhere past the good, patient, building their book, waiting on a season of their own choosing.

We handled the investigator. The family's whole.

My hip's mending.

But that silver-truck feeling never fully left, and a man who's survived as long as I have learns not to argue with it.

I drop her at her door and kiss her long enough that she laughs and pushes me off, and I watch her light come on inside, and I ride home under all those stars telling myself what men like me always tell ourselves.

That we've earned a little peace.

That the worst is behind us.

That we get to keep this.

I almost believe it, too.

That's the trouble with happiness.

It makes you careless.

It makes you stop watching the dark quite as hard as you should.

And the dark, in my experience, has never once failed to notice.

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

Presley

Carelessness never announces itself.

You never feel it happening.

You don't notice the exact day you stop parking your truck around back.

You don't clock the moment you quit checking the yard before you kiss him.

It creeps up an inch at a time, all that happiness making you soft, slow and sure.

Until one ordinary afternoon you're standing in the gap between the horse barn and the equipment shed with Thunder's hands on your face and his mouth on yours in the wide-open daylight.

Not a wall or a door between you and the whole ranch, because you've forgotten to be afraid.

For months I did everything right.

I parked where nobody looked.

I left before dawn.

I checked windows and doorways and the tree line like a woman with a price on her head, because in a way I had one, because us getting caught meant my entire family would come apart for a second time.

And then the family stitched itself back together, and the investigator went away, and my sisters started answering my texts.

Somewhere in all that relief I let my guard down one notch at a time until there wasn't any guard left at all.

Happiness did what fear never could.

It made me stupid.

That's how it gets you.

That's how it gets us.

It starts sweet, is the cruel part.

I've come from the tack room and he's come from the shop.

We meet in the middle the way we do a dozen times a day now, and he catches my wrist and reels me in.

I go, laughing, because Raine's at Mama Lou's and the afternoon's soft and gold, and there's nobody around.

"You've got hay in your hair," he says, and picks it out, and then he doesn't let go.

His hand slides to my jaw, that big warm palm cupping the side of my face the way it does when he's about to kiss me like he means it.

I tip up into him, and he kisses me slow and deep right there in the open, one hand in my hair and the other dropping to my waist, and I melt into him the way I always do.

His hand at my waist rucks my shirt up.

Just an inch.

Just enough that the warm air hits the small of my back, the fresh ink there barely healed.

I don't think anything of it.

I've got my arms up around his neck and my whole self leaned into the man I love and I am, for one more second, completely happy.

And then I hear my father's voice, and the bottom drops out of the world. "What in the hell?"

We spring apart like the ground's gone electric.

My whole body floods cold, then hot, a sick lurch of adrenaline that leaves my hands shaking and my ears ringing and my heart trying to climb up out of my throat.

I yank my shirt down on pure reflex, too late, always too late.

Everything slows down the way it does in a wreck, that awful stretched-out second where you can see exactly what's coming and you can't do one single thing to stop it.

There's a roaring in my ears.

The gold afternoon that felt like a gift thirty seconds ago has turned into a spotlight, and we're standing dead center in it, with no wall, no door, and no dark to duck into.

Nothing between us and the man at the mouth of the gap but twenty feet of open dirt.

Pops’ standing there, and I don't know how long he's been there.

It doesn't matter, because his eyes aren't on my face.

They're on my back.

On the strip of skin my rucked-up shirt left bare, on the black script he'd have caught before I could yank the hem down.

Property of Thunder.

He read it.

I watch him read it, watch the words hit my father's face and change everything behind his eyes.

"Pops—" My hand's already out, reaching, my heart slamming so hard I taste it. "Pops, wait⁠—"

But he's not looking at me anymore.

He's looking at Thunder.

And I've seen my father angry.

I've seen him cold, seen him deadly, heard the stories about what Phantom Lyle is capable of when somebody crosses the club.

But I have never once seen what's on his face right now, this white-lipped, wild-eyed, betrayed-to-the-bone fury, and it's not aimed at me.

Every ounce of it is aimed at his Sergeant at Arms.

"Harlan." Thunder's voice is low, steady, both hands coming up open and easy, the voice he uses to gentle a spooked animal. "Let's you and me walk somewhere and talk."

"Talk." Pops says it like the word tastes foul. He crosses the distance between them slowly, and there's nothing slow about what's underneath it. "You want to talk to me now. That's rich, Thunder. That's real rich, comin' from you."

"Pops, this is on me too, it's not just—" I try to step between them and my father's arm comes up, not touching me, just barring me back, his eyes never leaving Thunder's face.

"Stay out of this a second, baby. I'll get to you." Quiet. Almost gentle to me, even now. Then, to Thunder, every bit of gentleness gone. "My sergeant at arms. My sword. The man I trust with—" His jaw works, and he drops his voice low and lethal, because even furious he doesn't say the buried things out loud in the open.

"You know exactly what I trust you with. Better than any man breathin'. And you've been puttin' your hands on my daughter behind my back."

"Yes." Thunder doesn't flinch. Doesn't dodge. Takes it standing. "I have."

"How long?"

"Since the spring."

The number hits my father like a fist and I see him absorb it, the months of it, all the Sunday suppers and church meetings and shared cups of coffee, every one of them with this secret sitting underneath.

"The spring." Pops’ chest is heaving now. "Months. Months of sittin' at my table, breakin' bread at my house, lookin' me in the eye in church, and the whole time you're—" He can't even finish it.

He scrubs a hand down his face and when it comes away his eyes are bright and terrible. "You looked me in the eye, Thunder. Every week. And you lied. Not once. Over and over, for months, you chose the lie."

"I did." Thunder's voice doesn't waver but I can see how it’s affecting him, the set of his shoulders, the way his hands stay open at his sides. "And I'll answer for it however you need me to. But you point that at me, Harlan. Not at her. This was my call as much as⁠—"

"Don't."

Phantom's on him then, fast for a big man, one hand fisting in the front of Thunder's cut, shoving him back into the equipment shed wall hard enough to rattle the tin.

"Don't you tell me where to point."

"Pops, stop—" I grab his arm and he doesn't even feel me.

Thunder could put him down.

