Page 28 of Burned & Bound

“He needed you. West needed you, and the ranch came first. Didn’t want to upset the fucking balance at the ranch.”

“That ranch is our entire family history!” she exclaimed. “There was no good way to separate the two! Being an abusive asshole wasn’t enough to break a generational contract. We would’ve had to sell the ranch—sell everything we had.”

“Or you could’ve just told me,” I said as I pushed to my feet “I could’ve walked off the ranch at any point and found him. He could’ve had the chance at a real life instead of the one he got. He didn’t deserveanyof what the three of you put him through. If you’d done a single fucking thing to protect him, he wouldn’t have gone through any of that.”

I left, stalking straight out her door while she called after me. There were a lot of things I wanted to say to my mother and not a single one was appropriate. Not with the anger surging through my blood.

Not with the thought of what they’d let happen to him stuck in my head. Her words haunted me.And I didn’t know what the fuck to do about them.

CHAPTER 18

jackson

Convincing myself to goback to the ranch was hard. What the hell was I supposed to say to West? WhatcouldI fucking say?

The answer: not a damn thing.

That fucking killed me.

I eased my truck to a stop outside the stables because going home felt wrong.I felt like I owed West something.What that was… I didn’t have a goddamn clue. I just knew I couldn’t go home and sit with this.

As always, West was in with the horses. The sunset settled across his shoulders like the proverbial new light I was seeing him in. He wasn’t the West that left me. He was the West I’d lost. That did something to me.Something painful.

Those gray eyes caught mine and I swore the fucking world stopped for just a moment. Any of the anger and hatred I had for West had dissipated, replaced with a kind of sadness I couldn’t describe. Even with the giant fucking rift between the two of us, I wanted to fix it. I wanted to take away all the awful things. The anger, the fear, the panic. Every single damn thing.

West broke eye contact and returned to work while I just stood there, staring and wondering.What the hell was his life like now?The drinking and the fighting were just the smallest of indicators. But what couldn’t I see? How deep did his self-harm and self-loathing go? Was it worse than that? Did it affect his ability to keep a job? A house? Was it why he stayed as far off the grid as he could manage?

And the guy he killed… was it related to…

I couldn’t bring myself to think the thought. How fucked up was that? It was his everyday reality and my stomach rolled just thinking about it.Fuck.

My mind was a wild mess as I tried to make sense of it all. Of all the things I expected my mom to tell me about West, this wasn’t it. This was the kind of thing you didn’t want anyone to go through.

“You knew,” I said under my breath when Mickey joined me. “You knew and you didn’t say a fucking word.”

“And what the hell was I supposed to say, Jackson?” Mickey replied. He sighed heavily, draping his arms over the fence and staring out to where West traded horses. “There’s just some things…”

His voice trailed off, and I glanced over at him. The haunted expression on his face did nothing to quell my anger. He didn’t have a fucking right to be haunted. Not after everything he helped hide.

“You know, I ain’t ever wished someone dead,” he whispered, “but when I saw that boy after… I couldn’t help thinkin’ it. You know, they marked him. One cut for every man that…”

The nine scars on his side.Bile stung the back of my throat with that little piece of information.

“And the guy he killed?” I asked. Did I want to know? Not particularly. But I felt like I needed all the information I could get—to understand what the hell West was going through.

“You know, he had to go back in there with those animals once he was out of the hospital,” Mickey told me. “Your daddy tried to convince them to send him to another prison—somewhere he’d be a bit safer—but no one fuckin’ listened. Or maybe they just didn’t care.

“It changed him. Not sure how it couldn’t, you know? But it did. And I don’t know the details—not sure I want to—but two years later, he killed one of them. Not that the fucker didn’t deserve it, if you ask me. He hadto go back to court and all that. Got off with self-defense. Had a damn good lawyer. She managed to get him transferred to another prison too. Your daddy and I went to watch the trial, and West… he wasn’t there, you know? He’s got that empty look about him right in the eyes. Still does.”

I knew that look. I saw it every fucking day.And it made sense now.

“Sometimes, I still wonder if he would’ve been better off dead,” he admitted, his voice cracking slightly. That fucking guilt he felt? He deserved it. “Livin’ with somethin’ like that… I don’t think there’s livin’ after somethin’ like that.”

“Y’all should’ve done something, that’s what should’ve happened,” I said. While I understood where he was coming from, it was all a load of fucking bullshit. There’d been chances—a lot of them—to spare West this life. Instead, the lot of them picked a fucking plot of land over a kid.

That shit I couldn’t let go.

“I’m tryin’ here, boy. It’s the best I got.”

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