Chapter 21
Kade
Itake the long way home.
No good reason for it. Just not ready to walk through that door yet.
The land’s all frost and brown scrub on either side of the road, and I keep my eyes on it and my hands on the wheel and try not to think about the fact that I spent the past few hours babysitting Allie.
Or what I almost did in broad daylight when that asshole Joseph walked up to her.
I didn’t set out this morning to watch her all day.
I was there, she was there, and then I couldn’t leave.
Told myself it was about keeping an eye on her.
Everything that’s happened lately, that’s not even a lie.
But she got out of her car, and I sat there with the engine idling for another forty minutes.
At some point, I ran out of ways to call it anything other than what it was.
She looked up from across the street, and I sank back in the seat. It didn’t matter because she fucking saw me. She always sees me.
I’m still chewing on that when I pull up to the house and find my brothers’ vehicles scattered around the property. Full house.
I haven’t laid eyes on Calder since last night—since we both said things that put hard lines between us—and seeing all three of them here already tells me exactly how his morning went.
He got to them first. Rounded them up, laid out his side of it, and made sure the numbers were in his favor before I walked in.
I follow their voices inside and find the study.
My boots slow in the doorway.
Calder’s behind Roman’s desk. Settled in like he’s been there for years, papers spread in front of him, working through them like it’s nothing. Maybe it is nothing to him. I never gave much thought to what Calder was waiting for while Roman was alive. What any of us were.
But seeing him in that chair does something to me I don’t have a clean word for.
It’s not that I wanted it. God knows I don’t want that desk or anything it stands for.
It’s not about that. It’s more like—Roman’s actually gone.
The order of things has shifted. And I thought I wanted that, thought I’d wanted it for years, but standing here looking at proof of it sits wrong in my gut all the same.
The desk. The chair. A man settling into a dead man’s space.
Even if the dead man had it coming.
Sawyer’s got both palms on the surface mid-sentence when I walk in. Levi’s over at the drink cart, and when he spots me, he pours a second glass without a word.
Never a good sign.
Three of them. One room. I do the math fast, and I don’t like what it adds up to. I’ve walked into worse ambushes, but that doesn’t mean I can’t see this one for what it is.
“What the hell are you all doing in here?” I ask.
Calder and Sawyer both startle. We never came in here willingly before. Roman saw to that. “Where the hell did you come from?” Calder says, hand going to his chest.
“Answer the question.”
He leans back—in Roman’s chair— and looks at me like he’s already three moves ahead, and I’m still figuring out the board. “It has a desk. I needed a desk.”
“We should throw everything in this room out. All of it.”
“You’re welcome to that.” He says it like he means it. Maybe he does. “Right now, I have work to do.”
I make myself walk in. The room’s got a weight to it that has nothing to do with furniture.
I know every corner of it. The window where Roman used to make you stand while he sat with his back to the light so you couldn’t read his face.
The way the walls swallow sound. A faint cigarette smell lingers in the air, and I don’t know if it’ll ever leave.
Calder is not Roman. But standing in this room, watching him from behind that desk, it all bleeds together in my head in ways I can’t stop.
I plant myself near the bookcase. Levi holds out the second glass. I don’t move for it. Taking a drink right now feels like agreeing to something I haven’t heard yet.
“You’re having a meeting without me,” I say.
“Hard to have a meeting with a man nobody can find,” Sawyer says. He doesn’t dress it up. “You’ve been gone half the time, Kade. Show up when it suits you and disappear the rest.”
He’s not wrong.
“While you were out sulking about last night,” Calder says, setting his papers down, “cattle rustlers hit the south pasture.”
The back of my neck prickles. “What’d they take?”
“Eleven head. Probably more, still counting.” He says it flat, like he’s already past the shock of it. “But the number’s not what matters. What matters is they came at all.”
“When’s the last time anyone tried that?
” Sawyer has moved away from the desk, arms crossed, jaw set.
He looks wrung out. The kind of tired that’s been building for weeks.
“Years, Kade. Nobody’s touched this land in years.
And what, weeks after Roman’s in the ground, and somebody’s walking our fence line and helping themselves. That’s not a coincidence.”
“No,” I say. “It’s not.”
“They see the gap. They’re watching to find out who fills it. And us being split up, with you off God knows where every other day—”
“I’ve been handling the Lowry situation.”
“I know what you’ve been handling.” The way Sawyer looks at me says he knows more than that. “But that’s not all of it, and you know it.”
I look around at the three of them. That feeling of walking in late, of everyone already knowing their lines, presses on my chest like a fist. They had this conversation before I got here.
Decided what they were going to say and how they were going to say it.
And now I’m standing in the room I hate most in this house while they wait to see which way I fall.
Second round. I missed the first.
