The room goes quiet again while everyone processes it.
Finally Mason looks at me.
“Ghost.”
“Yeah.”
“You keep eyes on Harlan.”
I nod.
“Already planning to.”
Blade glances over at me, a faint smirk tugging at his mouth.
“Funny how that works.”
I ignore him.
Mason’s gaze moves between all of us again. “Voss thinks small towns are easy targets,” he says. “People too scared to fight back.”
Tank cracks his knuckles. “Sounds like he picked the wrong territory.”
Mason nods once. “Exactly.”
His voice drops a notch, calm but deadly.
“Let’s find out how big this operation really is.”
Then we’ll shut it down.
TEN
RAE
The fourth dayof the bar being closed is officially where I start losing my mind.
The farmhouse wakes up before I do, which is pretty typical. The chickens start complaining the second the sky turns gray, the goats take that as their cue to start yelling, and Pickle the donkey adds his own dramatic commentary from the pasture like someone is actively starving him to death. I groan into my pillow and roll onto my back, staring at the cracked ceiling above my bed while the entire rescue zoo outside my window loses its collective mind.
“Alright,” I mutter to the empty room. “I’m up.”
The moment I step outside in my boots, the animals immediately start acting like I’ve abandoned them for a week instead of eight hours. The goats crowd the gate, yelling. The chickens swarm my feet like tiny feathered mobsters demanding protection money. Hank trots over and leans his entire weight into my leg like he’s personally offended I slept at all.
“Yes, hello to you too,” I tell him, scratching behind his ear. “Everyone calm down. Nobody is starving.”
Pickle lets out a loud, offended bray from across the pasture.
I point a finger at him. “You especially need to relax. You ate half a bucket of grain yesterday.” Pickle stares at me like that is slander.
Feeding everyone takes a while. Water buckets, grain, fresh hay, the whole routine. Normally it’s my favorite part of the day. It’s quiet out here in the mornings, just the wind moving through the fields and the animals shuffling around while they eat. Most days it settles my brain before the chaos of the bar starts.
Today it doesn’t work. Every time I stop moving, my brain drifts right back to the same place like it’s stuck in a loop I can’t shut off. The Rust Nail. The crunch of broken glass scattered across the floor. The ugly plywood boards covering the windows where sunlight used to pour in. And that stupid note someone left behind like they expected Wayne to panic and start handing over protection money like a scared little shop owner instead of the stubborn old bastard who’s kept that place running for thirty years.
I lean against the fence and watch the goats for a second, my arms folded across my chest while irritation crawls slowly up the back of my neck. Someone decided they could bully us. And now I’m supposed to sit quietly while the Iron Reapers ride around handling it. Yeah. That’s not really my personality.
By midmorning I’ve already cleaned the kitchen, swept the mudroom, and reorganized a cabinet that absolutely did not need reorganizing. Now I’m pacing the farmhouse like a cagedanimal while Hank watches me from the living room floor like he’s genuinely concerned about my mental stability.
“I’m not pacing,” I tell him.
