Knotted Read online

  Bypassing Main Street, I hop onto a gravel road and take the most direct route to the ranch. Since I didn’t leave Chicago until after two in the morning, I ended up crashing for a few hours in a seedy motel outside St. Louis.

  I also swung by a public library and used a computer to send Jake and Jarret an email. If, by some miracle, they still check those accounts, they’ll know I’m arriving around dinnertime.

  A trickle of sweat itches my nape. I’m a filthy fucking mess, but nothing can be done about that. Despite the pit stops, thirteen hours on a motorcycle has taken its toll. My back aches from hunching over. The bruises on my abdomen protest every pock in the road. My legs throb from squeezing the vibrating steel frame, and the helmet feels like a thousand-pound oven on my head.

  But holy sweet lord in heaven, I’m home!

  By the time I zip beneath the stone archway of Julep Ranch, I’ve lost the ability to breathe.

  Multiple cars and trucks sit in the lot between the house and the main stable. Some familiar. Some not. How many new ranch hands work here? Will they know who I am or what happened in the ravine?

  Don’t think about that.

  Craning my neck, I don’t see Ketchup in the surrounding meadows. She’s probably in the mare barn. Jake will know.

  I search the lot for his beat-up old blue pickup, and the instant I spot it, my heart shoots to my throat.

  He’s here.

  I’m here.

  Is this really happening?

  I park behind his truck. The helmet comes off, and the sweat… Oh God, I wipe it from my face. Keeping my eyes on the house, I shake out my braids, finger comb my hair, and grab the gift box with his bracelet. Is that all I need? What am I missing? Christ, why I am so nervous?

  I run to the front porch, palms slick and insides buzzing with a swarm of bees.

  The heavy interior door hangs open, letting in the afternoon air.

  “Hello?” I press my face to the screen on the storm door and pound on the metal frame. “Jake? Jarret?”

  Inside, the masculine furniture, rustic decor, everything looks the same, except…darker. Colder. Barren. Where is everyone?

  I knock again, raising my voice. “Jake!”

  I’m shaking so badly I’m lightheaded. Please, don’t pass out.

  Why am I just standing here? I’ve never knocked on this door. This is my home, and I’m making myself feel unwelcome for no damn reason.

  Hand on the latch, I swing open the screen and walk in like I’ve done my entire life. “Is anyone here? Jake?”

  Is that music? I tilt my head, moving through a fog of nervous energy as I follow the sound. Clutching the gift box, I enter the Holsten wing and fuss with my hair. My shirt. My bra. Shit, I can’t stop trembling.

  Midway down the hall, the melody grows louder, coming from behind the door to Jake’s room. Is he in there? What song is that?

  Then I hear it. Jake’s sexy-as-hell voice singing Beautiful War in perfect pitch with Kings Of Leon. I shiver and press a hand over the banging beat of my heart.

  My gait speeds up, my pulse pounding harder, stronger, wild and giddy. I’m running by the time I reach his door, my clammy hand fumbling with the knob. Slipping. Turning. Pushing open. Tripping in.

  I freeze.

  He’s not alone.

  Not alone in his bed.

  Not alone and not with me.

  Not alone with fingers stroking bare skin. Sheets tangling around joined bodies. Feminine blonde curls fanning his pillow.

  He holds her with arms I ache to feel around me. Hips pressing between her thighs. Sara Gilly’s thighs. The girl who pined for him through high school.

  The gift box falls from my hand. Two heads turn in my direction. Staring eyes. Parted lips.

  I avert my gaze, unseeing, every heartbeat careening toward expiration. I can’t watch or hear or breathe. I don’t want to witness my demise. I don’t want to feel it.

  Go.

  Run.

  Fight.

  Do something.

  Say something.

  Paralysis seizes my limbs. Air evacuates my lungs. Rigor mortis sets in.

  This is what death feels like. The shattering, unstoppable separation between life and the bleeding remains of the soul. There’s no countermeasure. No resuscitation. I’ve taken my last breath as Jake Holsten’s girl.

  Movement shifts in my periphery. Blonde hair sways as she pulls on clothes. Then whispering. Soft, shared words between lovers. I can’t hear them because that fucking song.

