I look at Spur.
He’s at the fence. Water bottle in his hand now, not beer.
He’s listening, but he’s not laughing.
His jaw is set and his eyes are on the dark beyond the barn where the round pen is, and I can see it on his face—the way he takes Thunder’s joke personally.
Not because he’s offended. Because that horse is his project.
His patience. His work. And Thunder’s calling it a lost cause from the comfort of a chair he hasn’t left in two hours.
Something clicks in my chest.
Not a decision. Not really.
More like a key turning in a lock that’s been waiting forexactlythis moment to open.
I set my beer down on the table.
Presley looks at me. “What are you doing?”
I stand up.
“Dakota.” Presley grabs my wrist. “What are you doing?”
“Something stupid.”
“Should I stop you?”
“You can try, but you won’t get far.”
I walk to the edge of the fire. The coals throw heat against my shins.
Every face at the table turns toward me, because a woman standing up at a fire pit full of bikers with that look on her face is either about to cry or about to start something, and I don’t cry.
“I can break that horse.”
Silence.
Not the polite kind.
The kind where every man at the table recalculates what he thought was happening tonight and arrives at a different number.
Thunder blinks. Bullseye tilts his head. Longhorn’s beer stops halfway to his mouth.
“I can break that mustang by the end of September. Nobody else has.”
I don’t look at Spur. Not yet.
I’m talking to the fire. To the club. To every man who’s watched me grow up on this compound and still thinks of me as Phantom’s little girl who used to sneak sugar cubes to the horses.
I keep talking.
"So, here's the bet."
I turn. Walk across the yard. Ten feet. Fifteen.
The gravel crunches under my boots.
