Chapter Two
The shovel bit into Carolina clay, and Caroline watched a stranger dig her horse's grave.
She should be doing this herself. Had planned to, once she finished with the morning's appointments and found the strength to walk back out to the barn. Bella deserved better than rotting in the summer heat while her owner stitched wounds and pretended everything was fine.
But the man called Forge had taken the shovel from the barn wall like he owned it, pointed to a spot beneath the old oak where the ground was softer, and started digging without asking permission.
Just like he'd done everything else this morning. Without asking.
"I have three dogs boarding in the clinic." Caroline stood at the edge of the growing hole, arms crossed, ignoring the throb in her forearm. "Two post-surgical, one diabetic who needs insulin twice a day. I can't just leave them."
"Call someone."
"There is no someone. I'm the only vet in twenty miles."
Forge paused, leaning on the shovel. Sweat darkened his shirt despite the early hour, and she could see the outline of muscle beneath the fabric—the kind of build that came from actual labor, not gym vanity.
"Then we bring them with us."
"Bring three recovering animals to a biker compound."
"We've got space. We've got security." He resumed digging. "What we don't have is time to argue while the men who did this regroup."
Caroline's jaw clenched. She'd been handling her own problems since she was twelve years old, pulling calves in West Texas while other girls worried about homecoming dresses. Nobody had ever shown up at her door and simply decided things for her.
It was infuriating.
It was also, some traitorous part of her brain noted, a little bit of a relief.
"You don't even know what you're dealing with," she said.
"Then tell me."
The words came out clipped, operational. Not a request—a command wrapped in reasonable packaging.
She should tell him to go to hell. Should grab another shovel and finish this herself, then lock her doors and figure out her next move like she'd always done.
Instead, she started talking.
"It began about eight months ago. Dogs showing up on the roadside, dumped like garbage. Fighting breeds, mostly—pits, mastiffs, the occasional Dogo Argentino. The ones that survived had injuries I've only seen in combat animals. Bite wounds, torn ears, scars layered on scars."
Forge kept digging, but she could feel his attention sharpen.
"At first I thought it was isolated. Strays, maybe some backyard breeding operation gone wrong. But the numbers kept climbing. Two dogs a month became four. Then six. All with the same injury patterns, all dumped within a fifteen-mile radius."
"You started documenting."
"Photographs. Necropsy reports on the ones that didn't make it. GPS coordinates of dump sites." She uncrossed her arms, then crossed them again when the movement pulled at her stitches. "I mapped it out. The pattern pointed to something organized. Something big."
"And you started asking questions."
"I asked the wrong people." The words came out bitter. "County animal control. A deputy I thought I could trust. Someone I went to vet school with who works for the state agriculture department."
Forge stopped digging. "Who talked?"
"I don't know. Maybe all of them. Maybe none of them—maybe Pittman has eyes everywhere and I was never as subtle as I thought."
"Pittman."
"Lyle Pittman." Just saying the name made her skin crawl. "Good old boy, family roots going back generations. Runs the county fair livestock auction, donates to the volunteer fire department, sits in the front pew at First Baptist every Sunday."
"And runs dogfights in his spare time."
"Tobacco barns scattered through the sandhills. I've never seen a fight, but the dogs tell the story well enough." Her voice hardened. "The ones that survive, anyway."
Forge resumed digging, the rhythm steady and relentless. The hole was deep enough now to hold Bella's body, the red clay piled beside it like a wound in the earth.
"The four men who came yesterday," he said. "Describe them."
"The leader did all the talking. Big guy, six-one maybe, mean eyes. Looked like he enjoyed scaring me more than he needed to." She forced herself to remember details she'd rather forget. "Said his name was Buddy. Buddy Stroud."
"The others?"
"Hired muscle. Two of them looked barely old enough to drink. The fourth was older, wiry, didn't say anything but kept watching the road like he was expecting trouble."
"Stroud cut your arm?"
"Warning shot, he called it. Said next time it wouldn't be a warning." Her hand drifted to her forearm before she could stop it. "Then he walked to the barn, looked at Bella, and put two rounds in her chest while I watched."
The shovel stopped.
Caroline met Forge's eyes and found something there that made her breath catch. Not pity—she would have hated pity. Something colder. Harder. The look of a man who had decided something and wouldn't be moved from it.
"Why?" he asked. "What did Stroud say the message was?"
"That curiosity kills more than cats. That some things in these hills have been running for longer than I've been alive, and they'll keep running long after I'm gone if I'm not careful.
" She swallowed. "He said Pittman was being generous.
That most people who ask questions about his operation don't get warnings at all. "
"He's right about that."
The flat certainty in his voice should have terrified her. Instead, it felt like solid ground after months of sinking.
"What are you going to do?" she asked.
"Whatever's necessary."
"That's not an answer."
"It's the only one I've got right now." He drove the shovel into the dirt pile and climbed out of the grave. "Help me with her."
They carried Bella together, Caroline at the head and Forge at the hindquarters. The mare was heavy with death, her coat already dulling, flies rising in angry clouds as they moved her. Caroline's arms screamed and her stitches pulled and she didn't make a sound.
She'd raised this horse from a foal. Named her after a grandmother she'd never met. Rode her through the sandhills on mornings when the clinic felt like a prison and the isolation pressed too close.
Now she was lowering Bella into red clay while a stranger watched.
"I'm sorry," she said quietly. To the horse. To herself. To whatever part of her had thought documentation and phone calls would be enough to stop men like Pittman.
Forge didn't offer condolences. He just picked up the shovel and started filling the grave, each scoop of dirt a steady drumbeat of finality.
They worked in silence until the hole was covered. Caroline found a flat stone near the oak's roots and placed it at the head of the mound. No name, no dates. Just a marker that said something mattered here.
"The men who did this," Forge said, wiping his hands on his jeans. "They're going to regret it."
It wasn't a threat. Wasn't bravado. He said it the way someone might say the sun rises in the east—a simple statement of fact that required no elaboration.
Caroline looked at this man she'd known for barely an hour. The weapons sergeant build, the constant alertness, the way he'd walked into her crisis and simply started handling it.
She should be frightened by the violence coiled beneath his calm. Should be worried about what she was getting herself into, following a biker she'd just met into a world she didn't understand.
Instead, she believed him.
Completely. Absolutely. In a way that should probably frighten her more than it did.
"My dogs," she said. "The boarding ones. I'll need supplies."
Something shifted in his expression. Not quite a smile, but an easing of tension.
"Make a list. We'll load up before we go."
"And you'll explain what exactly your 'club' does? How you plan to handle a man who's been running blood sport in these hills for decades?"
"On the way." He pulled keys from his pocket. "You've got ten minutes to pack what you need. Then we're gone."
Caroline wanted to argue. Wanted to assert some control over a situation that had spiraled beyond her grasp.
But Bella was in the ground, her arm was throbbing, and four men who shot horses for sport knew exactly where she lived.
"Ten minutes," she agreed.
She turned toward the clinic, already cataloging supplies and making mental lists.
Behind her, she heard Forge's boots on the dirt, the steady footsteps of a man who had decided to stand between her and something monstrous.
She didn't look back.
But she was glad he was there.