My fingers tightened on the fence rail.
"Sassy."
"Hmm?"
"Who's allowed behind the chutes?"
She glanced over. "Gate crew, stock handlers, the vet. Why?"
I didn't answer. My eyes were locked on Wyatt. He'd stopped—just behind the back wall of the header's box. Not visible from inside. Not visible from the arena. Hidden in that narrow gap where the metal panels met, close enough to touch the fencing if he reached out.
Close enough that a horse could sense him. Smell him. Hear him.
A chill started at the base of my skull and flooded downward, filling my chest, my stomach, my legs. Not panic. Older than panic. The deep, animal knowledge that something terrible was about to happen and I was too far away to stop it.
Wyatt's hand came out of his pocket.
I opened my mouth?—
The chute banged open.
The steer broke.
Speed lunged—and then didn't. His body torqued sideways, a violent full-body flinch, and I saw Brody's weight shift wrong, saw his left foot lose the stirrup and the exact moment the saddle stopped being underneath him.
The barrier snapped. Speed lurched forward on instinct—chasing the steer because that's what he was trained to do—and Brody went ass over tea kettle, his body ragdolling through the air for one horrible, suspended second before the ground caught him.
The sound of him hitting the ground carried across the arena. A dull, heavy thud that I felt in my teeth.
The crowd gasped. One collective intake of breath from two hundred people.
I barely heard it.
I was twelve years old.
I was standing in the center of a paddock and the dust was hanging in the air and my mama's body was on the ground and her neck was wrong—bent at an angle that necks don't bend—and the horse was screaming, a sound I would hear in my sleep for the next twenty-two years, and I couldn't move. My feet were rooted to the dirt and my mouth was open but nothing was coming out and the world had gone silent except for that horse and the buzzing of a single fly that landed on my mama's hand while she lay there not moving, not breathing, not anything anymore.
"Calvin!"
Sassy's hand clamped around my bicep.
Air slammed back into my lungs.
The arena dirt was settling around Brody's body. He was on his back. Not moving. Speed had bolted, the riderless horse cantering toward the far end of the arena while two pickup riders gave chase. Rhett was already off Duke and running. The crowd had gone from a gasp to a murmur—an entire group of people deciding whether they'd just witnessed something bad or something worse.
I was off the fence before I knew I was moving—over it, not through it. My boots hit the arena dirt on the other side while Sassy shouted something behind me that I didn't catch and didn't care about. The distance between the fence and where he lay was maybe forty yards and I covered it at a dead sprint, boots pounding packed earth, dust kicking up behind me.
Rhett was already kneeling beside him when I slid to a stop and dropped to my knees in the dirt. Brody's eyes were closed. His hat was five feet away, upside down. Dirt in his hair, on his face, in the creases of his neck. His chest was rising and falling—I could see it, could count it—but his eyes were still closed.
My mama's eyes never opened again.
I needed his eyes to open.
"Brody." My voice came out wrecked. I didn't recognize it. "Brody, open your eyes."
Rhett had two fingers against the side of Brody's neck. His face was controlled—all business, all foreman—but his other hand was gripping Brody's hand hard enough to blanch his own knuckles.
"Don't move him," Rhett said.