That's what guts me, watching it.

Thunder is bigger, and even hurt he's the most dangerous man on this ranch.

He could break my father's hold and drop him in the dirt without half trying.

He doesn't.

He takes it.

He lets Pops slam him into the wall and fist his cut, getting right up in his face.

He keeps his hands open and down and his eyes level, because this is his president, and by every law of the world they both live in, Thunder's the one in the wrong.

And I can't stand it, watching the man I love hold still and let another man rattle him against a wall.

Every muscle in me wants to throw myself between them.

I've got my hands on my father's arm and I might as well be pulling on a fence post for all the good it does.

Thunder catches my eye over Pops’ shoulder, one flick, and there's a warning in it, a plea, a don't, and I understand what he's telling me even as it kills me.

He needs me to let this happen.

He needs to give Pops this, the shove and the fury and the right to it, because it's the only apology the club's world lets a man make with his body.

So, I let go of my father's arm.

I stand there with my fists clenched so hard my nails bite my palms and I let them have it out, and it's the hardest thing I've done since the day I learned what my mother did.

"You're an officer at my table," Phantom says, low and shaking, their faces inches apart. "You took an oath. You of all of 'em. And you decided my own daughter was somethin' you could just take and not tell me. Like I don't matter. Like twenty years of brotherhood buys me nothin'."

"It was never that."

"Then what was it!" It rips out of him, and for a second under the rage there's something that looks horribly like hurt. "What was it, if not you deciding I couldn't be trusted with the truth about my own girl?"

"Because I told him not to." My voice cracks out of me before I can think, and finally, finally, my father's head turns, his hand still fisted in Thunder's cut. "It was me, Pops."

I'm shaking everywhere, but I get it out. "I'm the one who wanted it secret. I begged him to keep it quiet. I was scared, and my family had just blown apart, and I couldn't—I couldn't take one more thing detonating, so I made him promise. If you're gonna be furious at somebody for the secret, then be furious at me, because the secret was mine before it was ever his."

It works, at least halfway.

His hand loosens on Thunder's cut.

He steps back, breathing hard, and turns to face me full on, and now I'm the one getting the whole weight of that stare, and God, it's so much worse aimed at me.

"You," he says, and his voice has changed, gone rough and wounded in a way that scares me more than the yelling.

"You kept this from me too."

"I—yes. Yes, I did."

"After everything." He shakes his head slowly. "After what secrets did to this family. After what my secret did to your sisters, to Shiver, to you—you watched all of it, you lived it, you know better than anybody in this world what a secret costs when it finally comes up. And you looked me in the eye at Sunday supper and kept one of your own."

And there it is.

What's actually breaking him.

Not the club, not Thunder's hands on me, not even the ink.

That I did to him the exact thing he did to us.

I look at my father.

Really look at him for the first time since he came around that corner, and under the fury I finally see the rest of it.

The lines around his eyes are deeper than they were in the spring.

His hands aren't quite steady where they hang at his sides.

This isn't a man protecting his daughter's honor or defending his club's chain of command.

This is a man who spent two years watching one buried secret rot his family from the inside, who finally got most of his kids back in the same room, who thought the worst was behind him.

And here I am, the daughter he took in late and tried the hardest to make room for, showing him the rot got into me too.

That I learned the family trade after all.

Keeping things in the dark.

Looking him in the eye and letting him believe a lie because it was easier than the truth.

I want to tell him it wasn't like that.

I want to tell him a hundred things.

And the sheer helpless need to make him understand shoves the first words up out of me before I've thought them through.

"That's not fair." My voice is climbing now, wet and unsteady. "Pops, that's not—the situations aren't the same, you can't⁠—"

"Aren't they?"

"No! God, no, they're not, and if you'd just let me⁠—"

"You stood in my kitchen." He's not shouting now. Somehow the quiet is worse. "Not two months ago. And you let me go on thinkin' I knew what was happenin' in my own family, on my own ranch, with my own daughter, and the whole time you and my sergeant at arms were⁠—"

"Because I knew you'd do this!" I throw a hand at the two of them, at Thunder pinned a second ago against the shed, at all of it. "This exact thing, Pops, this is why, because the second you found out you'd⁠—"

"I'd what, Presley." His eyes are blazing. "Say it. What was I gonna do that was so terrible it was worth lyin' to my face for half a year?"

And I open my mouth to tell him.

To finally say all of it, everything that's been building in me for months, every ounce of the anger and the grief and the terrible unfairness of being the one who lost the most and got blamed the worst.

But he doesn't let me.

"No," he says, cutting clean through whatever I was about to become. "No. I don't want to hear it right now, because right now I'm lookin' at my youngest, the one who came to this family late and got hurt worst of all, and I'm realizin' she looked me dead in the eye and decided I was just one more person she couldn't trust. That's what I've got. That's what the both of you left me holdin'."

His voice breaks on the last word, actually breaks, and my father, my hard, deadly, unshakeable father, turns away from me so I won't see his face.

And every word I had lined up dies in my throat.

The heat drains out of me all at once and leaves something hollow and awful behind.

My eyes are burning, spilling over before I can stop them, and there's a pressure building behind my ribs so hard I can barely pull a breath around it.

I came into this braced to fight him, and instead I'm watching the strongest man I know stand in the dirt with his back to me like I put a knife in him.

"Pops." It comes out of me wrecked, barely a sound. "Pops, please, let me just⁠—"

"Not now." He doesn't turn around. "I can't look at either one of you right now."

"But you're not being—if you'd only listen for one second, you'd⁠—"

"I said not now, Presley." And it hits so heavy, so final, that whatever I was building toward collapses in my chest before I can get it out.

My throat closes.

My hands won't stop shaking.

Every argument I've been stacking up for months, every true and furious thing I've been dying to say to him, jams in behind my teeth and won't come, because he won't turn around, and he won't listen, and I'm crying too hard now to force it.

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

Thunder

Every second of my life the club taught me to stand still and take it, and I've been standing still and taking it since the second Phantom came around that corner.

You don't fight your president.

You don't raise a hand to the man who gave you your patch, not when he's in the right, and he's in the right, because I did what he's accusing me of.

