30. Jamison
CHAPTER THIRTY
JAMISON
Days of torture passed. Sienna and I got closer. She wasn’t as closed off with me after the first week. Today, the family decided it would be a great idea to stand outside in the sun. Again. For clay shooting. The afternoon had become hot enough to irritate me personally.
Harlan had heat. But this was country heat, and made the long-sleeved dress shirt I had worn impractical.
I lasted nine minutes.
Then I stopped beside the pavilion, handed Sienna my glass, and reached for the buckles of my shoulder rig.
She went quiet.
I did not look at her yet. That would have been indulgent, and I was busy saving myself from fainting in a family field surrounded by gun cases and lemonade.
The black leather holster sat over my dress shirt because I had refused a jacket in this heat and I refused existing without weapons even more.
Two guns rested beneath my arms. A knife sat flat against the leather line near my ribs.
Practical. Visible enough to make polite people uncomfortable.
My preferred balance.
I unfastened the rig and handed it to Reeves.
He took it without comment, though his expression suggested he had already judged the entire afternoon and found it beneath all of us.
I opened the cuffs next, then the buttons, dragging the shirt off my shoulders.
The black T-shirt underneath clung to my chest and back from the heat.
My chains had warmed against my skin, dark metal at my throat, one pendant tucked half beneath the collar.
Ink ran down both arms, disappearing under the short sleeves.
I shook the dress shirt once, folded it badly over the back of a chair, and held my hand out.
Reeves gave the holster back.
I slid into it again, leather settling over the black T-shirt this time, the weight of the guns returning beneath my arms. I adjusted the straps across my shoulders, checked the knife, then rolled my neck once.
Better. Much better. The heat remained offensive, but at least I had stopped pretending I was built for garden society in formal sleeves.
When I finally looked at Sienna, she was staring.
Trying not to.
Failing immediately.
Her gaze dropped from my throat to the black leather crossing my chest, then lower, over the T-shirt stretched against me, then down my arms where the ink disappeared beneath the sleeves.
She blinked, caught herself, and looked very seriously toward the shooting traps, as if orange clay discs had become fascinating on a spiritual level.
My mood improved.
Then I saw the other women looking.
A cousin in green. One of the married sisters. Two wives near the lemonade table. Celeste, with her eyes moving over the holster, my chest, the guns, the exposed ink, before she looked away with careful calculation.
Wrong move.
I reached for Sienna.
She made a tiny sound when my arm wrapped around her waist and pulled her back against my side. Her hand came to my forearm by instinct, fingers curling over ink and muscle, and the response pleased me far more than public behavior should have allowed.
I looked at Celeste over the top of Sienna’s head.
Her eyes lowered.
Sienna glanced up at me. “What are you doing?”
“Standing.”
She stared at me for one second, then realized I had no intention of answering honestly. That suspicious little look appeared, the one she had developed over watching me lie with a straight face whenever I was being possessive.
“You’re being strange again.”
“I have been excellent all day.”
She pressed her lips together, trying not to smile.
I kept my hand on her waist like a civilized monster and watched the clay shooting setup begin.
The west field had been arranged with obscene professionalism. A row of shooting stands. Staff in green jackets. Gun cases on felt-lined tables. Ear protection laid out in neat rows. Cold drinks beneath a canvas pavilion.
White markers in the grass. A neat shooting line
I had no interest in shooting clay.
Clay lacked debt records.
Still, the Bellemeres treated the activity with reverence.
Sienna stayed still.
I felt it through her body before I saw it on her face.
“You hate this,” I said.
She looked ahead. “I’m terrible at it.”
“She hates it,” Adrian said, appearing on her other side.
Sienna gave him a look. “Adrian.”
He shrugged. “You do.”
I glanced toward her father. He had begun speaking to Julian and avoiding my eyes, which proved the man had survival instincts after all.
Sienna exhaled. “It’s fine.”
Adrian and I both looked at her. Julian joined us with two glasses of water. He handed one to Sienna, one to Adrian, then glanced at me.
I looked at his empty hands.
He lifted a brow. “Do Crows drink water?”
“Rarely on purpose.”
“Sienna said you prefer coffee.”
“Sienna says many things.”
Julian’s gaze flicked to his sister. “Less lately.”
The sentence landed near a nerve. I let him keep his life because Sienna was standing between us, and because she had begun tracing her thumb over the leather strap of my holster as if she did not realize she was doing it.
