Archive of Our Own

The rotor blades were beating the air when Rip pushed off the truck and straightened, turning toward the driver’s door as the bone-deep vibration rattled in his chest. The downdraft shoved at him, drove the smell of fuel and copper into the back of his throat, and flattened the grass across Hemmett’s pasture on Highway 89 while the chopper lifted, red and white against the ridgeline.

He climbed in and turned over the engine, not waiting for the rotors to fade in a sky streaked pink and blue. What was the point of standing there? There was nothing else to do for Mr. Dutton now. The medics had him. The hospital. People who could look at a man gutshot and Swiss-cheesed by automatic fire and know which bleeder to clamp, how to keep a heart pumping when it was slowing down for good.

All Rip had was a steering wheel and a gas pedal under his boot. That was it. No way to stop the bleeding or keep John’s eyes open. Not a goddamn thing to do except drive a hundred miles an hour and scream at him not to die, then drop to begging when screaming wasn’t enough.

John’s blood was tacky across his hands, dark in the creases between his fingers, soaked into the denim where he’d knelt in the gravel and gone stiff across his shirt. He could still feel the slick warmth of it, the way his grip had slipped on John’s ribs when he tried to lift him into the truck.

Pulling onto the highway, Rip white-knuckled the wheel.

He’d put down horses with less damage than what those bullets had done to the man who took him in. Anything that couldn’t get back on its feet got one clean shot delivered with a hand steady enough to end it quick. That was mercy, whether the animal understood it or not. There had been no such mercy on that stretch of empty road, only gunfire and gravel and John Dutton bleeding into the dirt while the ravens waited their turn.

The phone was already flipped open in his hand, Beth’s name lit on the screen.

It rang. Once. Twice. Three times. Four.

“Damn it, Beth.”

He pressed the gas harder as it hit the fifth ring. The engine opened up beneath him, the truck eating pavement, and then her voice finally cut in, flat and impersonal, asking him to leave a message.

A fucking message.

Just answer the phone, he wanted to say. Tell me you can’t talk because you’re too busy ruining some asshole’s day. He didn’t bother. What did a voicemail accomplish except prove no one was there to pick up? All he needed was to know she was safe, that she was somewhere, anywhere, and not—

He redialed before the thought could finish itself, but the result was the same. The thin, electronic pulse looped on and on into nothing while the highway blurred past.

The third try went straight to voicemail.

God-fucking-damnit.

Maybe her phone died. Maybe she was driving back from Bozeman with the charger sitting useless in her glove box. Or maybe she was already at the ranch, in their cabin, feet up on the coffee table with a glass of whiskey and one of those doorstop novels she tore through. Maybe she was fine and he was losing his mind for no goddamn reason except that John had just been shot to pieces in broad daylight and nothing about that was chance.

Maybes got people killed, and he wasn’t doing that with Beth.

Lloyd picked up on the second ring.

“Rip. Where the hell are you?”

“South of Livingston.” He had to clear his throat. “Beth there?”

“What? No. Listen, we had—”

“Is Beth at the ranch, Lloyd?”

“No. Her car ain’t here.”

“You seen her today?”

“Not since this mornin’.”

Rip reached for the turn signal and hit the wipers instead. The blades scraped once across dry glass. A curse slipped out as he shut them off.

“You sure?”

“Yeah. I’m sure. Rip, what’s with all this? What’s goin’ on?”

The highway kept coming at him, white lines disappearing under the hood one after another. “John’s been shot.”

“Jesus Christ. How bad?”

“Bad enough they flew him out. He made it to the chopper breathin’, but I don’t know if—”

“Rip.” Lloyd let that hang a second. “We had shooters here.”

The truck drifted right without warning, gravel chewing at the undercarriage until the wheel jerked in his hands and the tires caught asphalt again.

“How many.”

“Seven we put down. Four in the grass, two by the barn, strung one up while he was still kickin’. Could be more we missed.”

“Where’d they hit?”

“Split up soon as they cleared the south pasture. One went for the house—Monica and Tate were inside.”

“They all right?”

“They’re fine. Kid put the guy down himself. Grabbed the side-by-side shotgun from the mudroom and blew him halfway across the kitchen.”

“Jesus.”

“Monica got him to the bunkhouse after. They’re both shook up, but they’re all right. Others came in on the bunkhouse same time. Ethan caught one in the gut. Couple more banged up, nothin’ that won’t heal.”

“When.”

“’Bout an hour ago. Maybe less.”

“Fuck.” The speedometer dropped ten miles without him meaning to. “…Fuck.”

“Forty years on this ranch, boss,” Lloyd said, “I ain’t never seen nothin’ like it.”

“Beth ain’t there.”

“No. I told you, her car—”

“She’s not answerin’ her phone, Lloyd.”

