Across the chute, Rhett backed Duke into the heeler's box. He sat still as stone, rope already built, eyes on the chute gate.
The steer banged against the inside of the chute. Metal rattled. The animal's head poked through the top, wild-eyed. A Corriente—lean, fast, horns curvin' up and out. Perfect target if I did my job right.
Speed's ears locked forward. His whole body coiled. I could feel the engine revvin' underneath me—twelve hundred pounds of quarter horse muscle waitin' for the signal.
I adjusted my loop. Checked my dally hand. Took a breath.
This was the part I lived for. The seconds between the settle and the storm. Everything quiet, everything focused. Just me and my horse and the gate and what came after it.
Somethin' flickered at the edge of my vision. Past my shoulder, behind the chute, in the narrow gap between the back of the box and the stock pens. A shape—quick, there and gone.
Speed felt it before I could process it. His head snapped right. His body torqued beneath me—a full-body flinch, the kind of violent sideways lurch that only came from genuine fear.
In all the years we'd been doin' this, Speed had never spooked in the box. Not once. Not in thunderstorms, not with firecrackers, not with the loudest, wildest stock Meagher County had ever run through these chutes.
"Woah—woah, easy?—"
But he was already gone. His hindquarters swung hard into the wall, the metal panel clangin' loud enough to ring through the stagin' area. He reared—not high, but sharp—and my weight shifted at exactly the wrong angle.
The chute banged open. The steer broke.
The barrier snapped and Speed lunged forward on instinct and I was already off-center, already losin' the saddle, my left foot slippin' the stirrup as Speed's first stride launched crooked out of the box.
For one suspended second I was airborne. The arena tilted. The sky swapped places with the dirt. The crowd noise went distant and cottony, like someone had stuffed my ears with gauze.
Then the ground came up fast and mean and caught me with everything it had.
My shoulder hit first. Then my hip. Then the back of my head, hat flyin' off somewhere behind me. The impact punched every bit of air from my lungs and replaced it with dust and a white-hot bolt of pain that started at the base of my skull and radiated outward until I couldn't tell where my body ended and the dirt began.
The world went very bright.
Then very dark.
Then somethin' in between that didn't have a name—just sound and pressure and the vague awareness of hooves thunderin' somewhere nearby that I hoped to Christ weren't comin' my way.
The last thing I registered before the dark won was Speed's whinny—high and sharp and panicked, the sound of a horse that knew somethin' was wrong.
He wasn't the only one.
CHAPTERFORTY-SIX
The fairgrounds smelledlike dirt and animals and funnel cake, and I was twelve years old.
Not literally. I knew where I was—Meagher County, Montana, August, thirty-four years old and standin' on solid ground with Sassy's arm looped through mine. I knew the difference between then and now. I knew this wasn't the circuit, wasn't a dusty rodeo lot in some town I'd forget by Tuesday, wasn't the particular brand of chaos that came with followin' a man who loved bulls more than his daughter.
But my body didn't know that. My body smelled the livestock and the hot grease and the cocktail of dust and leather and sun-baked metal, and it decided we were twelve.
I focused on breathing. In through the nose. Out through the mouth. The way I'd taught myself during the years when panic was a luxury I couldn't afford—you didn't get to fall apart when nobody was coming to pick you up.
"—haven't even told Rhett yet. It's only one semester, but I just know he's gonna make it a whole thing, and I can't deal with that right now. Bozeman isn't even that far, it's like—Calvin? Calvin. You listenin'?"
"Mhm."
I wasn't. Something about Bozeman and Rhett and not telling him—I caught the tail end but couldn't make the pieces fit, not with the noise in my own head drowning everything else out.
Sassy tugged my arm, steering us through the crowd toward the main arena fence. The bleachers were filling up—families, ranchers, the usual collection of sun-weathered locals who turned out for anything that qualified as entertainment in a county where the population barely cracked four thousand. I scanned every face without meaning to. A reflex. Sixteen years of walking into rooms and clocking exits and identifying threats before they identified me.
I didn't see Denny. Didn't see Wyatt.
