Ride or Die (Southwest Sinners #1)

Prologue

COLT

The bull slams the chute panel so hard the metal sings.

Tombstone's Revenge is eighteen hundred pounds of brindle fury with a spin rate that's ended more cowboys' seasons than anyone on this circuit cares to count. The kind of bull that stock contractors talk about in hushed voices, the kind that riders cross themselves after drawing.

When I saw his name on the draw sheet, I smiled for the first time in weeks.

The bull that killed Grant Corbin. The same animal, different arena, and from the way he's moving in the chute, raw and rank but not wired wrong the way a drugged bull moves, I'm betting he's clean this time.

Just eighteen hundred pounds of honest mean, and me, and eight seconds to prove that what happened in Las Cruces wasn't the bull's fault.

It was never the bull's fault.

I slide my legs over the top rail and lower myself onto the bull's back, and the animal explodes beneath me before I'm even seated. The chute crew grabs my vest, hauling me up while Tombstone's Revenge thrashes, slamming left, right, the panels buckling outward with each hit.

The sound is like a car wreck happening in slow motion. Steel on bone. Bone on steel.

"Easy, easy, easy." That's Ricky, the chute boss, both hands on my vest, holding me above the tornado while the bull burns through his tantrum. "Settle him. Let him settle."

Tombstone's Revenge doesn't settle. Tombstone's Revenge is a natural disaster that eats hay and hates everything, especially cowboys.

His head drops between his front legs, and the muscles along his spine coil like bridge cables under load. The violence is packed tight beneath his hide, waiting.

I love this animal. I love him because he's trying to kill me, and that kind of honesty is hard to find.

Ricky lets go. I drop onto the bull's back and immediately start working my riding hand into the bull rope, sliding my glove into the handhold and pulling the rope across my palm. The rosin on the glove grips the braided poly as I wrap the end over my hand once, twice, locking it down tight.

The wrap has to be perfect. If it's too loose, the rope slips on the spin. If it's too tight, I can't release when the ride ends, and then it's not eight seconds on a bull but eight seconds followed by however long it takes to get dragged to death.

My hand closes into a fist over the wrap. The rope seats. My pulse hammers through the wrap, fast and steady, the only clock that counts.

The arena crowd is a wall of noise, impossibly far away and right on top of me at the same time. The announcer's voice booms off the metal rafters, but I stopped listening to announcers years ago.

Out there is theater. In here is a conversation between two living things, and only one of us is going to win it.

I scoot forward on the rope, positioning my hips directly over the bull's shoulders. His head swings left, and one rolling eye catches the light, the iris a ring of white around a black center that holds nothing but rage.

The animal's breath comes in short, hot blasts through flared nostrils, and the smell of him fills the chute. Sweat. Hot hide. The copper tang of blood from where he's cut his lip on the panel.

I nod.

The gate swings open, and the world detonates.

Tombstone's Revenge launches with his hind legs, kicking so high that for a fraction of a second I'm looking straight down at the arena dirt. My free hand snaps to the sky.

My hips absorb the first kick, rolling with the force instead of fighting it, and every hour I've spent in practice pens since I was a kid lives in that one reflexive adjustment.

The bull spins left, hard and fast, and the centrifugal force tries to rip me off his outside shoulder. I dig my spur into his hide and lean into the spin, counterbalancing with my core, riding the edge of the g-force like a surfer on the curl of a wave.

My teeth rattle. My spine compresses on every landing, the impact jarring up through my pelvis and into my skull.

Two seconds.

Tombstone's Revenge changes direction. The spin reverses, right now, and the transition is a whipcrack that snaps my neck sideways. The bull's head comes up on the cut, and the tip of one horn catches me above the eye, a hot stripe of pain that splits the skin and sends blood into my lashes.

Direction changes can kill a rider. The body commits to the left spin, builds the muscle memory, and when the bull cuts right the brain can't recalibrate fast enough. You go one way. The bull goes another. The dirt comes up to meet you.

I don't go with the spin. I go with the bull.

There's a place you find when the ride is right, when the animal beneath you is the rankest thing on four legs and your body is answering its fury with your own. It's not calm. Calm is a lie cowboys tell reporters. It's synchronization. The bull moves, you move. The bull rages, you rage.