I put my hands on his daughter and I kept it from him for a whole season, and by every law I've lived by for fifteen years, whatever he wants to do to me for that, I've got coming.

So, I took the shove.

Took the fist in my cut and the wall against my back and the worst words a brother can say to a brother.

I kept my hands open and my mouth shut, because that's the price and I'll pay it.

Something in me that's been holding still since the spring just quits holding.

Because I'll take a beating.

I'll take his fury and his fists and lose my seat at his table.

I will not stand here and watch her take it for me.

"No." It comes out of me low and hard.

Both of them turn, because I haven't said more than five words this whole time and now I'm stepping up out of the spot I've been rooted in. "That's not how this goes."

Moving up beside her, close, my shoulder to hers, I look my president dead in the eye for the first time since he caught us.

"She's not payin’ the price for this, Prez. Not one ounce of it. You want somebody to be furious at, you're lookin' at him. I'm the one with years on her. I'm the officer who sat at your table and broke faith with you. Any promise got made, I'm the one who should've known better than to make it. You put every bit of it on me."

"Thunder, don't—" Presley grabs my arm. "I'm not lettin' you take this."

I don't look away from Phantom when I say it. "Not this. Not for me."

And Phantom, who a minute ago couldn't look at either one of us, looks at me now, really looks, and the fury finds a new channel.

"You want it all on you." His voice has dropped, gone quiet and dangerous. "Fine. Let's put it on you. Let's talk about what you did."

"Harlan—"

"You marked her." The words land flat and terrible in the space between us, and beside me Presley goes rigid. "I saw it."

His jaw is working. "On her back. Your name. Property of Thunder, inked into my daughter's skin like she's a bike or a bar stool, permanent, forever, and you did it behind my back and never said a word." His voice cracks down the middle. "That's not a man sneakin' around with a girl, Thunder. A man sneakin' around, that I could understand, God help me, I was young once. But you claimed her. In ink. The most permanent thing our world's got. You put the club's own language on her body and you didn't have the decency to look me in the eye and tell me first."

And there it is, the wound under all the rest of it.

Not that I touched her.

That I claimed her like a brother claims an old lady, made it permanent and real and forever, and cut him out of the one moment a father's supposed to get.

"You're right," I tell him, because he is."About all of it. I'd have wanted to be told too."

"Don't you dare agree with me right now⁠—"

"But you're wrong about one thing." I hold his eyes. "You keep sayin' I claimed her. Like she's somethin' that got done to, somethin' with no say in it. Harlan, that woman standin' next to me walked into a tattoo shop with her chin up and told the man what she wanted and where. I tried to talk her out of the Property of. I did. I told her it was too much, too permanent, that you'd take it as a declaration of war."

I let that sit. "She got it anyway. Because she wanted it. Your daughter has more spine than the whole clubhouse put together, and you're standin' here talkin' like she's a girl I stole. She's not. She's the strongest person either of us knows, and she made a choice, and the choice was me."

Phantom's eyes cut to her.

And Presley, God love her, lifts her chin and proves every word of it.

"He's telling the truth," she says, and her voice isn't shaking anymore. "I chose it. All of it. The tattoo, the secret, him. And you want to stand here and be furious about a secret, Pops? You? You want to talk to me about keeping something from the people you love?"

"Presley." Low. A warning.

"No. You had your turn, now I'm having mine." She steps forward, and there's something coming up in her now that I've never seen. All that grief and fury she swallowed a minute ago rising back up with nowhere left to go. "Your secret was a body, Pops. Mine is that I fell in love. You want to compare? Let's compare. You buried a woman. You let my sisters grieve a mother who abandoned them for two years, when you knew the whole time she was in the ground. You let Shiver blame himself. You let Dakota lose her mind hiring investigators. And me⁠—"

Her voice breaks and climbs right through the break.

"Your secret cost me my whole family. It cost me my sisters looking at me like I killed their mother. I was a stranger who didn’t even go to supper because I was avoiding everything. I was talking to Mitch's ashes because there wasn't a living soul who'd have me. Your secret did that. And you've got the nerve to stand in this yard and be destroyed because I didn't tell you I'm happy?"

Something happens to a man when he watches the woman he loves finally put down a weight she's been hauling for far too long.

I've seen Presley strong before.

I've seen her run a whole breeding program on no sleep, how she was with her laboring sister to the hospital encouraging her, take a needle to the ribs without a sound.

But I've never seen this, never seen her stand toe to toe with the most feared man in three counties and hand him back every ounce of what he laid on her.

I have to plant my boots to keep from pulling her into my side right there, because God, she's magnificent, and she's mine, and her father is finally, finally hearing her.

I don't say a word.

This part's hers.

All I do is move a half step closer so she can feel me at her shoulder, so she knows without looking that whatever she throws down, I'm standing on it with her, and her chin comes up that last defiant inch when she feels me there.

Nobody says anything.

The whole ranch has gone dead quiet around us, that thick summer silence with nothing in it but a windmill turning somewhere off past the barns, and Presley's words go into her father one by one like nails.

Because she's right. She's dead right, and every man standing in this gap knows it.

It finally sinks in for him.

I've spent almost fifteen years learning to read Harlan Lyle, the small tells under the hard face, and this one hits him somewhere he can't armor.

His jaw unclenches.

Something goes loose and stricken around his eyes.

For just a second the fury drops clean off him and what's left underneath is a tired man in his fifties who did a terrible thing for what he told himself were good reasons, hearing his youngest daughter lay out the bill.

He opens his mouth.

Nothing comes.

Because there's no answer to it.

There's no version of I did it to protect the family that holds up when his daughter's standing in front of him listing everything the protection cost.

He taught his kids that secrets keep the people you love safe, and every one of them learned the opposite the hard way, and now here we all are.

"Presley," he finally says, and his voice is wrecked. "You don't understand what I was tryin' to⁠—"

"I understand better than anybody." She's crying now, but her voice stays level. "That's the whole issue. I understand exactly why you did it, because I just spent half a year doing the same thing. That's what you gave me, Pops. That's my inheritance. I learned to lie to the people I love to keep them safe, and I learned it from you."

That does it.

