Chapter Fourteen
~ Josiah ~
Knox caught me halfway to the woodshed, right as the evening started to go gold and the last of the sunlight flared off the barn roof like a warning shot.
He didn’t say a word—just pointed, flat-palmed, to the barn, and waited while I weighed whether to ignore him or make it harder on myself by running.
I went, because that’s what men like him expected, and because he was blocking the only path to the house and Bodean. My boots hit the packed dirt in a line of echoes behind him.
The old wood barn stood at the far edge of the yard, two stories of McKenzie history, dust and rot, and the kind of smell that makes your lungs feel like they’ve grown roots.
Inside, the hayloft beams cut the air into sharp stripes, every one of them alive with floating dust motes. The place wasn’t empty—never was—but today it felt like an ambush.
Ransom leaned against a support post, arms folded, chewing a toothpick and radiating the kind of quiet malice you only get from a lifetime of being the third-eldest and the meanest.
Quiad hung back by the tack room, silent and motionless as a winter river, eyes hooded, watching the space between us like he expected it to catch fire.
Harlow was perched on a sawn-off hay bale, his big frame bent forward, boots planted wide like he was bracing for a tornado.
They didn’t need to say anything. I could read the arrangement of their bodies, the triangulation of their stares. I was the lone animal at the auction, and they were deciding whether to break me to harness or just send me to the butcher.
Knox stopped in the middle of the floor, waiting for the others to close the circle before he turned to face me. He crossed his arms, the muscles in his forearms writhing under the skin, and set his jaw in a line that could’ve split a cinderblock.
“We’re doing this now?” I asked, voice low.
“We’re doing it while there’s still a chance to stop you from fucking up my brother’s life,” Knox said, his voice quiet but sharp enough to draw blood. “That means now.”
I glanced around, looking for a sign of Bodean—his paint-stained hands, the edge of his laugh, the way he’d lean on the doorjamb when he was nervous—but he wasn’t there. He’d been excused from the execution, apparently, or maybe they wanted to keep his hands clean if things got ugly.
Knox didn’t waste time. “I want to know what exactly your intentions are with Bodean.”
I’d seen this move before—cop face, judge voice, the years of disappointment turned into something harder and meaner than love.
I waited for the rest.
He delivered. “I’ve seen what you put around his neck. I saw the fucking collar, Josiah. You want to explain to me how that’s any different from what Westbrook did to him?”
The words hung in the barn like the aftermath of a gunshot—nobody moved, not even to breathe.
Ransom’s eyebrow went up, all skepticism and challenge.
Quiad didn’t move at all, but the tension in his knuckles was visible even in the dim.
Harlow looked at the floor, lips moving like he was working out a problem with too many variables.
My jaw clenched so hard I thought I might crack a tooth.
I counted to five before I let myself answer.
“Don’t ever compare me to that bastard,” I said.
I kept my voice steady, each word filed down and oiled, because men like Knox only respected precision.
“I might like control, but I will never, ever treat your brother like a thing. I don’t lay hands on him unless he wants it. And if he wants out, he gets out.”
Knox didn’t blink. “It starts that way. It always does. How do I know you’re not just breaking him in for yourself?”
Ransom cut in before I could answer, his tone so casual it almost masked the acid. “Heard you’re letting him call you sir, too. Real original, Jo.”
I ignored it, kept my eyes on the one that mattered. “You think I’d risk my whole life here, everything I’ve built, to do the same shit Westbrook did? You think I want to see him scared of me?”
Knox opened his mouth, but I cut him off. “I spent more time with him in the last two weeks than you have in two years. I’ve seen the bruises. I’ve seen what happens when he wakes up from a nightmare so bad he can’t stand to be touched. You have any idea what that’s like?”
He hesitated, just long enough for me to know he’d never seen it.
“I’m not looking for a project. I’m looking for someone who doesn’t give a fuck that I’m thirty-five and still fixing the same damn motorcycles I did at seventeen.
I’m looking for someone who wants to belong to me, who doesn’t make me explain why it matters so much that they’re alive in the first place. ”
Harlow shifted on the bale, hands fidgeting at his knees. “He seems… happier,” he said, voice so soft it barely made it past the bales.
Ransom snorted. “He always seems happy right before he blows everything up.”
