Chapter 1
KENNA
The Amarillo Tri-State Arena smells like every rodeo Grant ever dragged me to as a kid. Livestock and leather, fried food and cheap beer, red dirt kicked up from the warm-up pen and ground into everything.
It hits me the second I step through the press entrance, and for three full seconds I forget how to breathe.
I press my thumbnail into the pad of my index finger until the sting brings me back.
Focus. I'm not Kenna Corbin here. I'm Kenna McEnroe, freelance sports journalist with credentials from a regional outlet that barely checks its own voicemail. I'm here for a story. I'm curious, professional, and slightly green.
I am not the dead rider's sister with a fake name and his murder on my mind.
The press box sits above the chutes, and I take the metal stairs two at a time because standing still makes the grief louder. My badge gets a cursory glance from the gate attendant, a sunburned woman with a clipboard who waves me through without a second glance.
Weeks of preparation, and the hardest part of going undercover on the Southwest Circuit turns out to be walking into an arena without falling apart.
The sounds are the worst. The metallic clang of chute gates, the low bawl of livestock in the holding pens, the particular way a crowd murmurs before the action starts, rising and falling like a tide.
I know these sounds the way I know my own heartbeat. My parents had me at my first rodeo before I could walk, and Grant and Dax made sure I never forgot it. By the time I was ten, I could tell whether a bull was rank or honest just from the noise it made in the chute.
Grant leaving to ride professionally blew my family apart.
Dax went with him, and my father never forgave either of them for walking away from the ranch.
By the time I left for college a few years later, the silence between us had hardened into something permanent.
He hasn't spoken to any of us in nearly three years.
His last words to me were ‘you and your brothers are dead to me.’
After that, Grant and Dax were all I had left. The circuit became the closest thing they had to home.
I find a seat near the end of the press row, away from the two reporters already settled in with their laptops and oversized sodas. A copy editor from Lubbock and a stringer for a livestock trade magazine, based on the logos on their lanyards.
Neither gives me more than a polite nod.
Good. I pull out my notebook because its sometimes easier to use than my laptop, the one with carefully pre-written questions designed to make me look like I know enough to be credible and not enough to be threatening.
I studied the current roster for weeks. I watched footage of every rider on the circuit until my eyes burned.
My phone buzzes. Dax. I let it go to voicemail the way I have for the past three weeks, because my brother's messages have shifted from worried to angry to the particular cold silence that means he's done waiting for me to tell him what I'm doing and has started figuring it out on his own.
The last voicemail was four words: "I know you're lying."
He's right. I'm lying to everyone. The difference is Dax won't let me get away with it forever, and when he stops waiting and starts acting, he'll do it with the subtlety of a hand grenade thrown into a church service.
Dax Corbin does nothing quietly. He got Grant's stubbornness without Grant's patience, and the combination makes him the most dangerous kind of ally — the kind who helps whether you want him to or not.
I'll call him back tomorrow. I've been saying that for a week.
I shove the phone in my pocket and pick up the laptop and notebook. Dax can wait. Grant is dead. Finding out what killed him can’t wait.
I read every article about the Southwest Circuit I could find, including the few paragraphs buried deep in the Las Cruces Sun-News that called my brother's death a tragic accident.
Tragic. Accident. Bullshit.
I dig my thumbnail into my finger again.
The arena is filling up. Friday night in Amarillo means cowboys in pressed shirts and women in turquoise jewelry, families with sticky-faced kids waving at the rodeo clowns warming up the crowd.
The announcer's voice booms off the metal rafters, rattling through the standings and the evening's lineup with the practiced enthusiasm of a man who's done this ten thousand times.
I scan the program. Barrel racing, team roping, saddle bronc, and the headliner: bull riding.
Colt Holloway's name is listed third in the bull riding rotation.
I've done my research on Holloway. Everyone on the Southwest Circuit has an opinion about him.
He's the current points leader with a reputation for never turning down a dangerous draw, riding the rankest bulls on the roster with the kind of reckless fury that makes you wonder if he's trying to win or trying to die.
Grant talked about him. Not often, but with the quiet respect my brother reserved for people he considered the real deal and a true friend.
