“You sure?” Ryker asked quietly. “What if you got a little extra next paycheck?”
Breakneck tilted his head, blank. “Like overtime? You need something else done?”
Ryker leaned against a beam, casual in a way that wasn’t casual. “Depends how flexible you are.”
“Flexible how?”
“Flexible about what you see. What you do. What you don’t report.”
There it was. The test.
Breakneck let confusion flicker across his face, shallow and controlled. “You trying to get me fired on my third paycheck?”
“Fired isn’t the problem,” Ryker said evenly. “Misunderstandings are.” He lowered his voice. “We take care of people who mind their business.”
Breakneck scratched the back of his neck like a man thinking it through. “I’m just here to work. That’s it. You want something done, say it. I’m not looking to make enemies.”
Ryker’s smile returned, thin and sharp. “Good answer.”
Breakneck caught the flicker in the man’s eyes. Approval. Calculation. He’d passed the first test.
Exactly what they wanted.
Ryker jerked his chin toward the yard. “Finish up here. Boss wants to see if you ride as well as you work.”
Breakneck nodded, kept his expression bland, and reached for another bale.
Ryker stepped out into the sunlight, boots crunching gravel, leaving Breakneck alone again with the dust, the hay, and the suspicion curling like smoke in the rafters.
He stacked the bale, jaw tight. Three weeks in, and this was the first crack in their armor. This was the opening.
It was also the danger.
He set his shoulders, reached for the next bale, and kept working.
He’d find the route. He’d find the leak. He’d find the truth tucked in the shadows of Stone Creek Ranch. When he did, he’d need to be ready. Whoever ran this place was watching him very, very closely.
Ryker led him around the side of the lower paddock, past rusted gates and a line of cracked water troughs, toward a smaller corral tucked behind a row of old cottonwoods. The sun had dipped low, staining the dirt with copper light, and Breakneck felt the prickle along the back of his neck that always meant trouble.
A horse stood inside the round pen, tall and raw-boned, its dark coat slick with sweat, foam around its mouth, eyes rolling white at the edges. Breakneck knew that look, the thin trembling space where fear met fury, where an animal didn’t know whether to tear through the fence or turn on whatever trapped it. He felt that same edge under his own skin, sharp and restless, the line between fight and flight he’d been walking since the night the world shifted beneath him.
“This the one you want me to ride?” Breakneck asked, keeping his voice casual. He stood easy, weight balanced, hands loose, the way he’d stood around horses his whole damn life. Summers on his uncle’s ranch in British Columbia had carved that into him early, long before the Navy, long before he learned how to kill with precision. That was where he’d learned to ride, to rope, to sweat under the sun with calloused hands, where the older hands had spoken French and English in the same breath without thinking. His father had left Canada, but the family he’d stayed connected to never had, and Breakneck had grown up straddling both worlds without realizing how rare that was. It made him look like he belonged here. Hell, it made him belong here more than the men running the place.
Ryker rested his arms on the top rail, the hint of a smirk curving his mouth. “Boss wants to see what you can do.”
Breakneck lifted his chin slightly, but inside his stomach went cold. A test. Another one. They were stacking them now. Getting bolder. Good one step closer to the inner circle.
He watched as two men brought out a saddle, rough leather worn shiny in places and stiff in others. Breakneck noted the loose cinch, the way the girth strap had been threaded wrong. A setup meant to throw someone fast.
“You ride?” Ryker asked.
“Enough,” Breakneck said.
He felt the eyes of the ranch hands settle on him as he opened the gate and stepped inside the pen. The horse pinned its ears and snorted, shifting sideways in agitation.
Breakneck approached slow, steady, breath even, posture loose. Inhale four. Exhale six. Sniper breathing. Steadying the mind first, the body second, the situation last.
“You aren’t gonna die,” Breakneck murmured, his voice low, pitched for the animal, not the men watching him. “Not today, at least.”