I turned on him, let some of the anger leak out. “Yeah, well, maybe it’s because every time he got close to happy, someone came along and called him a fuck-up, or told him he didn’t deserve it. Maybe he’s sick of running from people who think they know what’s best for him.”
Ransom shrugged, toothpick bobbing between his teeth. “Maybe. Or maybe he’s just doing what he always does—grabbing the first out he can find.”
I shook my head. “He can walk out any time he wants. He knows it.”
Quaid finally spoke, and when he did, it was quiet but so final it shut everybody else up. “You hurt him, you’re done here.” He let the words hang, then added: “You know what I mean.”
I looked him dead in the eye. “Yeah. I know.”
The barn creaked in the wind, the smell of old hay and oil thick enough to choke. For a minute, nobody said anything. The air was full of all the shit that never gets said, every old fight and broken promise packed into the insulation with the dust.
Knox stared at me, a muscle in his jaw twitching. “You really think you’re better for him than his own family?”
I thought about it, really let the question settle. Then I nodded. “Yeah. Because I let him be what he is, not what I want him to be.”
Ransom spat the toothpick into the dirt. “And what is he, Jo? You got some great insight none of the rest of us do?”
I exhaled slow. “He’s a fighter, but he wants to lose. He wants somebody to take all the choices away so he can finally relax and not worry he’ll fuck it up again. He wants to belong. So I give him that.”
There was a rustle as Harlow stood, looming and awkward but somehow more solid than any of them. “He said… he likes the collar,” Harlow said, looking at his feet. “He said it makes him feel safe.”
Knox’s lips curled, just a little. “Safe from what?”
I shrugged. “From having to be in charge for once. From having to fight to be heard, every single second.”
Nobody said anything for a long time. The light shifted, moved up the walls, turned everything in the barn to a kind of sepia-washed memory.
Finally, Knox uncrossed his arms and stepped forward until he was close enough that I could smell the sweat and sawdust on his shirt. “You fuck this up,” he said, “and you’ll wish it was Harley coming after you.”
I held his gaze. “Understood.”
He nodded, sharp and final, and then he was gone, boots thumping out into the dusk.
Ransom followed, muttering something under his breath.
Harlow lingered a second, then patted my shoulder with a hand the size of a shovel before he left.
Quaid was last, and he stayed by the door, watching me for a long time with eyes that never blinked.
I didn’t move, just let the sweat dry on my palms and the adrenaline settle. Outside, the world was changing color by the minute, the air thick with everything we hadn’t said but would one day have to.
I’d survived worse. But this—this was family. And that meant if I failed, I didn’t just lose Bodean. I’d lose the only place I’d ever wanted to call home.
The barn was empty now, or as empty as it could be with fifty years of ghosts and the taste of old arguments still hanging in the rafters.
I let myself sag against the side wall, sliding down to where the boards bit through my jeans.
My hands shook, just a little, so I buried them in the straw and stared up at the last of the light bleeding through the hayloft.
It would’ve been easier if they’d just beat the shit out of me. Instead, I got the full McKenzie tribunal—guilt, threats, and a reminder that even when you earned your spot, you could lose it in a breath.
I didn’t hear Knox come back in. He moved like he weighed half of what he did, boots muffled in the dust, voice gone quieter than before. He stopped a few yards away, leaning on the shovel handle he’d found God knows where.
“You’ve never been around when someone’s been on the wrong end of a McKenzie before, have you?” he said, not a question.
“No,” I answered, and left it at that.
He grunted. “Didn’t think so. If you were, you’d know what we do to people who hurt our own.”
I let my head fall back against the wall, closed my eyes. “I don’t plan to hurt him.”
Knox laughed, the sound empty as the silo after a bad harvest. “Doesn’t matter what you plan, Moxley. Pain finds a way.”
I didn’t argue. He was right. Plans were for people who thought they could outrun history.
But he didn’t leave. He stood there, waiting, shovel shifting in his grip.
So I gave him what I hadn’t given anyone else.
“Look,” I said, “I’m not pretending I don’t get off on control.
I do. I want to own every part of him. I want to tell him what to do, what to wear, what to eat for breakfast if that’s what makes him happy.
But I’m not Westbrook. I don’t get off on fear, or pain, or making him small so I can feel big. ”