Chapter 3
POV: Ember
The first thing I felt was the ring.
Heavy. Wrong. Cold metal biting into the swollen skin of my finger like it had been welded there while I was out. I tried to pull it off before my eyes even opened. The band wouldn’t budge. My wrist screamed. Rope burns, raw and tight, circled both arms like ugly bracelets.
I forced my lids up.
Ceiling beams. Thick, dark wood. The slow turn of a ceiling fan that hadn’t been dusted in years.
The smell hit next—clean sheets, antiseptic, and underneath it the faint ghost of saddle soap and the man who used to live in my bloodstream.
Colt’s ranch house. His bedroom. The same room where we used to sneak in after dances when we were stupid and seventeen and thought forever was a real word.
My head throbbed in time with my pulse. Someone had cleaned the blood off my temple, but the cut still felt tight and hot. A white bandage peeked from the edge of my vision. I sat up too fast. The room tilted. Nausea rolled through me in a slow, greasy wave.
Get up. Get out. Now.
I swung my legs over the side of the bed. Bare feet hit cold wood. I was still in the same clothes I’d been wearing when they grabbed me—jeans, dark sweater, boots gone. Someone had taken the boots. Smart. Harder to run without them.
The door was closed. I made it three steps before it opened.
Colt filled the frame like he’d been standing there the whole time, waiting for me to try exactly this.
Tall. Broad. Dirt still on his jeans from whatever ride he’d climbed off of before he found me.
His eyes moved over me once, slow and thorough, and something in my chest cracked open that I immediately tried to nail shut again.
“Sit down before you fall down,” he said.
Voice rough. Low. The same voice that used to say my name like it was the only word worth knowing.
I didn’t sit. “Where are my boots.”
“Somewhere you can’t reach them.” He stepped inside and shut the door with his boot. The click sounded final. “You’re not walking out of here tonight.”
“Watch me.”
I moved toward him anyway. Bad idea. The room spun harder.
His hand caught my upper arm—gentle, but unbreakable—and steered me back to the edge of the bed like I weighed nothing.
I dropped because my knees gave out, not because I listened.
The ring flashed under the bedside lamp. His gaze locked on it and stayed there.
“Start talking,” he said. “All of it.”
I laughed once. It came out cracked. “You first. How long was I out?”
“Four hours. Jax stitched the cut. Said you’ll live.” His jaw flexed. “The ring stays on until you explain why the hell a Blackthorn crest is sitting on your hand.”
Short internal argument, fast and mean: Tell him everything. Tell him nothing. He looks like he wants to burn the world down and you’re the match. Don’t give him the match.
I went with fragments. Safer.
“It’s fake.” My voice sounded scraped raw. “The engagement. Rhett Blackthorn doesn’t get to keep me. Someone decided I looked like good leverage and forced the ring on. I was supposed to walk down an aisle in three days. Instead I woke up tied to your brother’s beam with a knife in my shirt.”
Colt’s hands curled into fists at his sides. I watched the shake start in his fingers and travel up his arms. He wanted to touch me. I could see it. He also wanted to put his fist through the wall. Both truths lived in the same tight line of his mouth.
“Investigating,” I added, because the silence was getting dangerous.
“Both families. Voss. Blackthorn. Seven years of following money and bodies and the quiet little wars nobody puts in the paper. Someone found out how close I was. They wanted me dead before the wedding could make me harder to kill.”
He took one step closer. The air between us went electric, the way it used to right before lightning hit the ridge. My pulse kicked hard against the rope burns.
“You let me think you walked away,” he said. Quiet. Deadly. “Seven years of unanswered texts. Seven birthdays. And the whole time you were what—playing detective in the city while I drank myself stupid sending messages to a ghost?”
There it was. The real wound. Not the ring. Not the blood. The silence.
I looked at the floorboards between my bare feet because looking at his face hurt worse than the cut on my head. Short, vicious argument with myself: Don’t you dare soften. Don’t you dare reach for him. He’ll use it. They always use it.
I lifted my chin instead and threw the only truth sharp enough to cut us both.
“I let you hate me so they couldn’t use me against you.”
The words landed like a slap. His breath left him in a rough exhale. For a second neither of us moved. The ceiling fan kept turning. Somewhere in the house a floorboard creaked—Jax, probably, giving us the illusion of privacy.
Colt’s voice came out lower. Rougher. “Say that again.”
“You heard me.” I forced my eyes up to his.
“Every tip I fed. Every shipment I burned. Every name I buried. It was all to keep the target off your back. Hate was safer. Hate meant they looked at me and saw a bitter ex, not the woman who still had the only key to the files that could level both syndicates.”
His hands were shaking openly now. He dragged one through his hair hard enough that I heard the scrape of calluses.
Then he stepped in close—too close—and the smell of him hit me full force: whiskey, dust, the clean sweat of a man who had just climbed off something that wanted him dead.
My body remembered him before my brain could stop it. Traitor.
“You don’t get to decide that for me,” he said. “You don’t get to disappear and play martyr and then show up bleeding in my barn with another man’s ring on your finger.”
“It isn’t another man’s.” My voice stayed steady even though everything inside me was not. “It’s a prop. And I was coming back anyway. The message came too late. They found me first.”
He reached out like he couldn’t stop himself. Fingers hovered over the bandage at my temple, not quite touching. The heat of his hand was close enough to feel. Electric. Dangerous. I wanted to lean in. I wanted to run. Both desires hit at the same time and canceled each other out into pure static.
“Ember—”
Headlights swept across the far wall.
Bright. Fast. More than one vehicle.
We both froze. The beams cut through the thin curtains, white and harsh, painting the room in sudden stark relief. Engines rumbled low outside. Doors opened. Voices carried—male, clipped, the kind of confidence that came with guns and orders.
Colt’s head snapped toward the window. The shake left his hands. What replaced it was colder. Focused. The cowboy disappeared between one breath and the next.
He looked back at me once. Something raw and possessive flashed across his face.
“Stay behind me,” he said.
Then the first shout rose from the driveway, and the quiet of the ranch house shattered