Page 2 of Dark Horse

“Jesse!” I yell, shaking him harder and harder as I yell his name over and over. But he doesn’t answer me—not in the car, not as I drag him into the emergency room, and not as they wheel him away.

An hour later, Jesse’s sister, Dakota, comes crashing through the doors of the waiting room, her eyes red and her cheeks stained with tears, confirming what I already knew but didn’t want to believe. She rushes at me, and I’m half worried she’s going to slap me, blame me for everything that’s gone wrong in his life, but instead, she just holds out her arms and wraps them around my waist. She presses her face to my chest, sobs racking through her while she can barely catch her breath. We don’t talk. She just clings to me, holding on to me like I’m the last life raft she has left.

Her dad died when she was a baby, then her mother before she turned ten, and now her only brother. All with six months left before she even graduates. She hasn’t even tasted how cruel and bitter the real world is outside those walls.

And it’s all my fault.

I’m the one who put her here tonight.

The one who didn’t keep him from joining the Horsemen.The one who didn’t stop him from taking this job even though he wasn’t ready. The one who didn’t talk him out of going tonight. The one who didn’t call 911 when it might have been his only chance. The one who didn’t drive fast enough to save his life.

I’m the asshole who left her without a single fucking soul in the world to watch out for her.

ONE

DAKOTA

THE DEVIL:

I’m here

I glance surreptitiouslydown the bar when my phone dings with a message on the counter in front of me. He’s in his usual spot, my brother’s place, on the far side of Seven Sins Saloon. It keeps him near the door, away from the rabble, with his back to the wall as he surveys the room and tucks his phone away into his pocket. He makes quick, one-handed work of the buttons on his suit jacket before he eases onto the bar stool.

Heads swivel around the room, despite the loud atmosphere and the blaring country music; mostof them don’t need a text to know he’s arrived. There’s a cold snap and a rise in whispers and low voices chattering, like a slow wave that travels through the bar.

It’s always the tourists who try to grab his attention. A good number of them just want to fuck him because he’s tall, dark, and handsome. But the locals know who he is—what he is—the head of The Quiet Horsemen. Our very own living, breathing devil in the flesh, and for them, he owns too many souls in this town to ever see him as anything other than a pretty face to be observed from a distance.

For me, he’s an extortionist. A tyrannical landlord who owns this building and my home upstairs and uses both as an excuse to keep tabs on me like I’m a child he’s put in charge of. Which I was for six brief months between my brother’s death and my eighteenth birthday. Before that, he’d been my brother’s best friend, the one my friends and I giggled about whenever he showed up, and the man we’d fantasized about marrying when we played marry, fuck, kill. Something that’s hard for adult me to reconcile with, since these days I mostly imagine wrapping my hands around his throat until the lights go out in his eyes.

“What’s wrong, gorgeous?” The young guy’s voice snaps me back into the present, and I finish shaking the drink he’s asked for, grabbing a glass to pour it into. I force myself to fix my face and flash a bright smile at him.

“Death, taxes, and the devil himself,” I answer as I slide the glass across the bar top.

His brow furrows immediately, and he looks between me and the drink. “What?”

He’s far too drunk to process words and too young to understand that life comes with certain guarantees. I envy him for that. I feel at least a decade older than my twenty-eight years, and some days, I’d give anything to be a bright-eyedcollege kid again. One without the burden of the future always weighing me down.

“Nothing, handsome. That’ll be ten dollars. You want it on your tab?” I flash a fake smile that he accepts as real before his eyes drift down to my breasts.

“Yeah.” He nods too emphatically for my liking. I’m going to have to watch him to make sure he doesn’t get overserved because I’d bet money that he’s a raging asshole when he’s drunk. I just hope his friends decide to move on to the next bar before we get there, and he remembers how heavy my pour is when he scrawls his name on the receipt before stumbling out.

The next guy bellies up to the bar in his wake. This one’s got bright-green eyes and curly red hair, a smattering of freckles across his nose and cheeks, and a smile that’s so sweet I can’t imagine he’s ever seen a bad day. His buddies creep up behind him, mischievous grins on their faces as he holds up a fifty.

“What can I get you, handsome?” I slide a napkin in front of him, and he stares at it for a moment before he blinks.

“Hey! I want to order a… uh…” He looks back at his friends, and one of them shouts something in his ear before he turns back to me with a little more confidence. “I want a Sinner’s Shower.”

“It’s his birthday!” One friend leans forward to tell me.

“Twenty-one!” the other adds.

“I’ll give you the birthday bonus then. What do you want as a chaser?”

“Uh.” He stares back at me, clearly clueless.

“Anything that’s on tap.” I nod back to the blackboard behind me.

“Umm…” he answers, his brows knitting together for a moment as he studies the list. “A Yeti?”

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