He didn’t say anything, which could only mean he was doing the same math Rip was.

It wasn’t hard math. John, the ranch, Beth’s phone ringing out into nothing. That wasn’t bad luck stacking up and it sure as hell wasn’t some single desperate play against the brand. No. That was a plan. Someone had reached for every Dutton they could get their hands on and pulled the trigger at the same fucking time. Not just John. All of them. And Beth was in Bozeman, alone in a brick office building with too many doors and windows, too many ways in and out for men who had already proved they knew exactly where and how to strike, while he’d been standing in a pasture on Highway 89 with her father’s blood going dry and dark in the lines of his hands.

The road was too empty. There was too much space between him and her.

Rip put the gas through the floor and let the engine howl, let it climb and shake through the cab because he needed it loud. He needed it louder than the sum he’d already added up twice and didn’t want to add up a third.

Nothing was happening to Beth. Not when there was a ring in his pocket he’d dug out of his mother’s grave that morning and a life he hadn’t given her yet. If somebody had laid a hand on Beth, if somebody had even tried, there wasn’t a draw or a coulee in this state deep enough to keep him from them.

“I’m headin’ to Bozeman,” he said. “You hold the ranch.”

“Copy that.”

The line went dead.

Rip smelled it before he saw it.

Not the blast itself but what followed, the acrid bite of burnt plastic and crushed brick that cut through the smoke and sat raw at the back of his throat. It slipped through the vents as he took the last corner, thick enough that he didn’t need to crack the window an inch.

His foot went to the brake, harder than he meant, and the truck shuddered to a stop in the middle of the street.

The Schwartz & Meyer sign was gone. So was the black directory panel bolted beside the entrance. But the bakery was still to the left, the insurance office still to the right, and he read the numbers on the glass doors once and then again because they had to be wrong. It had to be the wrong block.

It wasn’t.

Red strobes rolled across the storefront windows and turned the brick in and out of color. A fire engine sat crooked through the intersection, hoses dragged out across the pavement. Patrol cars sealed the far end. An ambulance idled at the curb with its rear doors open.

Where Beth’s office used to be there was only a blackened hole, the space behind it gutted and scorched, smoke still crawling out of the wreckage. The sidewalk below was buried under everything that had been part of it and wasn’t anymore. Windows, walls, chunks of concrete, all of it blown outward onto the hoods of three cars piled into each other in the intersection, onto people who’d just been walking by and were now sitting on the curb bleeding and coated in a fine gray dust.

Every face was wrong. Too young. Too old. Dark hair. Brown eyes. None of them sat the way Beth would have.

None of them were her.

He was already at the barricade tape when a young cop he didn’t know stepped in front of him.

“Sir—”

“There was a woman in that office.” Rip pointed at the blown-out brick. “Did she get out?”

“Sir, step away from the tape. The structure’s not stable.”

“I’m not asking about the fucking building. I’m askin’ if she got out.”

“We’re triaging at the end of the street. Ask there.”

As if that meant anything. If Beth were still on this street, he would’ve known it. Burned, bleeding, half-deaf, it wouldn’t matter. She did not disappear into other people’s suffering. She bent it around herself.

She wasn’t at the end of the street. She wasn’t anywhere he could see.

“I’m not leavin’ till I find her.”

The cop squared up. “I’m not saying it again. Move.”

“Let me through.”

“I can’t do that.”

Moving left, he tried to pass anyway, boots crunching on pulverized glass, but the man moved with him and put a hand flat to his chest. Rip looked down at it.

“Get your hand off me.”

“Don’t make this any more difficult than it needs to be.” 

“You don’t understand. That’s my…”

The word died there.

What was she, exactly, that a stranger on a Bozeman street would understand?

Fiancée? It was too small and too new. It didn’t come close to Beth Dutton, to half his life with her, to what they’d been before that, which had never had a name and never needed one. It didn’t come close to a man who’d already handed over every tomorrow he had.

None of that fit in a sentence, and the cop was still watching him, and the building was still smoking, and he had nothing.

He ducked under the tape.

“Sir!”

Five steps, maybe six, before the cop caught his arm. Another came in from the left, and then there were two of them, hands on him, dragging him back. Rip didn’t go easy, but he wasn’t going anywhere either. The smoke caught in the back of his throat and tore a cough out of him, eyes watering, and through the blur he could see how far away the entrance was, how much of the upper floor just wasn’t there anymore.

“Calm down. Don’t make us cuff you.”

He could’ve dropped them both. Been through that door before either one found their feet.

But he didn’t.

A squad car. That’s where this ends if you don’t stop.

Rip stopped pulling.

