Chapter Thirteen
~ Rawley ~
The next time I woke, it wasn’t to retching, but to a silence so perfect it felt manufactured. For a disorienting second, I thought maybe the previous day had been a fever-dream: Jojo, the embryo, the threat painted in chick blood across our kitchen.
My body didn’t buy it.
Every nerve stayed live and twitchy, registering the faintest pressure, the shift in barometric pressure that came with dawn over the fields.
Jojo was fused to my side, the way a sapling clings to the only rock on a mudslide. His breathing, gone shallow and even, ghosted across my sternum.
I made myself catalog everything about the moment—his heartbeat, thready but steady; the soft fan of his hair against my shoulder; the heat radiating off his skin where his leg tangled with mine.
My right hand was bracketed across his back, fingers splayed as if I could fuse him to me by grip alone.
The edges of the curtains leaked thin stripes of daylight, transforming the room into an aquarium of navy and gold. All the dust motes hung motionless, suspended in air still cool from the night. For once, there were no shadows of threat, just the illusion of peace.
But even in this pocket of calm, my mind ticked off contingencies: possible ingress points, which angles left us vulnerable, whether the windows were latched or the Sig on my nightstand loaded.
I tried to breathe it in. Not the threat, but the absurd fucking sweetness of the bed, Jojo in it, the low-grade hum of possibility that now pulsed under every moment.
I traced the memory of the ultrasound with my thumb over his skin. The embryo was microscopic, a dot in a blizzard, and yet it owned every square inch of my head.
The old stories always said it hit you like a bomb, the first time you found out you’d made a life. For me, it was more like waiting for a sniper’s bullet—time slowed, every detail burned in with a cruel clarity.
I kept waiting for the panic to kick in, but all I got was the same cold purpose I’d felt in combat. If anything, it made sense. I’d spent my whole life learning how to kill to protect.
Now I had something worth that violence.
Jojo burrowed tighter, his nose pressed into my armpit, breathing the way you do when you’re safe enough to surrender to sleep. I tensed at the soft scrape of gravel, a sound that didn’t belong—at this hour, on this road, it was a foreign intrusion.
Every muscle in my body shivered to wakefulness.
I extricated myself, slow as a surgeon, bracing with my elbow so the mattress wouldn’t shift and wake him.
The air lost some of its warmth as I eased away, but Jojo only flinched, then relaxed again, mumbling a syllable that sounded suspiciously like my name.
I sat on the edge of the bed for a beat, letting my feet acclimate to the shock of cold boards beneath them, and watched him breathe. In the new light, he looked impossibly fragile—skin almost translucent, veins webbing his wrists, collarbone like the edge of a flint blade.
If I hadn’t seen him plow through a tray of cinnamon rolls in one sitting, I might have thought he’d shatter if I blinked too hard.
The blankets had slipped to his hips, baring the long line of his back, the faint arch that—fuck it, yeah—was sexy as hell even now. My thumb itched to trace the outline, but I knew better.
I tucked the blankets around him instead, cocooned him in as much insulation as a man could buy at the Black Butte general store.
The scraping of tires grew louder, slowing as it hit the potholes near our gate. A single vehicle, heavy, idling in neutral before the engine cut. I mapped it to a four-door, maybe a Crown Vic, which meant either law enforcement or some asshole who didn’t know how to drive a truck.
The room was haunted with the smell of Jojo—sweet, a little citrus, something earthy underneath—and, now, the sharper note of his fear, left over from the night before. I tried not to think about the trauma layers I was grafting onto his life.
The Sig was exactly where I left it, magazine loaded, safety on, round in the chamber. I slid it into the waistband of my pants and then checked the corners of the hall before moving.
Downstairs, the house had an after-battle feel.
In the kitchen, the crime scene was untouched except for the chalk outline of blood where the sun hadn’t quite reached to dry it.
My eye went straight to the table, the dead chicks, the neat little arrangement like a florist’s offering from a mortician.
I hated that Jojo would have to see it. I hated more that I’d have to clean it myself before he did. For now, I left the carnage untouched. Let the sheriff see it raw.
The front door’s old brass lock felt warm in my palm as I turned it, almost hot from where the morning sun hit the handle. I cracked the door an inch, enough to get a full 180 view of the yard.
Sheriff Calloway’s cruiser sat in the gravel, dust still floating around the tires.