  It’s not a beautiful war.

  It’s disgusting and cruel.

  Make it stop.

  I spin toward the sound and smack the phone off the dresser. It hits the hardwoods, killing the music. But my hands keep going, swinging and slapping and grabbing until everything crashes to the floor. Belts, cologne, books, hats. The last to go is a shoe box.

  It lands at my feet, and the lid falls off, spilling its contents.

  Letters.

  Hundreds of letters written in metallic brown ink with gold flecks.

  I remember the day I bought that shimmery marker in Chicago. It was a terrible, lonely day, and that marker was everything. Because it matched the color of his eyes.

  Stillness suffuses the room. Blood roars in my ears, pulses in my neck, and throbs painfully in my abdomen.

  Sara yanks up a zipper, breaking the trance.

  My lungs convulse into sudden, agonizing wheezes, billowing my chest and shortening my breaths. My limbs shake heavily, uncontrollably, and spasms contract the muscles and arteries around my heart, squeezing out the light.

  I fight the surge of tears, because dammit, I refuse to breakdown in front of him. “You knew I was coming.”

  It takes great effort to meet his eyes, and when I do, it’s like staring at a stranger.

  He perches on the edge of the bed and holds the sheet around his waist, looking back at me with the hard eyes of a grown man. He won’t be nineteen until next month, but he appears older, the stubble on his face thicker and darker, his jaw more chiseled, like a square block of stone. But it’s the expression on his gorgeous face that makes him unrecognizable. It’s empty, cold, dead… Everything I feel.

  “Conor.” Sara approaches, fully dressed. “I didn’t know.”

  Didn’t know I was coming? Does it matter?

  I won’t look at her face. I don’t want to see the pity there. There’s enough of it in her voice to curl my stomach.

  “I’m gonna go.” She slips around me and starts to close the door behind her.

  I catch the edge and push it open. I won’t be far behind her.

  Give him a chance to explain.

  “Why did—?” My voice strangles. Start with something easy. “Why did all the phones get disconnected?”

  “That was Dad. I don’t know why.” Low and deep, smooth and languid, his voice rolls through me like a drug.

  “You had my number.” I quiver with the despair of an addict and toe the letters with my boot. “Why didn’t you call me? Or write back? Or…or…I don’t know, maybe pretend I still existed?”

  “I had to let you go.”

  “Let me go,” I echo hollowly. “Why?”

  “It was easier.”

  “Easier than what? Shooting me a message and telling me to fuck off?”

  “Yeah.”

  I burn beneath waves of abject pain, my tongue wrapped in slimy, poisonous truths. “You got my email and knew I was coming today. You wanted me to find you with her.”

  Muscles ripple along his locked jaw, and his gorgeous brown eyes pin me with frosty silence.

  A crack runs through the childhood bridge that connects us. Suspension cables snap. Beams twist and tear away. Piers crumble. The link between us collapses, leaving a yawning void as deep and vast and dark as an ocean.

  I feel myself falling in. Breaking beneath the heavy, jagged shards. Gulping for air at the bottom of oblivion.

  “Is it because I’m ruined?” I battl
e the instinct to hug myself, to protect the vulnerability.

  “What?” His eyes narrow dangerously.

  “The night in the ravine… I’m used. Dirty. Worthless.”

  “No. Jesus, Conor.” He stands, clutching the sheet to his groin and scans the floor. “That’s not it at all.”

  “Then what is it?” I grab his jeans and toss them into the hall. “Was Sara a virgin? Now that she’s not, will you be done with her, too?”

  “Dammit, Conor. No! I mean, yes. No, that’s not… Fuck!” Holding the sheet around his waist, he yanks at the far corner where it stubbornly clings to the mattress. “You don’t get it.”

  “I get that you threw me away. Because it was easier.” Easier than loving a used-up girl.

  He uncurls his hand and stares at the scar on his palm, his expression stark. I press my thumb against my own scar. Levi Tibbs has served two years of his seven-year sentence. The blood oath hasn’t changed. We both know it.

  I drop my arm. “I’ll see you in five years.”

  He goes still, lips flat, eyes hard. That’s how I leave him.

