Chapter 16
Turnbuckle found Teague at the Sandhills rodeo grounds, drinking whiskey in the announcer's booth like a man who'd earned a celebration.
The intel had come from Harlan Jessup. The old stock contractor had contacts on every circuit within a hundred miles, and when Turnbuckle called asking where Fogarty's enforcer liked to spend his evenings, Harlan had an answer within the hour.
"Sandhills grounds. Uses the announcer's booth as a personal office after hours. Thinks nobody knows." A pause. "Be careful with that one. Strand was mean. Teague's something worse."
Turnbuckle didn't ask what was worse than mean. He already knew. Men like Strand hurt people because they were told to. Men like Teague hurt people because they liked it.
Carla's collarbone. The message burned into her truck. The cowboy hat he hadn't earned.
Turnbuckle rode.
Fathom flanked him—the SEAL hadn't said a word since they'd left the hospital, just mounted his bike and fallen into formation with the economical silence of a man who understood that some missions didn't require discussion.
They cut through the Carolina dark on back roads, avoiding the main highways, moving with purpose through territory Turnbuckle was learning the way he'd learned the Wilmington waterfront: by necessity.
The rodeo grounds sat on fifty acres of fenced pasture south of town. Off-season empty—no livestock, no competitors, no witnesses. Just dirt arenas and metal bleachers and the announcer's booth perched above the main chute like a crow's nest.
Light in the booth window. A truck parked below it. One truck.
Teague was alone.
Fathom killed his engine a quarter mile out. They walked the rest, boots quiet on packed dirt, approaching from the stock pens where the shadows were deepest.
"One man in the booth," Fathom murmured. "No backup visible. Could be inside the truck."
"I'll check the truck. You cover the stairs."
Fathom nodded and melted into the dark.
Turnbuckle circled wide, approaching the truck from behind. Empty cab. Empty bed. A coil of rope and a propane torch in the back—the tools Teague had used to burn his message into Carla's truck, still sitting there like evidence he didn't think anyone would collect.
The torch was heavy in Turnbuckle's hand. He set it back down.
Not tonight. Tonight was fists.
He climbed the announcer's booth stairs without trying to be quiet.
Stealth wasn't the point. The point was the sound of boots on metal, each step announcing what was coming, giving the man at the top time to hear and understand and feel the first cold touch of what he'd spent years inflicting on others.
Fear.
The booth door was open.
Teague sat in the announcer's chair with his boots on the console and a bottle of Maker's Mark in his hand.
The cowboy hat—clean, white, absurd on a man who'd never worked cattle in his life—sat on the desk beside him.
He was lean and weathered, with the patient eyes of someone who enjoyed the waiting part of violence almost as much as the act itself.
He looked up when Turnbuckle filled the doorway. Didn't startle. Didn't reach for a weapon.
Smiled.
"The prospect." Teague took a drink. "I was wondering when you'd show up."
"Then you know why I'm here."
"The trainer woman. Bowman." Teague set the bottle down with the casual ease of a man settling in for conversation. "She healed up yet? Collarbone breaks are tricky—sometimes they set wrong, cause problems for years."
The fury hit like a wall of heat. Turnbuckle let it come, let it burn through his chest and down his arms and into his fists, but he didn't move. Not yet.
"You enjoyed it," he said.
"I'm good at my job. Being good at something tends to bring satisfaction." Teague's smile widened. "Fogarty sends Strand for the rough stuff. Sends Gault for the business side. Sends me when he wants someone to remember what fear tastes like."
"Strand's dead. Gault's dead."
"I heard." Not a flicker of concern. "Fogarty's running out of lieutenants. That should worry you—means he'll get desperate, and desperate men are unpredictable."
"I'm not here to talk about Fogarty."
"No. You're here about the woman." Teague studied him the way a predator studied prey—not with aggression but with assessment, calculating angles and weaknesses. "The barrel racer. Dana Scofield. Fogarty says she's yours now. That true?"
Turnbuckle stepped into the booth.
"I broke her friend's collarbone with a pipe wrench," Teague said, still seated, still calm.
"Waited until the husband was gone. She fought—give her credit.
But a pipe wrench against bare hands isn't much of a contest." He picked up the bottle again.
"The truck was artistic, I thought. The branding iron touch.
Fogarty wanted a message. I gave him a masterpiece. "
"Stand up."
"In a minute. I want to finish my drink."
"I said stand up."
Teague looked at him. Really looked—past the prospect patch, past the scar, past the fury radiating off him like heat from a forge. Whatever he saw made his smile change. Not disappearing—sharpening. The smile of a man who recognized a fight he'd been waiting for.
"All right." Teague set the bottle down and rose from the chair.
He was tall. Lean in the way that came from endurance, not bulk.
His hands were scarred—not from labor, from inflicting damage.
"Let me guess. You're going to make this about the horse.
About the trainer. About all the people your woman cares about that Fogarty's been systematically destroying. "
"I'm going to make this about the fact that you enjoy it."
Something flickered behind Teague's eyes. Recognition. The awareness that this prospect wasn't here for justice or revenge or the club's agenda. This was personal in a way that went deeper than assignments.
"You think you're different from me," Teague said. "You think because you hit people for a cause instead of a paycheck, that makes it righteous."
"I don't think about it at all."
Turnbuckle hit him.
