Chapter 7
CHAPTER SEVEN
Banshee
I haven’t slept in four days.
Not properly. Not the deep, black, dreamless kind that resets you.
I’ve been getting the other kind—the shallow, fitful surface sleep where your body shuts down for an hour and your brain keeps running, replaying the same footage on a loop until you wake up with your jaw clenched and your sheets twisted and the taste of her mouth still on your lips.
I can’t stop feeling it.
The kiss.
Her body against mine in that stall, the rain overhead, the horse trembling in the corner.
Her hand fisted in my shirt.
Her mouth opening under mine.
The sound I made—that sound, the one that came from somewhere I’d bricked over years ago, the sound of a man coming back to life against his will.
The only thing I can do to occupy my mind is ride, so I’ve been riding at night.
After midnight, when the compound is dark and the brothers are asleep and no one’s going to ask where I’m going.
No room for guilt.
No room for the memory of her hip under my hand.
No room for the way her dark eyes looked when I pulled away and the word she threw at me—I know exactly who she was, Lee—which hit harder than a fist because she was right.
She was right about everything.
The roads I ride are the same roads that killed Rose.
I know this.
I know that taking curves at speed on a motorcycle after midnight on rural Texas highways is not the behavior of a man who’s processing his emotions in a healthy way.
Shadow would kill me if he knew. Phantom would pull my patch.
The irony of the Road Captain being reckless with roads is not lost on me.
But the roads don’t scare me. Nothing about dying scares me.
What scares me is the thing that happened in that stall—the moment my body overrode all of the walls I’ve built and I kissed Bex like she was oxygen and I was drowning.
What scares me is that I can’t undo it.
Can’t unfeel her under my hands.
Can’t unhear the catch in her breathing when my thumb found the bare skin above her hip.
What scares me most is that I don’t want to.
I’ve been avoiding her for days now.
Days of short sentences and calculated distances and the kind of cold professionalism that fools nobody, least of all the woman I’m inflicting it on.
The problem is, I can’t stop watching her.
I catch myself doing it at the worst possible moments.
She’s working the paint mare and I’m supposed to be in the feed room.
Instead I’m standing at the door watching her hands on the hoof knife, the controlled precision of her cuts, the way she shifts her weight and braces her thigh, and the muscles in her forearms flex and release in a rhythm I could watch for hours.
She straightens and rolls her shoulders. There's a strip of sweat darkening the collar of her shirt, and I’m looking at it like it’s a message written in a language I’m desperate to translate.
She lifts her braid off the back of her neck to let the air hit her skin and I forget what I came to the feed room for.
I listen for her truck in the morning.
That’s the thing I can’t explain away.
The diesel growl at 7 AM—I’m tuned to it now, the way you tune to a sound that matters.
I know when she pulls up before I see her.
I know the sound of her boots on the barn aisle, heavier than Grace’s, confident, no hesitation in the stride.
I know the way she greets the horses—low, practical, no baby talk, just a hand on a neck and a “morning” that sounds like she’s talking to a colleague she respects.
I know the sound of her laugh when Grace says something funny.
It’s different from Rose’s laugh—lower, rougher, surprised out of her like she didn’t expect to find anything funny and is annoyed that she did.
Rose laughed easily, at everything, the way sunshine happens.
Bex laughs like it’s been earned.
Like the thing that made her laugh had to work for it.
I’m cataloguing her.
Building a file I didn’t authorize and can’t delete.
The way she holds a rasp.
The scar on her left knuckle.
The specific shade of black her hair turns in direct sun—not pure black, darker brown, almost auburn at the edges where the light catches.
The way she takes up space without apology, her body occupying the room in a way that demands attention not because she asks for it but because she’s too much to overlook.
Rose was a whisper. Gentle, pervasive, everywhere at once without you noticing until she was all you could hear.
Bex is a statement. Loud and present and impossible to ignore, even when you’re trying. Especially when you’re trying.
I’m trying.
I’m failing.
Somehow, the day flew by and it’s nearly eleven at night.
I’m in my quarters in the bunkhouse—small, clean, spartan. Bed. Desk. A single photo of Rose on the nightstand that I can’t look at and can’t put away.
I’m sitting on the edge of the bed in jeans and no shirt, staring at the wall, debating whether tonight’s the night I ride or the night I sleep, when my phone lights up.
Grace.
I answer immediately because Grace doesn’t call this late unless something’s wrong.