The man himself stood by the hood, arms crossed, one hip cocked out in a pose that said he’d been up all night and blamed me for it.
His sunglasses were perched high, not because the sun was bright, but because he liked the intimidation factor.
Small-town lawman trick.
I waited a beat, then opened the door wide. “Took you long enough,” I said, voice flat as the tabletop. His thirty minutes had turned into an hour.
“Evening, Steele.” His voice had that gravel-pit resonance. “You leave the light on for me?”
I didn’t answer, just gestured for him to follow. I watched his boots track the dirt onto my porch, then counted the steps it took for him to sweep the entryway with his cop eyes, cataloguing the layout, angles, any sign of threat.
Respectable.
I might have liked the guy in another universe.
We went straight to the kitchen. He stopped cold at the threshold, taking in the tableau. He didn’t flinch. Didn’t even bother with the notebook, just let his gaze sweep over the evidence, then lingered on me.
I respected that. He could have started with the formalities—questions, statements, “Can you walk me through what happened.” Instead, he asked: “You got a guess who did it?”
“Hargrove,” I said, before he finished the question. “Met him at Miller’s Feed. He wants this place.”
The sheriff pulled a latex glove from his pocket, slipped it on with a snap. He leaned over the chicks, then scraped some of the white powder into a plastic bag. “You know what this is?” he asked, holding it up to the sun.
“Lime,” I said. “Pest deterrent.”
He grunted. “Or a message. Old timers used it to scatter the scent of blood from predators.” He pocketed the evidence and gave me a look that bordered on respect.
I watched him work, the way he catalogued every detail, the way his hands didn’t shake even when he scraped tissue into another baggie. He’d seen worse, maybe. Or he just had the kind of nerves they don’t teach anymore.
He straightened, peeled off the glove. “You’ve made an enemy already. Fast work.”
I shrugged. “I’ve always been efficient.”
He let the silence hang, then: “You want protection? Patrols?”
“Not unless you plan to camp out here for the next decade,” I said, and I meant it. “I can handle my own perimeter.”
He almost smiled. “I thought you might say that.”
The kitchen smelled like copper and the acidic ghost of disinfectant, a note of death that made the hair on my arms rise. There was a tightness in my chest that hadn’t been there before—like something vital had been cored out and left to chill in the open air.
I didn’t want to see the chicks, or the loops of intestine coiling off the edge of the table. I didn’t want to see the little box Jojo had painted for their bedding, now soaked through and split like a crime scene prop.
Dan worked in silence. He lined up each bird for a close-up, then took a wide shot of the whole table, the powder, the spatter. He didn’t glance at me until he’d finished the set, then said, “You want to tell me the real reason you’re out here, Steele?”
I kept my arms folded, body blocking the stairwell. “It’s a ranch. I’m ranching.”
He gave a single, barked laugh. “Never seen a rancher who stands at parade rest while I process a poultry massacre.”
I didn’t bother answering.
He went back to work, opening a brown evidence envelope and scraping a few grams of the lime into it. He was careful, efficient—didn’t waste time with the rituals of big-city forensics. Out here, everything was looser, but if he missed a detail, it was only because it wasn’t worth finding.
When he was done, he clicked the pen and wrote a date and case number on the bag. He set it on the counter, lined up with military precision.
“You know, Victor Hargrove’s been sniffing around this property since the day he got here,” Dan said, rolling his shoulders. “Used to joke with old man Steele about buying it out, back when the market was hot. Now he just wants it because he’s pissed you got it and not him.”
I grunted. “He’s a beta who needs to prove something.”
Dan shot me a look, equal parts curiosity and warning. “Careful, Rawley. He’s got money and a mean streak.”
I nodded, because it was obvious and because I’d learned a long time ago that men like Hargrove only respected escalation.
Dan picked up the first of the chicks, holding it by the wings. “Your kid’s project?” he asked, voice flat.
I bristled at the word. “Jojo. He’s not a kid.”
Dan’s eyes slid to me, sharp and measuring. “He’s what, nineteen?”
“Twenty-one,” I stated, because I could feel the line of interrogation coming and didn’t want to give the sheriff any ammunition.
Dan just grunted and slid the chick into the evidence bag, then snapped it shut.
The sun was fully up now, slanting through the kitchen windows and turning every blood droplet into a tiny, perfect ruby. I stared at them, counting each one, the way I’d once counted bullet holes in a wall to reconstruct an ambush.