Not the anger.

The truth.

Phantom takes a step back like she shoved him, and for one raw second his face just crumples, and I think, there it is, that's the road back, he heard her⁠—

And then the armor slams down.

Because Harlan Lyle doesn't fall apart in a ranch yard in front of his sergeant at arms, not even now, not even wrecked.

He pulls it all back in behind that hard face and squares his shoulders and I know we've lost him for today, that whatever just cracked open is going to scab over before he lets any of us see it work.

"I can't do this right now." His voice comes out flat and scraped raw. "I can't stand here and look at the both of you and think straight.

I need—" He shakes his head. "I need to not be here."

He turns to go.

Gets a few steps away and stops.

He doesn't turn all the way around.

Just his head, just enough to throw it over his shoulder, and it's aimed at me. "Almost fifteen years, Thunder."

Quiet. No heat left in it, which is somehow worse than the yelling.

"You've been my sword for those years. There's not a man alive I trusted more."

"I know it," I say.

"I'd have told you. I wanted to tell you a hundred times. I hated every day I didn't."

"Then why?"

"Because she asked me not to, and she'd already lost everything. I wasn't gonna be one more person who let her down."

His stare doesn't waver and neither does mine. "You'd have done the same for a woman you loved. You did do the same. That's the whole damn problem in this family, Harlan. We're all willin' to burn ourselves down to protect our women, and not one of us knows how to just tell the truth and trust the people we love to survive it."

Something moves behind his eyes.

It's not forgiveness. It's a long way from forgiveness.

But it's not the door slamming either, and after years of reading this man I know the difference.

"We're not done, you and me," he says.

"No, sir. I don't reckon we are."

"But not today." And then, lower, almost too quiet to catch: "Take care of her. Since I'm apparently the last to know she's yours to take care of."

And he walks off across the yard toward the clubhouse, and doesn't look back again.

He leaves me standing in the gap between the barns with the woman we both love coming apart beside me.

She holds it together until his truck starts up somewhere past the shop.

Then she breaks.

It comes out of her all at once, the whole day, every held breath since the spring, and she folds in on herself right there in the dirt with both hands over her face and her shoulders heaving.

The sound she makes goes straight through the middle of me.

I don't say a word. Words are no good for this.

All I can do is get my arms around her and pull her in against my chest and hold on.

She grabs two fistfuls of my shirt and cries into it like something's tearing loose, and I stand there in the open where anybody could see and I don't care, not anymore, because the secret's out and the worst has happened and there's not one thing left to hide.

"I've got you," I tell her into her hair. "I've got you. Come on. Not here."

She lets me walk her to my truck.

I drive her to her cabin because it's closer and because right now she needs walls around her and my body between her and the whole rest of the world.

She cries the whole way there with her hand fisted in mine over the console, and I hold it the entire drive and don't let go once, not to shift, not for anything.

I get her inside.

The door shuts behind us, the two of us finally alone with no yard and no father and no club.

She turns around in the middle of her own living room and looks up at me with her face wrecked, her eyes wet and something else coming up underneath the grief now.

Something with heat in it, something that's been building all through the worst afternoon of both our lives.

"Thunder." My name, raw, half a plea.

"I'm here." Both my hands come up to take her face. "I'm right here, rattlesnake. I'm not goin' anywhere."

And she comes up onto her toes and kisses me like she's drowning.

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

Presley

Kissing him is the first thing all day that doesn't hurt.

Everything else has been a knife.

My father's face when he read the ink.

The sound of his truck pulling away.

The awful stretched-out minutes in the yard with every word I'd saved up jammed useless behind my teeth.

All of it still sits in me, raw and bleeding, and the only thing on this earth that dulls it is Thunder's mouth on mine and his hands framing my face like I'm the one thing left worth holding onto.

So, I kiss him like I'm drowning, because I am, and he's the only air in the room.

"Presley." He pulls back just far enough to get the word out, his forehead against mine, both of us breathing hard. "Talk to me. Tell me what you need."

My hands are still shaking as he lets me go and heads to the door.

Thunder turns the lock. One click, as final as a coffin nail.

I stand in the middle of my own kitchen, arms wrapped around myself, staring at the linoleum like it's got answers.

My throat's raw from crying. From screaming. From every word I hurled at my Pops in that yard, each one landing like a bullet I can't call back.

"Presley." His voice is low. Not a question. A line thrown to someone drowning.

I look up. He's still in the doorway, one shoulder against the frame, watching me the way he watches a horse that's about to bolt—steady, patient, like he'll wait all goddamn night.

"I'm fine," I say.

Neither of us believes it.

He crosses the kitchen in three strides. His hands find my face, rough palms against my jaw, thumbs sweeping under my eyes where mascara's bled down in black rivers.

I don't know when I started crying again. Maybe I never stopped.

"Look at me."

I do.

God help me, I do.

And what I see in his face isn't pity.

It's that same controlled heat that's been there since the first time he put his hands on me.

"I ain't goin' anywhere," he says. Drawl thick as honey, each word deliberate. "You hear me, rattlesnake? None of it changes a goddamn thing between us."

A sound comes out of me. Half laugh, half sob. "You sure about that? Because I'm pretty sure I just got disowned."

"Then he's a fool." His grip tightens just enough. "And you're still mine."

Property of Thunder.

The tattoo throbs on my lower back like it knows.

Fresh ink still scabbing under the bandage, a brand I chose, a secret I wore under my clothes until today.

Until my daddy saw it and the whole world split open.

I grab his shirt. Both fists, knuckles white in the worn cotton. "Then prove it."

Something darkens in his eyes. Not anger. Something hungrier.

"You don't know what you're askin'."

"Thunder—"

His mouth comes down on mine.

Hard. No softness.

His teeth catch my bottom lip and I gasp into it.

He takes the gasp like payment, tongue sliding against mine, tasting the salt of my tears and the copper where I bit through my lip in the yard and didn't notice.

He walks me backward. My hips hit the kitchen counter.

His hand drops from my jaw to my throat—not squeezing, just holding.

A collar. A leash.

My pulse hammers against his palm and he feels it, I know he does, because his mouth curves against mine.

