Page 17 of Devoured

"Two thousand miles," Levi said, to no one, settling it.

Mack found him in the saddle barn that afternoon, which was Mack's way, he never came to find you in the open where a thing might have to be said straight. He picked a corner with tack to be cleaned and waited for you to come to him.

"Kids like her," Mack said, to a bridle.

Dean kept coiling the rope in his hands. "Mm."

"Helen does too."

"Helen tell you that?"

"Helen don't have to tell me." Mack worked saddle soap into the leather, unhurried, sixty years old and in no rush about anything that wasn't on fire. "Been a long time since this place ran easy. Notice that's all."

"It's running easy because there's finally somebody doing the office."

"Sure," Mack agreed, in the exact tone the whole county seemed to have agreed to use with him this week, and said nothing else, which was worse than if he'd kept going.

It was Chase and Jett who finally cracked it open, because of course it was. A man could keep a thing locked down in front of the whole world and his own father besides, and then his idiot brothers would walk up and read it off him like a feed-store receipt.

It was late afternoon, the good gold hour, and Dean and Chase were re-hanging a gate by the corral that had been dragging for a month. Chase was twenty-seven and built like Dean run a little leaner, the same dark hair, the same hands; the steady one, the one who'd stayed when Brody left and worked the land at Dean's side without ever once being asked and without ever once being thanked, because thanking Chase for it would have meant admitting out loud how much of it had landed on him. He didn't talk much. He never had. He just turned up, every day, and did the thing in front of him, and saw, Dean had learned this the hard way over the years, a great deal more than he let on.

"Hold it," Chase said, and Dean held it, and Chase drove the pin, and the gate that had dragged for a month swung clean and true.

That was when Jett came across the yard.

You could always tell Jett at a distance because he was wrong for the picture. Dean and Chase in worn denim and ranch dust, and here came their brother in clean boots and a collared shirt and the particular gleam of a man who spent his days somewhere with air conditioning and a parking lot, walking off John Royston's land toward the truck that would take him to Clay Royston's mine. Twenty-five, the youngest of the boys, the one with their mother's easy mouth and a smile that had been getting him out of trouble since he could talk. He had a way of crossing a yard like the yard was glad to have him. Dean felt his own shoulders set, the way they always did, the same low wordless wrongness of watching a brother walk off toward the other side of a thing nobody in the family would say plainly.

"Brothers." Jett tipped two fingers off an eyebrow. "Don't let me interrupt. Looks like real work. I wouldn't want to catch anything."

"You're gonna be late for your shift," Dean said. "Wouldn't want to keep Clay waiting."

It came out with more edge than he'd meant, the way things about Jett's mornings always did, and Jett's smile flickered — just a beat, just enough to show he'd felt it — and then it was back, easy as ever, because Jett's whole talent in life was letting things roll off him that would have stuck in anybody else.

And then Lara came out of the house.

She had a folder in her hand and a question on her face, crossing toward the corral to ask Dean something about an invoice, and Dean watched his youngest brother clock her at forty feet and watched the smile change gears, and thought, with a sinking inevitability, here we go.

"Well," Jett said, low, just to his brothers, grinning now. "Hello."

"Don't," Dean said.

"Don't what?"

"Whatever you're about to do. Don't."

"I'm not doing anything," Jett said, already doing it, already turning the full wattage on as Lara came into range. "Ma'am. You must be the famous Lara. I'm Jett — the good-looking brother, they'll have warned you." He put out a hand, and the smile went all the way up to the eyes, and it was, Dean had to admit, a genuinely good smile; it had been wrecking the local female population since high school. "So you're the one who's got this whole place running. Where on earth did Dad find you, and do you have a sister?"

"Boston," Lara said, shaking his hand, perfectly pleasant, "and yes, I do, and she'd eat you alive."

Jett put a hand to his chest like she'd shot him. "I'd let her."

"You would," Chase said, to the gate, not looking up.

"I would," Jett agreed cheerfully. "Lara. Beautiful name. You free Friday? I know a place two towns over does a steak that'll —"

"She works in the office," Dean said.

It came out flat and hard and a half-second too fast, and it dropped into the conversation like a boot into a creek, and there was a small terrible silence in which Dean became aware of three things at once: that he had said it like the words mine and no welded together, that Jett had heard exactly that, and that Chase had stopped working on the gate.