Chapter 1
CHAPTER ONE
Banshee
Present Day…
The bay doesn’t trust me yet.
That’s fine. I’m not in a hurry.
It’s a quarter past five in the morning and I’m sitting on an overturned bucket outside the quarantine stall with a cup of coffee going cold between my boots.
Haven’t moved in forty minutes.
Haven’t spoken.
Haven’t done anything except exist in this animal’s space and let it decide what that means.
The horse is pressed against the far wall.
Quarter horse, maybe five or six years old, though it’s hard to tell with the ones that come in like this.
Ribby. Scars across the left shoulder where someone used something they shouldn’t have.
Hooves cracked and flared so badly I could see the neglect from twenty feet away when we unloaded him off the trailer yesterday.
He’s standing with his weight shifted off the front left, which means there’s pain in there—abscess, rotation, something deep and structural that’s been wrong for a long time and nobody bothered to fix.
Kill pen horse.
Forty-eight hours from a slaughterhouse in Mexico before I pulled him.
He was standing in a feedlot ankle-deep in mud with thirty other horses, head down, ribs showing, not fighting anymore.
The ones who’ve given up are the hardest to bring back.
The fighters—the ones who kick and bite and pin their ears—those are easy.
They’ve still got something left.
It’s the quiet ones that break your heart.
The ones who’ve decided the world is just something that happens to them.
I know the feeling.
The barn is dim and warm. Smell of hay and pine shavings and the low earthy scent of horses at rest.
Outside, the Texas sky is just starting to crack along the eastern edge—a thin line of gray-gold that’ll bleed into pink if the clouds cooperate.
This is my favorite hour.
Before the ranch wakes up.
Before the brothers start moving through the compound.
Before I have to be Banshee instead of just the quiet man in the barn who’d rather talk to broken animals than people.
The bay’s ears flick toward me.
One rotation, then back. Testing.
He’s been doing that since I sat down—checking to see if I’m still here, whether I’ve moved, whether I’m a threat.
Every time he looks, I’m exactly where I was.
Same bucket. Same posture. Same slow breathing.
That’s the whole game.
Consistency. Showing up and being the same thing every single time until the animal’s nervous system stops bracing for the hit that isn’t coming.
It takes days. Weeks, sometimes.
I’ve had horses that didn’t let me touch them for a month.
You can’t rush it. You can’t force it. You just have to sit in the dark with another living thing’s fear and wait for it to figure out you’re not going to add to it.
I’m good at waiting.
The bay shifts his weight, takes a half-step along the wall.
Not toward me—lateral, testing the space.
His nostrils flare, pulling in my scent.
Coffee. Leather. Hay.
Whatever a man smells like when he’s been sitting still long enough to become furniture.
I don’t look at him directly.
I keep my eyes on the ground, my body loose, everything in my posture saying the same thing I’ll say tomorrow and the day after that: I’m here. I’m not moving. Take your time.
Somewhere outside, a rooster goes off.
One of the barn cats threads between my boots, tail up, and disappears into the feed room.
The coffee’s fully cold now. I drink it anyway.
By the time the sun clears the tree line, I’ve fed and watered the quarantine horses, mucked the stalls in the main barn, and checked the fencing along the south pasture where one of the older rescues keeps testing the bottom rail.
The ranch runs on routine, and I’m the one who sets the clock.
First one in. Last one out. Every day for years now.
The Shotgun Saints compound sits on one-hundred thousand acres of Texas Hill Country—rolling limestone terrain, live oaks, mesquite, a seasonal creek that runs through the eastern section when it bothers to rain.
The clubhouse and main buildings are on the south side, closer to the roads, but not as close as Grace’s vet clinic.
Residences scattered throughout the property for brothers who live on-site.
Barns, round pens, and pastures on the north end where our rescue operation runs.
It’s not a small operation anymore.
What started as me pulling a couple horses from a kill pen auction six years ago has turned into something real—thirty-plus on the property at any given time, a proper quarantine setup, a vet on staff.
Part of me thinks that Phantom agreed to pay Grace’s vet school if it meant she would oversee the cattle operation and take care of the livestock here on Sharp Shooter Ranch.
She has a busy vet clinic, but makes time to take care of the animals here.
One of my Prez’s daughters, but also Shadow’s wife.
She was working a lot more hours until recently, until the pregnancy really started showing and slowing her down.
