Chapter 12
TWELVE
Gage
This was starting to feel like home.
Millie at the table every breakfast, lunch, and dinner. Millie in the morning, looking well-fucked and well-loved. Millie talking to my dad about his art, to my mom about baking, to Haven about growing up around horses, to Sawyer about movies.
Even to Wyatt, who didn’t ever talk. Even Wyatt was starting to like her.
She was becoming a fixture right in front of me.
It was a night like any other when our bad seed showed up.
I saw Arlo’s truck from the porch; it was pulling up the drive slow, kicking up clouds of dust, the horses watching with interest. Even the most friendly of them seemed to know this wasn’t good—like they knew this was the guy who wanted to take their home away and sell it to the highest bidder.
I was off the porch before I'd made a conscious decision about it.
"Stay inside," I said, back through the screen door. I didn't know who I was talking to specifically. Everyone, maybe.
The truck rolled to a stop and Arlo climbed out moving like a man who owned the ground under his feet, which was the whole problem in a nutshell.
He was sixty-one and lean and weathered in the way of men who'd spent their lives outdoors and in trouble, and he had that smile—that easy, pleasant, I'm-just-passing-through smile that he'd been wearing my entire life like a second skin.
Behind him, out of the passenger side, came a younger man I'd only ever met a handful of times: my cousin—Arlo’s youngest.
Cooper Holt was twenty-five and built like Arlo but softer around it, with blond hair like Wyatt’s, too many tattoos, and the particular loose-limbed quality of someone who worked hard and played harder and hadn't yet learned that the world kept score. Cooper was the only one of Arlo’s kids who’d actually had him around when he was growing up—probably a bad thing, all things considered.
He was in jeans and boots and a t-shirt with an oil company logo on it and he looked around the property with genuine, uncomplicated interest, like he'd been told they were stopping by somewhere and hadn't asked a single follow-up question.
"Gage," Arlo said. Warm as anything. "Hope we're not interrupting."
"You are," I said.
He smiled wider. Like I'd said something fond. "Thought we'd stop by. Been a while."
"Has been," I said.
He hadn’t actually been to the property yet—just lurked around town, sending us legal notices like we weren’t even family.
Asshole.
"Place looks good." His eyes moved over the property the way they always did—slow, thorough, doing math I didn't like. The fence line. The stable. The main house. The cottage in the distance with the light on. "You've kept it up."
"I always keep it up," I said.
"You do."
I couldn’t help the way my lip curled in disgust. This land would have gone to Arlo if Arlo hadn't gone to prison the year I was born.
Three years older than my dad, the eldest son, the natural heir.
He'd forfeited it the way he'd forfeited everything—carelessly, violently, without seeming to understand until it was gone that it wouldn't be handed back. "Your daddy inside?"
"Arlo—"
The screen door opened, and my dad stepped out onto the porch.
Even if I ran the place, this was his land, his family's land, built by his grandfather's hands, and he had spent his entire adult life managing his older brother at a cost I would never fully know.
He'd been doing it since before I was born.
He'd been doing it when Arlo went to prison and when Arlo got out and when Arlo went back in and when Arlo got out again, every single time, steady and quiet and immovable.
He looked at Arlo from the porch.
"Arlo," my dad said.
"Adam." Arlo's smile didn't change. "Been a while."
"Has been." My dad looked at Cooper with something genuinely warmer. "Cooper."
"Hey, sir," Cooper said, easy and amiable. "Sorry to just show up. Dad said—"
"It's fine," my dad said, in a tone that meant precisely the opposite and was too well-mannered to say so.
But there was one person missing—the person most likely to send Arlo packing without even the pretense of politeness.
I felt it before I turned around—the particular shift in temperature that meant my mother had come out.
She stood on the porch with her arms crossed and her face doing nothing at all, which was the most dangerous version of my mother's face.
She looked at Arlo the way you look at something you stepped in.
She and his first baby-mama, Marlena Meadows, had been best friends since high school.
My mother knew things about what Arlo had done to Marlena that had never been said in front of me and never needed to be.
She'd been carrying it for thirty-eight years and she carried it the way she carried everything—quietly, completely, without ever putting it down.
"Arlo," she said.
"Peggy." His smile didn't waver. "You look well."
"I look exactly the same," she said. "Come in or go home. I'm not feedin’ mosquitoes."
We went inside.