"There she is," he murmurs. "There's my girl."

I want to bite back. I want to match him.

But my hands are shaking too hard to unbutton his shirt, and he sees it, and something in his expression shifts. Tender and ruthless at once.

"Let me," he says. Not a request.

He strips me methodically.

Boots first, tugging them off and setting them aside.

Socks.

Then he stands, lifts my shirt over my head, and I'm bare from the waist up except for the sports bra I threw on this morning when the world was still normal.

He unclasps it with one hand.

My breasts spill free and the cabin air prickles against my nipples, already tight.

His gaze drops. Not leering—checking if I'm still in one piece.

"Arms up," he says.

I raise them. He runs his hands down my sides, slow, palms flat, and I flinch when he brushes the rattlesnake coiled on my left ribs. Still tender. Still healing.

His thumb traces the edge of it. "Mine," he says quietly. Like he's reading the ink aloud.

Then his hand slides lower.

He turns me around, gentle but firm, pressing my stomach against the counter.

I grip the edge.

The laminate's cold against my bare skin.

He unbuttons my jeans, drags them down over my hips with my panties in one pull, and I step out of them.

Naked. In my kitchen. In the late afternoon light slanting through the window, catching dust motes, and I'm shaking.

Not from cold, not from crying anymore.

From the way he's looking at me.

From the way his breathing's gone rough and uneven, the only tell he's got.

"Property of Thunder." He reads it off my lower back, voice thick. His thumb presses the script. I hiss—half pain, half something else. "Goddamn, rattlesnake. You walked around with my name on you for weeks. Let your daddy find it. Let the whole world find it."

"I wasn't hiding anymore," I whisper. "I was done hiding."

"Good." He leans in, mouth against my ear, and his belt buckle's cold through his jeans where it presses my bare ass. "'Cause I'm done bein' careful with you."

I hear the zipper. Hear him shove his jeans down.

Then his hands are on my hips, and he's lifting me onto the counter.

I sit on the edge, legs dangling, and he steps between them.

His shirt's still on. I reach for it but he catches my wrists, pins them behind my back with one hand.

"No. You just hold on."

He kisses my throat. My collarbone.

Takes my nipple in his mouth and sucks hard enough that I arch into him, a moan dragging up from somewhere deep. His teeth graze and I clench around nothing, empty and aching.

"Thunder—please⁠—"

"Tell me what you need."

"You. Just stop fucking making me wait."

He pulls back and looks at me.

Flushed, wrecked, tears drying on my face, sitting naked on my own kitchen counter with my wrists pinned.

I must look like a disaster. He looks at me like I'm the only thing keeping the sky up.

"Wrap your legs around me."

I do. He notches himself against my entrance and I feel the blunt head of him, thick and hot.

My body opens for him because it knows him, knows this, knows the shape and weight of him. He pushes in slow. Too slow. Inch by inch until I'm full and stretched and shaking.

"Christ," he groans. Forehead dropping to my shoulder. "Always so goddamn tight."

I dig my heels into the backs of his thighs. "Move."

He does.

Pulls almost all the way out, then drives back in deep, and the sound I make isn't a word.

It's just need, raw and animalistic.

He sets a rhythm that's not gentle.

Each thrust pushes me back on the counter and I brace my free hand behind me, the other still held captive, and he fucks me like he's trying to exorcise both our demons.

The counter rattles.

A coffee mug slides toward the edge.

Neither of us catches it.

It shatters on the floor and he doesn't stop, doesn't even glance at it.

"That's it," he says, voice gone gravel-rough. "Take it. Take all of it."

I'm close.

The tension coils low in my belly, tightening with every stroke.

He reaches between us. His thumb finds my clit, circles it, and I come apart.

It hits like a thunderclap.

I clench around him and cry out, back bowing, vision going white at the edges.

He fucks me through it, grinding deep, and when I finally stop shaking he pulls out.

"Turn around. Hands on the counter."

I obey on shaking legs.

Bent over, palms flat, and he kicks my feet wider. He enters me from behind and the angle's different—deeper, more punishing—and I feel the tattoo on my lower back stretch as he grips my hips.

"Look at you," he says, thumb tracing the script again. "Mine."

"Thunder—"

"Mine." He thrusts hard. "Even when you tried to stay away." Another thrust, grinding, and I whimper. "Even when you put my name on your skin where anyone could see."

His pace turns ragged.

I feel him losing control—my big, steady, unshakeable man finally fraying at the edges.

His fingers dig into my hips hard enough to bruise and I want it.

Want the marks. Want to carry proof of this night on my body tomorrow when I have to face the wreckage.

"Presley—" His voice breaks on my name.

"Come inside me," I whisper. "I want to feel it."

He shudders.

Buried deep, he breaks—a groan torn from his chest, and I feel him spill hot inside me, pulse after pulse, his forehead pressed between my shoulder blades. His breath comes in harsh, uneven bursts against my skin.

For a long moment, neither of us moves.

Then his arms wrap around me from behind.

He pulls me upright, my back against his chest, and just holds me.

His heart's pounding against my spine.

Mine's still racing.

We stand there in the wreckage of the afternoon.

A broken mug on the floor, my clothes in a pile, his jeans around his ankles, and he holds me like I'm the only solid thing in a world that just fell apart.

"You okay?" he asks finally. Mouth against my hair.

I think about my father's face.

The betrayal. The rage. The way he looked at Thunder like he was a monster, and at me like I was a stranger.

"No," I say. "But I will be."

His arms tighten. "Yeah. You will."

Outside, the sun's going down over the Texas hill country, painting everything gold and red. Like fire. Like a brand.

I watch it through the kitchen window, naked in his arms, and I don't look away.

We head into the bedroom, and the sun goes down.

In my bed, we lie there in the blue dark and let the quiet hold us.

His fingers trace idle up and down my spine, over the script that started all of this, and the exact moment he reaches it he lingers, his thumb moving slow across the letters that spell him out on my skin.

"He's gonna come around," Thunder says after a while. "Your daddy. I know him better than most, and I heard what was under all that yellin'. He's not done with you. Not by a long shot. He's just gotta lick his wounds and get past the part where his pride's involved, and then he's gonna remember the only thing he ever really wanted was for you to be happy."

