Chapter 3
CHAPTER THREE
Banshee
I last three days before I drive myself insane.
Three days of knowing Bex Dalton is in Sharp.
Three days of knowing Earl is sick.
Three days of turning both facts over in my head like rocks I can’t stop touching even though the edges cut every time.
I haven’t gone to see Earl.
I should. I know I should.
The man was a father to me—not in the sentimental, Hallmark-card way, but in the real way, the way that counts.
He taught me to shoe a horse before he taught me to shake hands.
Sat me down at his kitchen table when I asked for Rose’s hand and said, “She chose you. Don’t make me regret letting her.”
Stood beside me at the funeral and didn’t say a word because he was burying his only child and words were the most useless thing on earth.
Five and a half years of silence.
Five and a half years of letting an old man wonder if the son-in-law who used to come for Sunday dinners was alive or dead.
I didn’t call. Didn’t visit. Didn’t answer when Bex tried to bridge the gap.
I just… stopped.
Withdrew into the compound and the horses and the numb, airless space I’d built for myself, because going to Earl’s ranch meant driving the roads Rose drove, sitting in the kitchen where Rose cooked, looking at the barn where I proposed to her on one knee in the hay dust with Earl’s best mare watching like a witness.
Every piece of that place is a piece of her.
I couldn’t go back without drowning in it.
So, I didn’t go back.
And an old man with cancer asked about me every time Bex walked through the door, and she had to tell him no.
Every time. For months.
I know what that makes me.
I don’t need Bex to spell it out in a feed store.
But she did. And now it’s sitting in my chest like a coal that won’t cool.
Grace finds me in the round pen around seven in the morning on a Tuesday, which means she’s been planning this.
Grace doesn’t do anything accidentally.
Everything is deliberate, every move calculated for maximum effect with minimum waste.
Including this conversation, which she opens by leaning against the rail and waiting in silence until I acknowledge her.
I take my time.
I’m working with the chestnut mare, asking her to move off pressure, using body language to direct her around the pen.
The mare responds—ears flicking, head dropping, the soft chewing motion that means she’s processing.
Good work. Slow work. The kind that can’t be interrupted.
Grace waits anyway.
I give the mare a release.
She stops, turns to face me, licks and chews. I rub her forehead, then walk to the rail.
“The bay’s feet are getting worse,” Grace says. “He’s bearing less weight on the front left than he was three days ago. If there’s rotation happening, every day we wait makes the prognosis worse.”
“I know.”
“The yearling’s front hooves are flaring badly enough to affect her gait.
The paint in pasture four has chronic thrush that needs aggressive treatment and corrective trimming.
And the two mares from the last auction both have evidence of previous laminitis that needs monitoring and management from someone who knows what they’re looking at.
” She ticks them off on her fingers. Clinical.
Precise. “That’s five horses, Lee. Five animals that need specialist farrier work that neither of us can provide. ”
“I’ll call the guy in Kerrville.”
“The guy in Kerrville does trail horses and backyard ponies. He’s not equipped for corrective work on kill pen rescues with structural damage. You know that.”
I know that.
I’ve known it for weeks.
I just don’t want to hear what comes next.
“Bex Dalton,” Grace says, and the name hits me like a fist under the ribs.
“She trained under Earl Dawson, who was one of the best corrective farriers in Central Texas. She’s been doing this for over a decade.
She recently moved back and she’s building a client list. I’ve looked into her work—she’s good, Lee.
Really good. The kind of good these horses need. ”
“No.”
Grace doesn’t react.
Just watches me with those steady brown eyes that see everything and judge nothing.
It’s the same look she gives a horse before she sticks a needle in it—calm, measured, already three steps ahead.
“This isn’t personal,” she says.
“The hell it isn’t.”
“It’s about the horses. That’s it. Whatever history you have with Bex is yours, and I’m not asking about it. But I’m telling you, as the veterinarian responsible for these animals, that they need corrective farrier work and she’s the most qualified person within a hundred miles to do it.”
I stare at the mare in the pen.
She’s watching us, ears pricked, head slightly cocked.
Even the horse knows this conversation isn’t going my way.
“I’ll think about it,” I say.
“You said that three days ago.”
“Then give me three more.”
Grace pushes off the rail. “I’m bringing it to my father. I’ve waited long enough.”
That stops me. “You’re going over my head.”
“I’m doing my job. The rescue operation is an extension of club business.
