Chapter 20 #2
The drive to the farm should have been calming.
The Oklahoma countryside stretched out on either side of the road, fields and trees bathed in the soft gray light of early morning, the world quiet in that fragile way it only was before the day fully woke.
Usually that kind of stillness settled me.
Usually, the familiar roads home were enough to pull me back into myself.
But my mind wouldn’t stop racing. Every thought seemed to trip over the next one—John’s face, Blackjack’s voice, the warmth of that bed, the cold slap of guilt that followed it, the image of Tatum waking up and reaching for me if I wasn’t there in time.
By the time I turned onto the county road, I felt scraped raw by my own thoughts.
I shook my head and forced myself to focus on the road. The turnoff to the farm was just ahead, the familiar wooden sign my grandfather had carved decades ago coming into view through the pale wash of morning light.
Wilcox Horse Farm.
Home.
The word should have brought relief. It should have loosened the tight knot in my chest, should have quieted the panic that had been pacing inside me since I left the clubhouse.
Home was where things made sense. Home was fences to mend, horses to feed, coffee in my father’s kitchen, Tatum’s laughter drifting through the halls.
Home was the place where I knew who I was.
But the second I turned onto the long gravel driveway, that feeling vanished.
A car was parked at the entrance.
Black. Unmarked. Sleek in a way that looked wrong against the weathered fence posts and open Oklahoma land. It blocked the driveway completely, sitting there like it belonged, like it had every right to wait for me at the edge of my family’s property.
My foot hit the brakes as gravel crunched beneath my tires and the car jolted into a stop, my pulse kicking hard against my ribs.
What the hell? The question flashed through me, but underneath it came something faster and colder than surprise.
Fear. Immediate and absolute. Not for me—not first. For the house behind that car.
For the little girl inside it. For the awful possibility that whatever I had tried to keep separate from my real life had arrived at my gate before I did.
For a moment, I just sat there with both hands locked on the steering wheel, staring through the windshield. My mind tried to make it ordinary and failed. A delivery driver. Someone lost. A neighbor with car trouble.
No.
Nothing about it felt ordinary.
It didn’t belong here. It didn’t belong near my home, near my daughter, near anything I loved enough to fear losing.
Then the driver’s side door opened.
A man stepped out and started toward me.
Tall. Maybe mid-forties. Dark suit, no tie. Clean-shaven. Composed. There was nothing hurried in the way he moved, nothing uncertain. He walked like a man who expected to be listened to, and something about that calm confidence sent a cold ripple through me.
I rolled my window down halfway, my hand already moving toward my phone before I consciously decided to reach for it. Instinct. Protection. A line drawn before he ever opened his mouth.
“Can I help you?” I called out, my voice sharper than I felt, clipped and professional in the way it always got when I needed distance.
He stopped a few feet from my car and smiled.
It was the kind of smile that did nothing to reassure me.
“Carolina Wilcox?” he asked.
My blood ran cold.
There was something uniquely unsettling about hearing your full name from a stranger standing at the mouth of your driveway before dawn.
Not because the information was impossible to get, but because of what it implied: that he hadn’t ended up here by accident.
He had come looking for me. And suddenly the space inside my car felt too small, the air too thin.
My skin went cold even as heat climbed up the back of my neck.
I had spent years building a life that felt solid, ordinary, protected.
In one sentence, he made it feel frighteningly reachable.
“Who’s asking?” I said.
He ignored the question so smoothly it felt deliberate.
“I’d like to ask you a few questions,” he said, almost casually. “About your connection to the Diamondback Motorcycle Club.”
My heart slammed once, hard enough to hurt.
In an instant, every thought narrowed to one thing: Tatum is in that house.
The realization hit with such force it was almost physical.
I could practically see her in my mind—small, warm, half-asleep, safe only because she did not yet know there was any reason not to be.
A wild, protective panic rose in me so fast I had to lock my jaw to keep it from showing on my face.
Whatever this man wanted, whatever game he thought he was playing, he was doing it within reach of my child. That changed everything.
I didn’t look toward the farm. I didn’t dare. I kept my eyes on him and made myself breathe through the panic trying to climb up my throat.
“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” I said, and I was proud of how even my voice sounded despite the fear slicing through me. “And you’re blocking my driveway. I suggest you move your vehicle before I call the police.”
His smile widened slightly, as if the threat amused him more than it concerned him.
“The police,” he repeated. “That’s interesting. Considering you just spent the night at a known criminal organization’s clubhouse.”
Heat flashed through me then—fear burning fast into anger.
Not because of the accusation. Because he knew where I had been.
Because that meant he had been watching.
Me.
Or John.
Or both.
My fingers tightened around the steering wheel until the leather creaked under my grip.
“Who the hell are you?” I demanded. The lawyer in me snapped fully into place then, sharp and cold and furious. “Show me your identification. Right now.”
He tilted his head, studying me as if I were something on a slide under glass.
“What’s your relationship with John Smith?”
The question hit harder than I wanted it to.
Because there it was—that line I had been trying so desperately not to look at, spoken aloud by a stranger at my gate.
What was my relationship with John?
Former lover. Current disaster. Old wound. New temptation. The man I had never quite stopped carrying, no matter how much time or pride or anger I had packed on top of him.
None of that was any of this man’s business.
“I’m his attorney,” I said, each word clipped clean. “And unless you have a warrant or a badge, this conversation is over. Move your car. Now.”
He stared at me for a long moment, and I held his gaze even though every instinct in me wanted to end this, to drive through the ditch if I had to, to get to the house and put myself physically between this stranger and my daughter.
Then he laughed.
Actually laughed.
“You’re a fighter,” he said, his tone almost approving. “I can see why he likes you.”
My stomach turned.
It wasn’t flirtation. It wasn’t even admiration, not really.
It was the casual certainty in his voice, the suggestion that he knew things he shouldn’t know, that he was standing there with pieces of my life in his hand and enjoying the fact that I understood it.
That was what made my stomach turn. Not just fear, but violation.
The sickening sense that someone had reached across the boundaries of my life and laid a hand on things that were mine—my work, my history, my daughter, my home.
By then, anger was the only thing keeping me upright.
“Get the fuck off my property,” I said. My voice shook, and I hated that it did, hated that fear had found its way in around the edges of my anger. “Or I swear to God, I will call the police and have you arrested for trespassing.”
His smile disappeared. For one beat, two, he just looked at me, his expression flattening into something colder, more measuring.
And in that stretched-out silence, the full weight of it landed: This was no longer only about me.
Whatever John’s world was, whatever danger came with it, it had found the road to my home.
It had found the gate with my family’s name on it.
It had come within reach of my child.
Without another word, he turned and walked back to his sedan. He got in, started the engine, and reversed just enough to clear the driveway before pulling away down the road. As I watched the car go, a cloud of dust rising behind it, I still didn’t move.
My hands were locked so tightly around the steering wheel that my knuckles ached. My heart pounded against my ribs in hard, uneven blows, and my breathing had gone thin and shallow, like my body still hadn’t gotten the message that he was leaving.
Who the hell was that?