Chapter 1 #2
The walk from the press box to the chute area takes me down the metal stairs and through the back corridor where the air gets thicker with the smell of livestock and sweat and the industrial tang of the veterinary supplies stacked on pallets along the wall.
Crew members dodge around me with equipment. A stock contractor I don't recognize barks orders into a walkie-talkie.
Two barrel racers walk past leading their horses, the animals' hooves clopping against the concrete, and one of them looks at my press badge and looks away.
Behind the chutes is organized chaos. Cowboys stretching, checking gear, talking in low voices about their draws. The energy back here is different from the arena. No performance. Just the quiet focus of men who know what's waiting for them on the other side of the gate.
I find Holloway sitting on an overturned bucket with his elbows on his knees and the cut still dripping. A medic hovers a few feet away, holding a suture kit and looking like a man who's been told to go to hell more than once tonight.
"Mr. Holloway." I hold up my badge. "Kenna McEnroe, freelance press. I'm covering the Southwest Circuit for a feature piece. Do you have a minute?"
He doesn't look up right away.
When he does, the full weight of his eyes lands on me, and my stomach tightens.
The photos don't do him justice. Not because he's handsome, though he is, in the rough-edged way of men who've been hit too many times to look pretty.
It's the intensity. The way he looks at me like he's cataloging everything I am and everything I'm hiding in the space between one heartbeat and the next.
"Fuck off," he says.
His voice is low, ground-glass rough, with a West Texas drawl that drags the vowels out slow and deliberate. The kind of voice that makes two words sound like a door slamming shut.
"I just have a few questions about the circuit," I say. "Your perspective as the points leader on—"
"I said fuck off." He stands. Six-two, easy, thick through the shoulders and arms, built the way bull riders are built: heavy muscle packed onto a frame designed to absorb punishment.
His hands are scarred across the knuckles and the backs of his fingers, old rope burns layered over new ones.
The nose has been broken at least twice.
He fills the space the way weather fills a valley, slow and total, and the air around him carries the smell of arena dirt and rosin and the copper edge of blood drying on his face.
It's not just the size. It's the stillness beneath the aggression, the control of a man who could put you through a wall and is deciding whether you're worth the effort.
I've interviewed politicians and police chiefs and a county judge who turned out to be embezzling from the school district. None of them made me recalculate my approach mid-sentence.
This one does. And he can't know that.
He turns toward the stock pens and starts walking.
I follow.
"The story's going to run with or without your input," I call after him. "I just thought you might want a say in how it reads."
He stops. Turns. The look on his face sits somewhere between amusement and contempt.
"You thought wrong." He takes a step toward me, close enough that I have to tilt my chin up to hold eye contact.
He's bleeding freely now, a thin line of red tracking down his temple and into the collar of his shirt, and he hasn't so much as wiped at it.
"Let me save you some time, sweetheart. The circuit's a tire fire, the officials are bought, and nobody with any power gives a damn about anything except keeping the sponsors happy, the public paying and the cameras rolling. "
"That sounds like a story to me."
"That sounds like a Tuesday." He studies me, and the amusement fades.
What's left is sharper. Assessing. The cut above his eye is starting to swell, the skin around it purpling, and he doesn't touch it.
Doesn't acknowledge the bleeding or the way his left hand hangs at his side with the fingers slightly curled, protecting the riding hand the way bull riders do when the adrenaline fades and the rope burns start to announce themselves.
I've seen Grant do the same thing a hundred times, stand there bleeding after a ride and pretend nothing hurt, and the familiarity of the gesture sends a spike of grief through me so sharp I have to swallow against it.
Behind us, a chute gate clangs open for the next rider, and the crowd roars, and neither of us turns to look.
He makes a decision. I can see it happen, the shift behind his eyes, the moment he stops dismissing me and starts testing me.
"You want a real story? Start by asking why the Southwest Circuit ruled Grant Corbin's death an accident when every stock contractor from here to El Paso knows Thornton Livestock's bulls have been juiced."
The name hits me like a sucker punch.
Grant Corbin.
My brother's name, out of Holloway's mouth, dropped so casually it takes everything I have to keep my expression locked down.
My fingers go tight around my notebook.
Holloway's watching. Close. Too close.
"Grant Corbin," I repeat. My voice comes out steady, which is a minor miracle. "The bull rider who died in Las Cruces."
"The bull rider who was murdered in Las Cruces." He says it the way other people say the sky is blue. Flat. Certain. Daring me to flinch. "But you already knew that, right? Since you're covering the circuit."
"I've read the reports. They said—"
"The reports are horseshit." He leans in, and the closeness is a weapon, designed to crowd me, to test whether I'll step back.
I plant my feet. "Thornton Livestock supplied a bull named Tombstone's Revenge for the Las Cruces event.
That bull was doped. Corbin drew that bull because somebody made sure he drew it.
And two months later, nobody's asking why. "
The blood is covering his shirt collar now. He doesn't seem to notice. Or care.
"Are you saying someone killed Grant on purpose?" I ask the question like a journalist. Measured. Probing. Inside, my belly feels like a cage of razor wire.
"I'm saying I watched that bull's footage. Tombstone's Revenge was a different animal in Las Cruces than he was at every other event that season. Faster. More aggressive. Targeted the rider like it had instructions." His mouth goes flat. "That's not an accident. That's an execution."