The horses’ welfare is my responsibility.
If the Road Captain won’t authorize a necessary hire, I go to the president.
That’s how this works.” She says it without heat.
Without apology. Just fact. “I’d rather you agreed, but I’ll go around you if I have to. ”
She walks away.
Six months pregnant and still the most formidable person on this ranch.
I stand in the round pen with the chestnut mare and feel the walls closing in.
Phantom doesn’t ask me.
He tells me.
Catches me outside the clubhouse after lunch, coffee in hand, expression neutral in the way that means the decision is already made and this conversation is a courtesy.
“Grace brought me the farrier situation,” he says. “Bex Dalton. She starts this week.”
“Prez—”
“The horses need the work. She’s qualified. It’s done.” He takes a sip of coffee. Studies me over the rim. “You want to tell me why you’re fighting this?”
I could lie.
Could say it’s about credentials, about bringing an outsider onto the compound, about a dozen practical objections that would sound reasonable if you didn’t look too hard.
Phantom would see through every one of them.
The man didn’t become president of an MC by being easy to bullshit.
“She was Rose’s best friend,” I say.
Phantom nods. Slow.
The kind of nod that says he already knew and was waiting for me to say it out loud.
“And you think having her here is going to make things harder.”
“I know it will.”
He’s quiet for a long moment.
The compound moves around us—a prospect washing bikes, two brothers working on a fence section, the distant sound of a horse blowing in the barn.
Normal life.
The kind of ordinary I’ve leaned on like a crutch for years, especially since Rose’s death.
“Harder isn’t always worse,” Phantom says.
He doesn’t elaborate. Just claps my shoulder and walks inside.
I stand there holding my coffee and feeling like a man who just lost an argument he never had a chance of winning.
She shows up Thursday morning.
I hear the rig before I see it—a heavy diesel pulling onto the compound, the particular rumble and rattle of a farrier’s truck loaded with anvil and forge and the hundred pounds of tools that make the work possible.
I’m in the barn with the bay, sitting on my bucket, and the sound reaches me through the open doors like an advancing weather front.
I don’t go out to meet her.
I stay where I am, in the dim quiet of the quarantine stall, and let someone else handle the welcome.
Shadow, probably.
Or Grace.
The people with functional social skills who don’t turn to stone at the sound of a woman’s truck in the gravel.
Five minutes. Ten.
I hear voices—Grace’s, warm and professional, and another voice I haven’t heard in person in years.
Lower than Rose’s. Rougher.
Even through the barn walls, even muffled by distance and wood, it does something to the base of my spine.
A recognition. A tightening.
I ignore it.
Footsteps on the barn aisle.
Two sets.
Grace appears first, clipboard in hand, already talking case notes.
Behind her—
Bex.
She’s dressed for work.
Steel-toed boots, thick denim, a leather farrier’s apron tied at the waist that hangs to mid-thigh.
Her black hair is pulled back in a tight braid that runs down between her shoulder blades.
No jewelry. No makeup. No effort made toward anything except function, and somehow that’s worse than if she’d shown up looking like she was trying, because she’s not trying and she still looks like—
I shut that down.
Hard. File it in the same locked drawer where I keep every thought that threatens to complicate the simple, airless life I’ve built for myself.
She sees me on the bucket outside the quarantine stall.
Our eyes meet and the air between us does something complicated—thickens, charges, develops a texture I don’t want to name.
The feed store was shock.
Ambush. Neither of us were ready.
This is different. This is deliberate.
She’s here because she was hired to be here, and I’m here because this is my barn and my rescue operation and I don’t leave my own ground for anyone.
“Lee.” Professional. Neutral. Giving me exactly what I gave her at Holcomb’s—nothing.
“Bex.”
Grace looks between us with the expression of a woman who has assessed the situation, determined that the two people in front of her are going to be idiots about it, and decided to proceed as though they’re not.
“Let’s start with the yearling,” she says. “She’s the most cooperative and it’ll give Bex a chance to see the facility before we tackle the harder cases.”
Bex nods.
All business.
She’s not nervous—I notice that immediately.
A lot of people get twitchy on a massive ranch like this, then add in the fact we’re also a MC compound.
The bikes, the patches, the general atmosphere of men who live by a code most civilians don’t understand.
Bex walks through it like she’s walking through a feed store.
Comfortable. Unimpressed.