Grant said Colt was the best bull rider he'd ever seen and the worst human being he'd ever liked.
I write Holloway's name in my notebook and underline it twice.
The first two bull riders go out. One makes the buzzer, barely. The other gets bucked off in four seconds flat and scrambles over the fence while the bullfighters redirect a ton of pissed-off Brahma cross.
The crowd loves it. The energy in the arena is electric, primal, the kind of collective adrenaline that turns strangers into a single organism.
Then the announcer's voice drops into that register reserved for the headliner.
"Ladies and gentlemen, our next rider needs no introduction. Current Southwest Circuit points leader, two-time circuit champion, the man they call the last cowboy standing. Riding Tombstone's Revenge, the rankest bull on the Southwest Circuit, please welcome Colt Holloway."
The arena erupts.
My blood goes cold.
Tombstone's Revenge. I know that name. It's in the Las Cruces incident report, in every article that called my brother's death an accident. That's the bull that killed Grant.
And Colt is climbing onto its back.
I lean forward.
Behind the chute, I can barely make him out. He's tall, broad-shouldered in a dark shirt, settling onto the bull with the focused economy of a man who's done this a thousand times.
He wraps his hand into the bull rope while two cowboys on either side of the chute keep the animal pinned.
Tombstone's Revenge is slamming against the metal panels, and the sound carries all the way to the press box, a deep booming that rattles the press box railing under my hands.
The chute opens.
Tombstone's Revenge explodes into the arena like a detonation. The bull spins left, drops its head, kicks so high its back hooves clear the top of the chute panels.
Holloway rides with his free hand high and his body low, absorbing every violent pivot with his hips and core.
His spurs find the bull's hide on every jump, marking time with a rhythm that turns raw survival into something deliberate.
Controlled. The kind of spurring that makes judges reach for the high numbers.
His face is half-shadow above the chute rail. The set of his jaw. The way he leans into the spin instead of fighting it.
There's no self-preservation in the way he rides.
The technique is muscle memory, trained into his body over years, but the man behind it is riding like he's got nothing left to lose.
He looks like a man who made peace with getting killed a long time ago and now treats every eight seconds as a personal insult that death keeps standing him up.
The buzzer sounds.
The crowd is on its feet. Tombstone's Revenge bucks Holloway off the back end, and he hits the dirt hard, rolls, and comes up in a crouch.
The bull wheels on him. Eighteen hundred pounds of muscle and horn swinging back around with its head low, targeting.
The bullfighters move in, and Holloway doesn't run.
He stands there for a full second, staring the animal down, before one of the bullfighters gets between them and he finally turns for the fence.
He pulls himself over the rail one-handed. Blood is already sheeting down the right side of his face from a gash above his eyebrow.
A medic rushes toward him with gauze and he waves the man off like he's shooing a fly.
Score: ninety-one point five. The press box buzzes. The copy editor from Lubbock lets out a low whistle.
I'm gripping the railing so hard my knuckles ache.
Around me, the press box has gone quiet in the particular way it does when the crowd noise speaks for itself.
The copy editor has stopped typing. The livestock stringer has his phone out, recording, which tells me this is the kind of ride that gets shared, talked about, argued over in bars and at breakfast tables across the circuit for weeks.
Ninety-one point five—A score like that means the judges saw what I saw: control in the middle of chaos, technique wrapped around something raw and reckless that has no business being that effective.
I've watched hundreds of bull rides in my life, probably thousands, and I can count on one hand the number that made me forget to breathe.
This was one of them.
"That cowboy's got a death wish," the livestock stringer mutters.
Yeah. He does. And I need to know why.
I've seen plenty of cowboys ride hard. Grant rode hard.
The difference is that Grant rode to win, rode because the competition was in his blood and the prize money kept us fed.
What I just watched wasn't competition. It was confrontation.
Holloway on that bull looked like a man picking a fight with God, and the score was an afterthought, a side effect of being too stubborn and too angry to fall off.
That kind of riding doesn't come from ambition. It comes from damage.
I give it twenty minutes. Long enough for the adrenaline to settle, short enough that he hasn't disappeared.