More kids spilled from the direction of the clearing. Not cartel. Not victims dragged out of trucks. High schoolers. Prep schoolers, if the pressed shirts, expensive boots, and daddy-money vehicles meant anything. They ran like their world had caught fire because, from the look of the smoke, it had.
A girl in a white dress sobbed into her phone.
A boy with blood on his arms kept yelling about his Bronco.
Another girl was on her knees in the dirt, screaming that someone had to call her mother before the cops did.
Nate looked at the chaos and shook his head. “This is why I hate teenagers with money.”
“They’re all lit.”
“Drunk?”
“And more.”
It was in their eyes. Too wide. Too bright. Faces stretched with panic, sweat, and whatever powdered courage or desert hallucination had been passed around that party. Half of them looked like they were running from fire. The other half looked like they were running from whatever they thought they had seen inside it.
I caught one boy by the shoulder when he stumbled too close.
He flinched so hard he almost fell.
“Anyone hurt?” I asked.
His gaze flicked to my hand like he forgot what language was.
“Hey.” I shook him once. “Anyone still back there?”
“Cars,” he babbled. “Cars are burning. Brielle’s Bronco blew up. She did it. She said she was fire. She said—she said they wanted Mandy’s daughter.”
My blood cooled.
The name hit like a hand around my throat.
Mandy.
Not my history.
Not my ghost.
But I knew enough.
Everybody in the Royal Bastards knew enough.
Santa Fe had old wounds, and Mandy was one of the ones men still talked around instead of through. Tarak. Edge. Regan. The daughter who had appeared out of nowhere like the past had grown skin and come home.
I had only seen that daughter once.
Three years ago.
I had been bleeding on Santa Fe’s clubhouse floor, too proud to fall down and too desperate to admit I might. She had stepped toward me with a towel in her hand, fifteen and furious, all big eyes and sharp bones and anger too heavy for a kid’s body.
Edge had stopped her cold.
Not because she was weak.
Because she was his.
I remembered the way she tossed the towel on the table instead of handing it to me.
