▍ AN ORIGINAL ╱ western romance
There's a kind of wild you can't outrun.
Lemon Odell knows this better than anyone-the kind that lives under your skin, that shapes the way you move, the way you fight, the way you break. Born into a bloodline stitch...
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I came to in pieces.
The world was all wrong—too white, too still. The ceiling above me flickered with artificial light, humming faintly like it was trying to lull me back under. For a moment, I wasn't sure if I was alive or if this was the part where everything finally quieted for good.
Pain anchored me.
It started behind my eyes, a dull pressure that pulsed with every heartbeat, spreading down my neck and curling around my ribs like something half-feral. My mouth was dry, cottony, and the scent of antiseptic clung thick in the air, stinging the back of my throat. Somewhere to my right, a monitor beeped in soft, steady intervals, a rhythm that felt foreign against the memory of chaos still pounding through my chest.
Then the images came—sharp and out of order.
The chute. Colt's body slamming into the dirt. Blood. My hands covered in it. The sound of hooves like thunder, like war. His face, pale and twisted in pain. His voice—rough, stubborn, alive.
Alive.
I sucked in a breath too fast and choked on it, my chest seizing under the strain. Panic flooded my limbs, but they felt slow, disconnected. My arms wouldn't lift. My legs didn't move. Only my heart seemed to know something was wrong, beating like it was trying to outrun the moment I'd just escaped.
A soft rustle beside me. Then a voice.
"You're awake, sweetheart."
The words floated down like snow, slow and kind, too gentle for the storm still inside me. I turned my head—everything sluggish, swimming—and found a nurse standing next to the bed, her scrubs dotted with cartoon scarecrows and pumpkins. Autumn. October, maybe. I hadn't even realized we were that far into the year.
I blinked at her, trying to pull her face into focus. Her hair was tucked under a scrub cap, her eyes lined with exhaustion or maybe pity—it was hard to tell which. I didn't recognize her. That felt wrong.
"Where am I?" My voice was more breath than sound. It scraped out of me like gravel, hoarse and thin.
She leaned in, brushing a cool hand along my wrist to check the line taped there. "You're at St. Vincent's. Cody. You've been here a few hours. You're safe now."
Safe.
The word settled in the space between us like dust on glass—weightless, untouched, meaningless.
I stared past the nurse, past the walls, past the too-bright lights that tried to pretend everything was fine. Like the world hadn't ended hours ago in the dirt.
How could I be safe, when I still felt Colt's blood clinging to my skin like it belonged there? When the sound of him hitting the ground kept playing in my head on a loop, louder than the monitors beeping beside me? He'd looked at me like he wasn't sure I was real. Like maybe he thought I was the last thing he'd ever see.
