Chapter 4
BOULDER
The mailbox still says brIGGS, rust eating the second G.
I cut the engine of my brother’s truck at the top of the lane instead of driving down it, and Sable climbs out on her side without a word, already looking toward the house like it’s a job she’s bracing to finish.
Frost still sitting in the shadow of the barn.
The chickens are loud in their coop, restless.
It’s past their feeding time. It’s such a small thing to notice, but the farm is quiet.
No engine turning anywhere, no stock calling that isn’t the chickens, just wind through dead cornstalks in the back field.
“I’ll be quick,” she says, and goes.
I don’t follow past the porch.
The steps still creak on the third one up, same as they did when I was a kid.
I get as far as the doorframe. My hand finds the wood on its own, flat against the paint gone soft and gray with weather.
I rock back on my heels there a second, weight shifting the same way it used to when I was too scared to go in and too scared to stay out.
My name is on a deed in a drawer in Caulder Mill.
I let go of the frame, breathe out slow through my nose, and turn my back on the house. There’s a whole yard to read and I’m better at that than I am at standing in doorways. Sightlines to the road, the tree line past the equipment shed, the barn doors hanging open on a busted hinge.
Twenty minutes she stays in there. I hear drawers, a closet door, once a long quiet that goes on too long before I hear her moving again.
I don’t go check on her. She’ll come out when she comes out.
And crowding a grieving woman’s twenty minutes alone in the house she grew up, in isn’t protection, it’s just another kind of taking.
She comes out with a duffel bag over one shoulder and Wade’s denim jacket folded over her arm. The line between her eyebrows is gone, like packing gave her hands a job her heart needed.
“Got his coat. The parts book. Enough clothes.” She says it like a report, like I asked, and maybe I did without meaning to. “House still smells like him.”
That’s when I hear engines on the county road, and I know as soon as I see colors whose engines they are.
Three trucks and two bikes come up the lane. I’m off the porch and standing in the yard by the time the lead truck stops. Sable’s beside me a breath later, the duffel strap wound twice around her fist, her chin already up before anybody’s said a word.
I count heads. Five men. No rifles out, nothing in hands but keys and cigarettes. Not war yet.
The man who gets out first is lean, a scar splitting one eyebrow clean through, wearing a Gallows Hounds cut with VP stitched under the patch. He clocks the farmhouse, the empty yard, exactly the picture he came for. Then his eyes land on me.
He stops. I watch him take in my cut, my size, the fact that no one warned him this lonely twenty-year-old comes with a Thunder Bastards VP standing dead center of her yard.
“Didn’t expect company,” he says. No snarl. Just a man resetting his plan out loud.
“Warden.”
Cross had his name in his county watch log weeks back, when we figured the void left by the sheriff was going to attract nuisance. Spade is the president with a stand-up reputation. Warden, the VP, not so much.
“You’re on my land.”
That gets his eyes to move, quick, off me and onto the house, then back to me, slower the second time. “Your land.”
“Mine. Been mine for decades.” I don’t raise my voice. There’s no reason to. “Whatever you were pushing on Wade before he died, that’s over. You want that barn, you talk to me. And I’m telling you no.”
Warden takes the no without heat.
“Shame,” he says. “Wade was a careful man and I was going to keep this civil, for his sake.”
Too courteous. That’s the part that sits wrong with me.
Behind him, two of his men shift their weight, a small resettling that means they’re waiting on a word. My own hand stays loose at my side. Doesn’t need to be anything else yet.
Warden looks at Sable for the first time since he pulled up.
“She’s under Thunder Bastards protection,” I say, before his eyes can settle anywhere I don’t like. “Same as the farm. You come back out here for either one, you’re not talking terms with a woman alone. You’re starting something with my whole table.”
Nobody moves for three long seconds. Sable doesn’t step back. I feel her half a pace behind my shoulder, close enough that I know exactly where she is without looking. I don’t reach for her, don’t need to, she’s not going anywhere and neither am I.
Warden’s face doesn’t change much. He just nods once, like he’s already decided what happens next and doesn’t need my agreement to start it.
“Barn’s got good road access,” he says, climbing back into his truck without being asked twice. “Two ways in, two ways out. We won’t give up on a spot like that.” He shuts the door. Rolls the window down. “We’ll have it. One way or the other. Lease or no lease.”
The trucks pull out slow as they came in, same unhurried arrogance. Spark’s hand finds mine down at my side — not holding, just knuckles against knuckles, the smallest touch there is — and neither of us looks at it or moves away until the dust settles back onto the lane.
That’s when I see it plain.
I do the math Warden already did. Two hundred acres paid off free and clear, a barn you could stage a freight business out of, county road on one side and a graded back track on the other, and no neighbor close enough to hear a truck load at midnight.
Ground like this doesn’t come up in Carrow County once in twenty years.
Wade was sitting on the exact piece of land a smuggler would draw if you handed him a pencil.
They’ve been planning a way through this farm since before Wade’s heart ever gave out on him.