PROLOGUE
COLT
The bull slams the chute panel so hard the metal sings.
Tombstone's Revenge is eighteen hundred pounds of brindle fury with a spin rate that's ended more cowboys' seasons than anyone on this circuit cares to count. The kind of bull that stock contractors talk about in hushed voices, the kind that riders cross themselves after drawing.
When I saw his name on the draw sheet, I smiled for the first time in weeks. The bull that killed Grant Corbin. The same animal, different arena, and from the way he's moving in the chute, raw and rank but not wired wrong the way a drugged bull moves, I'm betting he's clean this time. Just eighteen hundred pounds of honest mean, and me, and eight seconds to prove that what happened in Las Cruces wasn't the bull's fault.
It was never the bull's fault.
I slide my legs over the top rail and lower myself onto the bull's back, and the animal explodes beneath me before I'm even seated. The chute crew grabs my vest, hauling me up while Tombstone's Revenge thrashes, slamming left, right, the panels buckling outward with each hit.
The sound is like a car wreck happening in slow motion. Steel on bone. Bone on steel.
"Easy, easy, easy." That's Ricky, the chute boss, both hands on my vest, holding me above the tornado while the bull burns through his tantrum. "Settle him. Let him settle."
Tombstone's Revenge doesn't settle. Tombstone's Revenge is a natural disaster that eats hay and hates everything, especially cowboys.
His head drops between his front legs, and the muscles along his spine coil like bridge cables under load. The violence is packed tight beneath his hide, waiting.
I love this animal. I love him because he's trying to kill me, and that kind of honesty is hard to find.
Ricky lets go. I drop onto the bull's back and immediately start working my riding hand into the bull rope, sliding my glove into the handhold and pulling the rope across my palm. The rosin on the glove grips the braided poly as I wrap the end over my hand once, twice, locking it down tight.
The wrap has to be perfect. If it's too loose, the rope slips on the spin. If it's too tight, I can't release when the ride ends, and then it's not eight seconds on a bull but eight seconds followed by however long it takes to get dragged to death.
My hand closes into a fist over the wrap. The rope seats. My pulse hammers through the wrap, fast and steady, the only clock that counts.
The arena crowd is a wall of noise, impossibly far away and right on top of me at the same time. The announcer's voice booms off the metal rafters, but I stopped listening to announcers years ago.
Out there is theater. In here is a conversation between two living things, and only one of us is going to win it.
I scoot forward on the rope, positioning my hips directly over the bull's shoulders. His head swings left, and one rolling eyecatches the light, the iris a ring of white around a black center that holds nothing but rage.
The animal's breath comes in short, hot blasts through flared nostrils, and the smell of him fills the chute. Sweat. Hot hide. The copper tang of blood from where he's cut his lip on the panel.
I nod.
The gate swings open, and the world detonates.
Tombstone's Revenge launches with his hind legs, kicking so high that for a fraction of a second I'm looking straight down at the arena dirt. My free hand snaps to the sky.
My hips absorb the first kick, rolling with the force instead of fighting it, and every hour I've spent in practice pens since I was a kid lives in that one reflexive adjustment.
The bull spins left, hard and fast, and the centrifugal force tries to rip me off his outside shoulder. I dig my spur into his hide and lean into the spin, counterbalancing with my core, riding the edge of the g-force like a surfer on the curl of a wave.
My teeth rattle. My spine compresses on every landing, the impact jarring up through my pelvis and into my skull.
Two seconds.
Tombstone's Revenge changes direction. The spin reverses, right now, and the transition is a whipcrack that snaps my neck sideways. The bull's head comes up on the cut, and the tip of one horn catches me above the eye, a hot stripe of pain that splits the skin and sends blood into my lashes.
Direction changes can kill a rider. The body commits to the left spin, builds the muscle memory, and when the bull cuts right the brain can't recalibrate fast enough. You go one way. The bull goes another. The dirt comes up to meet you.
I don't go with the spin. I go with the bull.
There's a place you find when the ride is right, when the animal beneath you is the rankest thing on four legs and yourbody is answering its fury with your own. It's not calm. Calm is a lie cowboys tell reporters. It's synchronization. The bull moves, you move. The bull rages, you rage.
