Page 78 of Song Bird Hearts

Wolf’s voice doesn’t rise. It doesn’t have to. The words are a blade sharpened by loyalty, by obsession, by something that evolved beyond infatuation. We’ve bled for each other, and we’ll bleed again.

“Very well,” the man says, turning his attention back to me. “Here’s my offer. You, Valerie Decatur are off-limits. Steele, Wyoming is sovereign. That’s the agreement. For now.”

“What’s the catch?” I ask.

“You keep your fire contained to this soil. Step beyond, and we’ll be waiting.”

“I won’t promise that. I won’t be placed in a cage when I have wings.” My words are angry, but they’re also defiant. I won’t be making any deals with this man, even if he thinks this is a deal in the making.

He smiles. “That’s the offer. Do with it what you will. Once you step outside of this basin, everything is fair game.”

“So you’ll be watching me?”

He chuckles softly. “We always have. We’ll be watching even closer now.” He tips his chin to me. “Have a good night, Ms. Decatur.”

He turns and walks back toward the line of SUVs without another word. He doesn’t bark orders. He doesn’t signal retreat. But it seems like that’s the instructions anyway. We all watch him walk away and I have half a mind to shoot him in the back, but doing so would accomplish nothing. He may be a higher up in the Foundation, but there’s no one way to stamp them out. If I killed him, he’d just be replaced by another, like a hydra regrowing its heads. Toppling an organization like the 27 Foundation takes time and commitment, both of which we haven’t had much ability to utilize yet in the middle of survival.

So even though it’s tempting to tell everyone to leave them with one last impression of us, I don’t. I just watch him walk away, get in his mockingly white SUV, and lead all the black SUVs away. They disappear into the dark like shadows melting back into the sky, but that white one stands out all the way out to the main road, until it turns a corner and we can’t see it anymore.

The silence that follows isn’t peaceful. It’s heavy, loaded, like a warning. I stand in the quiet, my pulse loud in my ears, almost drowning out the ringing. My arm is throbbing. My lip stings. My head is threatening to split wide open with the headache pushing at my forehead.

“That’s it?” I say, half to myself, half to everyone else.

“It’s not a win,” Wolf reminds me. “It’s a temporary ceasefire.”

Gilden comes up behind me, resting a dirt-smeared hand on my shoulder. “Then we build something better in the pause.”

Knox shakes his head, his eyes watching the road, his muscles tight. “I don’t trust them. We just painted a target on Steele,” he says. “This was only round one.”

I turn my eyes up to the bronze bull rider again, forever suspended mid-flight. I don’t pretend to know anything about the Savage legacy, but I can’t help but think the statue represents something more than just freedom.

It’s defiance.

“Then we get stronger,” I say. “Smarter. We survive at all costs. That’s what we do.”

Somewhere inside, something new flickers. A resolve that hasn’t been forged with fame, but in blood. We will not be threatened. We will not have our wings clipped.

And I, Valerie Decatur, will not be caged. . .

Chapter38

Valerie

The city of Steele is bruised, but not broken.

The sidewalks are littered with crushed signs and debris, but someone has already swept the blood off the steps of the courthouse. White Stag Pastures has taken in more bodies than I can count—people with no homes to return to, journalists who never expected to become part of the story, fighters with trembling hands still stained red. The Big Ranch Inn had been damaged in the fight, so all the big thirteen ranches have opened their doors to those who need it. I heard even Udder Nonsense opened their doors, a rarity for the dairy farm. Steele comes together, like it always does.

I stand on the porch of White Stag in borrowed flannel, watching a windblown copy of the Steele Gazette flutter in the wind. My face is on the front page of it, just beneath the headline.

COUNTRY MUSIC, CONSPIRACY, AND THE WOMAN WHO LIT THE FUSE

Below those words is a photo of me in the middle of the streets of Steele, blood streaking down my arm, my mouth open in defiance mid-livestream. I don’t even recognize myself in the image. I don’t even know when it was taken. There’d been so much stuff happening, I didn’t even realize Indie had been snapping pictures in the midst of chaos.

Inside, the radio hums. One of the local stations now loops my songs between bursts of updates. My voice has been playing nonstop since the livestream ended. Even national outlets are running the story despite the danger. It’s too big of a deal not to report on at this point, especially when the rumors are going viral on social media. Everyone has something to say about the girl with a guitar who took on the empire and lived to tell the tale.

There are murals now. It’s been only three days and there are whole ass murals of my face around the country. The fan art that’s come across my feed has both blown me away and grounded me. A girl with a tattoo of my signature already inked across her collarbone had sobbed in my arms outside of Ugly Mugz early this morning.

“You made me feel brave,” the girl had whispered.

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