“Let me guess, you didn’t know about the will?” I ask Kincaid, both of us breathing hard.
“No.”
“Fuck. He always was up to something.” My teeth clench. “And you never could see through it.”
“What was I supposed to do, Dean? It’s not like you were here holding things down when Grandpa died and shit really fell apart.”
“You still played your part in this.”
“Yeah, and where were you?”
I hate that he’s right. He was here, and I wasn’t. It isn’t enough to forgive him, especially for what he did to Willa, but we’re the product of what our parents made us. Both fucked up in our own ways.
Tate tries to glance around the tractor but pulls back when a bullet hits the wheel.
“For what it’s worth, I thought Willa really did choose me at first,” Kincaid says. “I didn’t know she was justprotecting you until after you were gone. And then I was just fucking pissed. At her. At you. At everything.”
“So you treated her like shit?”
He shrugs. “I didn’t say what I did was right. It just is what it is.”
That much, I believe.
“This doesn’t make us good,” I remind Kincaid. “Far from it.”
“Yeah, figured.” He huffs.
Gunfire ceases, and I look in time to see Tate take a bullet to the chest. Red blooms on his shirt as he stumbles backward. His angry gaze moves from Gordon to me, and even with Gordon still firing, he aims at my head.
He aims at the person he’s really mad at.
Because my mother showed me affection.
Because I was the heir to the ranch.
Because I wasn’t his blood, and he couldn’t manipulate me.
Rage fills his eyes as he aims for me, but I’m faster. I lift and shoot once without an ounce of regret. The bullet lands in the center of his forehead.
Tate falls, and I turn my attention to Gordon, but he’s already too weak to lift his gun and try to shoot me. It slips from his hand as he bleeds out in the dirt.
I storm over to him, grabbing him by the collar. “You don’t get to die this fucking easy. You deserve to pay for what you did to Willa.”
“WhatIdid to her?” He grins, blood pooling between his teeth as he chokes. “I didn’t pull the trigger. I didn’t shoot my daughter.”
Blood freezes in my veins. I wasn’t talking about who shot her, but he is. Which means he knows who did it. It wasn’t someone from Vegas like I thought.
“What are you talking about?” I shove the gun against his temple. “Who shot Willa?”
“They’re just like me,” Gordon whispers, his smile dimming. Before he can say more, he’s gone.
“Fuck,” I yell, shoving Gordon to the ground as I push to my feet.
Tate’s body is twisted on the porch while Gordon lies dead in the dirt. Kincaid stands stock-still between them, looking from one to the other with blood on his hands.
Maybe I should pull out my gun now and finish him off too. My brother hasn’t been on my side in years. He hurt Willa. He fucked up my life. Still, that pesky bit of my mother’s faith whispers in my ear, and I know he wasn’t the one who staged this mess. They pulled his strings just like they did hers.
Just like they did mine.
