Ranger.
Jake.
My sister.
The scent of orange-blossom flooded my senses. I gripped my blade tighter. We edged forward another step, sharing a readiness so taut it crackled between us, bracing for war. For the same fight to the death we’d both survived so many times to be here.
But as we breached the gap in the hedge and rounded the braid trunk of another tree, no enemies awaited us. No guns. No knives. In the ditch at our feet, we found only a horse, wedged in the mud and braying the low whine that had triggered us into battle mode.
“Fucking-A.” Cam relaxed, his hand slipping from my shoulder. “I thought that was van doors opening with a horde of cunts here to kill us.”
“Me too,” I admitted, adrenaline fading, leaving a grazed sensation inside me.
“This fucking life, man.”
I could only agree, but that didn’t help the horse, who was well and truly stuck. “We need to get it out.”
Cam moved closer, but the horse startled, flailing in the mud, splattering it all over him.
I did not laugh. Outwardly, anyway. “We need rope.”
“I have some.” Cam backed up. “But it ain’t gonna do us much good if we can’t get close enough to lasso that fucker.”
That fucker. My heart sent another pang of yearning to my brain. I heard Cam’s words in Ranger’s thick Leeds accent and wondered why life was cruel enough to have me living this absurd moment without him.
Cam returned to the bikes.
I found my phone and reopened my text thread with Ranger, falling head first into the last message he’d sent me. From upstairs in our house when I’d had the audacity to be downstairs.
Ranger:i miss u. come back and bring two bags of pickled onion
Monster Munch.
God, I loved him.
Tell him.
Cam returned before I could thumb out a text, bearing a rope long enough that I raised a brow in question.
“Saint. He likes to pack weird shit in my saddlebags when I’m not paying attention.”
“A rope is not that weird.”
“There’s three fucking apples in there too.”
“I will take one.”
“Fuck’s sake.”
Cam rolled his eyes and went back for my apple. I ate it while I studied the horse, allowing it to grow used to our presence before we approached it again.
“The rope must go around the body.” I passed it through my hands, testing the strength. “And we do not pull.”
“Done this before, have you?”
“With donkeys. We have a lot of them at home.”
Cam crushed a cigarette against a disused fence post. “I thought Ranger was taking the piss about that.”