She dropped the camera and grabbed the revolver, for all the good that would do. If she fired a round now, they’d know exactly where she was.

All she could think was that this couldn’t be happening. She was on her own property, for shit’s sake. Right now, though, she wondered if she’d make it out of the valley alive.

One of the men let out a whooping cry.

Gunfire rained over her. Shot after shot. Puffs of dirt exploded off the canyon walls. She ducked, holding her torso flush against Lincoln’s mane. Time to take the chance and run. The idea scared her out of her mind, but she had to get Lincoln out of the line of fire. She had to save them both.

She stuffed the revolver in her waistband and gripped the reins with both hands. A bullet whizzed into the smoke tree, cracking a limb and sending splinters flying at Lincoln and Rachel.

Lincoln reared all the way up, his hooves clawing the air. Even over her muffled hearing, she registered his shriek of pain. Another shot sounded, too fast for Rachel to react, and Lincoln fell sideways. She vaulted from the saddle and face-planted in the sand.

The gunfire stopped.

A searing pain spread from her upper arm into her shoulder, but she didn’t have time to wonder about it. She scrambled to her knees, spitting sand, and scanned the mesa for the shooters. They’d left the edge and were standing at their truck, leaning against the side of the bed, cool as could be. Two of them were laughing. Another was reloading his rifle’s clip. The lanky, dark-haired man took a match to the glass pipe hanging from his lips. He took a couple puffs and passed it on.

Assured that she wasn’t in immediate danger, she dropped to her knees. Lincoln lay on his side, his front legs pawing the ground. His breath came in shallow gasps. A bullet had pierced his chest. His hair was stained a slick, shiny red.

“No, no, no,” she breathed, smoothing her hands over his neck and cheek. Her mind whirred so loud it felt like a silent scream on the inside of her skull. “Oh, Lincoln, what have they done to you?”

His saucer eyes watched her check his limbs for other injuries. His left hind leg jutted from under his body at an odd angle. Broken. The moment was too unreal to process. Her horse, her best friend, lay before her, dying.

A dry, angry sob broke free from her throat.

She’d put animals down before—it came with the job—but never her own steed. Never a friend. But she couldn’t let him suffer, and no matter how the next few minutes unfolded, Lincoln had no hope for survival. Not here, tucked into a deep canyon, miles away from anything, bleeding from the chest, and with a broken leg.

She pressed her forehead to Lincoln’s cheek and cried. Wails of longing and pain. Sounds so tortured, they shocked even her. Then Lincoln made a noise that reminded her that whatever misery she felt, his pain was worse by far.

Sniffing, she rose to her knees. Her spine was weak, barely able to hold her body upright. A glance at the mesa told her the men hadn’t left. They were all taking hits of the pipe now. Even so, they kept their rifles close at hand, either slung across their shoulders or tucked under their arms.

Her focus returned to Lincoln. At the sight of his prone body and pained expression, her face crumpled into another silent sob as she prepared to do the unthinkable. The men on the mesa would hear her shot. Odds were they’d open fire at her again, but it was a risk she’d willingly assume. Lincoln had suffered too much already.

With her hands shaking so hard the cylinder rattled against the gun frame, she brought the revolver to Lincoln’s ear. Bile rose in her throat. She pushed her tongue to the back of her mouth like a cork and locked her jaw closed. Then she pulled the trigger and let the recoil push her. The gun fell away as she heaved the contents of her stomach into the sand.

Another explosion of gunfire sounded from the mesa, but the only sound in Rachel’s head was a howl of unconditional rage. It burned in her chest worse than the ulcer, worse than grief. How dare some group of young punks trespass on her property, defile her land, and shoot her horse? How dare they laugh and smoke dope like they weren’t the cause of one of the worst moments of Rachel’s life? Standing on a mesa in plain view like they were above retribution. They didn’t care that somewhere in the valley, someone with a gun was seeing red. Maybe they planned to kill her too. Maybe they’d go after her sisters next.

The edges of her vision dimmed as a spike of adrenaline sent her up to her knees.

She pushed against the ground with her hands. A slice of pain rocketed from her left arm, straight to her spine, but she was hard-pressed to care. Whatever the damage, her arm was still functional, which was all that mattered.

