The circuit event in Scottsdale runs its Saturday card to a packed house, and the energy behind the chutes is the same controlled chaos it always is: riders stretching, stock contractors running final checks, the smell of rosin and dust and animal heat thick enough to taste. I'm strapping my bull rope, wrapping the flat braid around my riding hand with the focus of a man who has decided, for the first time since Grant died, that he wants to get off this animal alive.
The shift happened somewhere between Creede and the FBI field office. Between watching Kenna hold Rainey in a photography studio and sitting in a conference room while Torres told us the case was real. Between the drive south through the San Luis Valley, where Kenna laughed at a story about Grant, and the parking lot, where I told her she handled it like Grant would have and meant every word.
I'm riding to win. Not because winning matters for the points or the prize money, but because staying on this circuit keeps us close to the conspiracy, and winning keeps me visible, credible, too public to quietly disappear. A dead rider is a tragedy. A championship contender is a headlight.
The chute boss calls my name. I climb the rails and settle onto the bull's back, my legs clamping around the barrel, my hand working into the rope. The animal shifts beneath me, muscles bunching under the hide, and I feel the power of him through my thighs and my core and the palm of my hand.
"You good?" the chute boss asks.
"Turn him out."
The gate swings.
Close to a ton of animal explodes into the arena, and the world reduces to physics and pain.
The bull spins left, hard, shoulder dropping exactly the way I was told he would. The force slams my hips sideways, and the rosin on my glove bites into the rope as my hand locks down.Hips forward, free arm high, chin tucked. Dust kicks up in a thick cloud that tastes like dirt and copper, and the arena lights blur into a smear of white above me.
I ride through it.
He reverses. The spin goes right so fast that my neck snaps sideways, and for a half-second the world tilts at an angle that has no relationship to the horizon. My hand is locked. My core is engaged. I stay centered on the rope. The crowd noise compresses into a wall of sound that exists somewhere outside my skull. Inside is only the bull, the rope, and the count I'm running in the back of my teeth.
He kicks high, rear legs clearing the dirt by a full body length, and the jolt when he lands rattles up through my spine and into the base of my skull. My seat shifts. I compensate, a half-inch correction that drives my hips forward and drops my weight back over center. The rope burns against my palm through the glove. The bull's muscles bunch and roll beneath me like something tectonic, and I can feel his next move building in his hindquarters before he commits to it. He drops his head and tries to suck me forward over his horns.
I lean back. He comes down. I'm still there.
The buzzer sounds at eight.
I throw my leg over and dismount, landing on both feet in the arena dirt. The crowd roars. The pickup men intercept the bull, and I walk toward the fence with my rope in my hand, my lungs burning, my pulse thudding in my ears.
Ninety-three five. Highest score of the event.
I tip my hat to the crowd because the camera is on me and the persona requires it. Then I climb the fence, drop behind the chutes, and press my back against the metal panel and breathe.
The adrenaline is different tonight. Cleaner. It doesn't taste like guilt.
I wash up at the rider's station, change my shirt, collect my check from the payout office. The routine is the same as a hundred events before this one, but the man going through the motions has changed. I can feel it in the way my shoulders sit, the way my hands move, the way I walk through the back of house without scanning for threats.
The scanning is still there. I'm just doing it with purpose instead of paranoia.
I find Kenna in the stands.
She's in the third row, notebook on her lap, pen behind her ear, watching the team roping with the focused attention of someone who's using the event to observe, network, and build the source list for her story. She's dropped the journalist cover entirely. She's just Kenna now, working under her real name, asking real questions, wearing an expression that sits somewhere between grief and determination.
She looks up when I approach, and whatever she sees on my face makes her pen stop moving.
"Ninety-three five," she says. "I was watching."
"I know."
"You ride better when you're not trying to die."
"Everything's different when you're not trying to die."
I sit beside her. The stands are thinning as the event winds down, spectators heading for the parking lot and the beer garden, the lights casting long shadows across the arena floor. The air smells like dust and popcorn and the faint copper tang of livestock.
"So," she says. "Are we doing this?"
"Doing what?"