That was it—a strip of yellow plastic and strangers’ hands and not a goddamn thing he could do about either one. There were no scumbags to kill this time. No glass wall to break. No bullets to take or door to kick in, no road in the world that could’ve gotten him there in time. He was the man who showed up, and he was late. Too late. Whatever had happened to Beth had already happened, and he was pushed back to the wrong side of the tape with that burnt, chemical taste still in his throat and the place he’d come for already blown open.

Was she at her desk when it went off?

The thought arrived flat and terrible and he couldn’t move it.

Had she seen it in time to know what it was? Had she touched it? Turned to call somebody over? Gotten halfway out of her chair before the whole room blew to hell?

Or had she been at the window when it happened—

A male voice cut in close behind him. One of the cops responded, and the grip on his arms loosened as someone stepped into his personal space.

“Are you okay?” he asked. “Are you hurt?”

Rip blinked, dragged back into it. The man’s eyes were on his hands. The blood.

John’s blood.

“I ain’t hurt.”

“Sir, I need you to hold still a second.”

Vest. Gloves. A paramedic. They thought he’d been in it.

“I said I’m fine.”

“That’s a lot of blood.”

“Then quit starin’ at it.” Rip shook him off. “There was a woman up there.”

“Was she with you?”

“No.”

“Sir, if you were near the blast, I need to check you over.”

“I wasn’t near the blast. Nowhere fuckin’ near it. That’s the whole problem, ain’t it? So tell me. Was there a woman in that office or not?”

The paramedic stopped reaching for him. Read him right, finally.

“We have one confirmed fatality. Female.”

The ground went out from under him for a second, just an inch, just enough.

There was a question in his mouth he didn’t have the guts to ask. Because there were only two answers to it, and only one of them was something he knew how to come back from. Because Beth was the one thing in his life he hadn’t had to survive. Everything else, his mother, his father, the things he’d done and the things that had been done to him, all of it, he’d gotten through by being harder and bigger than whatever was coming at him. But there was no version of hard that got you through losing the person you’d loved since you were fifteen years old. No callus thick enough. No part of him built to take that and keep standing. He knew that the way he knew very few things, cleanly and without doubt, and so he stood there unable to ask who, because he was not built for a world that didn’t have her furious and alive somewhere in it.

Then the paramedic spoke again. “Another woman made it out. On her own feet. Asked somebody for a cigarette right there.” He pointed at the curb. “They took her to Bozeman Health maybe forty minutes ago.”

Rip didn’t move right away. “How bad was she?”

“Bad. Burns, cuts, but she was conscious.”

Conscious. Asking for a cigarette with half the building gone behind her, burned and bleeding and still stubborn enough to want one.

That was her. It had to be.

The thought didn’t settle easy, but it held, and once it did there was nothing left to stand there for.

Rip didn’t thank him. He turned and went, already heading for the truck, because if she was breathing and at Bozeman Health, that was the only place in the world he needed to be.

He killed the engine and stepped out, leaving his hat on the seat.

The sliding doors at Bozeman Health were stuck in a loop, shucking open and shut. Inside, the waiting room was packed wall to wall. Some people still had dust in their hair and gauze taped over cuts from the blast downtown; others looked like they’d come in on the usual bad draw. A drunk had the window chairs to himself. A kid in a fast food uniform was trying to keep his palm from leaking on the floor through a dish towel. Next to him, an old man sat with a plastic bag of pill bottles in his lap, folded in on himself like he wasn’t getting back up anytime soon. Staff pushed through it all with clipboards, while the overhead lights buzzed and made every face look the same kind of tired.

At the front desk sat a woman in her fifties who looked like she’d said the same thing sixty times in the last hour and wouldn’t mind saying it sixty more. 

Rip stepped up to her. 

“Beth Dutton,” he said.

The woman held up a finger, eyes still on her screen as she finished a thought with clicks and taps. When she finally looked up, she didn’t make it past his hands on the desk.

Her mouth opened.

“Blood’s not mine.” He cut her off before she could go there.

“I need to get someone—”

“Don’t.” Rip kept it level, but he was white-knuckling the tether on his own goddamn sanity. Nobody in this sterile place needed a play-by-play of his entire fucking day. “I’m lookin’ for Beth Dutton. She came in from the blast on Main. An hour ago. Maybe less.”

She took him in: the blood, the strain, all six feet of barely-leashed stillness. Then went back to business. “Are you family?”

“Yeah.”

“Can I see some ID?”

He had forty crumpled dollars, his phone, his truck keys, and a ring.

“I don’t— I don’t have it on me,” he said.

Which was close enough to the truth. Out here, he was nobody. He had nothing. Just a brand gouged into his chest—skin raised and wrong where the fire had been—a life traded for a place to belong. There was no license, no card, nothing with his name on it that could withstand scrutiny. There was no record that said he’d ever drawn breath past the Yellowstone fence line.