A staff member approached with a gun suited for Sienna’s size and the kind of hopeful expression people wore right before becoming disappointing. “Miss Bellemere, your father has requested you take third rotation.”
Sienna’s smile appeared instantly.
I hated seeing the gun placed into her hands.
Something primitive and Crow rose in me so fast I nearly took the weapon and broke it.
Sienna and guns did not belong in the same image.
She wasn’t fragile. The sight simply made my blood go black.
Her hands were for my wrist under tables, soft touches given as reward until I behaved like a trained animal with a violent inheritance.
Never guns.
She accepted it because everyone expected her to.
Her father approached with Uncle Theo, both carrying the eager male confidence of men about to explain a skill to a woman who had heard the same explanation yearly and still wanted nothing to do with it.
“Sienna,” her father said warmly. “This year, remember the follow-through.”
Uncle Theo lifted a finger. “And don’t close your eyes.”
“I don’t close my eyes,” Sienna said.
“You do,” Adrian said quietly.
She looked wounded. “Traitor.”
“You close them after the first shot.”
Julian’s mouth curved. “Before the second, depending on weather.”
“Both of you are dismissed.”
Adrian leaned closer to me. “Every year.”
I kept my eyes on Sienna as a staff member positioned her. “What happens every year?”
“Father gives tips. Theo gives worse tips. She gets tense. Misses everything. They give up after making it worse.”
Julian stepped to my other side. “Then Adrian or I usually end it.”
“How?”
“Sudden weather. Equipment issue. A dog running through the field. Once, Adrian started an argument with Cousin Victor and dragged half the men away.”
“What about the other girls?” I asked.
Julian nodded toward the line of women near the stands. “All good. Excellent, some of them. Sienna is the only one who doesn’t like guns.”
Sienna lifted the gun awkwardly.
Everything in me rejected it.
Her father stood behind her, instructing. “Higher. Lead the target. Not that high. Relax your shoulder. Don’t relax too much.”
Reeves stood near the security line beyond the pavilion, black suit immaculate despite heat, eyes already on me. He saw my hand move. Nothing anyone outside my world would read. Barely a flex of two fingers against my thigh.
Reeves’s gaze shifted to one of my men near the far equipment table.
Good man.
Sienna fired.
The clay disc sailed untouched through the air and vanished into the grass.
Polite claps followed from people who should have been ashamed of themselves.
“Again,” her father said.
Sienna reloaded under supervision. Her shoulders had gone stiff. Her mouth stayed soft because Bellemere daughters apparently smiled their way through family tradition.
She fired again.
Missed.
Uncle Theo began explaining where her eyes had gone wrong. Her father corrected her stance. Sienna fired a third time and missed by enough that a few men looked down politely.
Adrian moved.
I caught his sleeve without looking at him.
“Jamison.”
“Wait.”
“I usually stop it now.”
“I said wait.”
He glanced at my hand on his sleeve, then at my face. Something in him measured the danger and chose patience.
Smart man.
Her father’s voice kept going. “Try to anticipate the arc. You dance…surely rhythm should translate.”
Sienna’s smile flickered.
My mood dropped. Reeves’s man moved into position near the far trap line with the casual invisibility of Crow security. No one noticed. The Bellemeres were all watching Sienna fail.
The next clay launched.
Sienna lifted the gun.
Her eyes were open this time.
She fired.
A fraction of a second later, the disc shattered midair. Orange fragments burst against the blue sky.
Silence.
Then the field erupted.
Her eyes went wide. The gun stayed in her hands.
“I hit it?”
Her father stared at the empty sky. Uncle Theo lowered his own gun. Everyone looked stunned, which was irritating because they should have looked proud first.
Sienna turned toward me.
“I hit it!”
Then she ran.
Toward me.
With a gun.
Every primitive Crow instinct in my body detonated.
I crossed the distance fast enough that staff members stepped back. My hand closed over the weapon first, taking it from her grip and making it safe before my other arm caught her around the waist.
She collided with me laughing.
I handed the weapon off to Reeves without looking. He appeared at my side because the man had a gift for materializing wherever weapons needed to disappear. He took it and removed it from Sienna’s immediate universe.
Good.
I kept Sienna.
She had both hands on my shoulders now, breathless, face lifted to mine. “I hit it.”
My hand spread over her lower back. “Good girl.”
“I did terribly before,” she whispered.
“You hit the one that mattered.”
Her smile widened. She rose onto her toes, close enough that her lips brushed my ear when she spoke.
“Thank you.”
She knew.