Chapter 22
Cade
The taillights of the black truck cut twin streaks of crimson through the rising dust as it rolls down the drive, but my eyes don’t follow it. I keep my gaze locked through the horizontal split in the weathered siding, tracking the exact point where the dust cloud settles over the porch steps.
Ben Knight is gone for now, but the ghost of him is still vibrating in the air, a hum that sets the nerves behind my ears to firing like live wires.
My right calf is locked down hard, a single, blunt knot of agonizing pressure where the snakebite venom has left the muscle fibers brittle, but I don’t dare shift my weight off it.
I’m fucking frozen. I don’t know what comes next.
I watch Clayton as he stands at the bottom of the steps, his chest puffed out, his boots digging deep into the dry earth as he looks up at Sadie.
The wind hooks down the draw, carrying the rumble of his voice, but the words are chopped up by the sudden rattling of the loose tin on the barn roof.
I don’t need the words. I know the rhythm of the language he’s using.
I know the way a predator talks when he thinks he’s re-establishing the boundaries of the pen.
But my brain keeps slipping backward, the gears grinding against the memory of the dark hair and the razor blade eyes I just saw standing on that porch.
‘If you look away from the threat for a second, Kellan, you’ve already given them permission to choose where the bullet lands.’ Ben’s voice is a heavy weight in my skull, smelling of the dry cordite and frozen gravel from the mountain ranges outside Carson City.
He was the one who pulled me out of the line when the rest of the unit started looking at me like I was a blind shell with a cracked fuse.
He didn’t give me a lecture about my mother or the cellar or the things my stepfather did with his hands; he just handed me a clean rifle and told me that the only thing that mattered was the metrics of the drop.
He called it brotherhood, what we did together. He stayed up with me on that ridge when the dogs were screaming in the hollow, his shoulder pressed against mine until the tremors stopped and the smoke cleared out of my eyes.
‘We’re a team. We take out the assholes who don’t deserve to live.’
War crimes. Murder dressed up and justified by his personal manifestos. Ben Knight was a cause I believed in.
But then he threw me away when the math got inconvenient.
Rage hits my stomach, but for once, it doesn’t spill over into the manic static. It can’t. Because as I watch the porch through the slats, the beam of light narrows down until there’s nothing left on the map but Sadie’s face.
Ben had the folder. I saw the thick black marker from here.
brIGGS.
He didn’t bring a team, because Ben doesn’t use a hammer when a wedge can split the log without making a sound. He showed her something, and I heard the whole thing. He did what he does best.
He handed her the ultimate weapon. He gave her a golden ticket that would clear her probation, bury her husband, and set her walking out of this county with a clean slate and a pocket full of state money. All she had to do was point her finger down the hill. All she had to do was say my name.
And she lied to his face. For me.
My hand closes around the rusted length of rebar on the dirt beside my boot, the metal ridges cutting deep into my calloused palm until the skin turns white.
My chest heaves, but the air coming into my lungs feels different—clearer, colder, stripped of the smoke that’s been filling my head for most of my life.
She protected me. She’s the first person who has ever protected me.
She looked the ultimate hunter dead center in the eyes, with her face still bruised from Clayton’s fist, and she threw her own salvation in the dirt to keep a capital murderer hidden in her barn.
She chose me.
The voices—Dylan’s wet, choking gurgle against the bedframe, Laney’s ungrateful screaming, Bradford’s textbook definitions of my instability, and my own mother’s excuses—they just all dissolve to dust.
I have someone.
But on the porch, the dynamic shifts so fast, it snaps my attention back.
Clayton mounts the steps, his hand dropping down to his hip, his fingers brushing the leather of his holster in that automatic, administrative display of ownership.
He’s running on the leftover adrenaline of being slighted by a federal captain on his own dirt, his neck flushed a dark, angry red above the midnight blue of his collar.
He steps into her space, his head canted down, his shoulders squared to block her from the door.
I watch, prepared to break his fucking neck. But Sadie doesn’t move back an inch.
The timid, submissive posture she’s been carrying since I crawled into this draw is entirely gone.
She stands against the porch railing, her face turned full into his light without a single moment of submission.
Her hands aren’t tucked under her ribs or hidden in her pockets; they’re loose at her sides, open, completely prepared for the weight of whatever’s coming.
She says something to him—the movement of her lips is quick, flat, devoid of that soft, hesitant pitch she uses when she’s trying to keep him from looking too close at her.
Clayton hesitates. I can see the physical hitch in his frame from here, the sudden, clumsy confusion. He reaches out, his thumb going for her jawline to find the yellowing edge of the bruise he left there last night.