You stop being a man on an animal and become a single violent organism, and for those eight seconds nothing else exists. The grief goes silent. The guilt shuts its mouth. The dead friend whose voice you hear in your sleep fades to static. There is only the ride.

Four seconds.

Tombstone's Revenge drops his front end, a power move designed to pitch me over the horns. My free hand arcs backward for balance, and the muscles in my riding arm scream as the full force of the drop channels through the rope into my fist.

The rosin holds. My wrap holds. I hold, because holding on is the only thing I'm still good at.

The bull bucks straight up, all four hooves leaving the ground, and for a split second we're both airborne. Eighteen hundred pounds of animal and one stubborn cowboy hanging in the air with nowhere to go but down.

We come down hard. My spine takes the hit. I taste copper and realize I've bitten the inside of my cheek.

Six seconds.

The crowd is screaming. The crowd noise breaks through—not words but a roar, a wall of sound that hits me from every direction at once.

Tombstone's Revenge is giving everything he's got, kicking and spinning and twisting in combinations that would have dumped any other rider. The bull is a masterpiece. The ride is a conversation, and both of us are shouting at the top of our lungs.

Seven seconds. One more.

Tombstone's Revenge launches into a high kick with a quarter-spin that catches me off-center. My balance shifts. My weight slides to the outside.

For one sickening half-second my hips are too far over, my center of gravity all wrong, and the arena dirt is right there, close enough to taste.

I wrench my hips back over the rope with a core contraction that's going to bruise every muscle in my abdomen. My spur finds his hide. My hips re-center.

The buzzer sounds.

Eight seconds.

I release the wrap. My fingers uncurl from the rope, and the instant the tension breaks, the bull's next kick launches me off his back like a stone from a sling.

I hit the dirt on my shoulder, roll, and come up in a crouch.

Tombstone's Revenge wheels on me. Eighteen hundred pounds of post-ride fury with his head low and his horns tracking.

The bull charges, and the distance between us closes in the time it takes to breathe.

The bullfighters converge, two of them working in tandem, one drawing Tombstone's Revenge left while the other slides between me and the horns.

They redirect the bull toward the exit gate the way good bullfighters do, smooth and fast, two guys who know damn well that a half-second too slow means somebody goes home in an ambulance.

I stand in the dirt and watch Tombstone's Revenge disappear through the gate.

Blood is running down my face from the cut above my eye, opened by a horn tip during the direction change. I can feel it, warm and wet, tracking along my temple and into my ear.

A medic rushes toward me with gauze, and I wave him off.

The score goes up on the board: ninety-one point five. The crowd roars, and the announcer says my name with the kind of reverence usually reserved for men who've accomplished something meaningful.

I wipe the blood off my temple with the back of my hand and walk toward the chutes.

Grant would have loved that ride. He would have stood at the rail and tipped his hat, that slow, sarcastic tip he did when he was impressed and didn't want to admit it.

He would have said something like, 'Not bad, Holloway. Almost looked like you knew what you were doing out there.'

Grant's not at the rail.

Grant is in the ground, and the bull that killed him was drugged by a man who disappeared, on the orders of a man nobody will touch.

I've been riding bulls that want me dead because the alternative is lying still long enough to remember that my best friend was already gone by the time I got there.

I didn't even get to see him. By the time my truck limped into Las Cruces, the arena was empty and the ambulance was long gone. I will carry that for the rest of my life.

The medic catches up to me behind the chutes, and I let him press gauze to the cut because the blood is getting in my eye and I need to see.

I need to see everything, because seeing is all I've got. Just a dead man's last words, all of them, the parts about the case and the part I can't say out loud yet because it cuts too close to a promise I haven't figured out how to keep. And a name I can't say without getting called crazy.

'Tell Colt Holloway everything. Merrick. Thornton Livestock. Tell him Rainey has everything. Flint has copies. Tell him I wasn't wrong.'

I sit on an overturned bucket and let the medic work, and the adrenaline drains out of me like water from a cracked basin.

What's left underneath is the thing that's always underneath. The guilt. The rage. So much rage. The promise I made to a dead man's voicemail at two in the morning on a night I don't talk about.

I'm going to find the people who killed Grant. I'm going to take everything they built and burn it to the ground. And when the smoke clears, I'm going to stand in the ashes and make sure the whole goddamn circuit watches them fall.