Nothing at all.

The woman’s fingers moved rapidly over the keyboard. Every tap pinned him in place while Beth was somewhere back there without him.

“Name?”

“Rip Wheeler.”

Braced against the laminate edge, he leaned in until he felt the dried blood crack across his knuckles. If he put enough weight to snap the desk in half, maybe he could physically shove his way into the answer he needed.

Then came the pause.

He hated that fucking pause. It was a vacuum, sucking the air out of his lungs, proving that no matter how hard he pushed, his desperation would be of no use here.

“I’m not seeing you listed as next of kin,” she said. “Are you a sibling?”

“No.”

“Husband?”

The word hit like a deadbolt sliding home.

“We’re engaged.”

The frantic rattle of the keys died as she lifted her eyes from the screen. “Sir, I can confirm we have a patient by that name. However, I can’t grant access or share any information without authorization from next of kin. Unless you’re a legal guardian or spouse, my hands are tied.”

To the state, he was a clerical error. Everywhere else, he was an almost. Almost a son. Almost family. Almost a husband. Almost enough. John Dutton had given him a bed, a wage, a purpose, everything a man could give another without signing a piece of paper, and it had never been that piece of paper that mattered, until right now.

The protocols were cruel in their binary simplicity. There was no checkbox for “hers.” No field for “devotion.” You were a husband or you weren’t, you were family or you weren’t, you were somebody or you were no one.

Almost didn’t have a field on the form.

“Ma’am.” Rip leaned in further. “I need to see her.”

“I understand that—”

“No. I don’t think you do.”

“Look—”

“She’s all I got,” he got out.

For a flickering second, the receptionist’s professional mask slipped. Then it set again, sealed over by hospital policy. “Is there someone listed we could contact?”

There was no one. John was either under a surgeon’s knife or under a sheet. Kayce was out there, likely turning his fury and rage into a body count. Jamie? Jamie’s name was not leaving his mouth.

“No.”

“If you fill this out…” The woman slid a sheet of paper across the desk. “We can flag your name, and when she’s able to authorize visitors, we’ll let you know.”

When she’s able.

“How long?”

“It depends on her condition.”

“Is she alright?”

What a fucking stupid question. Beth hadn’t caught a cold. A bomb went off in her office; people didn’t walk away from that alright. 

“I can’t share that information.”

Still, he needed something. Anything.

Rip dragged both hands through his hair. “Please.”

That did it. The rulebook could go to hell, just this once. “She’s stable,” she said, lowering her voice. “They’ve got her in treatment right now. That’s all I can tell you.”

“Can you—” He knew he was pushing it. He didn’t care.

“I’ll see what I can do.”

“I’ll be over there,” he said, sliding the completed form back before stepping away.

The corridor entrance gave him a clear line of sight to both the main doors and the hallway beyond, so that’s where he placed himself, back to the wall, arms crossed. An old habit he’d buried years ago. Or so he thought.

His hand moved to his jacket pocket until he found his mother’s ring.

Rip had been in waiting rooms before, but not like this one in front of him. This one had vending machines humming in the corner, sanitizer stations everywhere, and two flat-screens: one looping local news no one was watching, the other flashing a four-digit code that decided when you were up. The ones he remembered were smaller, in free clinics and community health centers that smelled like cigarettes despite the handwritten no smoking signs taped crookedly to the walls. And that other scent. Pine-Sol, he thought. No, not Pine-Sol. Bleach. Those places had gray plastic chairs bolted to the floor and a box TV mounted too high that nobody had bothered to fix, because fixing it wasn’t in the budget, and neither was much else.

He’d never been able to sit in those chairs either.

Back then he couldn’t have been more than twelve. Seven the first time, maybe eight. Small enough that he had to go up on his toes to reach the drinking fountain.

It was always back to the wall, eyes on the entrance, watching in case that son of a bitch found his feet long enough to burst through the double doors while some underpaid stranger in the next room decided if the bruises on his mother’s arm were from a fall. If the story about the cast-iron skillet slipping off the burner held. If the broken rib on the X-ray was new or just one of the others already on file.

They had a record on her by then. A whole paper trail of wet bathroom tiles, throw rugs, laundry baskets left like landmines on the stairs, and doorframes that seemed to jump out of the dark. The same hollow script, over and over.

Someone should’ve punctured the lie. Nobody ever did.

Now there was too much noise in his head and too much stillness in his hands, which had nothing to do except remind him what useless felt like. So Rip started moving, slow circuits between the corridor and the far wall, not pacing so much as keeping himself from coming apart at the seams.

