▍ 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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The sound was sickening, pure and brutal. It echoed through the clearing, swallowed the fire, the rain, the very breath in my lungs. I jerked back instinctively, my hand flying to my mouth, my heart pounding so hard it made the world around me blur.
Rhett stumbled a step—not far, not enough to give Colt the satisfaction of it—but when he straightened, the blood trailing from his lip looked dark and vivid against the silver downpour. For a moment, he just stood there, unmoving, the rain pouring over him, dripping from the sharp line of his jaw like molten steel cooling into something lethal.
And then, slowly, he wiped the blood from his mouth with the back of his hand, golden eyes never once leaving Colt's face. There was a stillness in Rhett that terrified me more than Colt's rage ever had. A cold, cutting calm that said he didn't need to meet violence with violence to win.
"Guess you do think this is all about you, Langmore," Rhett said, voice low, each word measured, deliberate. It wasn't a taunt—it was an indictment. A slow, brutal laying bare of a truth Colt wasn't ready to face.
"That's your problem," Rhett said, stopping just close enough that the tension between them tightened like a noose. "You think you're the center of everything."
The rain battered down harder, turning the world around us into a haze of smoke and stormlight. Colt didn't flinch. Didn't break. But I could see the cracks spidering through him—the places where pride and hurt and desperation were eating him alive from the inside out.
His fists clenched and unclenched at his sides, the cords of muscle in his arms straining with the effort of holding himself back.
For a split second, his gaze cut to me—shattered, accusing—and it was worse than the punch, worse than anything he could have said.
Because it was real.
Because it was mine.
Because it was the cost of the choices I had made without even realizing I was making them.
"Stay away from her," Colt said, voice raw, ragged, a threat and a plea tangled together so tightly they were indistinguishable. His chest heaved with the force of it, his whole body coiled like a man who had nothing left to lose.
"You don't know a damn thing about her."
Rhett's lips curved into a slow, dangerous smile—one that didn't warm, didn't soften, didn't even try. It was the kind of smile that warned you the storm had already found its teeth. His head tipped a fraction, as if he was considering Colt's words like a card drawn from a deck he already knew the outcome of.
And then, in a voice that barely disturbed the rain, Rhett let out a low, almost amused chuckle.
"Oh, I think I know more than you'd like," he said, every syllable a quiet, sharpened thing. No shouting. No taunting. Just the lethal calm of a man who understood he didn't have to raise his voice to win. Because he already had.
