Page 5 of Broken Ride

My stomach drops so fast my vision swims. For one full second my body reacts before my training catches up, and I taste bile at the back of my throat.

Then I stand very still. My breathing stays even because I've trained it to stay even, the same way I taught my hands to stop shaking and my face to show nothing when my body wants to show everything.

I stare at the boots and feel the hum underneath my skin shift from ambient to something sharper, hotter. The low steady frequency I've lived with for over a year climbing until I can feel it in my jaw.

The old Laney would have cried. The old Laney would have sat on the edge of the bathtub shaking and calling a friend who would tell her to call the police, as if calling the police on a police officer had ever done anything except make him angrier.

I'm not the old Laney.

Nobody else would notice. Nobody else would look at a pair of boots beside a bed and feel their entire nervous system reorganize. Nobody else would understand that the specific placement, the careful alignment, the toes pointed outward instead of toward the wall, is a signature. A handwriting. A message delivered in the language of a marriage that was a prison.

I know exactly whose handwriting it is.

Garrett arranged my shoes this way. He preferred boots lined up beside the bed, toes out, ready to step into. He corrected me when I left them by the door. Small corrections. Patient corrections. The kind that feel like preferences until you realize they are mandates, and by then you've already been trained.

He's been in this room. Or someone working for him has.

I check the bathroom first. Behind the shower curtain, behind the door. Then the closet. Then I drop to one knee and look under the bed. Empty. All of it empty.

I close the door. Lock the deadbolt. Slide the chain. Wedge the desk chair under the knob, angled so the legs bite into the carpet.

I check the parking lot through a gap in the curtains. My truck is where I left it. The lot is quiet. A few rigs, a sedan, the clerk's car near the office. Nothing out of place.

I pull my duffel from the closet and repack it. Everything goes back in. Clothes, documents, the prepaid phone I keep as a backup, the envelope with enough cash to fill my tank three times over. The duffel is zipped and sitting by the door in less than four minutes.

I could leave right now. I could be on the highway in sixty seconds, heading east or west or south, and by morning I would be in a different state under the same name doing the same work at a different circuit. I've done it before. Three times in fourteen months. The leaving is the easy part. I'm an expert at leaving.

I sit on the edge of the bed with the packed duffel at my feet, the boots still arranged in Garrett's handwriting beside me.

I don't leave. Leaving is what Garrett expects. Every small violation, every moved object, every rearranged detail is a tap on the glass of my cage, and the intended response is flight. He wants me running because a woman in motion is a woman reacting, and a woman reacting is a woman he still controls.

I pick up the boots. I place them by the door, side by side, toes toward the wall.

I turn off the light. I lie down on the bed with my clothes on, my keys in one hand, my duffel packed by the door. I don't sleep, but I don't run.

2

WADE

I'm at the pens before the sun clears the mesa, not because I'm eager but because the motel bed felt like sleeping on a cattle guard. Lying still with my back locked up is worse than moving through it. The ibuprofen I took hours ago has shaved the edge off my shoulders, brought the volume down from a scream to a steady, grinding complaint. I can work around it if I don't think about it too hard.

So I don't think about it. I stretch against the pen rails instead, pressing my spine into the metal the way a physical therapist taught me years ago, back when I still saw a physical therapist, back when I still pretended the damage could be managed instead of accumulated with interest.

The fairground smells like it always does. Hay. Diesel. Livestock. That cocktail of dust and animal heat that I've been breathing since I was small enough to sit on my father's shoulders at rodeo events.

Some mornings it smells like home. This morning it smells like another town I'll leave in two days and won't remember by next week.

There's a rhythm to competition mornings that I could execute in a coma. Tape the hands. Check the rigging. Walk the competitor area because walking keeps my back from seizing. Drink coffee that tastes like burnt motor oil from whatever vendor sets up first. Avoid conversations that go deeper than draw sheets and weather. Smile when someone recognizes me. Smile when someone congratulates me on a ride that happened three events ago in a town I've already forgotten.

The smile is load-bearing at this point. Remove it and the whole structure comes down.

I check my draw sheet. The horse is called Sidewinder, a tall sorrel mare with a blaze that runs crooked down her face and a reputation for explosive first jumps and hard lateral kicks.

Good draw. The kind of horse that rewards commitment and punishes hesitation, which means she'll either make my day or end it. I've ridden worse on less sleep and more bourbon, so the odds are in my favor. That's the kind of optimism only a professional athlete running on fumes and anti-inflammatories could produce with a straight face.

Other riders filter in with their coffee and their gear bags and the familiar blend of nerves and swagger that event mornings produce.

A couple of the younger guys nod at me. I nod back. One of them asks about my rein measurement, and I show him. I've been showing younger riders how to measure their rein since before this kid was old enough to drive.