Chapter 33
thirty-three
COLT
My boots hit the gravel, the impact sending a dull ache up my spine.
Long day. Longer ride. The dually’s heavy diesel engine cut out, leaving only my pack’s casual chatter for noise.
I reached over the tailgate for my gear bag, the phantom jostling of the bronc ride still working itself out in my tight shoulders.
I hadn’t been able to focus at the arena, first with the cattle drop-off and then with my practice rides.
Every time I set my grip in the chute, my mind returned to the fence line.
Julia’s hand on my cheek. The way she’d said my name like it was a prayer and a promise wrapped up in one.
The look on her face when I told her about East.
I should’ve been practicing, but all I’d wanted to do was get back to her. To finish our conversation.
The wind shifted, and I stopped cold.
My fingers tightened on the canvas strap of my bag. The air didn’t just smell like our Omega, it tasted like a lit match. The usual rich, warm notes had been incinerated, replaced by the sharp bite of furious, pissed off, terrified mate.
I turned around, worried for her safety for a split second.
Until I saw her marching down the center of the driveway, her boots eating up the distance, her brows angled in angry slashes, shoulders so straight they were almost unmoving.
She wasn’t looking at the truck, or at Stetson, who had just stepped out of the driver’s side.
Her focus bypassed my other packmates entirely.
No, those brown eyes were locked on me, burning with more of that Cristenello fire than I’d ever seen.
I was in trouble, and I had no earthly clue what I’d done.
Our conversation at the fence had been raw, yeah, but she’d handled it with more grace than I deserved.
She’d touched my face, shook me to the core when she told me it wasn’t my fault, and then laughed at my weed whacker joke when I needed to lighten the mood.
When I rode away, she’d been inside, resting, with Gideon there to help soothe her.
What the hell had happened between then and now?
Across the hood of the truck, Stetson winced. He took one look at the lethal line of her jaw and the violent spike in her scent, and he made the smartest decision of his life.
“River, Ransom,” the Pack Leader ordered, tone brooking no argument. “Grab the tack. Boone, take the gear.”
They sent me sympathetic glances, then hauled ass. The twins melted toward the back of the trailer, and Stetson stepped smoothly out of the trajectory of her warpath, giving her a wide, unobstructed berth straight to me.
Damn. Where was the loyalty? They were abandoning me to a firing squad of one.
I dropped my hand from the tailgate as she closed the final ten feet, marching right up to me and stopping just inches from my chest, forcing me to look down into a face I barely recognized without its usual sassiness and warmth.
“You’re not riding tomorrow,” she demanded, rivaling an Alpha’s bark. I would’ve been impressed if I wasn’t so damn confused where this shift in mood had come from. “I won’t let you do it.”
I stared down at her, noting how her jaw was locked tight and her hands were in fists at her sides, as closed off and guarded as I’d been when she’d first arrived.
“I’m on the roster, Julia.” I kept my voice soft and soothing, trying to bleed the volatility out of the space between us. “The rodeo is tomorrow. I have to ride.”
“No, you don’t.” She refused to yield an inch. She stepped closer, tilting her chin up to meet my gaze. “It’s the same arena.”
I frowned. “What?”
“He died in that arena, Colt,” she clarified, words falling away to a ragged whisper. “I looked up the articles, read the details. I saw his obituary. It was at the Coldwater Creek Arena, right?”
I went cold. Oxygen stopped moving past my ribs. The ambient noise of the ranch muffled, replaced by a sharp ringing in my ears. I opened my grip. The gear bag hit the gravel with a dull thud.
I grabbed the silver chain resting against my collarbone, letting the small metal pendant bite into my palm.
“Why?” she pushed, her voice trembling on the single syllable.
And yet, she stood her ground. “Why would you ride in the same place? Why would you get on a horse trying to kill you the same way it killed—” She swallowed hard, unable to finish that sentence.
“I know exactly what that necklace means, now.” Her finger jabbed toward my chest. “It was his.”
She already knew about Easton, about the rodeo that took his life, but I hadn’t had time to share the specifics.
I should’ve known she would have gone looking for answers herself, and now she knew about the significance of tomorrow, about the ride I did every year, about the guilt I’d long been pretending wasn’t always crushing my chest. I stepped back, needing air, distance, anything that would keep her from looking straight at the truth and surmising the reason I still rode.