Hospitals still did this to him, no matter how many years he’d put between himself and that version of his life. Any time he stepped inside one, something in him snapped right back to the kid who’d been scared out of his goddamn mind every single day. The same questions on the same grinding, relentless loop. Was his mother going to be okay? Was she going to make it home? Or was this the time she didn’t? He hadn’t been big enough then to do a fucking thing about any of it. He was now, and look where that had gotten Beth.

The woman at the desk had already moved on to the next person in line.

He got it. She wasn’t being cruel, just running the same play for every stranger who walked in bleeding or hysterical or both, and tonight that was half the room. Why would he be any different? There were hoops to jump through, blanks to fill, names that counted and names that didn’t, and his didn’t count for shit. From where she stood, that was the beginning and the end of it.

The ring didn’t help. If anything, it made the walls close in a little tighter, because that scrap of gold was supposed to fix exactly this. The empty field, the gutting misery of almost. Instead, because of it, he’d spent the morning on his knees in frozen dirt talking to a lifeless body like she could still hear him, hoping his mother would find some way to know the woman he loved from wherever the hell she’d ended up. Sentimental bullshit. All of it. While he was out there, someone walked a bomb into Beth’s office and tried to blow apart everything they hadn’t even had the chance to become yet.

He hadn’t been there.

That was what he couldn’t get past. Not the odds, not the what-ifs, not even the near certainty that staying on the ranch wouldn’t have changed anything. It was simpler than that, and far worse. He hadn’t been there. There was no reasoning with it. He had been somewhere else, doing something meant for her, and she had nearly died.

The four-digit code on the screen had rolled over six times when a nurse appeared at the far end of the hall.

“Rip Wheeler?”

Mid-stride, he stopped. “Yeah.”

“Come with me.”

As he passed the front desk, the woman didn’t look up, just kept typing like she had before. But she’d made the call. He knew it and she knew it. Earlier hadn’t been the end of the story after all.

By the time he reached the corridor, the nurse had already turned, expecting him to keep up.

“Is she conscious?” he dared to ask.

“She was sedated for the pain, but she’s awake now.” They started down the hospital corridor, her pace brisk. “She’s got burns across her back, some deeper areas, and multiple lacerations from debris. Nothing life-threatening, but it’s going to be a rough recovery.” 

She glanced at him. “She’s lucky.”

Rip said nothing to that. Lucky wasn’t the word he’d have used for any part of today.

When they reached the room, the nurse pushed the door open and stepped aside.

Beth lay on her stomach on the narrow bed, face turned to the side, eyes closed. One arm was bent, her hand resting near her cheek with an IV line set into its back, the tube passing through the pump to a half-empty bag hanging from the pole above.

Nothing covered her back but the dressings running from her shoulders down to the bunched drawstring waistband of loose hospital pants.

Rip had known, coming in. The paramedic had said burns, cuts. The nurse had filled in the rest on the way down. He figured it might take the edge off, hearing it first. It didn’t. It hit him the same as that night at the old lodge, lying in the dark with the blue light through the window and her face swollen half-shut on the pillow beside him. Back then, the cold had paralyzed his chest and swallowed the burn of the bullet wounds whole. There were two kinds of pain. He knew which one cost more.

Another nurse stood on the far side of the bed, pressing lightly along the edges of the gauze tape, checking that each pad was still secure. A faint shadow of pink showed through near one corner.

Beth’s breath caught, fingers flattening against the mattress. Then it passed and she was still again.

“The fiancée,” the nurse behind him said.

At that, Beth’s eyes opened.

He crossed the room and dropped to one knee beside the bed, close enough now to see where the dressings rose slightly with her breathing. His hand came up and stopped just short of her arm. He held it there a second, finding somewhere safe to put it, then let it settle against her elbow.

“Hey.”

It barely made it out.

“Hey.”

Her mouth moved like she meant to smile. It didn’t quite make it.

The nurse pulled the sheet up loose over Beth’s back before stepping away. “We’re done for now. I’ll have someone come back in a bit.”

Then the door swung shut, and it was just the IV ticking, the lights buzzing, and Beth.

Without lifting his hand, he pulled a chair in and sat.

Speaking felt like a physical impossibility; something had cinched tight around his throat and locked the rest of him with it. Rip searched for words and found none. Just a dull, ringing quiet.

The bruising had settled worst along her cheekbone, a deep, swollen purple where one gash had cut the deepest. At her temple it had gone darker, blue shading near black where the bone had taken the brunt of it. The rest was still spreading, violet working out through her brow and chin in uneven patches. Every mark sat wrong there. Every bit of it looked like a goddamn insult on her face.

“Twelve stitches,” she said. Slow, rough from the medication. “In case you were counting.”

“I wasn’t.”

“Liar.”

He was. He’d counted every one.

“I’m sorry,” he said.

“What are you sorry for? You didn’t send a fucking bomb package to my office.”

“I know.”

“Then what.”