  With every step toward the front door, the dam inside me bows and splinters beneath the rattling, guttural groan of pressure. Head down, arms locked around a chest full of pain, I walk faster, harder, holding it in.

  When I reach the foyer, Jarret’s waiting, hands in his front pockets, blocking the front door.

  A quick once-over is all I offer. He looks the same, as devastatingly handsome as his brother. Good for him.

  “I take it you got my emails and letters, too.” I don’t miss the guilty fall of his face as I push past.

  He follows me out. I pick up my pace, focused on the motorcycle and getting the fuck away from the cheaters and the hurters.

  His footsteps slow for a moment. Then they catch up, but I don’t look back. A few feet from the bike, I scan the pastures, searching for a glimpse of my black beauty. I need to see her, feel her coat beneath my hand, and nuzzle her snout. Just for a minute. Then I’ll go.

  “Where’s Ketchup?” I glance over my shoulder and flinch.

  It’s not Jarret behind me. He returned to the porch.

  An arm’s length away, Jake towers over me, barefoot and shirtless in jeans that hang low and unbuttoned on his trim hips. A foot taller than my short frame, he’s so much wider and more defined than I remember. The sculpted bricks of his chest twitch beneath sloping shoulders and narrow into a V-shaped ladder of corrugated abs.

  He looks harder to the touch, but I’ll never know. I’ll never touch him again.

  “Ketchup… She…” His scowl delivers the answer before the words pass his lips. “We lost her last winter. It was EIA. A virus—”

  “Equine Infectious Anemia Virus.” I know what the fuck it is, and my hand flies to my mouth.

  It hurts. Fucking goddammit, it hurts so damn much I bite down on my tongue, tasting blood.

  Don’t cry. Don’t you dare unleash that shit here.

  I whirl away, and the sharp movement engages bruised abdominal muscles. The agony steals my breath and staggers my steps.

  He stays on me. “Are you limping?”

  I snatch the helmet, and when he smacks it out of my hand, I jerk back in an explosion of swinging arms.

  “Don’t touch me!” I spin toward the bike and grapple for the helmet as he breathes down my fucking back. “Get the fuck away from me!”

  “Hey, hey, take it easy.” He grips me from behind and hooks an arm around my waist.

  The vise of his hold presses against injuries, resurrecting last night’s beating in a barrage of blinding pain. With it comes flashbacks from the ravine—the weight on my back, the vicious hands, the breaths, the agony.

  A scream wrenches from my throat, and I double over with a surge of nausea. My knees buckle, and his arm tightens, digging into the soreness with excruciating torture.

  I flail and shriek until he spins me around. His eyes narrow on my hands, where they flatten against the contusions beneath my shirt.

  Jarret runs to his side, his expression tight with concern. “What the hell happened to you?”

  My letters never mentioned the man who used to be my father. I never wanted to burden them or my brother with my problems.

  Jake glares at me with a look I recognize. A malicious look born in darkness, in the grisly tomb of the ravine, two years ago today. “Lift your shirt.”

  “You can kiss my go to hell.”

  “Lift it, or I’ll do it for you.”

  My blood runs cold. He used to represent protection and security, but that was before he hurt me with betrayal. Nothing’s stopping him from hurting me with fists, and as his hands flex and his chest expands with seething anger, I’m scared.

  My breath hitches as I direct my stare on the bike and yank up the shirt, baring a canvas of ruptured capillaries and yellow and purple bruises. Old ones. Fresh ones. The worst of it leaks beneath the skin, oozing from the decaying soul of a dead daughter.

  I keep my gaze averted and lower the shirt.

  “Who?” His murderous whisper defies reason.

  Has he forgotten that he doesn’t care? That he let me go and stuck his dick in Sara Gilly?

  He doesn’t deserve an answer, but I’ve been carrying this secret by myself for so long. I can finally unload it.

  “Dalton Cassidy is a drunk who beats on his daughter.” Avoiding his eyes, I grab the helmet, shove it on, and straddle the bike. “It started the day he left here and ended last night.”

  “Fucking fuck!” Jarret turns away, pacing through the lawn with fingers slicing through his hair.

  The depths of Jake’s eyes catch fire. “Your dad—”

  “Not my dad anymore.”