His arm tightens. "Give him time. He'll find his way back to you. Might take a bit. But he will."

"You think so?"

"I know so. Man doesn't say take care of her to the fella he's decided to hate." His chest rumbles under my ear. "That was him leavin' the door cracked. Trust me. I speak Phantom."

I huff a laugh against his skin, the first one in what feels like a year, and it startles both of us, and he squeezes me tighter for it.

"And if he doesn't?" I ask, quieter, the fear I've carried all day still hanging on by a thread.

"If he stays angry? If I lost him for good today?"

"Then that's on him, not you." His voice goes firm, no give in it.

"You didn't do one thing wrong today except love somebody and be scared to say so. That's not a crime, rattlesnake. That's just bein' human in a family that never learned how to do it out loud."

He tips my chin up so I have to look at him. "But you didn't lose him. I'd stake my patch on it. He's hurt, and he's proud, and he's gonna need a while to sit in it. That's not the same as gone. You of all people oughta know the difference by now. Your sisters froze you out for months and look where you all landed. This family breaks. Then it finds its way back. Every time."

I let that settle into me, and I find I believe it, because he's right — I do know the difference now.

I learned it over cold waffles in a diner. Broken isn't gone. It just takes time and somebody willing to make the first move.

Maybe this time the first move gets to be mine.

We lie there a while longer, not talking, his heartbeat slow and even under my cheek and his hand tracing lazy shapes on my shoulder.

Outside the window, somewhere off across the property a truck door slams and an engine turns over.

Ordinary ranch sounds, the world going on like it didn't just crack down the middle a few hours ago.

I think about my father driving those same roads right now, sitting with what he learned today, and I wait for the panic to come.

It doesn't.

There's just a tired, clean sort of ache where the terror used to live, the feeling of a wound finally open to the air instead of festering under a bandage nobody was allowed to lift.

It hurts.

But it's the kind of hurt that heals, and I'd take a hundred of those over one more day of the other kind.

"You went quiet," Thunder says.

"Good quiet." I press a kiss to his chest, right over the eagle. "Just thinking. I spent so long scared of this day. The day it all came out. And now it's here and it's the worst day I've had in months and I'm lying in your arms feeling almost peaceful, and I can't make the two things fit together."

"They fit fine." His hand stills on my shoulder. "What you were scared of was never the truth comin' out. It was bein' alone when it did." He tips my chin up. "You're not. That's worth noting, rattlesnake. Same storm. But this time you got somebody standin' in it with you."

"Raine'll be back tomorrow," he says, and I hear the smile come into his voice. "And she's gonna take one look at us not hidin' anymore and lose her entire mind. Probably start plannin' the wedding herself. Fair warning, she's already picked out where you're sittin' at her birthday."

"I'm sitting by her, obviously."

"Obviously." He kisses the top of my head. "You're already family to that kid, rattlesnake. Have been since you named the cat. Now the rest of the world just gets to know it too."

Family.

The word lands in the middle of my chest and takes root, because that's what this is now, isn't it.

Not a secret I'm keeping.

Not something I have to protect by living in the dark.

A cabin with a nine-year-old's horse posters down the hall, a man whose name I wear on my back, a life out here in the open where anybody can see it.

I got my sisters back over cold waffles.

I'll get my father back with time.

And I've got this, right here, this warm wrecked bed and this big steady man and a little girl who named me family before anybody else in this world would.

It's not a clean happy ending.

Nothing in this family ever is.

There's still a grave out past Big Spring we're all keeping quiet, still a shadow outfit somewhere past the good with a lens trained on the people we love, still a long road back with my father waiting to be walked.

But I'm not walking any of it alone anymore.

That's what I finally understand, lying here in the blue dark with his heart steady under my ear.

For a whole year I carried everything by myself, in the dark, terrified of what the light would do.

And the light came, and it was awful, and it burned, and I'm still here.

Still breathing.

Still his.

The worst finally happened.

And I survived it, and I'm not alone, and tomorrow the sun comes up on a life I don't have to hide anymore.

"Thunder?"

"Mm?"

"Thank you. For making it stop for a while."

He shifts, tips my face up to his, and kisses me slow and deep, no rush left in it now, nothing but a man kissing his woman in a quiet room at the end of a hard day.

"Anytime you need it stopped," he says against my mouth, "you come find me. That's what I'm for. Rest of my life, that's what I'm for."

And I believe him.

For the first time in longer than I can remember, I close my eyes and I don't brace for the next bad thing.

The fear's been my constant company, a low hum under everything, the part of me always scanning the tree line for the next disaster.

It's gone still now.

Not gone for good, maybe never all the way gone, not in this family.

But quiet enough, tonight, that I can feel the weight of his arm across me and the rise and fall of his chest and the plain animal safety of a big man who's decided you're his to keep, and let all of it be the last thing I know before sleep instead of the fear.

I just let him hold me, and I sleep.

And I don't dream of graves, or investigators, or my father's face turning to stone.

I don't dream at all.

I just rest, for the first time in ages, in a bed I don't have to sneak out of before dawn, next to a man the whole world's about to know is mine.

EPILOGUE

Thunder

One Month Later…

Nobody can figure out where the red hair came from, and it's the best argument I've heard all year against a man ever bein' sure of anything.

Rose Earlene came into the world six days ago with a full head of it, bright copper, a red that catches the eye clear across a room, and both her parents are dark as creek mud.

Banshee's been walking around the clubhouse holding her like she might go off, staring down at that little ginger head with a look on his face I've never seen on the man in all the years I've known him, somewhere between wonder and pure dumb terror.

"My grandmother," Bex keeps saying, every time somebody asks. "She was a redhead. It skips around."

"Skips around," Banshee repeats, dazed, and he can't stop touching the baby's hair like he's checking that it's real.

Little Rose’s name is an ode to someone they both lost.

Rose, for the woman Banshee and Bex both loved and lost, the one who stitched the two of them together before she went and left a hole in both their lives.

And Earlene for old Earl, whose oak still stands in the east pasture where Rogue married Hadley, whose name this ranch has carried longer than most of us have been alive.

