Safe.
There it was again.
The word that had followed me my whole life like a locked door.
I closed my eyes.
“I just wanted to feel free,” I whispered.
Dylan didn’t answer right away.
The horse moved beneath us, steady and warm. Morning spread across the desert in slow fire. Somewhere ahead, Nate said something that made Regan mutter a threat.
Finally, Dylan asked, “Did you?”
I opened my eyes.
The first car burning flashed behind them.
The white Bronco catching fire.
Brielle screaming.
The impossible, terrible beauty of flame taking something perfect and expensive and cruel and making it answer to me.
Shame followed fast.
But truth got there first.
“Yeah,” I whispered. “When I watched the first car burn, it was very freeing.”
Dylan stared at me.
Then he laughed.
Not loud.
Not mocking.
A real laugh, startled out of him like I had kicked a door open.
I smiled before I remembered pain.
“Ow.”
“You are a menace.”
“Allegedly.”
His arm tightened once, careful and brief.
“Yeah,” he said. “Allegedly.”
The trail dipped then, and the land changed.
The open scrub narrowed into a wash between low ridges, where the ground turned sandy and the brush grew thicker. The sun had not fully cleared the horizon, but gold spilled across the tops of the rocks. A fence line appeared ahead, nearly invisible unless you knew what to look for. Not barbed wire shining obvious in the light. Old posts. Weathered rails. Land that didn’t advertise where it began because it expected you to know better than to cross.
Cal’s border trail.
