▍ 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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Colt's chest heaved under the weight of what he could not undo, rain carving desperate rivers down his face, threading through the blood already congealing along the sharp line of his jaw. Every muscle in him seemed caught between violence and collapse, his fists still trembling with a rage that had nowhere left to go. It was unraveling inside him now, not like a storm breaking, but like something caving in—a slow, sick implosion under the gravity of his own regret.
His eyes, cobalt and broken, lifted to find me, and what I saw there hollowed me out in one brutal sweep. It wasn't anger anymore. It wasn't even pride. It was the sick, dawning terror of a man realizing he had crossed a line he could not step back from—and that he'd done it with my gaze pinned on him, silent and unflinching, offering no shelter.
He looked at me the way a man looks at the wreckage of something he loved, too late to save it, too late to take it back. There was no apology on his lips, but it didn't matter. It bled from him, thick and clumsy, settling between us in the cold mud, staining everything that had once been clean.
I couldn't move toward him.
Not even if I wanted to.
The rain poured harder, relentless and uncaring, soaking the fabric of my clothes until it clung to my body like a second skin, but the cold didn't touch me anymore. All I could feel was the rift widening between us.
"You all right, Rhett?" Sean asked, his voice tight with unease, his hand clamped hard around Rhett's arm like he was steadying a ticking bomb rather than a man.
Rhett didn't answer at first. He wiped at his face with the back of his hand, smearing more blood across the sharp angles of his cheek, across his mouth, his jaw, painting himself in deeper, darker strokes. It wasn't careful. It wasn't even an attempt to clean himself up. It was almost... deliberate. Like he didn't mind the sight of it. Like he wore it the same way he wore the rain and the ruin—proudly, unapologetically.
He straightened then, slow, unhurried, like he had all the time in the world to bleed out if he wanted to. The cut along his temple split wider with the movement, a fresh wash of red tracing the lines already carved into him, but he didn't flinch. Didn't stagger. His body was battered, his shirt torn and clinging, his mouth split open and dripping, but none of it touched the burning in his eyes.
And those eyes never left mine. Not once.
"Just a little fun, Sean," Rhett rasped, his voice low and wrecked, dragging over the air like broken glass. That twisted smile—sharp, bloodied, merciless—tugged at the corner of his mouth as his gaze flicked lazily to Colt, then back to me. Like he was flicking ashes off a cigarette he wasn't finished with yet.
"Langmore's always been a little too sensitive, don't you think?"
Colt stiffened at my side, the reaction immediate, visceral, his whole body snapping tighter like a taut wire about to break. His fists clenched again, the knuckles flashing white even through the rain, through the blood smeared along his fingers. I saw the second the rage surged back up in him, raw and blinding, the second he almost ripped free of Caleb's grip and threw himself back into the fight.