“I don’t know, baby.” His thumb shifted lightly against her forearm. “I’m just sorry.”

“Don’t be.” She paused. “You should see the conference room. It’s not having a great day either.”

He laughed. It was a low, ragged sound, mostly air. His head dropped to the mattress and stayed there, forehead pressed to the stiff hospital sheet as he emptied his lungs in one long, shaky surrender. He didn’t realize he was crying until he felt it, cold at the bridge of his nose.

Beside his ear, Beth’s fingers uncurled and threaded weakly into his hair.

By the time he lifted his head, she was already reaching for him, her arm lifting off the mattress, her shoulder following a fraction too far. A wince crossed her face, despite her best effort to hide it.

“Easy,” he murmured.

Her thumb pressed against his cheek anyway, wiping away the tears.

“Baby, you look like shit,” she said. “I’m the one who was in an explosion. You got no excuse.”

The tension in his shoulders finally gave, like a fence post working loose from thawing ground. He’d spent the day as a passenger in his own body, moving on raw reflex from one wreckage to the next, and now the reality of her was catching up with him all at once.

Beth was here. Battered, bruised, and still so relentlessly, violently herself. So goddamn her that every word felt like a lifeline.

He caught her arm, eased it back to the mattress. “Yeah, well. You never did do anything halfway, honey. Couldn’t just be a scratch, could it?”

This time, a smile actually reached her eyes. It was faint, but there nonetheless.

“Don’t you ever do that again,” he added. “You hear me? I ain’t got a ‘Version B’ of this life. You’re it. That’s all there is.”

“I’ll try.”

Her head sank deeper into the pillow, her breathing slowing. Rip found himself counting between them. One… two… three… then the next one came.

“Rip?” 

“Yeah.”

“The shit they put in there… Jesus. That’s fucking good. No wonder people blow their whole lives up for it.”

That’d be the morphine. Or the fentanyl. Whatever they’d put in that line to keep the burns from eating her alive.

“Usually you gotta pay a lot of money for that. Or be in a hell of a lot of pain.”

“Check and check,” she muttered. “If I didn’t have a hole in my back, I’d call this a five-star vacation.”

“That so?”

“Mm-hmm. You know… no bullshit meetings, no land deals... no Jamie and his fucking soul-sucking face. Just you. And the drugs are top-shelf.”

“Glad you’re enjoyin’ the ride, Beth. You damn near gave me a heart attack.”

“You worry too much.”

“You make it easy.”

“Do you think I smelled like a ribeye?”

“What?” Rip blinked. “What are you talkin’ about?”

“When they brought me in. Did I smell like a ribeye? ’Cause if I smelled like some cheap barbecue, I’ll never forgive myself. That’s a low-rent way to go out. I wanna die smelling fucking expensive.”

“You’re not dyin’.”

“I know that. I’m just saying.”

Beth squinted past him at the sliver of door he didn’t block, brow furrowing as rubber soles squeaked by in the hallway.

“We should buy this hospital,” she said. “Buy the whole damn place. Then fire everyone.”

“And do what with it?”

“Turn it into a giant bar. This is a terrible use of real estate.”

Halfway through it, she lost the thread, her eyes slipping shut.

A few minutes passed.

“Rip?”

“I’m right here.”

“You’re so goddamn handsome,” she slurred, her eyes opening just a crack, unfocused and glazed. “I’m gonna keep you. Put you in a glass box so nobody else can breathe your air.”

“I’m already in the box, baby. You’ve had the key for twenty years.”

“Then prove it.”

“How?”

“Take me home.”

There was nothing he wanted more than that. To get her home, into their bed, and keep her there until she was well again.

“I can’t. Not yet. They gotta take care of you here first.”

“You do it,” she said. “I don’t want them. You take care of me.”

“I will,” he promised.

“I’m sure you’ll make a very sexy nurse, Rip Wheeler. I want you in that little white outfit. And the hat.”

He let out a laugh. “Don’t go gettin’ too crazy on me now, honey. I’d bust the seams on that thing before I got it over my leg.” 

“Then just the hat.”

“You wouldn’t last five minutes behavin’ yourself.”

“I’d still pay to see it.”

“I bet you would.”

Leaning down, he pressed a soft kiss to the inside of her wrist, lingering there just to feel the heat of her skin and the steady, slow pulse.

“Go to sleep, Beth.”

“Mm,” she began, as though she had one more thing to say, but the drugs pulled her under.

Half an hour later, the nurse came back, adjusting the pillows under Beth’s chest and checking the lines. Beth hadn’t come back up, her breathing slow and even, while the woman assured Rip that it was normal—that the ebb and flow of consciousness was just the body trying to catch up with the trauma.

