Page 139 of Wild Sanctuary

He’s moving before I finish. One hand closes around my upper arm and he’s walking me backward, deeper into the barn, toward the cab of the F-250.

He jerks his chin. “Keys are in it. Always are. You get in, you lock the doors, and you drive.”

“Dave—”

“You drive out the south gate, girl.” His eyes look more serious than I’ve ever seen them. “Stay drivin’ and you do not stop until you see a badge, you hear me?”

“No.” I shake my head firmly. “I’m not leaving you.”

“Yes, you are.”

His grip on my arm tightens, and he starts walking me the last few feet toward the driver’s side door. My bare heels scrape backward across the concrete, but I plant them firmly.

“Dave, listen to me⁠—”

“Daisy.” He tilts his head, frustration evident in every muscle of his body.

“Colt and the boys are at the east ridge. Maggie’s in Sage Harbor. Wyatt and June are at Hadley’s. Marcus set all of it up to clear the ranch, Dave, he knew where everyone would be, he planned this⁠—”

“Then that’s why you get in the truck.” He says it like it’s simple mathematics.

“But he’ll kill you.”

“Well, he can certainly try.”

“Dave.”

His jaw works, but his grip doesn’t loosen.

Then over his shoulder, past the open barn doors, and across two hundred yards of packed dirt, the back door of the house bangs once more against its spring.

Suddenly, it stops because someone is holding it open, and Stan clears the porch step.

The side of his face where the mug broke is split deep along the cheekbone, blood running freely down his jaw and into the collar of his shirt. His left eye is half-closed where the swelling has started, and in his right hand, loose at his side, is the gun.

Marcus is on the porch behind him with his hat still in his hands, and I suddenly and involuntarily go very still under Dave’s grip.

He feels it, his head turning a quarter inch to track my eyeline, and then he sees them too.

Whatever he was about to say next, he doesn’t.

His fingers leave my arm, slow and deliberate, in the way he’d take his hand off a horse he doesn’t want to spook. He steps sideways, one measured pace, until his shoulder is in front of mine and he’s placed his body between me and the porch.

“Get in the truck, girl.”

“Dave—”

“Now.”

His voice says don’t argue, and we’re running out of time, and even though everything inside of me is screaming not to, I do as he says.

The driver’s door opens under my hand and I swing up into the cab, keeping low. The keys are hanging in the ignition, the way Dave said they would be, a dented brass tag on the ring that reads D.H. in Jessamine Hartley’s faded handwriting.

I pull the door closed as quietly as I can, then lock it.

Through the windshield, I watch Dave turn his back on me and walk several slow steps out of the barn doors and into the yard.

He stops in the dirt, maybe ten feet clear of the doors, squared off toward the porch. His empty hands are at his sides, his cap still pushed back on his head, and from the cab, he looks like a man waiting on an old friend to arrive.