Chapter 3 #6
The open scrub narrowed into a wash between low ridges, where the ground turned sandy and the brush grew thicker.
The sun had not fully cleared the horizon, but gold spilled across the tops of the rocks.
A fence line appeared ahead, nearly invisible unless you knew what to look for.
Not barbed wire shining obvious in the light.
Old posts. Weathered rails. Land that didn’t advertise where it began because it expected you to know better than to cross.
Cal’s border trail.
I felt it before I saw him.
Cal Northport was not like club men.
He was something older.
A real cowboy in the way tourists never understood. Not shiny boots and belt buckles. Not rodeo posters or denim commercials. Cal was weather, land, horse sense, and silence. He had a way of looking at people like he could tell whether they’d last one winter under an open sky.
He loved his family.
He tolerated the club.
He hated mess.
He had hated Mandy.
Not loudly. Cal didn’t waste energy on loud when a look could do the work. But I knew. Everyone knew. Mandy had been chaos, and Cal had no patience for chaos that hurt the people he claimed.
Which meant I was really looking forward to rolling onto his land bruised, drugged, and freshly responsible for an exploding rich-kid bonfire apocalypse.
“Great,” I muttered.
Dylan looked down. “What?”
“Cal’s going to murder me with disappointment.”
“Does that hurt worse than being shot?”
“Yes.”
“Good to know.”
We crossed the fence line as the sun broke.
For a moment, the world turned gold.
The ranch opened beyond the wash, wide and quiet, tucked between desert and mountain like it had been hidden there on purpose.
Barn roofs caught the first light. Cottonwoods moved silver-green near a dry creek bed.
Horses lifted their heads in the distance, watching us arrive like they already knew everything and planned to judge me later.
Cal stood by the north gate.
No hat drama.
No gun out.
Just boots planted, hands at his sides, eyes hard enough to make the morning reconsider itself.
Skye stood behind him with a blanket over one arm and worry all over her face. JD must have gotten word to her. Of course he had. Skye looked like she had been crying too, but when she saw me, she smiled like I was not the worst thing to happen to everyone’s sleep schedule.
That almost broke me.
Cal’s gaze moved over Regan first.
Then Nate.
Then Dylan.
Then me, cradled against a San Diego Royal Bastard with an IV tube in my arm and desert still tangled in my hair.
His mouth tightened.
“Hell of a graduation party,” he said.
I closed my eyes.
“Please don’t yell.”
“I don’t yell.”
“That’s worse.”
Cal grunted.
Dylan’s chest moved behind me with another almost-laugh.
Cal stepped closer to the horse, eyes scanning me with brutal efficiency. Bandage. Burn. Bruises. Blood. Shame. He saw all of it. Men like Cal didn’t miss much. Men like Cal also didn’t waste pity where sturdier things were needed.
“You alive?” he asked.
“Unfortunately for everyone’s insurance premiums.”
Skye made a soft sound that was either a laugh or a sob.
Cal’s eyes narrowed.
Then, to my shock, one corner of his mouth twitched.
“Still smart-mouthed,” he said. “Good. Means you ain’t dead.”
Regan dismounted fast and came to my side. “She needs a bed.”
“She has one,” Skye said immediately. “Back room. Curtains drawn. Supplies ready. No phones. No one knows she’s here.”
Cal looked at Dylan. “You handle horses?”
Dylan nodded once. “Yes, sir.”
Sir.
I almost laughed.
Cal noticed.
Of course he noticed.
His eyes cut to me. “Something funny?”
“No, sir.”
Dylan’s arm tightened in warning.
I ignored it.
Cal looked between us for half a second too long.
Great.
Fantastic.
Another terrifying man with instincts.
“We get her down slow,” Cal said.
Dylan shifted behind me. “I’ve got her.”
“I know you do,” Cal said.
The way he said it made Dylan go still.
Not a threat.
An observation.
Maybe that was worse.
Regan reached up for me. Dylan moved carefully, easing one leg over, taking most of my weight as Cal steadied the horse. Pain tore through my ribs when they lifted me down, and I made a sound I wished nobody heard.
Everyone heard.
Skye was there instantly, tucking the blanket around me. “I know. I know, honey. Almost there.”
“I messed up your hike,” I whispered.
Her eyes softened. “Terrible trail conditions anyway.”
That did it.
One stupid tear slipped down my face.
Not because of Cal’s disappointment.
Not because of pain.
Because she had made room for me without asking if I deserved it.
Dylan carried me the last stretch.
Nobody argued this time.
Maybe because I was shaking too hard to stand.
Maybe because he already had me before anyone could make a plan.
Maybe because the sun was rising and every second made us easier to find.
I tucked my face against his shirt and let myself be carried.
