Chapter 17
POV: Ember
The ranch house felt too quiet after the feed mill.
I sat on the edge of Colt’s bed in one of his clean T-shirts, the white dress long since cut away and burned in the barrel out back.
Jax had cleaned the cut on my temple again and wrapped my wrists where the zip ties had bitten deepest.
Everything hurt in the dull, distant way that came after adrenaline finally let go.
Outside, the last of the smoke from the mill had drifted west.
Inside, the only sound was the old clock in the hall and the low murmur of men still sorting the wreckage of two families on the porch.
Colt stood in the doorway watching me like I might disappear if he blinked.
He had washed the blood off his hands, but the knuckles were still split.
The same hands that had cut me free, that had held my face in the middle of that burning mill, that had whispered I never stopped against my mouth like a vow.
“Come here,” I said.
He did. The mattress dipped under his weight.
For a long minute we just sat there, shoulders touching, breathing the same air without a gun in either hand or a lie left between us.
The war was not over—we both knew it—but for the first time in seven years it was not sitting in the space where our bodies met.
I reached under the pillow where I had stashed the small envelope I had carried through everything. The childhood photos. Creased. Faded. The ones I had never been able to leave behind even when I left everything else. I spread them on the blanket between us.
Colt’s father teaching two kids to ride in the north round pen.
Me at nine, gap-toothed and sunburned, perched on a green colt while Colt grinned from the fence.
The three of us on the porch steps the summer before the accident—his father’s hand on my shoulder like I belonged there.
I watched Colt’s face as he touched the edge of each print.
Something raw moved through his expression and settled into quiet grief.
“I kept them,” I said. “Even when I told myself I was never coming back. They were proof that for a little while we were just kids who didn’t know how to be anything else.”
He didn’t speak right away. Instead he pulled his phone from his pocket, unlocked it, and opened the thread that had lived there for seven years.
He handed it to me without a word. Every birthday.
Every Christmas. Every night the whiskey had made him honest.
I scrolled slowly. Some of the messages I had read in real time from a cold apartment three thousand miles away.
Others I had only imagined. Seeing them all in one unbroken chain hurt in a clean way I had not expected.
“I meant every one of them,” he said. Voice low. Rough. “Even the ones that just said your name. It was the only way I knew how to keep from turning into the thing my father trained. You were the line I wouldn’t cross. The only one.”
I set the phone down and leaned my forehead against his shoulder.
His arm came around me automatically. We stayed like that while the clock in the hall marked another hour of borrowed peace.
No strategies. No files. No one bleeding out in a doorway.
Just the two of us and the wreckage we had both survived.
When the exhaustion finally pulled harder than the need to keep talking, he tugged me down onto the bed.
We lay on our sides facing each other in the dark.
His hand settled at the back of my neck, thumb brushing the edge of the bandage.
My palm rested over the steady beat of his heart.
Nothing sexual. Nothing that asked for more than this.
Just holding on the way we should have been allowed to hold on years ago.
“I never stopped either,” I whispered into the quiet.
His arms tightened. “I know, Fire.”
Sleep came in fragments. I woke once to the feel of his mouth against my hair and the certain knowledge that he was still awake, still guarding the dark.
The second time the light through the curtains had turned the thin gray of false dawn.
Boots sounded in the hallway—too deliberate for ordinary morning noise.
Jax opened the door without knocking. His face was set in the grim lines he only wore when the trouble had teeth again.
“He’s not dead,” Jax said. No preamble. “The mentor. Border patrol found the car he dumped, but no body. One of the clean-up crew turned up alive an hour ago. Talked for a reduced sentence. The puppet master has one last play in motion. And it’s aimed at both of you.”
Colt’s body went rigid against mine. The fragile intimacy of the night cracked like thin ice under a sudden weight. I sat up slowly, the childhood photos still scattered across the blanket, the phone full of seven years of unanswered longing still warm from my hand.
Outside, the ranch was waking to a war that had refused to end with the sunrise.
And the man who had started it all still had one card left to play