“We need a decision,” Calder says. The patience is gone from his voice. Just the straight edge of it now. “This family decides what it is. What we are to each other, to this ranch, to everybody watching from outside. Because a split answer to that question is the same as no answer.”
Fuck. I should have seen this shit coming after what happened at the gala.
“Either you’re with us,” Sawyer says, “or you’re not.”
“You want me to fall in line,” I say.
“That’s not what I said.”
“It’s what this looks like. All three of you in here with your minds already made up, and I’m the one who walks in and gets to agree or disagree. That’s not a conversation. That’s an ultimatum.”
Sawyer’s mouth opens. Shuts. Calder looks at me from behind the desk and doesn’t argue, which tells me I've landed somewhere true.
“You’re right,” Sawyer says, and I can hear what it costs him. “We should’ve waited on you. But you’re not easy to find lately, and the ranch doesn’t sit still while we go looking.”
Not an apology. But it’s something.
“What I’m asking,” he says, quieter now, the hard edge gone, “is that we get your head here when it counts. Not asking you to be over it. Not asking you to pretend things are fine. Just show up, so we’re not sitting in rooms making calls about your life while you’re somewhere else.”
I look at him. Then Calder. Then Levi, who has been studying the wall trim like it owes him money.
“He used every one of us,” I say. “Had something on all of us, pointed us wherever he wanted. I’m not the only one still hauling that around.”
“You’re not,” Calder says. He’s not looking at his papers anymore. Something in how he’s watching me—it’s not pity. It’s more like he sees what I’m saying because he’s said it to himself. “You’re not the only one, Kade.”
“Then quit looking at me like I’m the problem.”
“We’re not.” Sawyer drags a hand through his hair. “I know that’s how it feels.”
The room goes quiet.
Levi holds out the glass again. This time, I take it.
I look at all three of them. Really look.
Calder has been grinding through this with circles under his eyes because somebody has to, and he’s decided it’s him.
Sawyer just admitted I had a point when everything in him was set against it.
Levi would take any excuse to be at a rodeo right now but is here instead.
They keep showing up.
I think about Roman behind that desk. Then I look at Calder behind it, and I see the difference plain for the first time. These three are watching me like I belong in the same room. Roman never looked at me that way. Not in his whole life.
“Fine,” I say.
Sawyer blinks. “That’s it?”
“You want a speech?”
“I want to know you mean it.”
“I mean it.” I set the glass on the shelf. “I’m not saying I have it all worked out. But you’re right about the ranch. I’m in. I’m a fucking Bishop, ain’t I?”
Calder’s shoulders drop an inch. He nods, once, slow. “That’s all we needed.”
Levi starts to grin. I point at him.
“Don’t you fucking dare.”
He holds both hands up. Sawyer makes a sound that might be a laugh if the bastard knew how. The room breathes a little easier, and so do I.
“South pasture,” Calder says, already back to his papers. “I have names I want to run down. Don’t think those men acted alone. Somebody sent them. I need to know who before we do anything.”
“I have contacts in that world,” Levi says. “I’ll make some calls.”
He looks up. Something in his face settles. “Good.”
I leave them to finish things for now.
By the time I hit the second-floor landing, the whole morning is stacked up in my chest. My brothers, the study, Calder in that chair, everything it kicked loose in me. The drive. The hours I sat in my truck like a damn fool watching Allie move down the block.
I need sleep. I need food. I need a lot of things, and none of them are what I actually want.
What I want is her.
I want to get out of my own head, and the only way I know how to do that is with her.
I want my hands on her. I want to watch that tight set leave her jaw, watch her stop bracing for the next hit, watch her quit carrying all that weight for ten damn minutes.
She’s wound herself up so tight lately that sometimes I look at her and feel it like a cord pulled to its last thread.
And if it’s not me holding that thread, she might unravel.
She lets go for me. That’s the thing. She fights it every time, fights me, fights herself, but when she finally falls apart, it’s something.
The sounds she makes, the way she grabs on—like the whole world went quiet and there’s nothing left but that.
I need to give her that. And I need it for myself just as bad.
Need something solid under my hands that isn’t a problem I have to solve or a brother I have to answer to or a ghost I can’t get out of this house.
I need her to come apart so I can feel like something in this world still makes sense.
My phone goes off.
I figure it’s Calder with a follow-up, some name he wants me to run, and I pull it out without breaking stride.
Allie: I know you were following me in town. I saw you. I don’t know if I should be scared or grateful, but Kade, I need to talk to you. I need to see you. I’m losing it.
I stop walking.
Read it again. Then once more.
Me: I’m coming.
And I turn around on the landing and head straight back down the stairs, grabbing my jacket off the hook, not even bothering to think through the calls Calder might need or the sleep I want or any of the hundred things that were supposed to happen today. None of it matters right now.
She needs to see me.
And God help me, I need to see her more than I’ve needed anything in a long time.