Epilogue #2
"Saturday's event in Lumberton. Then the regional in Pinehurst the week after.
" He was already calculating—she could see it, the logistics running behind his eyes, the man who'd spent eight years moving cargo now moving horses and timelines and the pieces of her career into alignment.
"I'll have the trailer serviced. We should leave by six for Lumberton, get Duchess settled early. "
"You've been planning this."
"I've been planning this since you posted sixteen-nine ten minutes ago.
" He caught her hand and pressed his mouth against her knuckles—a gesture that was habit now, the brief contact he made every time they were about to climb into a truck or onto a bike or into the daily machinery of a life they'd built together.
"Saturday, Dana. We're going to Lumberton and you're going to ride like the woman who beat a gambling empire and tell them all to go to hell. "
"I didn't tell them to go to hell."
"You told them you wouldn't lose. Same thing."
She climbed into the truck. He closed her door, walked around to the driver's side, and started the engine. The trailer settled behind them—Duchess shifting her weight, the familiar sway of a horse in transit, the sound of a life in motion.
Dana put her hand on his thigh. He covered it with his own.
The road unspooled ahead of them—Carolina back roads through pine forests and open fields, the same roads she'd shown him the afternoon they'd driven her property for the first time.
Her geography. Their geography now. The map of a life that had started with nothing and accumulated meaning the way good ground accumulated topsoil—slowly, through seasons of effort, until something could grow.
She thought about the foster kid who'd aged out with a garbage bag and two hundred dollars. The girl who'd slept in truck stops and showered at gas stations and bought a horse nobody wanted because she saw herself in its eyes.
She barely recognized her in the mirror of who she'd become.
Not because she'd changed—because she'd finally become the person she'd been building toward. Belt buckle by belt buckle. Horse by horse. One stubborn morning at a time, refusing to lose, refusing to quit, refusing to accept that a kid from nowhere was destined to stay there.
The next event was Saturday. Turnbuckle was already planning the drive.
And Dana Scofield—barrel racer, horse trainer, old lady of a Bragg Exile who'd walked toward every fight and stayed for every morning after—leaned back in her seat, watched the Carolina light stream through the windshield, and let herself feel something she'd never trusted before.
Enough.
Not the resigned kind. Not the settling kind. The kind that came from building something worth having and finally believing she deserved to keep it.
The truck rolled on. The horses were safe. The man beside her was hers.
Saturday was coming, and they were ready.
THE END
AUTHOR’S NOTE
I hope you enjoyed TURNBUCKLE’S CLAIM! But no matter how you felt about it, I’d love to hear your thoughts. If you’d like to leave a review, here is a link to the amazon page:
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READ ON FOR A SNEAK PEEK OF LEGION’S FURY, THE FIRST BOOK IN THE BLACK OPS brOTHERHOOD MC SERIES
SNEAK PEEK: LEGION’S FURY
Chapter 1
Legion knew something was wrong before he killed the engine.
The Merritt Veterans Physical Therapy Clinic sat dark at six PM on a Tuesday—no lights in the treatment rooms, no cars in the staff lot, the kind of silence that meant either empty or ambush. Twenty-four years of Special Forces had taught him the difference. This wasn't empty.
He swung off his bike and moved toward the entrance, cataloging details with the automatic precision of a man who'd run operations on four continents.
Fresh tire tracks in the gravel, too wide for Hannah's sedan.
Broken glass glinting near the side door.
And two men in a black SUV parked at the edge of the lot, watching the building with the patient boredom of predators waiting for prey to bolt.
They hadn't noticed him yet. That was about to change.
Legion pushed through the front door and found destruction.
The waiting room looked like a bomb had hit it—chairs overturned, magazines scattered across the floor, the reception desk's computer smashed to pieces. Medical equipment lay in ruins throughout the treatment area. Six years of work reduced to wreckage in what couldn't have been more than an hour.
And in the middle of it all, sitting on an overturned exam table with a bag of frozen peas pressed to her face, was Hannah Merritt.