  His rigid posture vibrates with the promise of brutality. “What did he—?”

  “It’s over.” I put the key in the ignition.

  “That’s why you came home.”

  “No, Jake.” I fire up the engine, drowning out my whisper. “You were.”

  I punch the gas and burn rubber out of the lot. Off the property. Down the gravel road. As I speed away from the land that belonged to my mother, the floodgates open.

  Tears drown my vision. Tremors shake my fingers against the handlebars. All the ugly inside me crawls from my throat and hits the air in a wreckage of sound.

  When Lorne was hauled away, I lost a vital part of myself. When I was separated from the ranch, I became half a person. When I left Dad face down on the couch, more pieces of me tore loose. But I still had something left. I still had Jake.

  Now I have no one, nothing, and nowhere to go. I’m completely carved out.

  A few miles from the ranch, the vicious shaking in my body grows so unmanageable I pull off on a dirt path and park in a grove of trees.

  Killing the engine, I slide off the bike and curl up on the ground, where things get abandoned, where trash is tossed, forgotten, and never collected.

  There, I contemplate dying. Ending it all. I could hang myself, all alone, swinging by a rope around my neck. Wouldn’t that be symbolic? A tragedy that began and ended on a birthday with a passionately knotted rope.

  Then I think about being found that way. Being remembered as the girl who killed herself because she loved a boy. Because the boy didn’t love her back. Boo hoo. So sad. How fucking pathetic.

  I’m not that girl.

  Nor am I the girl he wants.

  I want to be her.

  Sara Gilly.

  I want to wear her skin and feel his touch.

  I want to be her breath and fill his lungs.

  I want to embody every part of her he wants.

  Lying in the dirt on my side, I tuck my knees to my mouth and yearn for all the things I’m not.

  I’m like that song by Little Big Town. Girl Crush. God, the lyrics have it exactly right. I think about it, crying as I try to sing it, warbling the words I remember, scraping every note from the corroded, dried-up bottom of my soul, and hating myself more.
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br />   I can never be Sara Gilly. But I am a person, and the pain that consumes me is more than I can withstand.

  Everything rises to the surface. Everything I am. Everything I feel. Every hurt, weakness, and break inside me drains from the darkest depths of my being. The night in the ravine, the abuse in Chicago, the pain in Jake’s room—I let it all out, sobbing, trembling, screaming until my throat shreds, until a mess of snot and sweat covers my skin, until I’m utterly depleted.

  I cry until all that remains is a loveless, empty, unfeeling core of nothingness. I become that hardened center and shed the tender, tear-soaked wrapper. It falls off like tattered clothes and litters the ground. Then I step away from the debris.

  I leave the bruises, the soggy flesh, and the puddle of susceptible emotions.

  I leave the girl who loved a boy with her whole heart.

  I abandon her there on the side of the road. Let her rot in post mortem.

  Feeling lighter, calmer, I embrace the void of nothing at all and walk away.

  I leave Sandbank.

  I stand on the front lawn long after Conor rides away, arrested by the lingering echo of her beauty, her strength, and her pain. She’s always been gorgeous, but fucking hell, the woman she’s become is so stunning, so fiercely potent and bewitching there isn’t a man on the planet who could resist her.

  That scares the ever-loving hell out of me.

  How can I protect her when I can barely protect her from myself?

  She was supposed to be safe in Chicago. I held onto that belief for two grueling goddamn years. But her dad didn’t give her refuge. He gave her bruises. Soul-deep bruises. The kind only a father can inflict.

  My chest constricts, and helpless rage heats my blood.

  After Conor was taken from me, I learned a great deal about Dalton Cassidy. He didn’t want to leave Oklahoma. Didn’t want to sell the ranch. Whoever’s threatening his family forced his hand. Whatever’s keeping him away from Sandbank is bigger and more powerful than the amateur hitmen in the ravine.

  Conor and Lorne were supposed to die that night, and if they return to the ranch, another attempt will be made on their lives.

  Most of my information comes from Lorne during my visits to the penitentiary. I can’t refute his claims. Dalton gave up his home, his job, and his happiness. He made sure his son went to prison. He moved Conor across the country. He did all this to keep them alive.