Decker (Black Butte Ranch #4)

Chapter One

Decker

AJA FOXX

~ Decker ~

The phone’s ring cut through the stillness of my room like an electric current. I’d been in the middle of cleaning my sidearm, a nightly ritual that required no thought, but kept my hands busy—the kind of task that left my mind free to scan for threats, assess the day’s work, plan tomorrow’s.

Five a.m. calls never meant anything good.

I set the cleaning rod down and wiped my hands on an old dish towel before picking up the phone. The screen glowed with a number I recognized, but hadn’t seen in a very long time. My grandfather.

I pressed the phone to my ear. “Decker.”

“Decker.” His voice came through the line thin and unsteady, a register I’d never heard from the man before. “It’s—it’s your grandfather.”

“I know.” I sat down on the edge of the bed, back straight, eyes fixed on the far wall. “What’s going on?”

“I’m sick.” A pause. “Maybe dying. The doctor says it’s my heart.” The words came out clipped, like he was delivering a report on fence repairs or crop rotation. “I’d like you to come home. If you can make it.”

No elaboration. No pleas. Just the bare facts delivered in the same tone he’d used to tell me the tractor needed oil or the north pasture was ready for planting. Sixty years of Nebraska stoicism compressed into forty seconds of phone call.

“I’ll be there.” I didn’t ask how bad it was or what the doctors had said. Those questions would keep until I arrived. “I’ll leave tonight.”

“Good.” The word carried the weight of four letters. “Drive safe.”

The line went dead. I sat with the phone in my hand, thumb pressed flat against the screen, watching the light fade. The room suddenly felt too small, too closed in.

I set the phone down, finished cleaning my sidearm with methodical efficiency, then packed it away in the metal lockbox under the bed.

Two minutes to pull on boots and jacket. Thirty seconds to grab my keys from the hook by the door. I stepped outside into the pre-dawn darkness, the air cool against my face.

Rawley would be up. The man kept Navy SEAL hours even out of the service—sleeping four hours a night, running the ranch with military precision. Another former operator who couldn’t turn it off.

I found him near the barn, checking the lock on the main doors with a tactical flashlight. He turned at the sound of my footsteps, expression unchanging as he registered my presence.

“My grandfather’s sick,” I said, keeping it simple. “Could be dying. Needs me in Nebraska. Don’t know how long.”

Rawley’s eyes did a quick scan of my face, reading whatever was written there. He didn’t ask follow-up questions or offer condolences—one of the reasons I’d taken the job at Black Butte in the first place. The man didn’t waste words.

“Go,” he said, giving a single nod. “Take whatever time you need. Job’ll be here when you get back.”

I nodded back. “Thanks.”

“Keep me updated.” Not a request, but not quite an order either.

I returned to my room and packed a single duffel—three shirts, two pairs of jeans, underwear, socks, my kit with its carefully organized medical supplies. Nothing sentimental. Nothing I couldn’t live without. The whole process took less than five minutes.

The truck started on the first turn of the key.

I loaded the duffel behind the seat, did a quick check of the tires and fluid levels, then pointed the hood east and pulled away from Black Butte.

The headlights cut a swath through the darkness, illuminating the gravel drive, the main gate, the long stretch of highway beyond.

In the rearview mirror, the ranch receded in slow motion.

The fence line disappeared first, then the silhouette of the barn against the dark sky.

The house lights grew smaller, pinpricks of yellow in a sea of black.

The big Montana sky arched overhead, stars scattered across it like salt on black velvet.

The last of the familiar—the road I knew, the mountains I’d memorized, the weight of the pistol at my back that felt like part of my body now—all of it falling away behind me.

I pushed the speedometer to five over the limit, not enough to attract attention, but enough to shave minutes off the drive. The landscape flattened as I headed east, rolling hills giving way to long stretches of featureless prairie.

The sky seemed to shrink with each passing mile, the horizon pulling closer, the world narrowing down to two lanes of cracked blacktop and nothing to look at but my own thoughts.

I’d left Nebraska eight years ago with a duffel bag not much bigger than the one I’d just packed, the door to my parents’ house closing behind me with a finality that still echoed.

