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Spoiler: I had not.

It was probably nothing. Someone in this town with too much time and a mild gifting kink.

Even so, I crouched and tilted the box, listening for any suspicious ticking.

Silence.

I picked it up and carried it inside my room. The lock clicked as I shut the door behind me, and the room greeted me exactly as I’d left it: unmade bed, tea mugs on the table, and Hattie’s laminated schedule glinting at me menacingly like it knew I was failing already.

I set the package on the bed and peeled the tape back.

Inside, nestled in tissue paper, was a can of deodorizing spray with Blackwood Inn stamped on the label in cheerful red letters. A folded note rested on top of the tissue, and I lifted it carefully.

Honey, Morton called. Thought you might need this. Don’t inhale too deeply, and if you see the light, walk AWAY from it.

—Hattie

I snorted.

It was…cute. Embarrassing. And weirdly comforting.

Also mildly alarming that in this town you couldn’t have a small public disaster without someone, somewhere, responding with a care package. Was this just…what normal small-town life was like?

I genuinely didn’t know.

I toed off my shoes, tossed the note onto the nightstand, and grabbed the spray. A cautious spritz into the air puffed out something that smelled like citrus and sugar and a suspicious amount of artificial vanilla. I sprayed my shirt, then my jacket, then the space around my head for good measure.

The embalming scent recoiled but did not entirely die.

“Close enough,” I muttered.

I dropped the spray onto the bed, already planning the scalding shower I was going to take in approximately three seconds. Preferably one long enough to burn the whole dead people situation off my skin and maybe half my dignity with it.

I stared again at the deceptively cheery-looking laminated schedule.

“My plan didn’t work,” I informed it. “But at least there weren’t any cowboys involved.”

STERLING

My phone buzzed as I stared at the ashes of somebody else’s mistake, still smoldering at my feet.

The southern ridge looked harmless from a distance, just another stretch of scrub and rock rolling down toward the tree line, but up close you could see where it had been used. The grass was trampled in a wide circle, the dirt packed in strange, uneven patches. Someone had built a camp here in a hurry and left even faster.

“It’s still hot,” Jett said, crouching near the blackened ring. “We probably missed the party by minutes.”

I nudged a charred log with the toe of my boot. It crumpled in on itself. A beer can lay half buried in the dirt beside it, its rim kicked in.

There were tracks, too. Not the clean, solid prints of a man who knew what he was doing. These were…off. Jagged. The weight was uneven in the stride. Like whoever had been here had forgotten how to walk.

Jett followed my gaze. “He was limping,” he said. “Or drunk.”

“Or both,” I muttered.

I stepped away from the fire pit and toward the edge of the ridge. From here you could see most of my property stretching out below—the fields, the distant line of the creek, the speck of the house. The mountains walled all of it in.

Behind me, one of the horses snorted, stamping its hoof. They’d been restless since we saddled them up. Heads tossing and the whites of their eyes flashing when the wind blew.

“Easy,” I called back without turning, keeping my voice low and steady.