She steps back, swatting his hand away.
That’s my good girl. Fuck him, Sadie. Fuck him all the way to hell.
She disappears inside for a moment, and Clayton doesn’t follow. My heart pounds in the side of my head, in the few moments of silence. But then she returns and shoves the lunch bag into his chest.
Clayton scowls, his lips twisting into a defensive mutter that gets swallowed by the wind. He grabs the bag, turns on his heel, and thuds back down the steps, his boots heavy and uncoordinated as he breaks for his truck.
The door slams with a rattle that carries all the way down the draw, and then the cruiser is moving, the tires spinning loose in the gravel as he floors it back toward the highway, the thing dissolving into the haze building on the horizon.
My brow furrows, heart still thumping. Now what?
The sky to the northwest has gone the color of a wet copper coin, the storm clouds stacking up in thick layers that take the last of the gold out of the afternoon light.
The wind drops to a dead slack for five seconds, and then it explodes, screaming through the horizontal gaps in the siding and whipping the dust into tiny, frantic spirals across the dirt floor.
Wait, where did Sadie go?
Before I can even refocus, the sliding barn door yanks back on its rollers.
Sadie doesn’t hesitate at the entrance, nor does she have the usual protein bar and water. She just marches down the long axis of the barn, Flint tracking a half-step behind her with his head low and his hackles raised straight up against the static in the air.
She hits the threshold of the rear stall, where I am, and stops.
Her hair has completely torn loose, the blondish-red strands thrashing wild against the black material of her shirt.
Her face is pale, but her eyes are bright—radioactive with a cold, unyielding clarity that I’ve never seen on a woman’s face in my life.
“Sadie,” I say cautiously.
She reaches into the dark of the stall, her fingers wrapping around my wrist. “Come on.”
I don’t resist her. I let her drag my six-foot-four frame out of the shadows, past the empty feed bins and the rotted pallets, straight out into the sulfur-green light of the yard.
We cross the open run to the house side-by-side, our boots crushing the loose dirt while the first heavy drops of the storm hit the ground like lead shot.
What the hell is happening?
She drags me straight up the wooden steps of the back porch, yanks the screen door open with a force that makes the rusted spring whine in protest, and pulls me through the mudroom.
We cross the threshold into Clayton’s house.
The door slams shut behind us, and she leans past me, flipping the lock and then putting the chain in place at the top.
“What are you—”
She turns on me before I can finish. Sadie plants both palms flat against my chest, her fingers hooking into the damp fabric of my shirt, and shoves me backward with a strength that catches me completely off guard. My spine hits the wall with a dull thud, the vibration rattling the walls.
Holy fuck.
She reaches up, her fingers tangling in the mess of my hair, yanks my head down, and then crushes her mouth against mine.
The kiss is a direct head-on collision. It isn’t soft.
It isn’t the slow, exploratory moment we had out in the barn.
She bites at my lower lip, sucking the skin hard enough to draw a thin line of red, her tongue pushing into my mouth with a desperate hunger that tells me she isn’t surviving the rules of this ranch anymore.
She’s the one holding the match, and she’s ready to burn the whole outfit down to the clay just to see what’s left standing when the smoke clears.
And I don’t hear any noise in my head telling me to stop.
My hands go to her hips on an automatic, primal reflex, my knuckles locking into the stiff denim of her jeans as I lift her off the vinyl floorboards, pinning her weight directly into my center to keep from falling.
My cock comes alive against her thighs, thick and throbbing against the fabric. I feel nothing but the press of her skin, the heat coming off her neck, and the sound of her breath rushing into my throat.
A thunderclap cracks directly overhead, the concussion slamming into the tin roof and shaking the foundation timbers beneath our boots until the glass in the front window shivers in its frame.
The lights in the hallway flicker once, twice, the pale-yellow bulbs dying out for a split second before the current catches again.
Sadie pulls her mouth back, her breaths coming in ragged, short gasps against my neck. Her fingers are still locked in my hair, her nails digging deep into my skull like she’s trying to anchor herself into my skull.
“He’s not coming back for hours,” she chokes out. “He’s stuck at the station.”
“Okay,” I breathe out, nodding. “Okay.”
She lifts her chin, her eyes penetrating, completely unblinking under the harsh light. There’s no shame in her face now. No regret. Just a cold, beautiful meanness that matches the scars of my own.
“Let’s go to the bedroom,” she whispers against my lips.
And as the rain finally hits the glass above the sink with a deafening roar, I kiss her again. Because while all those assholes are busy looking for light…
We’ll be the ones who own the dark.
Just us.