The crowd's gone quiet, that terrible hush that means everyone knows they just watched something bad happen.Medics rush into the arena with a stretcher and gear rattling. They try to get me to move, but I don't until Tyler's hand closes around my wrist. Weak grip, barely there, but desperate.
He pulls me closer. Tries again to speak.
"Grant." It comes out as barely a whisper, his voice destroyed. "They... said..."
"Who said what? Tyler, who?"
His eyes are losing focus. Blood trickles from the corner of his mouth. He's trying so hard to get the words out, and I can see the fight in him, the need to tell me something.
"They... paid..." His grip loosens. "Grant, they..."
And then nothing. His hand falls away. His eyes go empty.
The medics push me aside, start working on him, but I already know. I've seen that look before. Tyler Brennan is gone.
I stand there in the arena dirt, covered in my friend's blood, while the medics confirm what I already know. Dead on arrival. Massive internal injuries. Catastrophic trauma. All the words that mean Tyler took a ride that killed him.
Except it wasn't just a bad ride.
I look up at the stock contractor, a guy named Vic Sutton who manages Hellfire's Revenge along with a dozen other bulls on the circuit. He's standing by the exit chute, pale and sweating, hands shaking as he fumbles with the latch. When he catches me looking, he jerks his gaze away too fast.
Something's wrong. Not just Tyler-dying wrong. Something else.
The circuit officials are already swarming, radios crackling, moving into damage control mode. I recognize Dale Thornton, the Southwest Circuit's head of operations, talking to the announcer in low urgent tones. Within five minutes, they're making an announcement. Tragic accident. Wrong bull on a bad night. These things happen in rodeo. Tyler Brennan was a skilled rider who knew the risks.
I watch them clean up the scene with efficiency that feels too practiced, too smooth. They get Tyler's body onto the stretcher, covered with a tarp, and moved out of the arena. They reset the chutes. They get Hellfire's Revenge back into the stock pens like nothing happened.
By the time they're done, it looks like just another ride gone wrong.
But I saw Tyler's eyes in those last seconds. I heard him trying to warn me about something. And I saw Vic Sutton's face when he realized I was watching.
This wasn't an accident.
Someone killed Tyler Brennan and made it look like rodeo bad luck.
Colt finds me behind the chutes, still covered in blood, staring at the pens where they took Hellfire's Revenge. Zane Crowe, the veteran stock contractor who supplies half the bulls on the circuit, is standing at the far end of the pen row with his arms folded and his jaw tight, watching his handlers work with an expression I can't read from this distance. He's been around rodeo longer than most of us have been alive. If something was wrong with that bull, Zane would know.
Colt Holloway is six-two of controlled violence in a sport full of men who can't control anything, least of all themselves. He's the top-ranked bull rider on the Southwest Circuit, and he carries that ranking the way some men carry weapons: quietly, with the understanding that everyone around him already knows what he's capable of. Dark hair, darker eyes, a jaw that looks like it was designed to take a punch and a mouth that rarely wastes words. He's been my biggest rival and closest friend for eight years, and I've never once seen him rattled. Not when he shattered his collarbone in Tucson. Not when his ex-wife cleaned out their joint account and disappeared to Denver. Not once.
Tonight, his hands aren’t steady. Colt’s hands are always steady… always. The man doesn’t rattle.
He hides it fast. Shoves them in his pockets, locks his jaw, does the thing Colt does where he buries whatever he's feeling so deep you'd need a backhoe to find it. But I saw. And the fact that Tyler's death cracked something in a man who doesn't crack tells me more about how bad this is than anything the officials have said.
Colt doesn't say anything, just stands next to me. We've been friends and rivals long enough that he knows when I need words and when I need silence.
Right now, I need silence.
But after a minute, he speaks anyway. "You okay?"
"No."
"Fair." He's quiet for another beat. "Officials are calling it an accident."
"I know."
"You don't sound convinced."
I turn to look at him. Colt Holloway's got the same thousand-yard stare every bull rider gets after watching one of us die, but underneath it I can see the question. He knows me well enough to know when I'm chewing on something.
