No White Knight

by Snow, Nicole

  I take a little satisfaction in the fact that although Barry’s wool suit probably has a higher thread count than my Egyptian cotton sheets, her foundation is currently ruining it, leaving colored, chalky smears on his expensive fabric.

  “Don’t be like that, Holt,” she says. “You know how it goes.”

  Do I?

  Do I really know?

  Because this is a colossal amount of fuckery above my pay grade.

  All I know for sure is I fucked her last week, and she screamed my name and held on like she loved me.

  When she knew this was coming.

  When she did nothing to warn me.

  When she decided to stab at my soul just for fun.

  In a twisted way, I get it, even if I’ll never get the cruelty.

  She’s a pretty girl from a rich family.

  She’s just covering her own ass—barely, that dress is about to let it all hang out—and so she followed the money.

  Leaving me in the dust.

  The way they’re both looking at me is textbook definition smug. Conniving. Self-satisfied.

  Like they’re already done with this game, and I’m the only dummy who didn’t know what was at play.

  The bile rises in my throat, turning a sip of overpriced wine into poison.

  This isn’t my world.

  I just wish I hadn’t ruined myself to figure it out.

  Not just my business, but my goddamn fool heart.

  I thought I’d been in love with her, and maybe I had, but she never loved me.

  Real love doesn’t do this shit.

  Maybe I don’t know what real love is, not yet, but I know it can’t be this.

  I don’t have to torture myself, staying here to let them watch me try to cling to my pride, while I crumble apart inside. That ends with me in prison after clubbing Barry over the head with his expensive wine bottle.

  So I stand, offering Barry my hand.

  “I won’t be staying for dinner,” I growl. “But thank you for being so kind as to inform me in person.”

  Like hell I’m letting him pay for my meal after he just took my livelihood away from me with a few casual words.

  Barry looks at my hand as if it’s somehow confusing, this gesture he can’t process, before he takes it and shakes it again, tentatively.

  “Don’t take it personally,” he says. “This is just how this industry works, especially in a city as big as this. You’ll learn that with age and experience. Play your cards right, and someday you’ll be on the right side of the table.”

  “No.” I don’t let go of his hand. Maybe I clasp it a little too tight, drilling my gaze into his until he flinches. “Matter of fact, I’d rather work with a little more integrity.”

  Calypso frowns and gives off a little sniff. “You, Holt? Integrity? As if you didn’t ratfuck your way into every contract you’ve ever had.”

  That hits me like a knife to the gut.

  Deeper than anything I’ve known.

  Purely because she’s right.

  And I’m dizzy because suddenly, I don’t want her to be.

  I let go of Barry’s hand, and for a moment I almost spill everything, turn into the raging bull Barry clearly wants me to be.

  But looking into Calypso’s perfectly made-up face, her gorgeous eyes, her soulless lips that tasted like candy days ago...

  Fuck no.

  I won’t ever give her or anybody like her my soul.

  I’m not letting go of my stubborn-ass pride.

  Chin held high, I simply offer them both a sardonic smile.

  Then turn and walk out, shoulders stiff.

  I’ll start over. I always do.

  Next time, I’ll build an honest empire no one can take away from me.

  * * *

  Present

  I’ve tried like hell to forget that day.

  Some days, the memory hits me harder than others, remembering everything I’ve lost.

  Plus the things I never really had. The life I’d built was thrown together on a shitty foundation of grift and seduction and dirty backdoor deals.

  The love I’d thought I’d won was with someone who breathed high society.

  A place I never belonged.

  I’m not sure where I belong, honestly.

  Heart’s Edge is a good place to start over.

  At least here, I can make my own rules, and this time build those rules on trust.

  Not just on what benefits me.

  Fuck. Will Libby ever trust me at all?

  There’s nothing I can do...is there?

  Then again, what if?

  What if I found just what she needs to have her land declared a protected site that no one could intrude on?

  There’s got to be something.

  I have to keep looking, but hell.

  Maybe I won’t tell her.

  Not until I’ve got something concrete. I can’t stand to get her hopes up, then dash them again—and if I do that, if I string her along when I’ve got nothing solid, then I’ll give her every reason to never give me another chance.

  To never trust me again.

  I’ll do my digging on my lonesome.

  Scour through those survey maps, and if I have to, I’ll take an excursion.

  I’ll find out what’s down that old road.

  She never has to know unless I find something worth knowing.

  It’s not the best logic, I know.

  It’s a little underhanded, even, trespassing on her place by going behind her back.

  But she sure as hell won’t let me do it to her face. Not now.

  I just want to save us both.

  Even if she hates me for it for the rest of our natural lives, it’ll be okay if she gets to keep that ranch.

  As long as she’s okay.

  “Boss?” Alaska thumps my shoulder lightly. “You zoned out again.”

  I shake myself from my thoughts as the world clears around me.

  Shit. I’m still in the middle of the fabric shop, lost in my own head.