Just for a little while.
The ranch house smelled like coffee, cedar, horses, and biscuits somebody had made before dawn because Northports apparently processed disaster through carbs.
Skye led us through a side entrance, down a short hall, and into a quiet back room with heavy curtains, a made bed, clean towels, and a pitcher of water on the nightstand.
Dylan laid me down carefully.
Too carefully.
Like I mattered.
Like I had not set the desert on fire.
His hands slid away, and I hated the emptiness they left.
Cal stood in the doorway, arms crossed.
Regan hovered at the bed.
Skye fussed with the blanket.
Nate appeared behind Cal holding the IV bag like a war trophy. “I have successfully not killed the patient.”
Cal looked at him.
Nate lowered his voice. “Yet.”
“Out,” Cal said.
Nate pointed at himself. “Me?”
“Anyone who doesn’t need to be in this room.”
Nate stepped back. “Harsh but fair.”
Dylan did not move.
Cal’s gaze shifted to him.
The room got quiet.
I looked at Dylan.
His eyes met mine.
For a second, everything from the trail moved between us again.
Beautiful.
Seventeen.
Forbidden.
Free.
Safe.
A whole impossible mess of words neither of us could say.
Then he looked away.
“I’ll be outside,” he said.
My chest tightened.
I wanted to ask him to stay.
I did not.
Growth.
Or exhaustion.
Hard to tell.
Regan sat beside me and took my hand.
Skye adjusted the curtains until the room fell into soft shadow.
Cal lingered in the doorway.
I braced myself.
Here it came.
The disappointment.
The lecture.
The old cowboy judgment that would somehow hurt worse than legal consequences, because Cal’s disapproval felt like being weighed by the land itself and found foolish.
He looked at me for a long moment.
Then said, “You scared a lot of people who love you.”
My throat tightened.
“I know.”
“You made a mess I wouldn’t wish on my worst enemy.”
“I know.”
“You could’ve died.”
“I know.”
His jaw flexed.
For one second, I saw it then.
Not anger.
Fear.
Cal had been afraid too.
That was unfair. I did not have room for more guilt.
He stepped into the room, came to the side of the bed, and tucked the blanket higher over my shoulder with one rough hand.
“You get some sleep,” he said. “We’ll sort the mess while the sun’s up.”
I stared at him.
“That’s it?”
His eyes narrowed. “You want a speech?”
“No.”
“Then don’t look disappointed.”
“I’m not.”
“Good.”
He turned to leave, then paused at the door.
“And Destiny?”
“Yes?”
His gaze softened by almost nothing.
But almost nothing from Cal was a lot.
“Mandy burned because she liked watching other people catch. You burned because you were hurting and drugged and seventeen. Don’t confuse the two.”
The words struck so hard I couldn’t answer.
Regan’s hand tightened around mine.
Skye looked down.
Cal left before I could cry again, which was probably kind of him.
I stared at the ceiling.
Outside the window, morning spread over the ranch, bright and clean and rude enough to arrive after the worst night of my life like the world had not noticed I ruined myself.
Regan brushed her thumb over my knuckles.
“Sleep, baby.”
I closed my eyes.
For once, I listened.
But right before I slipped under, I heard Dylan outside the door, low and steady, telling Nate to keep watch on the north trail.
My heart gave one tired, foolish kick.
Safe, I thought.
Then, quieter, deeper, truer:
Free.
And for the first time, I wondered if maybe I didn’t have to choose between the two.
Sleep was supposed to feel like sinking.
That was what people always said, wasn’t it? That sleep pulled you under. That it wrapped around your bones and dragged you somewhere soft, somewhere quiet, somewhere your body could stitch itself back together without asking permission from your brain.
But I wasn’t asleep.
I was floating just under the surface of it, my body heavy, my throat dry, my arm aching where the IV had been taped down, my skin still humming with whatever poison had been pushed through my system and whatever medicine had been used to drag me back out of it.
The room smelled like antiseptic, leather, old wood, coffee, and men trying not to panic.
I kept my eyes closed.
That was the only smart thing I had done in days.
Voices moved around me in low, clipped bursts.
Cal’s was calm in the way men sounded when calm was the only thing holding a building upright.
Regan’s voice had a sharper edge to it, the kind that said she had cried already and was furious with herself for wasting the time. JD’s voice was gravel and gunpowder.
“They showed up at the clubhouse with search warrants,” Cal said quietly. “We got Cal’s copy before they started tearing through everything, but I just biked back in time to see half the yard ready to go nuclear.”
JD growled. “People are pissed. Really pissed. They’re angry, and they’re going for the jugular, just like I expected them to.”
A chair scraped. Someone paced.
I knew that sound. Men with too much power trapped in a room too small for their rage.