We give him hell for it.
We don’t laugh long.
Because by midmorning, somebody finds livestock down near a small farm off the back road.
A goat, half-dragged toward the treeline. Throat torn open. Not eaten clean. Not like a coyote does. Not like any animal I’ve ever seen in these woods.
Legend stands over it, jaw working.
“This ain’t coincidence,” Royal says quietly.
“No,” I agree.
It ain’t.
“Ain’t a scary story. It’s sabotage and men fucking with us. Maybe even some of our own,” Legend says.
And somewhere under all that noise and damage there’s still a missing girl.
News vans sits at the access road with microphones in strangers’ hands and locals whispering about curses and cryptids, all of it blending together until truth becomes a mystery people can consume.
I stand at the edge of the dock that afternoon while men argue in low voices behind me.
“You think it’s them?” Holler asks.
“Pearly Gates?” Royal replies. “They don’t leave marks like that.”
“They leave fear,” Holler mutters.
Legend answers, “They do whatever they have to do to throw us off the trail.”
I don’t give my opinion, because my mind’s somewhere else.
Down near the fire pit.
Where Brittany sits on the far edge of a bench, pretending she doesn’t care that I didn’t come back to the cabin last night.
Where she laughed with Lottie earlier like she wasn’t hurt.
Legend’s words sit in my skull like a splinter.
You made the choice. You made the commitment. VP. Marriage. Club before everything.
And Bethany’s standing across camp with eyes like sharpened glass. She twists my wedding band she found and slipped onto her thumb. She’s waiting for the moment I stumble and give her the excuse to go to the sheriff with all the blackmail her dad left her.
I drag a hand over my face.
“Something’s off,” Royal says beside me.
“You mean besides the torn docks and vanishing women?” I mutter.
He does not smirk.
“No,” he says quietly. “I mean inside.”
I glance at him.
He’s watching the treeline, but he ain’t talking about trees.