“It’s the gray mare.” Her voice is tight. The vet voice, not the friend voice. “Passage. I was doing late rounds and she’s down in her stall. Rolling. Pulse is elevated. Gut sounds are absent on the right side. I think she’s colicking.”
Colic.
The word every horseman dreads.
A displaced colon in a twelve-year-old rescue mare who’s been on the property for eight months and was just starting to thrive.
“How bad?”
“Bad enough that I want someone in the stall with her while I manage treatment. Shadow’s with me, but I need someone who knows the horse. She trusts you.” A pause. “Banshee, I’d be in there myself but—”
“You’re six months pregnant. You’re not getting in a stall with a colicking horse.” I’m already pulling on a shirt, shoving my feet into boots. “I’m coming. Five minutes.”
“One more thing.” Grace’s voice shifts. Careful. The voice of a woman who’s about to say something she knows I don’t want to hear. “I called Bex. She’s closer and she’s got experience with colic episodes. She’ll be here in ten.”
I close my eyes and open them. “Fine.”
“Lee.” Gentle. “The mare needs both of you. Your ego doesn’t get a vote tonight.”
She hangs up before I can respond, which is probably strategic.
Grace knows she didn’t need to call Bex. Hell, we both know it.
Passage is in trouble.
I see it the moment I hit the barn aisle.
Shadow is standing outside the stall, arms crossed, his face set in the grim, helpless expression of a man who will fight any human threat on earth but can’t fight what’s happening inside an animal’s gut.
Grace is at the stall door with her kit, stethoscope around her neck, gloves on.
Inside the stall, the gray mare is down.
On her side, flanks dark with sweat, breathing in the short, sharp pants of an animal in serious pain.
Her legs extend and retract, extend and retract—the restless, helpless cycling of a horse that can’t get comfortable because the pain has no position that eases it.
As I watch, she tries to roll—the full, violent roll that a colicking horse does to try to relieve the pressure, and the roll that can twist a displaced colon into a torsion that kills.
“Don’t let her roll,” Grace says. Already moving, already working. “Get her up if you can. Walk her. I’m going to tube her and get fluids and mineral oil in. We need to keep things moving.”
I go into the stall and crouch beside the mare.
Her eye rolls toward me—white-rimmed, frightened, searching for something familiar in the pain.
I put my hand on her neck.
Warm. Damp.
The muscles underneath are twitching and rigid.
“Hey, girl. I know. I know it hurts.” Low. Steady. The voice I use for every scared, hurting animal on this ranch. The voice I can’t use for myself. “We’re gonna get you up. Come on.”
I get the halter on. Brace my weight. Pull.
She resists—the ground feels safer when you’re in pain, even when the ground is the most dangerous place to be.
I pull again.
Talk to her.
Insist without forcing. She lurches up—front legs first, then the heave of the hindquarters—and stands swaying, head low, trembling.
I clip the lead and start walking. Up and down the barn aisle. Slow, steady laps.
Grace works behind us—the nasogastric tube, the mineral oil, the IV catheter for fluids.
Shadow assists, holding what she needs held, steady and silent and useful in the way big men often are during crises.
Grace directs them both with the calm authority of a woman who has done this a hundred times and knows that panic kills more horses than colic does.
Passage walks. Reluctant, painful, each step an effort.
I keep my hand on her neck, keep the rhythm steady, keep talking in that low, constant murmur that means nothing in words and everything in tone.
You’re not alone. I’m here. Keep moving.
Bex arrives sometime after that.
I hear her truck. Her boots. The barn door opening. I don’t turn around because I’m walking the mare and the mare needs consistency and because turning around to look at Bex is a thing I’m not allowing myself to do.
She appears beside me without a word.
Falls into step.
Reads the situation in three seconds—the tube, the IV, Grace’s face, the mare’s pain level—and doesn’t ask questions she already knows the answers to. She just walks.
Her shoulder is six inches from mine.
I can smell the night air on her—cold and cedar and underneath it the permanent base note of iron and leather and warm skin.
She drove here fast.
Her braid is messy, thrown together in the truck.
She’s wearing a flannel over a tank top and the flannel is misbuttoned by one hole and I notice this because I notice everything about her now and it’s driving me out of my mind.
We walk the mare.
Grace checks vitals every thirty minutes.
The first hour is bad—pulse stays elevated, gut sounds absent, and the mare stops twice to kick at her belly. I have to talk her through it, hand on her face, voice low, don’t roll, don’t go down, stay with me.