Rose Earlene.

A dead woman and a dead man living on in seven pounds of surprise redhead, and if she isn't the cutest thing in this damn place, I don’t know what is right now.

The clubhouse is loud tonight in the good way, the way it hasn't been in a long time.

Somebody's got music going low.

The ol' ladies have claimed the big table, and there's wine open.

Dakota pouring for Grace and Hadley and a couple of the others, everybody loose and laughing in a way that's been in short supply around here since the bunkhouse.

Bex isn't drinking, on account of the baby needing her, but she's got her feet up and a plate somebody made her and the bone-deep glow of a woman who's tired all the way through and happier than she's ever been.

I stand back by the bar and take it in, and I'll be honest, there's a lump in my throat I'd deny to any man who asked.

Because a season ago this room was a morgue.

Everybody tiptoeing, everybody grieving something, the whole family cracked down the middle over a buried woman and the lies that kept her buried.

And here it is loud again.

Here it is full of babies and wine and women laughing.

Presley's in the middle of it.

That's what gets me.

My rattlesnake, who spent months on the outside of this family with her nose pressed to the glass, is sitting at that table with a glass of wine and Waylon on her shoulders.

Dakota's leaned into her saying something that's making them both laugh, and nobody's looking at her like a stranger anymore.

And then there's the sight I never thought I'd get.

Marlena's at the far end of the table.

She's quiet about it, keeping small, the way she's learned to since it all came out.

But Grace passed her baby Braxton a while ago and let her hold him, and just now Dakota asked her something about the wine, some ordinary nothing question.

Marlena answered, and the two of them had a whole short exchange like regular people.

It's not forgiveness.

Not all the way.

You don't get all the way back from what happened in that salon, not ever.

But Grace and Dakota are talking to the woman who killed their mother, on purpose, in the same room, choosing it, and a month ago I'd have bet my patch it would never happen in any of our lifetimes.

Turns out this family breaks, and then it finds its way back.

Every time.

I told Presley that in the dark a month ago and I didn't half believe it myself.

Now I'm watching it happen.

* * *

"She looks good out there." I don't have to turn to know it's Phantom. I felt him coming the way you feel weather change.

"She does," I agree.

He steps up beside me at the bar, a beer in his hand, and for a minute we just watch the room together the way we've watched a hundred rooms, president and sergeant at arms, shoulder to shoulder.

It's the closest we've stood since the day in the yard, and we both know it.

"I owe you somethin'," he says finally, low, his eyes on his daughter and not on me. "And I've been chewin' on how to say it for a month, so bear with me, 'cause I'm no good at this part."

"You don't owe me anything, Harlan."

"Shut up and let me get through it." But there's no heat in it.

He turns the beer in his hand. "I handled it wrong. In the yard. The way I came at you, at her. I've had a month to sit with it and there's no shine I can put on it that makes it right." His jaw works.

"I was out of my mind. And I want you to understand it wasn't about you not bein' good enough for her, because you are, you're the best man I've got and we both know it. It was the secret. It was findin' out the two people I—" He stops.

Starts again. "Findin' out I'd been kept in the dark. Again. In my own family. After what the last secret did to us."

"I know," I tell him. "I knew it in the yard. That's why I didn't swing back."

"Secrets damn near destroyed everything I've got." He's quiet a moment, watching Grace laugh at something across the room.

"Jolene. What I did after. Two years of lyin' to my own kids, watchin' 'em grieve a woman who was in the ground the whole time. I did that. And then I stood in that yard and found out my youngest learned to keep secrets from her own daddy. Some part of me knew right then she learned it from me, and I couldn't stand to look at it." He shakes his head.

"So I did what I do. I got loud and I got mean and I walked off, 'cause I've never once in my life known what to do with a feeling except swing at it."

It's the most words I've ever heard Harlan Lyle string together about his own insides, and I have the sense not to make it a thing.

"She knows you love her," I say. "That was never the question."

"I'm workin' on tellin' her better than I've been." He finally looks at me. "I'm workin' on a lot of things. But I wanted to say it to you first, man to man. I'm sorry for how I came at you. You've been my sword twenty years and you deserved better than gettin' slammed into a shed wall for lovin' somebody."

I put my hand out.

He takes it, and then he pulls me in, one hard clap on the back, the kind of thing that says everything men like us can't.

"We good?" I ask.

"We're good." He steps back, clears his throat, all business again like the last two minutes didn't happen.

"Now. There's somethin' else."

And just like that the temperature of the night changes, because I know that voice.

That's not the voice of a man done talkin' about his feelings.

That's the voice of a president with a problem.

Blaze peels off from the wall across the room like he was waiting for the signal, and he crosses to us, and the easy comes off him with every step.

"Tell him," Phantom says.

Blaze keeps his voice down, under the music, under the laughter. "The Firm moved again. Yesterday."

Everything in me goes still and cold. "Moved how?"

"Package showed up at the P.O. box. No return address." His jaw is tight. "Photographs. Same as before, only closer. Somebody was inside the tree line at the swimming hole this time, Thunder. Close enough to read the label on Waylon's shirt." He lets that sit.

"And there was a note. Just a date. About three weeks out. Nothin' else."

A date.

I look across the room at all of it, the wine and the babies and the women laughing, at Presley with her nephew on her shoulder, at a redheaded newborn getting passed hand to hand, at everything this family clawed back from the dark this year.

And I feel the old cold settle into me, the sword's cold, the one I know better than my own name.

"They're done watchin'," I say.

"That's how I read it." Blaze's eyes are flat and grim. "Whatever this has been buildin' toward, it's comin', and now we know when."

"I'm callin' a national church tomorrow," Phantom says, low. "First light. Everybody at the table. We start makin' plans, because I’m not gettin' caught flat-footed with my grandkids in some shadow outfit's crosshairs." He drains the last of his beer and sets the bottle down hard. "We spent all summer bleedin' over old sins. I'll be damned if I let some suits I never met finish the job."

"I'll have the charter roster ready," I tell him. "Lubbock, Abilene, all of it. If we're callin' in help, better to know who's got what before we ask."

