Mated to My Step-brother and His Best Friend novel · Chapter 14 of 32

Chapter 14: Her Lead

A ring on a chain.

I saw it all at once.

Arlis at supper, his hand at his open collar.

Arlis in the front hall, touching his shirt.

Arlis in the meeting hall, his fingers resting on his collar while he smiled at me.

He'd been touching it in front of all of us.

"He's wearing it," I said.

Deacon was sitting up against the counter now, grey and sweating.

He didn't say anything.

He didn't have to.

His eyes had gone gold again, and the cook put her hand flat on his chest and held it there.

"Not tonight," she said. "Not with ten holes in your back."

A deputy came at two in the morning, forty miles in the rain.

He was young and scared of the room.

He wrote down what the shooter said, every word, while six rogues stood around him with their arms crossed.

Then he put the man in the back of his car and drove him to the county jail.

I called the Ridge at three.

My mother answered Abner's phone on the first ring.

"He's got a fever," she said. "Since Sunday. That dust you told him about."

"How bad?"

"Bad enough. Arlis brought him a tonic from some doctor in the county seat. A brown bottle. He's been taking it in his tea." She lowered her voice. "Dovie, he's not getting better."

"We're coming up," I said.

We drove up the mountain at dawn with Deacon lying across the back seat on his stomach.

Bowie drove.

I sat in the back with Deacon's head in my lap.

He slept the whole way.

Every time the truck hit a pothole, his hand found my knee and rested there, open, and went slack again.

Abner was in bed in the big room at the front of the house.

His face was red and his beard was wet with sweat.

My mother sat beside him with a wet cloth.

A brown bottle stood on the nightstand next to a cup of cold tea.

Deacon stood in the doorway in a clean shirt and told his father everything.

The shooter. The split ear. The man in the truck. The ring on the chain.

Abner listened with his eyes closed.

When Deacon finished, his father opened them.

"Friday," Abner said. "In the hall. I'll be on my feet."

"Dad, you can't stand."

"I'll be on my feet." He turned his head on the pillow and looked at me. "Can you keep my son alive till Friday, Miss Caskey?"

"I'm working on it," I said.

Deacon slept all day in my room.

He wouldn't sleep in his own.

He lay on his stomach across my quilt with his face turned toward the window, and I sat in the armchair and watched the holes in his back close.

Wolves heal fast once the silver's out.

By noon the holes were scabs.

By dusk they were pink marks across his shoulder blade.

I put my hand on them once while he slept.

He woke up under it.

He didn't move.

"You came over the counter," I said.

"She wouldn't get down."

"You could have yelled at her."

"I was yelling at her." His voice was thick with sleep. "She doesn't listen."

"Nobody listens to you. You should be used to it."

He laughed into the pillow.

It was the first time I'd ever heard him laugh.

It was low and rusty and surprised.

I wanted to hear it again.

The bond was warm and heavy between us.

I could feel him.

He rolled onto his back, slow, and looked up at me.

He didn't reach for me.

He put both hands flat on the quilt on either side of him.

"You said I don't get to decide how it goes," he said.

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