The fight was fast and ugly and quiet, the kind that leaves no room for bravado, and when it ended, two men lay groaning on my floor while the third bolted into the trees, panic tearing through his bravado like rot through wet wood. I didn’t chase him. I didn’t need to. Fear would carry my message better than fists ever could.
I called the sheriff myself.
That was mistake number two.
Sheriff Donnelly had been elected twice on a platform of keeping things “simple,” which in Blackridge Valley meant keeping things exactly as they were, and when he arrived, his eyes flicked first to the men on the floor, then to me, then lingered just long enough on Orion’s splinted leg to register judgment. He asked no questions about broken windows or forced entry, only whether I’d been drinking and why there were three unconscious men in my cabin.
“They broke in,” I said evenly.
“And you handled it,” he replied, not a question.
His gaze sharpened then, something calculating behind it, and I saw the moment he decided which story would be easier to sell, because truth is rarely convenient when power has already chosen a narrative. He cuffed me “for my own safety,” he said, while his deputies hauled the men out, and as he led me toward the cruiser, he leaned close enough for me to smell the coffee on his breath.
“Cole’s boys say you started it,” he murmured. “And around here, that counts for something.”
At the station, they ran my name.
That was when the room changed.