"You're early." Her voice came out steady, but he caught the tremor underneath. "Appointment's not for another thirty minutes."
Legion crossed the debris field in four strides.
His hand found her chin before she could pull away, tilting her face toward the fading light from the window.
The black eye was fresh—maybe two hours old, swelling already purpling the delicate skin beneath her brow.
Someone had hit her hard enough to leave knuckles imprinted in the bruise.
Something cold and lethal unfurled in his chest.
"Who."
It wasn't a question. It was a demand, delivered in the quiet voice that had made colonels flinch and enemies beg.
Hannah's jaw tightened under his grip. "Couple of guys with a business proposition I wasn't interested in. They got persuasive."
"Names."
"Didn't exactly exchange cards." She pulled away from his touch, green eyes blazing with the same stubborn fire that had made her the best PT he'd ever worked with.
The woman had spent six years bullying Green Berets and Rangers through rehabilitation, refusing to accept anything less than full recovery. She didn't scare easy.
But she was scared now. He could see it in the way her hands shook when she lowered the frozen peas, in the quick glance she shot toward the parking lot.
"They're still out there," Legion said. Statement, not question.
"Told me to think about their offer. Said they'd be back for my answer." Hannah laughed, the sound brittle and wrong. "I think destroying my clinic was supposed to help me think faster."
Legion moved to the window, positioning himself at an angle that let him see the SUV without being visible from outside.
Two men, both with the military contractor look—private security muscle, probably former Army who'd washed out or got pushed out.
The driver was smoking. The passenger was checking his phone.
Neither of them was watching the door.
"Stay here."
"What are you—"
But he was already gone, slipping through the side exit Hannah probably didn't know he'd noticed on his first visit three months ago.
The evening air hit him like a wet blanket—Carolina humidity that clung to everything—and he used the building's shadow to approach the SUV from the driver's blind spot.
The smoker died first.
Legion came through the driver's window before the man could reach for the gun at his hip, one hand clamping over his mouth while the other found the pressure point at his throat.
Four seconds of applied force and the cigarette dropped from slack fingers, the body slumping against the steering wheel.
The passenger looked up from his phone just in time to see Legion coming around the hood.
He was faster than his partner—got a hand on his weapon, started to raise it—but Legion had been dropping men like this since Panama. He caught the gun arm, twisted until the joint separated with a wet pop, and drove his elbow into the man's throat with enough force to crush his windpipe.
The whole thing took maybe fifteen seconds.
Legion stood in the parking lot, breathing slow and controlled, and assessed the situation. Two bodies. One SUV that needed to disappear. And a woman inside who'd just had her world torn apart by people who clearly didn't know what they were dealing with.
He pulled his phone and made two calls. The first was short: coordinates, cleanup, thirty minutes. The second was shorter: "Compound. Now. Bringing company."
When he walked back into the clinic, Hannah was standing at the window.
Her face had gone pale, lips pressed together in a thin line. She'd watched the whole thing—watched him move through those men like they were training dummies, watched him kill without hesitation or remorse. The frozen peas lay forgotten on the floor.
"You—" She stopped. Swallowed. Tried again. "You're not just a patient."
"No."
"Those men. They're—"
"Dead." Legion closed the distance between them, stopping just inside her space. Close enough to touch. Close enough to see her pulse hammering in her throat. "And whoever sent them is going to find out that coming after you was the worst mistake they ever made."
Hannah's chin came up—that stubborn defiance he'd watched her aim at broken operators who wanted to quit their rehab. "I didn't ask for your help."
"You didn't have to."
"I can handle my own problems—"
"Your clinic's destroyed. You've got a black eye. And two more of them would've been inside the minute they decided you'd thought long enough." Legion let the words land, watched her flinch at each truth. "This stopped being something you handle alone the second they touched you."
"And what, you're just going to fix it? Ride in on your motorcycle and make it all go away?"
"Something like that." He glanced around the destroyed clinic, at six years of her life reduced to wreckage. "But first, you're going to tell me exactly what they wanted. What 'business proposition' gets delivered with fists."