"Was."
"I know what you were."
Her eyes are blue and tired in a way I'm too young to read.
She smiles, but it doesn't go all the way up her face.
"Welcome to the family, Cade. Try not to break anything that belongs to us."
She walks back to her corner, red Solo cup in hand, watching the room.
The door opens just before ten.
I know the time because Phantom's been checking his watch every twenty minutes since sundown, the way a father checks a watch when he's expecting something that means more to him than he's going to admit out loud.
When the door opens, the whole room turns.
Which should tell me something, except I'm a little drunk and a little full of myself.
She walks in.
My spine knows before my eyes do.
Something shifts in the air—not the sound, the brothers keep laughing, the jukebox keeps playing George Strait—but the space rearranges itself around the door.
Gravity.
A planet entering the room.
I look.
She might be in her late teens or early twenties.
She's sunburned across the bridge of her nose in the exact pattern of a straw hat that's been off and on all day.
Her sandy hair is half-braided, half-fallen-out, the kind of hair that's been fought with and won.
Jeans dusty at the knee. Boots scuffed soft at the toe. A silver belt buckle on her hip that I recognize from ten feet away as a regional first-place, because I used to have them too, back when I was winning things.
Her eyes find Phantom first, and she smiles.
The smile is crooked. One side higher than the other, like she's thinking about a joke she's not going to tell.
She crosses the room to my Prez, puts her arms around his neck, and kisses his jaw and says something into his ear that makes him laugh—reallylaugh, the way he laughs at nobody else in the room, the laugh a man keeps in a vault for one person.
Then her eyes find me.
Not soft. Not shy. Not the way young women are supposed to look at a patched biker twice their size at a clubhouse party.
Appraising.
Like I'm a horse at auction and she's the one with the money.
I feel it in my femur. The rod goes warm.
I don't believe in ghosts. But if I did, I'd tell you the bull that ended me gave a small, low laugh from whatever part of Texas it was buried in, because the bull knew exactly what it felt like to be assessed by something that might own you.
"Spur."