When she was done and gone, he pushed up from the chair, his joints popping, and shoved the bathroom door open with his shoulder. The light flicked on automatically, harsh and white, stabbing at his eyes. Under the faucet, the water ran hot. Too hot. He let it scald. It hit his knuckles and turned red, spiraling pink in the basin before the stream finally cleared. He scrubbed once, rough, twice, until the last of the blood washed down the drain.

Rip didn’t bother with the mirror. 

Back in the room, not a hair on her head had moved. He settled into the chair and let his hand find its way back to her elbow.

The large second hand on the wall clock swept through the silence, marking the passing of another thirty minutes. Enough time to lose a man on the side of a road. Enough time for a building to come down on somebody you love. A man can live a whole life in thirty minutes. He can lose one, too.

Her eyes opened sometime after that. It took a long, heavy minute for her to focus. But when she finally did, she shifted, trying to wedge an elbow under her weight to lift herself off the mattress.

A sharp, jagged hiss cut through her teeth.

“Hey.” Rip was leaning forward before she could even try again. “Don’t move. Stay down.”

She stilled, then sank back into the pillow with a faint exhale.

“This bed’s bullshit,” she rasped.

“Not a five-star vacation anymore?”

“Amenities took a hit. And now it just—fuck—it hurts like a motherfucker. Like somebody fed me through a meat grinder.”

“You want me to get the doctor? Have ’em turn the dial up?”

“No.”

“Beth.”

“I said no.”

He frowned, his thumb hooking into his belt loop to keep from reaching for the call button. “Why the hell not?”

“Because I’m not done looking at you,” she said plainly. “So stop fussing.”

“You just said it hurts.”

“I say a lot of things. Most of them lies. When’d you last eat?”

She’d done it her whole life. Taken the thing that was killing her and handed it back as a joke, a deflection, a question about dinner.

“That’s not what we’re talkin’ about.”

“Humoring the patient is part of the job, baby. When?”

“Jesus Christ.” He huffed a quiet laugh, shaking his head. “You’re the most stubborn woman I’ve ever met.”

“Have you met many?”

“No. Not many.” He held her gaze. “None like you.”

“Good. Just sit there, Rip. Shut up and let me look at—”

The words died in her throat. Her eyes tracked from his face down to the dark, stiffening crust on the front of his shirt. She went cold all at once.

“Whose blood is that.”

How did you tell the woman you loved you’d found her father on an empty stretch of highway, shot so many times that lifting him had felt like trying to hold water? How did you tell her you still didn’t know if he was dead or alive? That you’d done everything you could, done it the best you knew how, and it still might not have been enough. How did you tell her you wished you’d been there five minutes earlier? Ten. Twenty. But you weren’t.

How the hell were you supposed to tell her that when she wasn’t even done bleeding herself?

That they’d come for her father, for her, for the ranch. Reached for every Dutton at once.

All except one.

“Rip,” she pressed.

He didn’t try to soften it. Softening things for Beth was a waste of breath on a good day, and this was about as far from a good day as someone could get. She’d see through it anyway. She always did. And whatever she didn’t see through, she’d pull out of him piece by piece until she got to the truth.

“It’s your dad’s.”

The color drained from her face so fast he could see the fear overtake the shock and the shock overtake the pain, all of it colliding at once. Then she was moving—pushing up off the mattress with her good arm, reaching across herself for the IV line.

“Beth—”

“I have to go.” Her fingers were clumsy from the medication, but she didn’t seem to care as she clawed at the tape. “I have to go to him, I have to—”

“Beth.” He caught her hand. Covered it with both of his, pressing it flat and still against the mattress. The pump was screaming. She was breathing hard through her nose, jaw locked. When she tried to pull her hand free, he held on. “Stop. Look at me.”

She did.

“I found him on the highway. Shot bad, left there. Got him in the truck and to a Care Flight on 89. He was breathing when that chopper lifted off, Beth. I swear to God he was. I wouldn’t lie to you about that.”

“I can’t just stay here.”

“There’s nowhere to go tonight that’s gonna change anything.”

“You don’t know that.”

“I know you can’t do a damn thing for him if you’re bleeding out on a hospital floor.” His voice came out rougher than he meant it to. “I know that much. So you’re gonna stay right where you are.”

“Rip—”

“Please.”

That stopped her. He didn’t say it often enough that she could ignore it when he did.

She sank back into the pillow, eyes bright with everything she was refusing to let out. The pump quieted down. The room found its breath again.

“Is Kayce with him?” she asked.

“I don’t know. I called him from the roadside. He got the bird sorted and I haven’t been able to reach him since.” He paused, the next words feeling like lead in his mouth. “They hit the ranch, too, honey. Same time.”

Her eyes went somewhere cold and calculating, the haze of the drugs burned away by the adrenaline of a daughter born for war. Her mind was working, pulling at threads, following them to their ends.