  “Right,” I say, forcing myself back on track. “Let’s just finish this up, and then I’ll buy you a beer.”

  * * *

  The survey maps don’t tell me much after poring over them all night.

  Partly because they’re so old they don’t have much info that’s relevant now.

  Partly because they don’t match.

  They show different geographies, different land masses, which is pretty fucked.

  Even with the same place names and distance markers, it doesn’t add up. They’re barely a decade or two apart, so it’s not like some natural disaster erased the land.

  Someone did shoddy work.

  And I won’t know who until I can see it with my own damn eyes.

  Which is how I find myself parking my Benz about a mile away from the edge of Libby’s property.

  I need a better car, but right now, I’m glad for the quiet purr of the engine. It keeps from giving me away as I kill the headlights and the motor to settle into a hidden place in the scrub brush.

  I’ll be hoofing it from here.

  My car isn’t dressed for the wilds, but I am.

  Back in USAF BMT training, they’d wake us up at two in the morning and send us jogging through harsh terrain, up and down gravelly slopes in full tactical gear.

  I feel like I’m doing that all over again, even though I’m in sturdy jeans and hiking boots with solid soles. I’ve got gloves to protect my hands from thorny brush and a backpack with a flashlight, compass, emergency rations, plus several bottles of water banging against my back.

  A man can leave the military, but it never leaves him.

  I don’t even need the flashlight as I set off at a steady run.

  Right along the edge where tumbled rocks rise up into the mountain bluffs, the Milky Way and the moon lighting my way plenty.

  In NYC, I’d forgotten how gorgeous a sky can look without all the city lights blocking it out.

  Being out he
re, it’s like standing in the middle of the universe.

  I let that calm my thoughts as I hit that patch of brush marking the start of the mountain cut, picking my way through to find the trail.

  It’s slower going here.

  Less flat terrain and more overgrowth so choked it’s almost like someone—probably Libby, maybe even Mark—deliberately let it all go so the path would be harder to pass.

  One way to discourage people from skulking around, I guess.

  I frown, pausing for a sip of water.

  There’s something from the survey maps sticking with me.

  Something about the flat elevation at the center of this cluster of mountains and bluffs, and this path leading right in.

  All the old tapped-out mining veins marked on the maps around it, but nothing in that one clear spot?

  Seems like the perfect place for mining.

  There are tons of stories about little towns that started up and then petered out as their ore veins did. A lot of them lost to history with no one remembering their names or much else, nothing left behind but shanty houses crumbling to dirt, given back to the land.

  Heart’s Edge used to be one of those towns, but its location plus the deeper veins of silver out where the Paradise Hotel used to be made sure it stuck around longer than most.

  Common sense tells me there’s nothing amazing down this road.

  But hope and optimism tell me I might just find something worthwhile.

  Especially when, after jogging forever, I almost trip over something unexpected.

  A wagon.

  The remnants of one.

  It’s old, the kind with the big old spoke wheels and timber framing that says it used to have a cover stretched over it, Oregon Trail style, though I doubt the owners died of dysentery.

  The actual wagon bed’s nearly rotted through, the whole thing a tilted and tumbled mess on the side of the road. The only things really intact are a few metal pegs and banding here and there.

  I crouch down next to the wreck and pull out my flashlight, checking it over.

  There’s paint clinging to the wood, something that might’ve been letters once, but I can’t make out a word. Old ragged bits of leather, too, though that’s been chewed to hell and back.

  I can imagine the cougars out here had a fine time using it for a scratching post.

  I lift my head, squinting farther up the road.

  No reason for a wagon to be going down there unless there’s somewhere to go to.

  No reason for a road that leads nowhere.

  With a fresh charge in my step, I haul myself up and move.

  Moon’s starting to set. I must’ve gone some six, seven miles by now. I was faster in my military days, but I was also jogging on open terrain.

  From the maps, this whole cut goes about twenty or thirty miles into the mountains.

  Sunrise, I tell myself.

  I’ll go till sunrise, and then I’ll accept defeat, turn back, and get the hell off Libby’s property before she kills me.

  I pass a few more things—more broken-down wagons, some rusty mining tools, even the remains of a fence, all things that get my heart racing and my legs pumping faster.

  Finally, I stumble through a knot of trees grown over the road and—

  And into an entire goddamn town.

  What the hell?

  I’d been expecting to find a few small shacks or the kind of old-timey gold-panning rigs they’d set up across streams to catch flakes and nuggets in the runoff from the springs that riddle this area.

  This is a fuckton more than that.

  There must be more than a dozen buildings—all of them constructed to last, and they’re still standing so someone did it right. Proper framing and varnished boards, though the varnishing’s worn off over time and everything’s dirty as sin.

  I glance around, taking it all in.

  Church, houses, something that looks like it used to be a bank.

  I think I even see an old police station, and inside some rusted iron bars.

  This isn’t some ramshackle settlement, but a proper town.

  The crazy part is it’s not on any damn maps I’ve seen.

  How’s an entire ghost town just sitting here, and nobody knows about it?

