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I settled for instinct number three which was somewhere in between. I crouched down so I was at Magnus’s level and took the bottle from him. His bleary eyes tracked the bottle until his gaze fell on my face. A small smile spread across his mouth. “Dante,” he murmured. “Knew you’d come.” His words weren’t exactly slurred, but it seemed to take him a while to get them out.
“Always,” I automatically responded. “What are you doing here, Magnus?”
Magnus looked around him and then reached out to stroke his fingers over Jenna’s name on the headstone. “Had to say goodbye to my girl.”
“I could have taken you,” I said quietly, resisting the urge to reach out and touch his face.
Magnus shook his head. “Wanted to go for one last ride with her,” he murmured as he motioned to the horses who were standing quietly a few feet away. He hadn’t even tied them up beyond stringing Dolce’s reins to the horn on Ace’s saddle. But they must have sensed their owner’s distress, because they remained unmoving, not even leaning their heads down to graze on the sparse grass.
“Come meet her,” Magnus murmured as he held out his hand to me. His bleary eyes stabbed at something deep in my heart. It didn’t look like he’d been crying, but I suspected that was because the alcohol was doing its job and dulling his pain with a false sense of contentment. I took his hand and let him maneuver me so I was sitting next to him, my back against the headstone. The ground was cold beneath my ass, but luckily it wasn’t wet so it wasn’t too uncomfortable. The sun was starting to set so my goal was to get Magnus out of here soon.
Magnus was quiet for a while as he played with the grass between our bodies. Even though Jenna’s body wasn’t buried there, he still seemed to focus on the ground as he spoke.
“They didn’t know you, did they, baby girl?” he whispered. I suspected he was talking about the people who’d attended the wake. I’d overheard a lot of comments and while no one had been overtly disrespectful, I hadn’t heard anything that told me who Jenna had been beyond her addiction. Rachel had been the only one who’d given me any insight into the kind-hearted but feisty girl Jenna had been before drugs had taken over her life.
“Will you tell me about her?” I asked Magnus. He looked at me and paused before nodding.
I watched as he leaned back against the headstone and rested his hands on his thighs. His eyes drifted shut and, for a moment, I thought maybe he’d nodded off. But then he said, “She was born two months premature. The doctors didn’t think she’d make it, but she proved them wrong.”
“She was a fighter,” I offered.
He nodded. “So stubborn,” he said softly, though there was no anger in his words and he actually smiled briefly. “She didn’t like anyone doing things for her, not even when she was a little girl. And she was fearless.”
Magnus opened his eyes and glanced at me. “To the point that some of the stuff she did scared the shit out of me.”
“Like what?”
“She’d climb that tree out in the front yard just to get a look at the eggs the robins would lay in this nest about halfway up.”
I smiled. The tree Magnus was talking about was huge. “That must have left you with a few extra grays. How old was she?”
Magnus laughed. “Six. That wasn’t the worst part. I’d go out there and yell at her to come down, but instead of climbing all the way down, she’d stop at the last branch and yell, ‘Daddy, catch me’ a second before she’d jump. Nearly gave me a fucking heart attack the first time she did it.”
“I bet,” I said with a chuckle.
“I caught her every time,” Magnus whispered, his voice breaking. “I kept telling her she needed to stop doing it because there might be a day where’d I’d miss.”
“What did she say?”
“She just shook her head and said, ‘No you won’t, Daddy.’”
I ached to reach out and touch Magnus, to offer comfort. But I wasn’t sure how that would go over, so I settled for resting my shoulder against his. I considered it a victory when he didn’t pull away to put space between us.
“What else?”
“She had a soft heart,” he said. “When she found out that Colton’s cattle were beef cattle, she used a wire cutter to cut his fence and then used Dolce to herd the cows to the back of our property line where she thought she could hide them.”
I laughed. “She was a rustler.”
Magnus nodded and smiled. “Thirteen years old. She wasn’t sorry either. When we found her, she proceeded to lecture Colton on why he shouldn’t be raising his cows to be someone’s dinner and then began rattling off the names she’d given to them. There were nearly a hundred cows in the group she’d stolen. She stopped eating meat after that.”