The kitchen was warm and full—dinner on the table, everyone already seated.
Wyatt at the far end, Haven beside him, Sawyer across.
And Millie in the kitchen doorway, dish towel in her hands, having come out when she heard voices the way she'd started doing, easy and unthinking, like she'd been navigating this house her whole life.
She looked at Arlo and then at me and I gave her the smallest shake of my head.
Stay easy. I've got it.
She stayed easy.
Arlo saw her immediately. He always saw the new thing first, always found the variable. He looked at her with that pleasant smile and I watched him file her away.
"Well," he said. "You must be the girl."
"Millie," she said, even. "And you must be Arlo."
"Must be." He looked at me with something that was almost approval, which I liked less than open hostility would have been. "Pretty. Good choice."
I said nothing.
Cooper had come in behind his father and was looking around the kitchen with the expression of a man who'd expected a quick stop and found himself at a dinner party.
His eyes moved around the table, landed on Haven—nineteen and pretty and watching the newcomers with open curiosity—and brightened in a way I noted and filed.
Wyatt noted it too. I saw it happen across the table, that particular stillness moving into his shoulders.
"Sit down," my mother said.
We sat.
Dinner was civil for exactly as long as my mother controlled the conversation.
She kept it moving—passed the bread, asked Cooper about the Midland field, got my dad talking about a piece he was working on.
It was low-stakes table noise that fills a room and leaves no space for anything sharp to get in edgewise.
My dad played along the way he always had, easy and unhurried, giving Arlo nothing to grab onto.
Arlo ate. Watched. Smiled when spoken to.
I kept one eye on him and one on the table.
Millie had sat back down between me and Sawyer and she was doing what she did—reading the room, adjusting, keeping her face open and her mouth mostly quiet.
I could feel her thinking beside me. She'd picked up enough from my mother's breakfast conversations to know the shape of this, even if she didn't know all the details.
Haven was talking to Cooper.
That was the first thing I didn't love.
Not because Cooper was dangerous—he wasn't, not the way Arlo was dangerous—but because Haven was nineteen and Cooper had that grin. She’d been working on our ranch for a long time, had been Wyatt’s honorary assistant almost as long. Wyatt was protective of her.
And Cooper? He was the kind of guy who got nice girls in trouble.
"Midland's not bad," Cooper was saying, leaning back in his chair. "Pay's good. Work's hard. You get used to it." He looked at Haven with that easy attention. "You from here originally?"
"Born and raised," Haven said. "I've worked the ranch since I was fifteen."
"No kidding." He looked genuinely impressed. "That's real work."
"It is," she said. There was a blush on her cheeks. “I work with Wyatt mostly—helping out when the baby animals come, that kinda thing.”
Wyatt ate his dinner and said nothing. The line of his jaw twitched.
At the other end of the table Arlo was talking to my dad about the property taxes, of all things—an innocuous subject that was not innocuous at all—and my dad was answering in that measured way he had, not giving ground, not taking the bait, just steady.
"County's been reassessing a lot of the Hill Country parcels," Arlo said. "Heard some families have had trouble keeping up."
"We keep up fine," my dad said.
"Sure, sure." Arlo broke off a piece of bread. "Big operation though. Must be a lot to manage for one man."
"Gage manages it," my dad said. “And he’s got his brother and the cousins, of course. Wyatt, Sawyer, Stetson…they’re good men.”
Stetson. Arlo’s oldest. He didn’t interact with us that often, but he lived on the property, took care of the outskirts and the woods.
And my dad knew it was a sore spot for Arlo that Stetson didn’t speak to him.
He was fucking with him.
“Stetson,” Arlo said, his smile just a little more tense…a little more tight. “You seen him lately?”
As if on cue, I heard tires in the driveway. My eyes darted up to the window, and I could see another truck pulling up—this one battered and covered in mud, a cage on the front and floodlights on top.
“Speak of the devil,” I said. “Looks like he came to dinner tonight.”
The truck door opened and Stetson climbed out, hands shoved in his pockets as he took a breath. Work clothes, hat pushed back. He stood in the drive a moment looking at Arlo's truck, then came toward the house.
He knocked once on the back door frame and walked in without a response. Stopped in the kitchen doorway. His eyes moved from my dad to my mother to me to Arlo.
"Stetson," Arlo said.
"Dad," Stetson said. Flat.