Chapter 6
POV: Ember
The east barn was still burning when I slipped into the old ranch office.
Smoke drifted across the yard in thick gray sheets.
Shouts and radio chatter cut through the dark—Colt’s voice, Jax’s, the low rumble of men who had ridden for the Voss name long enough to know what an open war smelled like.
I left them to it. My hands were steadier with paper than with a gun tonight, and someone had to figure out how deep the rot went before the next wave hit.
The office sat at the back of the main house, a narrow room that still smelled like old leather, tobacco, and the particular dust that settles on land that has been fought over for generations. I locked the door behind me, flicked on the desk lamp, and started pulling drawers.
Colt’s father had been meticulous in the worst way.
Ledgers. Receipts. Handwritten notes in the margins of cattle sale records that didn’t make sense until you looked at the dates.
I worked fast, ignoring the throb in my temple and the way my wrists burned every time I turned a page.
The Blackthorn ring caught the light every few seconds like it was reminding me it was still there.
I wanted to cut the finger off. Instead I kept digging.
Two hours in, the pattern snapped into focus.
False intel. Fed to both families for years.
Small things at first—wrong delivery routes, inflated head counts on rival herds, tips about federal eyes that never actually existed.
Each one just damaging enough to keep the Voss and Blackthorn operations bleeding money and men without ever quite tipping into open slaughter. Until now. Until me.
Someone had been playing both sides like a fiddle and collecting the pieces when they broke.
I sat back in the cracked leather chair and pressed the heels of my hands against my eyes. The headache pulsed harder. Childhood memory hit without warning, the way they always did when I was too tired to keep the walls up.
I was nine. Colt was ten. His father had us both on green colts in the north round pen, the Montana sun high and mean.
“Heels down. Eyes up. The horse can feel it if you’re scared.”
His voice was gruff but patient that day.
Rare. He walked between us, correcting my stirrup, tapping Colt’s knee.
For a couple of hours we weren’t the heir and the neighbor girl.
We were just two kids learning how to stay on something that wanted us off.
When the lesson ended, Colt’s father ruffled my hair like I belonged there.
“You ride like you’ve got Voss blood,” he said. I had beamed for a week.
Three years later that same man stood in our kitchen the night the “ranch accident” took my parents.
Tractor rollover, they called it. Steep embankment.
No witnesses. I remembered the smell of coffee and the way Colt’s father wouldn’t meet my eyes when he told me I was coming to stay at the big house until things settled.
Things never settled. Two weeks later my mentor appeared—kind smile, soft voice, a bag already packed for me.
Shadow Creek became a rearview mirror. I didn’t see Colt again for almost a year, and by then the silence had already started growing teeth.
I opened my eyes. The office felt smaller. The files on the desk looked like evidence in a trial I hadn’t known I was standing in.
Boots sounded in the hallway. I knew the weight of them. Colt. I shoved the most damning ledger under a stack of old invoices and wiped my face with both hands before the door opened.
He stepped in smelling like smoke and gunpowder and the particular fury he wore when people touched what was his. A fresh cut marked his forearm. He closed the door and leaned against it, eyes moving over me the same way they had in the kitchen—cataloguing damage, claiming it.
“You should be resting,” he said.
“You should be out there.”
“Jax has it. Perimeter’s quiet for now.” He nodded at the chaos of paper. “Find anything?”
The truth sat on my tongue, heavy and sharp. The same person has been feeding your family and the Blackthorns lies for years. Your father’s careful notes are full of traps someone else set. My parents’ accident wasn’t an accident. The man who raised me after might be the one who ordered it.
I almost said it. The words rose so fast I had to clench my jaw to keep them in.
Emotional fracture, clean and sudden: I wanted to hand him everything.
I wanted to stop carrying it alone. I wanted the boy who used to boost me onto horses to look at me like I hadn’t spent seven years turning myself into a weapon aimed at the people who hurt us.
Instead I shook my head once. “Patterns. Nothing solid yet.”
His eyes narrowed. He knew I was lying. He always knew.
But he didn’t push. Not yet. He crossed the room, stopped beside the chair, and set a bottle of water and two painkillers on the desk without a word.
His fingers brushed my shoulder—brief, deliberate.
Heat licked down my arm. I didn’t lean into it. I also didn’t pull away.
“I’ll be on the porch,” he said. “You get ten more minutes. Then you’re done for the night.”
The door clicked shut behind him. I waited until his boots faded, then pulled the ledger back out. Something had slipped free when I shoved it earlier—a thin envelope, yellowed, no label. I opened it with careful fingers.
One photograph.
My mentor stood on the left, younger, smiling that same soft smile he used when he taught me how to encrypt a drive.
Beside him, a teenage Rhett Blackthorn already wearing the entitled tilt of his chin.
And on the right, a third man. Broad shoulders.
Familiar build. The face had been burned away with a cigarette or a lighter, left as a black, blistered hole in the paper.
But the hand resting on my mentor’s shoulder was clear enough.
A scar across the knuckles. The same scar I had seen a hundred times on the man who taught two kids how to ride in a round pen under a hard Montana sun.
Colt’s father.
Or someone wearing his shape.
The room tilted. I set the photo on the desk with fingers that no longer felt like mine.
The puppet master hadn’t just been feeding both families false intel.
He had been inside the circle the entire time—close enough to smile for a camera, close enough to put a hand on a shoulder, close enough to decide which children got to keep their parents and which ones didn’t.
Outside, the east barn kept burning. Somewhere on the porch Colt was watching the dark like he could hold it back by force of will alone.
I stared at the ruined face in the photograph and felt the last of my careful calculations crack straight down the middle.
The war on Voss land wasn’t new.
It had been running for years.
And I had just found the first real proof that the man pulling the strings had been standing in the family photos the whole time