Page 111 of Roped

“Yeah,” I say simply.

I am.

I wanted to bring her back with me the moment I found her in that room. I wanted to tell her too. So many things. All the things I realized while looking for her. That was the longest stretch of time I’ve gone without seeing her since I first saw her all those months ago. Eight months, one week, four days, and seventeen hours.

But when she made her choice known, that she wanted to go with her brother, I decided to act like a fucking man for once and let her. I wanted to honor her wishes. Maybe give her some time with him. For all his failures, her brother did end up helping us find her, so I thought maybe he deserved a little respite, maybe a day or two with his sister. But I guess eighteen hours will have to do. Because I can’t wait any longer. To take her, to steal her away one last time so I can bring her back where she belongs.

With me.

CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE

I NEVER LIKED my room growing up.

Because it was on the first floor. It had several giant windows overlooking the garden in the back and a set of French doors leading outside. I thought all of this made it, and thereby me, extremely accessible. To all sorts of danger. Mostly my father, but still. I wanted a smaller room, with maybe one window and one door that I could bar with a dresser or something equally heavy. And I wanted it tucked away somewhere, maybe on the third or fourth floor, where no one would bother passing by or coming to see me.

I’m reevaluating that now because I think my room is gorgeous. It’s spacious and airy. It has white walls and cream curtains, billowing with the summer breeze. There isn’t anything blue in it, but that’s okay. I think I could come to like white if I gave it a chance. And the best part is that I can walk outside and get all the air I want because for some reason, ever since I got back to Wildfire at dawn today, I haven’t been able to breathe properly. Despite the room being so airy, I mean.

So that’s where I am. Outside, looking over the ranch I hated living on. The rolling fields, the mountains in the distance. The rows of barns and a stable, bunkhouses. All shining silver in the moonlight. I’m also trying to look beyond that, but I won’t go into it right now or ever. As in, what I’m looking for and why. But the point is I’m okay. I will be okay. I can’t breathe right now and I have a little PTSD about living on this ranch, but it will get better. I know it.

Just then I hear footsteps and turn around to find my brother rounding the corner and walking toward me. In a very rare turn of events, he’s wearing a pair of cotton pajamas and a T-shirt as opposed to what he normally wears, a bespoke suit complete with a tie and polished boots, just like our father. But then again, it’s approaching midnight and I bet he doesn’t sleep in those suits, no matter the impossible image I’ve created in my head over the years. Where both my dad and my brother are superhuman villains or monsters who don’t need sleep.

He comes to stand beside me, thrusting his hands into his pockets. “Hey.”

“Hey,” I say, wrapping my arms around my waist. “Can’t sleep?”

He stares at the horizon, much like me, his jaw tense and shakes his head. “Not really.”

“Is it all the excitement of me being back home?” I quip, trying to lighten the mood. But also because it’s true. In the sense that my brother has always wanted me to come visit from college. Ever since he got back from abroad a few years ago, where he remained for the better part of the last decade either studying or handling Turner business on the international front, Breck has been constantly calling me, texting and emailing, wanting for us to meet up. I always assumed it was another way my father was trying to control me, putting Breck on my back. So I kept dodging my brother’s calls and any attempt at making contact. But as it turns out, they were genuine, those attempts. He simply wanted me to come home and for us to have a relationship.

My joke makes his mouth twitch, and an ache emerges in my chest. Because it seems familiar, the urge to smile but not knowing how. Someone else does that too. Someone I’m determined not to think about. Not right now at least.

“Yeah,” my brother says, and I focus on him. “And the fact that you should’ve been here sooner.”

This time, the ache in my chest is different as I say, “You didn’t know.”

His chest moves with a sharp breath. “I should’ve tried harder to find out.”

That’s familiar, too, his angry words, directed at himself. Someone else also has a habit of taking too much blame on himself, as unwarranted as it may be. But since I’ve decided not to think about that certain someone, I keep my thoughts contained to my brother’s self-blame. Which is also unwarranted.