Eight years of building a life that had nothing to do with that place or those people. Eight years of finding corners of the world where the question of who I slept with mattered less than whether I could do my job.

And now I was headed back, pulled by a voice on the phone and a debt I could never quite calculate.

The sun broke over the horizon to my right, turning the gray dawn to gold. I reached for the radio, then stopped, hand in midair. Some drives were better made in silence.

* * * *

I’d forgotten how much of Nebraska was just empty space. The cracked two-lane blacktop cut through dry grassland that stretched to the horizon in every direction, broken only by occasional stands of cottonwoods marking water sources.

I’d cracked the window an inch, letting in the smell of dust and dry grass—a scent that was unmistakably home, even after eight years away.

The truck’s engine maintained its steady drone, neither speeding up nor slowing down, just carrying me forward at exactly sixty-eight miles per hour, the speed that consistently kept highway patrol officers from taking an interest.

The horizon never seemed to get any closer.

That was the thing about Nebraska—it gave you nothing to fix your eyes on, nowhere to measure progress against. Just the same flat expanse of nothing, mile after mile, until the monotony began to feel deliberate, like the landscape was conspiring to keep you exactly where you were.

My mind, left with nothing to engage it, began pulling backward in time. Not a clean flashback—I’d been trained too well for that—but fragments, sensory details disconnected from their context.

The sound of my brother Tyler’s voice going mean when he’d caught me looking at a boy from school. “You’re a fucking faggot,” he’d said, the word hanging between us with physical weight. “Don’t you ever look at me that way.”

The weight of a fist I hadn’t seen coming, my father’s hand connecting with the side of my head, knocking me into the doorframe. The metallic taste of blood in my mouth, the momentary darkness behind my eyes. The absolute certainty, in that moment of impact, that I deserved it.

The way my mother had looked at the wall instead of at me when I’d come downstairs with a split lip, her hands busy with dinner preparations, her face carefully blank. “Be more careful,” she’d said to the potatoes she was peeling. “You know how your father gets.”

My being gay was never discussed directly in that house. It was just the reason the fists came, the reason the silence came, the reason nobody stepped in. The unspoken truth that made my existence a problem with no solution except my absence.

The town had been the same—a closed circuit of people who’d already decided what I was.

I’d been “that Reynolds boy” since I was twelve, when someone had seen me holding hands with another boy behind the grain elevator.

By sixteen, I was just “the faggot” or sometimes “the Reynolds faggot” when people wanted to be specific.

The few who knew my name used it like they were doing me a favor.

I pushed the memory away and focused on the road. Fifty miles to the next gas station. Two hundred and twelve miles to the turnoff for my hometown. Numbers I could handle.

The first time I’d felt like I belonged anywhere was at BUD/S—Basic Underwater Demolition/SEAL training. Sixty men trying to survive the most brutal military training in the world, and none of them gave a damn who I slept with.

One night, after a particularly brutal evolution in the surf zone, a guy named Hernandez had clapped me on the shoulder as we stumbled back to the barracks.

“Fucking held it together out there, Reynolds,” he’d said, his voice rough with exhaustion.

Then he’d moved on, the moment already forgotten.

No elaboration, no awkwardness, just the simple acknowledgment that I’d done my part.

That was the framework the SEAL teams gave me—a world where the only question that mattered was whether you held under pressure.

Could you keep going when everything said stop?

Could you function when your body was screaming to shut down?

Could you make the right call when the wrong one meant someone died?

Everything else was just noise. I’d found my place in that hierarchy of necessity, excelled in that narrow band of performance that separated the exceptional from the merely adequate.

The military had given me that. But my grandfather had given me something else—the knowledge that I was worth something even without it.

I’d been sixteen, trying to help him repair the north fence line after a storm. My hands had been raw from pulling wire, my shoulders aching from driving posts.

“You’re doing it wrong,” he’d said, not unkindly.

He’d shown me how to set the post at the correct angle, how to tamp the soil in layers rather than all at once.

“The post holds the wire,” he’d explained, “but the wire also holds the post. Neither one can stand without the other.” His hands had been work-worn, the nails thick and yellowed, the knuckles swollen with arthritis.

But they’d moved with a certainty that made the task look simple.