With her gaze averted from Lincoln’s face, she reached for her saddlebag. Into her pocket, she stuffed a handful of rounds. Next out of the bag was her cell phone. She got service in this valley, but it was sketchy at best. Nevertheless, she got a dial tone this time, and punched Vaughn’s number from memory, having deleted it from the phone’s address book more than a year ago. He picked up on the second ring.

“Rachel?”

She flinched at the sound of her name on his lips. That was a whole other kind of pain she didn’t have time for now.

“I’m about to kill some men, Vaughn. You better get to Parillas Valley fast, and bring an ambulance.”

* * *

Vaughn’s heart had dropped to his knees when he saw the number of the incoming call. Rachel. This marked the first time he’d seen her number on his phone in sixteen months and twelve days. They’d crashed into each other’s worlds since then, but it was never planned, and never involved much talking.

He answered with his eyes closed, his mind racing to come up with a possible reason for her call, but he couldn’t think of a single one.

The sound of her voice stripped him raw. Hell, everything about Rachel stripped him raw, but this was different. Something was seriously wrong, and it wasn’t only her gravely spoken words that told the story. He heard the agony and fury in her tone, but despite all that, he refused to believe she’d kill anyone. She wasn’t made like that.

Still, he radioed for an ambulance and called Wesley Stratis off his patrol to follow him over the twisted dirt road that dipped near the now-dry Catcher Creek before disappearing into the rolling hills and canyons of Sorentino Farm.

He knew these roads better than he’d ever admit aloud. Parillas Valley in particular was scarred into his consciousness. So much so that the land came to him in dreams, the canyons sculpted by flash floods in the spring, the sheer vertical face of the mesa exploding from the valley, the single shade tree at the base of the mesa.

His eyes flashed to his glove compartment, but instead of reaching for the cigarettes he craved, he wrung the steering wheel and shoved the gas pedal to the floor. Behind him, Stratis’s patrol car and the ambulance worked to stay close, kicking up enough dust to block the sky from sight in his rearview mirror.

Rachel hadn’t ended the call, so Vaughn set his phone on speaker and tossed it on the passenger seat, but he heard nothing except faint rumbles that could’ve been anything from a car starting to a low-flying airplane. Then, for the last twenty minutes it took to make the drive deep into the heart of the desert, miles from any vestiges of civilization, the phone was completely silent.

The first thing he saw when he made a left turn around a foothill that opened into Parillas Valley was the body of a man laying facedown in the dirt. He muttered a curse and scanned the desolate countryside for Rachel. He didn’t see her, but identified a second man sitting against the mesa, using the wall of dirt as a backrest.

“Where are you, Rachel?” He ducked his head, squinting into the glare of the sun on his windshield.

At last he spotted her under the shade tree, approximately ten yards from the body in the dirt. She was upright, which most likely meant she was alive, but he couldn’t tell if she was injured. All he knew was, she didn’t rise or move in any obvious way, despite his convoy’s dusty, noisy approach. That alone would’ve been enough to scare him shitless if he hadn’t been at that breaking point already.

He picked up his radio and requested a second ambulance, then called Deputy Reyes to meet them at the scene.

What he needed to do was lapse into cop mode, to get into that zone of calm detachment that allowed him to do his job right and keep himself, his deputy, and the paramedics safe. He needed to unplug the wire that connected his brain to his heart. But this was Rachel he was dealing with, and he’d already proven over and over that with her, such a disconnect was impossible.

Still, the cop inside him never completely turned off. The minute he hit the brakes, he drew his firearm. He stood behind his open car door, assessing, as the odor of gunpowder smacked him in the face. Whatever happened here hadn’t been fast or clean. Whatever happened had been warfare.

He scanned the surroundings for danger—the glint of metal from a concealed firearm, a lurking perpetrator, any reason he or his crew shouldn’t rush forward to aid the victims. Today, though, the only firearm at the scene that he could see besides his and his deputy’s belonged to Rachel.

She stared straight ahead without acknowledging him, her arms wrapped around her knees, her right hand curled around a revolver. Her hair was a disheveled mess, her face a smear of browns. Tears snaked a path down her cheeks through the grime. Blood soaked her left shirt sleeve and chest.