So again, turns out there was a reason why my brother kept trying to make contact with me these past few years. It’s because he started to realize what a piece of shit our father was. It began with business and all the bad decisions our father had made over the years, running everything into the ground. Apparently, the Turner empire is struggling, and Breck has had to find ways to salvage what’s left of what was going to be his legacy. But it’s been difficult because at every turn, he’s had to contend with our father’s lying and cheating. Not to mention his enemies, loan sharks, people he’s pissed off over the years, all crawling out of one hole or another, breathing down my brother’s neck. I mean, I can’t even imagine. I don’t know much about the business, but the evidence I saw in Mars’s office that I was going to use to hopefully get my and my mom’s freedom told me enough to know that whatever our father’s been involved in is really bad.

Which is when he started to suspect that our father might be lying about other things. Such as that we have a neglectful mother who’s always traveling and shopping, when in reality she’s been shut up in one of our father’s cabins, in a catatonic state. Or that I was following in our mom’s footstep, when in reality I was living my life in fear of pissing off our dad who may or may not murder our mom. Since I was easier to get in touch with—because he hasn’t spoken to Mom in years, thinking she’s been holed up somewhere in Europe—he started with me first.

But even he couldn’t have guessed the extent of our father’s monstrous acts. Not only what he did to our mom but also his hand in recent activities. Which is why, Breck told me, it took him so long to figure out who was behind all this. He was looking in the wrong direction, he said. He was trying to look for our father’s enemies when it was our father himself, and his new friend Joshua Anderson—the California surfer guy—who were behind all this. And if it wasn’t for… him, the man I’m not going to think about, he never would’ve thought to look at our dad’s phone records. Which is how they found out he’d been calling one particular phone number a lot these past months, Anderson’s. Plus, his bank statements, which first led through all the dummy accounts before finally nailing down who those men were, the ones at the warehouse, and also the ones who took me. They all were small-time criminals or ran with the local gangs and our father had recently wired them money, presumably to kidnap me, confirming he had a hand in everything. When they tried to track my father down to get answers, though, they realized no one could reach him. The last time anyone saw him was several hours before when he’d left for his regular speech therapy appointment but, apparently, never made it. They knew that either something had seriously gone wrong or whatever it was he’d planned was going down. And then they got the ransom call. The call about the land and how Lynnie and I were being held hostage for it; the deal Anderson had been talking about. After that, it was a matter of figuring out where they’d been holding us. Breck went through all our property records, and together with the Graysons and him, they figured out where we were by the process of elimination. That Lakelyn and I were held captive at the same location was a matter of coincidence, but I’m not going to question our good luck.

I will, however, put a stop to this. To my brother’s guilt because it’s not really his fault; he assumed things about me and Mom. I did the same. “You know what, we could either be angry about what we’ve lost or be thankful that we finally found out the truth. And I…” I take a deep breath as he turns to face me, his features hard. “I want to be thankful. I want to be grateful that I have a brother. A brother who cares. That was the worst part, Breck. I thought you didn’t care. I thought you were… like him. That I was alone and I was surrounded by men who were…”

“I’m not like him,” he says fiercely, his blue eyes shining. “And you aren’t alone. You never will be.”

Another pang hits my chest, and I blink my eyes to get rid of the moisture. “So I don’t want you to blame yourself. I want us to be… to be a family.”

Something I never had. Something I didn’t even think I wanted in the first place. I’ve always been so busy being afraid, trying to protect Mom, trying to do whatever Dad told me to, that like many other things in my life, I never imagined being part of a family. But I want that now. I want us to be a family, my brother and I.

Our mom too. Breck is having Mom brought back to the house tomorrow so she can live with us. No more living up in the mountains away from her home. Granted, this home gave her more pain than love, but we can change that now. She won’t know it, not really, since she isn’t really aware of anything, but even so, I want her to have this one thing. Her freedom. Finally. After years and years of being Dad’s prisoner. And I want her to have her kids around her even though she wasn’t really close with us.

Which is why I’ve decided to spend my summer at the ranch. Not only so I can spend time with Breck and Mom, but also because I loved living at Rawhide and then at… his ranch. I loved being able to garden, to grow things; loved being involved in the day-to-day of a ranch, and so maybe I can learn to love Wildfire too. Because I realize I do have a love for the land, but only if it comes with peace, not war. As for college, I don’t know. Maybe I’ll go back come fall or maybe not. But for now, I want to live in the moment. I want to live free and without fear.

“We are,” Breck says, or more like promises, “family.”