Page 60 of Roulette Rodeo
The smoke swirls again, and the barracks dissolves.
New scent: ink and electricity, ozone and copper.
This has to be one of the others.
I'm in what looks like a cage—no, a fighting ring. The kind hidden in warehouse basements where men go to prove things that can't be proven in daylight. Blood stains the canvas despite someone's attempt to clean it. The ropes are frayed, repaired, frayed again. This is a place where violence is currency and pain is punctuation.
But there's art here too. Graffiti covers the walls, beautiful and savage, depicting angels falling and demons rising and everything in between. One piece draws my eye: a heart wrapped in barbed wire, bleeding liquid gold. Underneath, someone has written "TALON" in sharp, aggressive strokes.
The amber-eyed one who vibrated with barely contained energy.
This space smells like rage given form, but also like creativity born from destruction. Like someone who breaks things because it's the only way he knows how to create.
The smoke pulls me away before I can look closer.
Next: old books and whiskey, cedar and secrets.
A library materializes around me, but not a public one. This is private, personal, filled with medical texts and case files and newspapers with headlines about missing persons. Red strings connect push-pins on a massive board, creating a web of connections that makes my head spin trying to follow.
There's a desk in the corner, and on it, a half-finished letter that begins "Dear—" before trailing off into nothing.
Corwin. The hazel-eyed gentle giant.
This space feels like guilt. Like someone trying to solve puzzles that have no solution, fix things that are already broken. The kind of persistent hope that's almost more tragic than despair.
The smoke thickens, and I know what's coming before the scent hits.
Expensive cologne failing to mask disappointment. Ice and ash and something bitter, like medicine you have to take but hate the taste of.
Rafe.
The room that forms around me is all sharp edges and cold beauty. A office maybe, or a boardroom, everything in shades of grey and blue like color has been bled from the world. There's a portrait on the wall—a blonde woman with sad eyes and a smile that doesn't reach them. Fresh roses sit beneath it, but they're already dying, petals falling like tears.
I turn to look closer and catch my reflection in the polished surface of a table.
But it's not me—not adult me.
I'm eight years old again, drowning in a dress my mother bought before she got sick, my hair in pigtails tied with ribbons that match nothing because I did them myself. My child-face stares back, confused and a little scared, and when I open my mouth to speak, a child's voice emerges:
"Why are you so sad?"
The room doesn't answer, but I can feel Rafe here, feel his presence like winter wind through cracked windows.
He's watching from somewhere,always watching, never participating.
The perpetual outsider in his own life.
I turn away from my reflection, and the cold room dissolves into sunshine.
The transition is so sudden it makes me gasp—or eight-year-old me gasps, the sound high and sweet like I'd forgotten children could sound.
I'm standing in an open field, wildflowers up to my child-waist, and the air smells like summer and hay andhome. Not the home I'd known with my father, full of bourbon and strange women and broken promises. This smells like a field of paradise I'd imagined, the one from my mother's stories about her childhood.
In the distance, a ranch sprawls across the horizon. Not fancy, not modern, but solid and real with white fences and red barns and horses grazing in the afternoon sun.
And there, standing between me and the ranch, is my mother.
She's wearing a white sundress that catches the breeze, her auburn hair—the same color as mine—loose and flowing around her shoulders. But most importantly, impossibly, she'shealthy.