“You are not getting on a bronc in the same arena where your brother died,” she stated, putting the full, uncompromising weight of her mafia upbringing into the command. Deep down, I knew her brothers would be proud, but now wasn’t the time to focus on that. “I won’t watch it. I can’t.”
I swallowed against a throat tight with dust. I had spent three years barricading Easton’s ghost, making damn sure nobody else in this pack had to carry the weight of my failure. I didn’t know how to dismantle it. Hell, I didn’t want to. I deserved to bleed for it every single day.
And I had… until today. Julia’s words at the fence had done something to me I couldn’t undo—her palm warm against my jaw, her voice so sure when she said it wasn’t my fault.
I’d carried my brother’s name in silence for three years, and this afternoon I’d spoken it out loud and the ground had stayed solid beneath my boots.
When I’d climbed into the chute at the arena an hour later, my hands had been shaking for a different reason.
The cold dread was still there, sitting in my gut the way it always did before a ride, but it had company now.
Something had loosened. Shifted. Like a bone that had healed crooked and someone had finally told me it could be reset.
But loosened didn’t mean free. And tomorrow wasn’t just any ride.
Easton’s memorial buckle was on the line, the trophy the county rodeo committee had named after him the year after he died.
Three years running, I’d won it. Three years running, I’d carried it home and locked it in a drawer I never opened because knowing that all there was left of my brother was a trophy was its own particular brand of hell.
If I didn’t ride, someone else would take it. Some stranger would carry East’s name home and stick it on a shelf where it didn’t mean a damn thing.
I couldn’t let that happen. Even if riding for it was destroying me.
“It’s not just penance anymore,” I rasped, because she deserved the full truth even if it made me sound insane.
I told her about the buckle, about what it meant to me, hoping she’d understand.
“Don’t you see? If I don’t ride, someone else takes it home.
Someone who didn’t know him.” My grip tightened on the chain.
“You’re right. Riding in that arena used to be about punishing myself, but somewhere along the way, it became one of the only places I still feel close to him.
The dirt, the chutes, the noise. He’s there.
And that buckle is the last way I’m able to fight for him. ”
Easton used to love riding. It was the adrenaline of it, the high of a win, the roar of the crowd.
I should’ve kept his memory alive by sharing him with the people who mattered.
By talking about him at dinner. By telling the Omega he never got to meet what his laugh sounded like and how he took his coffee and why he loved that grove and how riding was in our blood.
Instead, I locked him in a drawer along with the buckle and buried him in silence.
“You don’t need a buckle to remember him, Colt. He was your brother. He was pack,” she cried.
He was pack.
The words hit harder than they had any right to. Easton had never met her. Never heard her laugh in the kitchen. Never watched her coax Wyatt into acting like a kid or let Sunny stick dandelions into her hair.
But Julia claimed him anyway.
Like death hadn’t taken him out of our circle.
She closed the distance until her knuckles brushed the front of my shirt. “He was one of mine. And you’re using him to punish yourself. You’re strapping yourself to a wild animal to pay a debt you don’t owe and win a buckle you don’t need.”
“I owe it.” The admission scraped its way up my windpipe, and I hated how easily it came back.
She’d told me at the fence that it wasn’t my fault.
I wanted to believe her. God, I wanted to.
But wanting didn’t undo three years of self-conviction.
“I survived. He didn’t. He shouldn’t have been in the arena that day.
That’s my fault. And the buckle is the only thing I can do for him now. ”
“It’s a suicide mission!” she yelled. She grabbed the front of my jacket, twisting the denim in her fists as her breathing hitched into something dangerously close to a sob.
“You’re daring the universe to take you too, and I won’t let you do it!
I can’t lose you, Colt. Not now. Not after everything. ”
I looked down at her white knuckles as she held onto me, then up at the wet, furious shine in her eyes. My throat tightened with the familiar, choking pressure of the guilt I swallowed every single morning.
I brought my hands up, wrapping my fingers over her wrists. I didn’t pry her loose. I just held on, letting her solid frame steady my trembling hands.
“I’m not trying to die, Julia,” I promised, and hated how unsteady it sounded.