“Monica and Tate?”

“They’re alright. Both of them.”

“Was he conscious? When you found him. Did he say anything?”

“He was in and out.”

“But you talked to him.”

“Yeah. I talked to him.”

That was the part that mattered to her. That somebody had been there. That John Dutton hadn’t been alone on that stretch of road with nothing but the sound of his own breath running out.

“Thank you,” she said. “For finding him. For getting him to that chopper.”

The words landed in a strange place. He turned them over and couldn’t find a home for them, because they were pointed at the wrong thing entirely.

“I wasn’t there for you.”

“Rip—”

“I should’ve been.”

“I’m tough,” she said, quieter now. “I’ve always been tough. But he’s just a man, Rip. That’s all he’s ever been. Just a man.”

By the time the nurse came back, it was fully dark. The window had turned into a black mirror, throwing the room back at them in dull reflection. Beth hadn’t gone back to sleep. She’d refused, insisting once again she’d rather look at him. He told her she didn’t need to be in a state of agony just to do that, but she only leveled that look at him—the one that said she’d found a way to make even a hospital bed feel like a battlefield.

It tore at him to see her like this. Every flinch, every hitch in her breathing was a knife in his ribs. He would’ve traded places with her in a heartbeat, taken every burn and every stitch if it meant she could be the one sitting in the chair, but the world didn’t work like that.

So he let her look. He sat still and let her anchor herself to him. In return, the sound of her voice finished loosening the iron band that had been cinched around his chest since her voicemail picked up instead of her.

The nurse set a small tray down beside the bed and pulled on gloves. “I’m going to check these, alright? We need to make sure there’s no seepage.”

Working from the top down, she lifted the edge of each pad just enough to see beneath it.

“Scale of one to ten,” she said. “How’s the pain?”

“Eleven.” The voice was thin but steady. “But I’ve been told I’m stubborn as a mule, so call it nine.”

A soft laugh escaped her as she smoothed the gauze back into place and moved to the IV pump. “I’m going to bump this a touch. Should take the edge off.”

“Take a look at her hand,” Rip said. “She was pulling at the line earlier.”

Beth’s eyes cut to him. “Snitch.”

“Damn right.”

Once the line was secured and the pillows adjusted to take the pressure off her back and hip, the nurse stripped her gloves.

“Everything looks good. We’ll change the dressings in the morning.” She looked at Rip. “When she’s discharged in a couple of days, we’ll walk you through the aftercare. Changing the dressings at home, what to watch for.”

“You hear that?” Beth murmured. “They’re putting you to work, cowboy.”

“Gladly.”

The woman smiled, gathering her supplies. “You’ll have your hands full.”

“He always does. I’m a handful, you see. Good thing he knows what to do with them.”

The tips of his ears went warm. “Beth.”

“What? It’s a compliment.”

Rip’s hand moved into her hair, thumb grazing the line of her ear. He gave the nurse a short, final nod. “Thank you.”

She stepped away. “Try to get some rest.”

Slowly the pain subsided, and Beth started to settle. The cuts on her face had darkened, the bruising setting in everywhere, but that was normal. Expected. It would take time before she looked like herself again.

“You need to go back,” she said after a while. “Someone has to hold the place together. Eat something, too. I’m not having you starve on my behalf.”

“I’m not leaving you.”

“You are. You heard her—it’s gonna be a few days before I’m out of here and back to making your life a beautiful, exhausting misery. The ranch needs you, Rip. I don’t like to share what’s mine, but for the land, I’ll make an exception. And I need to know about my father. You’re the only pair of eyes I trust to tell me the truth.”

His need to stay with her pulled one way and his loyalty to her father and everything the man had built pulled the other. But looking at her, he realized he couldn’t give her peace by sitting in a chair. So he leaned forward, careful, and pressed a kiss to her head.

“I’ll come back soon as I know.”

“You better.”

“Do me a favor,” he added, his voice dropping. “Tell that nurse you authorize me. Properly. I don’t want another fight at the desk tomorrow. I’ve said ‘please’ more times than I care to to that woman out front.”

“They gave you a hard time?”

“Turns out not bein’ your husband and not bein’ on some shitty next-of-kin list means I don’t count for much. I’m not real fond of bein’ told where I’m allowed to stand when it comes to you.”

Beth didn’t blink. “You are my husband.”

“Is that so?”

“In every way that matters.”

“All those ways didn’t matter much today, baby.”

“I’ll make sure they don’t keep you from me again.”

“Thank you.”

He stood, starting to pull away. But Beth caught his hand.

“Rip.”

He looked back.

“I love you,” she said.

His throat tightened. “I love you too.”

He let her hand go and walked out before he could change his mind.