Chapter 1 #3
"And Thornton Livestock?"
"Supplies stock across the whole circuit. Every venue. Every event." He holds my gaze. "You want your feature piece? There it is. But I'm guessing you won't write it, because nobody on this circuit has the balls to put their name next to that accusation."
He turns away again.
"Why do you?" I ask.
He looks back over his shoulder.
The blood has reached his jaw now, and the overhead lights catch the scar tissue on his forearms, a roadmap of every bull rope that's ever bitten into his skin.
"Grant Corbin was the best man I ever knew." He stops. The rest sits behind his teeth for a beat before he lets it out. "He's dead. I wasn't there. So no, I'm not worried about making friends."
He walks into the darkness behind the stock pens, and I let him go.
My hands are shaking. I shove them into my jacket pockets.
I stand there in the noise and the dust, the crowd roaring at the next ride, the announcer's voice a tinny blur overhead.
A bull handler walks past carrying a coiled lariat, and for one stupid second I think it's Grant, the same build, the same easy stride, and then the man turns and it's a stranger's face and the grief hits me so hard my knees almost buckle.
I lock them. Plant my boots in the dirt. I will not fall apart behind the chutes of a rodeo arena in Amarillo, Texas. Not tonight. Not here.
Grant's voice lands before I can brace for it, the way it always does when the grief gets a clean shot in.
Get up, Kenna. You're embarrassing me. The same thing he said when I fell off a fence rail at the Lubbock fairgrounds at eleven and cried in front of his friends.
He bought me a snow cone after and told me Corbins don't cry in public.
We cry in the truck on the way home like civilized people.
I almost smile. Almost. The almost is worse than the grief, but it does what Grant's voice always does. It puts my spine back together.
Thornton Livestock. Juiced bulls. A targeted draw.
Grant told me he was investigating something. Onto something big, he said, in our last phone call.
The one where he sounded excited and scared and so alive that remembering it now makes me want to scream.
He never told me what. He never got the chance.
I should have pushed harder. Should have gotten in my truck and driven to whatever event he was working and demanded he tell me what he'd found.
Instead I said okay and I love you too and I hung up the phone, and days later a sheriff's deputy was standing on my porch with a face that told me the answer before he said a word.
For days, I replayed them in my head like footage on a loop, looking for the moment I could have changed the ending, and I never found it.
Colt just told me more in two minutes than two months of my own digging has produced.
And he didn't even know he was doing it.
He handed me Thornton Livestock, the drugged bulls, the targeted draw, and the word murder like he was scattering grenades, and then he walked into the dark without looking back to see if any of them detonated.
Every single one did.
I flip open my notebook. Write down everything. Thornton Livestock. Tombstone's Revenge. Drugged bull. Targeted draw. Grant Corbin. Murder.
My pen hovers over the last word.
Then I add one more line, not a name but a question. The one that will keep me awake tonight and every night until I answer it.
'Grant Corbin was the best man I ever knew.'
Holloway doesn't just think my brother was murdered. He's certain of it, and he's grieving the loss.
The raw, self-destructive kind of grief that makes a man climb onto Tombstone's Revenge and dare it to finish what Las Cruces started.
That changes everything.
It changes the investigation, the approach, the calculations I've been running since I forged my press credentials and drove to Amarillo with a fake name and a taser in my glove compartment.
I close the notebook and head for the parking lot, walking fast, because if I slow down the grief is going to catch me and I can't afford that. Not here. Not yet.
I have a hotel room with a locked door and a laptop full of public records, and now I have a thread I can pull that might actually lead somewhere.
Colt Holloway is dangerous. The way he moved into my space, the cold certainty in his voice, the death wish I watched him ride into that arena with.
Every instinct I have says he's the kind of man who will burn the world down to get what he wants and not look back to check for survivors.
He's also the only person on this entire circuit who's willing to say my brother's name and the word murder in the same sentence, which means I need him.
The night air is warm and dry and full of dust as I cut through the back lot toward the parking area, and I can still feel the vibration of that bull slamming the chute panels rattling in my teeth.
I can still see the blood running down Holloway's face and the way he didn't blink.
I need him. Which means the lie has to hold. However long it takes, whatever it costs.