Page 41 of Thunder

Thunder, whose belt marks are still faint on my wrists under my sleeves right now.

Thunder, who dug that grave with his own hands and told me flat out he'd do it again, and who I climbed into bed with last night anyway because I've stopped being able to stay away from him.

I'm in love with one of the men that investigator could send to prison.

And protecting him—protecting all of them—means protecting the exact cover-up that turned my sisters to strangers and made me a ghost in my own family.

It's a trap with no clean way out of it, and I see all of it standing right there at the rail, every ugly angle laid out plain.

If the truth comes out, my mother goes to prison for a killing she did to save her own life, and my father goes with her for hiding it.

Blaze and Spur and Banshee go for helping, and Thunder goes for all of it, and Raine loses the only parent she's got.

If it stays buried, we all keep carrying it, the way we've been carrying it, my sisters knowing what happened to their mother and never able to say it, chasing off a hired man they can't tell the truth to.

Everybody guarding the same grave for the rest of their lives, and me standing in the middle of it exactly like Pops did, keeping the secret I hated him for keeping.

Either way somebody I love ends up destroyed.

And I'm the only person on this whole ranch standing in the gap between the two, holding a secret I never asked for, that I found out the same day everyone else did, that has somehow become mine to keep.

"You okay?" Grace is looking at me funny. "You went white."

"I'm fine." The lie comes easy. God, they all come easy now. "Just—it's a lot. Mom. All of it. I hate that Dakota's stuck dealing with that man at all.."

"Yeah." Grace picks her bag back up. "Me too."

She heads for her truck, and then she stops, and she doesn't turn all the way around, but she says it over her shoulder, quiet, like it costs her.

"It was good talking to you. Even about this."

There’s a moment of silence.

"I've missed—" She doesn't finish it.

Just shakes her head and gets in her truck and drives off toward the vet barn.

I stand there at the rail with a healing heifer and a belt mark under my sleeve and the whole sky falling on me slowly.

My sister missed me.

She almost said it.

That's the closest crack of daylight I've had in that direction since everything shattered, and any other day I'd be crying happy tears into the water trough over it.

But all I can think, watching her taillights go, is that I'm carrying a secret now that's so much worse than the one that broke us.

I know where the body is. I know who put it there.

And I'm in love with one of them, because she loves her mom and pops, and she loves the other guys too, because they're all family.

I get in my truck and I sit there a long time before I trust myself to drive.

And for the first time since I climbed into that bathtub, I let myself wonder if loving Thunder isn't just going to cost me my family.

It might be what helps me bury the truth right alongside him.

CHAPTER EIGHT