"Good man." He grips my shoulder once. "Get some sleep. Tomorrow we go to work."

He moves off toward the table, toward his family, the president sliding back into the father, and he drops a kiss on the top of Presley's head as he passes and she looks up at him surprised and pleased, the first easy thing between them since the yard.

The door's open.

It's gonna take time.

But it's open.

Blaze lingers a second beside me. "You good?" he asks. "With all of it? You and her, out in the open now, the whole nine?"

"Better than good." I mean it. "You'll see, one of these days. When the right one knocks you flat."

He laughs, short. "Not me, brother. I've got enough problems." He claps my arm and heads off to find a beer, and I let him go, and I don't tell him what I'm thinking, which is that every man who ever said that sentence ended up eatin' it, me included.

I find Presley by the door a while later, Rose Earlene asleep in her arms now, that shock of red hair against my woman's shoulder.

"Look at her," she whispers, tipping the baby toward me. "Have you ever seen anything so mad about being alive?"

"Takes after her mama." I get an arm around Presley, right there, in the middle of the clubhouse, where anybody can see, and nobody so much as blinks, and that's the sweetest thing in this whole loud room.

"Ready to head home? Raine's been askin' when you're comin' back all day. She wants you to see the drawing she made. It's the four of us, apparently. You, me, her, and the cat."

"The four of us." Something goes soft in her face. "Yeah. Let's go home."

Home.

A month ago I didn't have one, not really, not the kind with a full table.

Now there's a woman with my name on her back and a nine-year-old who drew our family with a cat in it and waits up to show me, and I get to drive both of them back to a cabin at the end of the property and call it mine.

I know what's coming.

I know there's a date circled three weeks out and a shadow outfit that's done watching and a church meeting at first light where we start figuring out how to keep everybody in this room breathing.

I know the dark isn't done with us.

It never is.

Not with this family.

But tonight there's red hair and wine and a woman I love holding a sleeping baby, and a president who called me a good man and meant it, and two sisters talking to a woman they've got every reason to hate because they've decided love is worth more than being right.

Tonight the family's loud again.

Whatever the Firm's bringing, it's gonna have to come through all of us to get to any one of us.

And I've spent my whole life learning exactly one thing worth knowing.

We break.

And then we find our way back.

Every single time.

I take my rattlesnake and the whole loud golden room with me out into the September dark, and I drive us home under all those stars, and I don't brace for a single thing.

Tomorrow, the sword.

Tonight, there’s only this.

AUTHOR’S NOTE

This is the beginning of the Shotgun Saints MC: Kings of the Road.

Five books. Five brothers. One ranch in the Texas Hill Country I've been walking around in my head for two years.

Many of you know this already, but this series started with the Shotgun Saints MC.

The spin-off, Shotgun Saints MC: Kings of the Road, is an extension of that world.

If you finished Thunder wanting to know who's been circling this family with a camera, you're not the only one. That thread doesn't close here on purpose. The Firm has been watching Sharp Shooter Ranch for a while now, and they made the mistake of getting close enough to photograph the kids. That's a line you don't cross with these men, and it's a line the club's VP intends to make them regret ever finding.

Blaze is up next. He's spent this whole series holding the door while everybody else fell in love, and now the fight lands squarely on him. The Firm wanted a reckoning at Sharp Shooter Ranch. In Blaze's book, they get one, and Blaze is not the kind of man who lets anybody put his family in the crosshairs and walk away clean.

I love writing in this universe, and thank you for taking a chance on this western + MC mashup.

I'll see you back at Sharp Shooter Ranch soon.

COMING SOON: BLAZE

I’m not done with the Shotgun Saints MC yet. Pre-Order Blaze, Book 2 in the Shotgun Saints MC: Kings of the Road.

READ IN KU: SHOTGUN SAINTS MC: THE COMPLETE SERIES

Get the entire Shotgun Saints MC with more spicy content, AND a new book, Presley.

Pre-Order Now:

SHOTGUN SAINTS MC MEMBERS

Phantom - Prez - Ol’ lady - Marlena

Children: Shiver, Grace, Dakota (all Jolene’s), Presley & Cal (Marlena’s)

Blaze - VP

Shadow - Enforcer - Ol’ lady - Grace

Children: Waylon & Braxton

Thunder - Sergeant at Arms - Ol’ Lady - Presley

Children: Raine

Banshee - Road Captain - Ol’ lady - Bex

Children: Rose

Rogue - Treasurer — Ol’ Lady — Hadley

Children: Nash (Hadley’s)

Blight - Full Patch

Spur - Full Patch - Ol’ lady - Dakota

Bullseye - Nomad

Longhorn - Nomad

Miller - Prospect

Ford - Prospect

Buckley - Prospect

ALSO BY ELIZABETH KNOX

Elizabeth Knox

MC Romance:

Skulls Renegade MC

Reapers Rejects MC

Reapers Rejects MC: Second Generation: Montana

Reapers Rejects MC: Second Generation: Nevada

Reapers Rejects MC: Second Generation: Mexico

Satan's Raiders MC

Iron Vex MC: New York City

Knights of Retribution MC

Sons of Gods MC

Raiders of Valhalla MC

Raiders of Valhalla MC: New Blood

Raiders of Valhalla MC: Prospects

Deathstalkers MC

Saint’s Outlaws MC: Morgantown

Saints Outlaws MC: Morgantown: Officers

Shotgun Saints MC

Shotgun Saints MC: Kings of the Road

Dark Romance Standalone Collaborations:

A Dark Holiday

Dark Billionaire Romance:

Love Hack

Mafia Romance:

Mackenzies

The Clans

Mafia Heirs: The Gallaghers

The O’Dea Crime Family

Umarova Crime Family

Sins of Steele

Security/Protector:

The Mafia Brotherhood

World Collaborations:

A Dark Holiday:

He Sees You

Hunt You Down

Captive Liberty

Mayhem Makers:

The Nomad’s Captive - coming October 2027

Saints Outlaws MC:

Ruger’s Rage

Bloodhound’s Burden

Coin’s Debt

Rookie’s Shot

Ounce’s Price

Maddox’s Mercy

Bracken’s Bond

Decorum’s Sin