Now she’s on the ranch full-time, except for a few emergency calls.
Anyone who needs routine care has agreed to wait until she’s back from her leave, or have a vet friend of hers tend to their animals while she’s out.
I see the lights on in their cabin as I walk from the south pasture back toward the main barn.
Warm yellow glow through the kitchen window.
Shadow’s truck parked outside.
The porch light they leave on all night now because Grace gets up three times to pee and Shadow hovers behind her like she’s going to trip on something between the bedroom and the bathroom.
The man survived exile, a rescue mission, and a shootout with the Copperhead Kings.
Yet his pregnant wife has him more rattled than all of it combined.
I watch the kitchen window for a beat longer than I should.
I can see them moving around inside—Grace at the counter, Shadow behind her, his hand on the small of her back as he reaches past her for something.
She leans into him without thinking about it.
Automatic. The easy choreography of two people who share space like they were built for it.
Something twists low in my chest.
Not jealousy. Not exactly.
More like a phantom limb—the memory of having that, of being the man with his hand on a woman’s back in a warm kitchen, of fitting into someone so naturally it didn’t feel like a choice.
It felt like breathing.
I look away before the ache becomes something I can’t swallow down.
I had that.
I had every bit of that, and now I have the barn first thing in the morning and horses that flinch when I raise my hand.
Same thing, some days.
Grace finds me mid-morning.
I’m in the round pen with a chestnut mare we pulled three weeks ago—she’s coming along, letting me work closer, and started accepting the halter yesterday.
I hear the crunch of gravel before I see Grace, and the mare’s ears swivel toward the sound.
“Easy,” I murmur. The mare holds. Good girl.
Grace leans against the rail, arms folded on top.
She’s six months along now and the belly is impossible to miss—stretching the flannel she stole from Shadow, which was already too big on her.
Her pink hair is pulled back, stethoscope around her neck, boots dusty.
She looks tired in the way pregnant women get when they’re pretending they’re not.
“Morning,” she says.
“Morning.” I keep my eyes on the mare. “You’re supposed to be taking it easy.”
“I walked two hundred yards from my front door to this pen. That’s easy.”
“Shadow know you’re out here?”
“Shadow can manage his own feelings about it.”
I almost smile.
Grace has been good for this ranch.
Good for Shadow.
Good for the rescue operation and good for the animals and good for the general morale of a club full of men who needed a woman with a spine to remind them they’re not as tough as they think they are.
She’s been good for me, too, in ways I don’t let myself think about too hard.
The sister I never asked for.
The person who saw my grief up close on that drive from Vegas and never once tried to fix it.
She just sat in it with me. That’s rare.
Most people want to hand you a platitude and move on.
Grace just… stayed.
“I checked on the new bay this morning,” she says, her voice shifting into vet mode. “He let me get close enough for a visual but wouldn’t let me handle him.”
“He won’t. Not yet.”
“I know. But Lee, those hooves.” She shakes her head.
“From what I could see, the front left has significant flaring. Possible rotation. The right isn’t much better.
And there’s what looks like an old abscess on the left hind that healed wrong.
He needs corrective farrier work before we can do anything else. ”
“I’ll get to it once he’s—”
“You’re good, but you’re not a corrective farrier.
This is specialist work. He needs someone who can do a full assessment, probably therapeutic shoes, maybe a resection on that abscess.
” She pauses. “There’s someone who just moved to the area.
Farrier with a strong reputation for corrective work.
Trained under a guy in East Texas who’s one of the best in the state. ”
Something in the way she says it—careful, deliberate—makes my shoulders tighten. “Who?”
“I’ll send you the info.” She pushes off the rail.
Diplomatic. Sidestepping the question like she knows the answer will cost her something.
“We’ve got six rescues that need hoof work in the next month, Lee.
The yearling, the two mares in pasture four, the paint with the chronic thrush.
I can keep these animals healthy, but I can’t do my job if their feet are falling apart underneath them. ”
She’s right. I know she’s right.
We’ve been limping along with a general farrier out of Kerrville who does adequate work on healthy horses but doesn’t have the skill set for the kind of damage kill pen rescues come in with.
Neglected hooves are the silent killer in this business.
A horse can survive starvation, abuse, parasites—but if the feet go bad enough, nothing else matters.
“I’ll think about it,” I say.
Grace gives me the look.