Both of mine, actually—wraps his fingers around my wet, calloused, scarred hands and holds them the way you hold something you’ve been looking for and just found.
“This is real,” he says. “You’re real. And I’m not running.”
I step into him, press my forehead to his chest.
His arms come around me and I let myself believe him.
Not because the words are enough—words are never enough—but because he’s showing me with his actions that what he means is true.
Monday morning, the Lockhart situation escalates in a direction none of us expected.
I'm in the main room, the big open space with the long bar and the scarred wooden tables and the wall of framed photos going back decades—brothers past and present, club runs, thehistory of the Shotgun Saints etched in faded Polaroids and group shots.
Grace asked me to meet her here to hang out, but she got called to an emergency calving at a neighboring ranch, so I'm sitting at the bar with a coffee.
Lee walks in through the side door.
His face has that quality I've started to recognize—the Road Captain face, the flat, controlled expression that means he's processing a threat and calculating responses.
The warmth from the weekend is still there, underneath, but it's been overlaid with something harder.
He sits on the stool beside me. Close.
His knee touching mine under the bar.
Even in Road Captain mode, the closeness is deliberate.
"County inspector showed up at the compound this morning. Unannounced. Wanted to look at the barn structures, the quarantine setup, the waste management for the rescue operation." His jaw tightens. "We passed. Everything's up to code. But that's not the point."
"Lockhart," I say.
"Has to be. We've never had an inspection. Not once in the years the rescue's been running. And the same morning, the county zoning office called about the farrier operation, because you've been here a lot and they’re trying to establish your business as being run here. Whether it constitutes a commercial enterprise on agricultural-zoned land. Whether we need a special use permit."
My stomach drops. "The farrier operation. That's me."
"That's you." He looks at me steadily. "He's not just going after Earl anymore. He's going after the people protecting Earl. He hit the ranch first. Now he's hitting us."
The calculation is elegant and infuriating.
Lockhart can't get past the Shotgun Saints to reach Earl, so he's targeting the Saints themselves.
Bureaucratic pressure. Inspections. Zoning challenges.
The kind of slow, squeaky clean bullshit that doesn't leave fingerprints but bleeds you dry in legal fees and compliance costs and hours spent fighting paper instead of fixing fences.
"What did Phantom say?"
"Phantom said Lockhart just made his first mistake." Lee's expression shifts.
The Road Captain recedes. Something colder takes its place—quieter, more focused, the strategic mind of a man who plans routes and manages logistics and sees three moves ahead. "You go after a man's family, that's one thing. You go after his club, that's something else entirely. Phantom's taking it to church tonight. Full table."
I look around the clubhouse.
The photos on the wall.
The long table where brothers sit and argue and vote and decide what matters.
The room where decisions are made by men who chose each other and call it family—the same way Rose chose me, the same way Earl took me in, the same way Lee is choosing me now.