The first punch caught Teague on the jaw and rocked him back into the console.
Equipment scattered—microphones, coffee cups, the whiskey bottle spinning across the desk and shattering against the wall.
Teague absorbed the hit and came back swinging—fast, technical, a counter-right that caught Turnbuckle on the cheekbone and split skin.
The man could fight. Not like Strand, who'd relied on size and weapons. Teague fought smart—defensive, patient, letting Turnbuckle spend energy on attacks while he waited for openings.
Turnbuckle didn't care about openings. He cared about contact.
He drove forward, taking a jab to the ribs that made his vision flash, and answered with a headbutt that crushed Teague's nose.
Blood sprayed across the console. Teague staggered, hands coming up to protect his face, and Turnbuckle drove a knee into his midsection that folded him over the announcer's desk.
The booth was too small for this. Good. Small spaces were what Turnbuckle knew—shipping containers, bar corners, warehouse aisles. Tight quarters where reach didn't matter and commitment did.
Teague lashed out from the desk—an elbow that caught Turnbuckle's temple and sent stars cascading across his vision. He grabbed the arm, twisted, and slammed Teague face-first into the booth's window. The glass cracked in a spiderweb pattern but didn't break.
Teague laughed. Blood in his teeth, nose destroyed, and he laughed.
"There it is," Teague gasped. "There's the thing you don't want to admit. You like this too. You're just like—"
Turnbuckle slammed him into the window again. This time the glass gave way, spilling shards into the night air, and Teague's upper body hung over the edge, twenty feet above the arena dirt.
"I'm nothing like you."
"You're exactly like me." Teague's voice was strained, his body suspended between the booth and the drop. "The only difference is you found a woman to make it noble."
Turnbuckle thought about Carla's collarbone. About the pipe wrench and the branding iron and the satisfaction in Teague's voice when he'd described his work. About the message on the truck, each letter burned with the care of a man who treated cruelty like craft.
He thought about Danny in the shipping container. About every time he'd looked away because getting involved was dangerous.
He wasn't looking away now.
"The difference," Turnbuckle said, "is that when I'm done tonight, I stop."
He pulled Teague back from the window and put him on the floor.
What followed was thorough. Not rage—something colder, more controlled.
The fury had burned itself into something precise, and Turnbuckle used it the way he used every tool: with commitment, with purpose, with the understanding that some things needed doing and the man who did them had to live with the weight.
Teague fought back. Kept fighting longer than Strand had, longer than Gault, because the man was built for punishment the way predators were built for hunting—it was in his nature to keep going even when the outcome was decided.
But the outcome had been decided the moment Turnbuckle walked through the door.
When it was over, Teague's cowboy hat sat on the desk untouched and its owner lay on the announcer's booth floor, and the man who'd enjoyed making people afraid would never enjoy anything again.
Turnbuckle stood. His hands were wrecked—split knuckles, swollen joints, blood that wasn't all his. His ribs ached from Teague's counter shots. The cut on his cheek was bleeding freely, dripping onto the console.
He picked up the cowboy hat. Looked at it.
Dropped it on the body.
Fathom was waiting at the bottom of the stairs, arms crossed, expression unreadable.
"Clean?"
Turnbuckle descended on legs that wanted to shake. "Clean."
The SEAL studied him in the dark—reading damage, assessing function, the silent triage of a man who'd served with the best and knew what combat looked like on a person's face.
"Ride?"
"Ride."
The trip back took longer than the trip out. Turnbuckle let the speed stay legal, let the night air work through the adrenaline, let the miles put distance between the man he'd been in that booth and the man he wanted to be when he walked through the compound gates.
Teague's words rattled in his skull. You're exactly like me. The accusation of a dying man, designed to poison. Designed to make the violence feel dirty instead of necessary.
He didn't believe it. Couldn't afford to. Because believing it meant every fight he'd ever taken was just destruction dressed in better clothes, and the woman waiting at the compound deserved more than a man who hurt people because he was built for it.
The compound gates appeared. Fathom peeled off toward the garage. Turnbuckle killed his engine in the yard and sat on his bike in the dark, breathing, trying to find the line between what he'd done and who he was.
Dana appeared.
She came out of the stable in bare feet and his flannel, her hair loose, her face carrying the same hollowed-out exhaustion he'd seen at the hospital.
She crossed the yard without speaking, without asking, without any of the questions that a normal person would ask a man who'd ridden off to commit violence and come back wearing blood.
She just walked up to him and put her arms around his neck.
Turnbuckle buried his face in her shoulder and let her hold him.
The weight of the booth—the blood, the glass, the words he couldn't unhear—pressed against his chest. But her arms were around him, and she smelled like hay and horses and the flannel she'd stolen from his room, and she wasn't asking what he'd done because she already knew and it didn't change what she felt.
Something settled.
Not loudly. Not dramatically. Just a quiet click, like a bone finding its socket—the feeling of a thing returning to where it belonged. The guilt he'd been carrying since the shipping container didn't disappear. Wouldn't ever disappear. But it shifted, making room for something else.
The knowledge that he'd stepped in. Every time. For Dana, for Carla, for the circuit full of people Fogarty had been terrorizing for years.
He wasn't the man who looked away anymore.
Dana's hand found the back of his head. Her fingers traced through his hair, gentle and steady, and he felt her lips press against his temple.
She didn't say a word.
She didn't need to.