  Back when I was a kid in the elementary school, they’d always tell us these old Wild West stories to keep us entertained.

  Some crazy shit about bandits roaming the hills, full of half-truths. A name comes back to me, my seventh grade history teacher writing it on the board.

  Ursa.

  No one ever said where Ursa was.

  Never saw it on a map.

  This seems like it could be a good candidate, right in the middle of these tapped-out mining spots.

  It’s a perfect road through the cut for some outlaw screamers to come ripping out, howling like banshees and riding hard for Heart’s Edge to raise hell.

  Makes sense, too.

  With the mountains and the road running through, there are only two narrow ways in and out, it’s an easy place to defend.

  Any white hat sheriff coming up here to take those boys out, they’d mow down that cop and every last one of his boys two at a time as they squeezed through the cut.

  The scene plays through my head so vividly I can see it like I’m standing under the dusty sun watching it happen, six-shooters everywhere and bandits milling around.

  Let’s not get ahead of ourselves, I tell myself. But hell, this might be it.

  If I can find anything that actually proves this town is Ursa and the home of those legendary gunslingers...

  We’ve got this cat in the bag.

  We could save Libby’s ranch.

  I flick out my flashlight again, making my way slowly through the streets.

  Best place to start looking, I think, would be that big building right in the middle, with a hitching post—a real honest-to-God hitching post—out front and swinging double doors that are still on their hinges.

  The construction man in me can’t help but admire it.

  Whoever put this place together did a beast of a job.

  It’s got to be well over a hundred years old.

  The big building looks like a saloon.

  If it’s like any Wild West town I’ve ever heard of, it’d be the busiest place—and the most likely to leave behind some evidence.

  I carefully push the swinging doors open.

  I don’t want to disturb anything, accidentally break or muck up anything that might contribute to this being considered a historical site.

  My flashlight sweeps over rows of dusty, empty bottles with their labels long worn off.

  They’re lined up on shelves behind a bar that’s mostly just a bunch of flat planks bolted to a long table, but it confirms my guess. It’s a saloon.

  Round ramshackle tables and chairs are scattered everywhere.

  There’s an upper level with stairs leading up to a railing. I can almost see pretty painted ladies leaning over with their bodices half-buttoned, flashing hankies and whistling boys upstairs.

  As I sweep that flashlight over the bar again, I get the living shit scared right out of me.

  There’s someone there.

  Sitting at the bar.

  “Fuck!” I gasp, stumbling back with my heart zinging around my chest like it’s on a zipline, fingers clenched around the flashlight.

  For a second, my head fills up with flashes of haunted saloons and old cowboys stalking through the room.

  A chill sweeps down my spine.

  But I take a wary step closer, holding the flashlight steady.

  Whoever it is, they’re not moving.

  My stomach fucking sinks.

  I’ve found some evidence, all right.

  Just not the kind I’m looking for.

  Because I think this might be evidence of a fucking murder, and it’s got nothing to do with Wild West bandits at all.

  There’s a skeleton slouched in one of the saloon chairs with its h
ead propped up against the wall, held together by raggedy bits of skin and clothing gone dusty and frayed. Looks like he’s been here a while, undisturbed by predators or people...but not that long.

  There’s still hair clinging to the corpse’s leathery scalp.

  I’m no expert on old-timey clothes, but I’m pretty sure that mottled suit holding him together is fairly modern, no more than twenty or thirty years old.

  And Rolex damn sure didn’t make ’em like the watch hanging on his wrist a hundred years ago.

  That watch is one of the things that’s extra weird about this.

  I flick the flashlight over the scene, barely even daring to breathe.

  The old blood stains on his chest, his shirt are obvious—shot right in the heart.

  Spent shell casing on the floor, looks like from a shotgun.

  But he’s still got his watch.

  His very expensive-looking watch.

  Gold cufflinks, too.

  Also, a briefcase, dropped on the floor, resting against the leg of the tall chair like it fell from his hand when he died and went limp.

  So this wasn’t some kind of back country mugging gone wrong.

  Somebody killed him, left his valuables, and ran.

  There’s got to be a story here, but I’m not sure it’s one I should be privy to.

  I’m not sure I should be here at all.

  For now, I’m just glad I have gloves on, and I want to get the fuck out of here at lightning speed.

  Still, I hesitate, then lean over and snatch the briefcase without getting any closer to the corpse than I have to.

  That chill hits me again as my hand brushes too close to his skeletal fingers.

  Then I back up, one step at a time, careful not to bump into anything else, before I turn and clatter down the steps of the saloon’s front walk.

  I take off at a jog for the trail with that briefcase dangling from my hand.

  It’s past time to go.

  Fuck, if this is why Libby’s been trying to keep me away from here, I’ve got a few questions.

  And I’m gonna be asking, whether or not she owes me any answers.

  7

  All Opposed, Say “Neigh” (Libby)

  One thing about running a ranch is that you almost never get a full night’s sleep.