▍ 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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It was too soft to be a threat, but it crawled under my skin like one anyway. Feminine. Unbothered. Carried like silk through the trees—light, lilting, just a little too smooth. It didn't belong to this forest. Didn't belong to this night. And sure as hell didn't belong to me.
At first, I thought I'd imagined it. The kind of sound your mind pulls out of shadows when it's tired and searching and afraid to admit it. But then it came again—sharper this time. Real.
I stopped walking.
Not because I wanted to. Because I had to. My body just... locked. Heart jammed in my throat, blood roaring in my ears like wind funneling through a broken window. That laugh didn't belong here. But it was here. Floating through the stillness like it owned it. And with it came that cold, heavy knowing—the kind that twists low in your stomach and whispers, this is the part where something breaks.
I didn't move. Didn't blink. I just stood there in the dark, every inch of me screaming to turn back. Not out of fear. Not exactly. But because some things aren't meant to be followed. Some things are meant to stay hidden. And that sound—that laugh—was one of them.
But I couldn't help myself. I was already past the point of no return. Already moving before I knew what I was doing.
The laughter came again, closer now, and then—God help me—I heard him.
Colt.
His voice, low and even, rumbling like thunder buried beneath the brush. I couldn't make out the words. I didn't need to. I knew the cadence. Knew the way he said certain things when he was trying to be soft, when his guard slipped just enough to let someone else in.
And that laugh? It answered him.
Easy. Familiar.
Intimate.
My lungs drew in a breath that didn't make it past my ribs. Cold swept through me like water through a cracked pipe, and suddenly, I couldn't move—not forward, not back. I was frozen in the kind of stillness that doesn't belong to the living. The kind you only feel when the world you thought you knew shifts under your feet and you realize you've been standing on a fault line the whole damn time.
I didn't want to believe it.
Even now, some part of me reached for excuses—maybe he wasn't laughing. Maybe it wasn't him. Maybe I was wrong, or tired, or hearing ghosts.
But I wasn't.
It was all happening.
Not in the way heartbreak hits in movies or in the way people describe it when they're far enough away from it to give it neat edges. No. This was slower. Meaner. The kind of unraveling you feel deep in your marrow—thread by thread, memory by memory—until you don't know where the pain started, only that it's spreading.
That laugh—that goddamn laugh—was still hanging in the trees, clinging to the bark and the branches like perfume, sweet and unwanted. And it wasn't fading. It was growing. Closer. Clearer. A sound I knew and hated all at once. Familiar. Too familiar.
