My jaw clenched so hard I thought I might crack a tooth. I counted to five before I let myself answer. “Don’t ever compare me to that bastard,” I said. I kept my voice steady, each word filed down and oiled, because men like Knox only respected precision. “I might like control, but I will never, ever treat your brother like a thing. I don’t lay hands on him unless he wants it. And if he wants out, he gets out.”
Knox didn’t blink. “It starts that way. It always does. How do I know you’re not just breaking him in for yourself?”
Ransom cut in before I could answer, his tone so casual it almost masked the acid. “Heard you’re letting him call you sir, too. Real original, Jo.”
I ignored it, kept my eyes on the one that mattered. “You think I’d risk my whole life here, everything I’ve built, to do the same shit Westbrook did? You think I want to see him scared of me?”
Knox opened his mouth, but I cut him off. “I spent more time with him in the last two weeks than you have in two years. I’ve seen the bruises. I’ve seen what happens when he wakes up from a nightmare so bad he can’t stand to be touched. You have any idea what that’s like?”
He hesitated, just long enough for me to know he’d never seen it.
“I’m not looking for a project. I’m looking for someone who doesn’t give a fuck that I’m thirty-five and still fixing the same damn motorcycles I did at seventeen. I’m looking for someone who wants to belong to me, who doesn’t make me explain why it matters so much that they’re alive in the first place.”
Harlow shifted on the bale, hands fidgeting at his knees. “He seems… happier,” he said, voice so soft it barely made it past the bales.
Ransom snorted. “He always seems happy right before he blows everything up.”
I turned on him, let some of the anger leak out. “Yeah, well, maybe it’s because every time he got close to happy, someone came along and called him a fuck-up, or told him he didn’t deserve it. Maybe he’s sick of running from people who think they know what’s best for him.”
Ransom shrugged, toothpick bobbing between his teeth. “Maybe. Or maybe he’s just doing what he always does—grabbing the first out he can find.”
I shook my head. “He can walk out any time he wants. He knows it.”
Quaid finally spoke, and when he did, it was quiet but so final it shut everybody else up. “You hurt him, you’re done here.” He let the words hang, then added: “You know what I mean.”
I looked him dead in the eye. “Yeah. I know.”
The barn creaked in the wind, the smell of old hay and oil thick enough to choke. For a minute, nobody said anything. The air was full of all the shit that never gets said, every old fight and broken promise packed into the insulation with the dust.
Knox stared at me, a muscle in his jaw twitching. “You really think you’re better for him than his own family?”
I thought about it, really let the question settle. Then I nodded. “Yeah. Because I let him be what he is, not what I want him to be.”
Ransom spat the toothpick into the dirt. “And what is he, Jo? You got some great insight none of the rest of us do?”
I exhaled slow. “He’s a fighter, but he wants to lose. He wants somebody to take all the choices away so he can finally relax and not worry he’ll fuck it up again. He wants to belong. So I give him that.”
There was a rustle as Harlow stood, looming and awkward but somehow more solid than any of them. “He said… he likes the collar,” Harlow said, looking at his feet. “He said it makes him feel safe.”
Knox’s lips curled, just a little. “Safe from what?”
I shrugged. “From having to be in charge for once. From having to fight to be heard, every single second.”
Nobody said anything for a long time. The light shifted, moved up the walls, turned everything in the barn to a kind of sepia-washed memory.
Finally, Knox uncrossed his arms and stepped forward until he was close enough that I could smell the sweat and sawdust on his shirt. “You fuck this up,” he said, “and you’ll wish it was Harley coming after you.”
I held his gaze. “Understood.”
He nodded, sharp and final, and then he was gone, boots thumping out into the dusk. Ransom followed, muttering something under his breath. Harlow lingered a second, then patted my shoulder with a hand the size of a shovel before he left. Quaid was last, and he stayed by the door, watching me for a long time with eyes that never blinked.
I didn’t move, just let the sweat dry on my palms and the adrenaline settle. Outside, the world was changing color by the minute, the air thick with everything we hadn’t said but would one day have to.
I’d survived worse. But this—this was family. And that meant if I failed, I didn’t just lose Bodean. I’d lose the only place I’d ever wanted to call home.
The barn was empty now, or as empty as it could be with fifty years of ghosts and the taste of old arguments still hanging in the rafters. I let myself sag against the side wall, sliding down to where the boards bit through my jeans. My hands shook, just a little, so I buried them in the straw and stared up at the last of the light bleeding through the hayloft.
It would’ve been easier if they’d just beat the shit out of me. Instead, I got the full McKenzie tribunal—guilt, threats, and a reminder that even when you earned your spot, you could lose it in a breath.
