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“Goldie?” I called out again, scanning around me for the woman and her horse.

And my eyes rested on a lone, unmoving figure off to the side.

“The scream,” I cried out in horrified realization that the sound had not come from a startled Sundance but from her. Scrambling across the gravel that cut into my skin, my trembling fingers reached out toward the limp body face down on the ground.

Blonde hair splayed out in every frenzied direction, stained red from a major wound on her forehead—gashed by a rock she fell on. Her still duct taped wrists stretched ahead of her, and her body bent at an awkward angle. All thoughts left my mind. Dirt covered her like a cloud of anguish that was forming in my dead soul.

“No,” I muttered as my eyes rested on a part of her back that became exposed from her shirt bunching up at her armpits. Hovering my fingers over a quickly forming bruise directly in the middle of her spine, a wave of indescribable, excruciating agony roared through my bones.

“Please no,” I cried out again.

My palm gently connected with her skin, and she didn’t flinch. She didn’t move. Sirens, muffled in the distance, wailed as deeply as the pain in my heart that tore through me. Iron claws shredded my strength as I pushed her shirt up just a little further.

A welt in the perfect shape of a horse hoof stared back at me.

“Briar?” I cried out again, biting back the tears that were brimming. “Please, wake up!”

As carefully as possible, I brushed some hair from her cheek, feeling for any sort of air releasing from her nostrils.

Nothing.

“No, no. No. No, this isn’t possible!” I shook my head and gently pulled her into my lap. I knew deep down moving her could make things worse, but what was worse than her not breathing?

She wasn’t breathing.

She wasn’t moving.

And the hounds of hell broke loose. I cradled her, rocking back and forth as my soul weeped as deeply as the earth fell around me. A wail escaped my lips, so powerful, it tore the very seams that held the fabric of time together.

It wasn’t supposed to go this way. This wasn’t the penance that I knew I was supposed to pay.

Not at the expense of her.

Chapter 31

CASSIDY

Somehow, paramedics showed up just in time.

Somehow, I explained to some officers what happened.

Somehow, I ended up at the hospital.

Somehow, I sat in the most uncomfortable chair and waited.

Rooney arrived at one point.

The rest of my family came next.

But somehow, that didn’t change the fact that Briar’s condition was unstable and still unknown.

Food and water became nothing to me.

I didn’t care about anything else or what anyone else told me.

The clock ticked steadily onward yet nothing changed.

Briar’s injury from the fatal slam of Sundance’s hoof may be too much for her.