Page 137 of The Mountain Echoes

“What happened?” Maverick asks.

I can’t think. My head is pounding. Not a migraine. Grief. Is Longhorn worth all these lives? Earl’s? Papa’s? Mine?

“The bolts on the jack. They’d been loosened. And no one checked them because they’d already been checked,” Tomas tells him. He’s crying. Earl was his mentor, his teacher, and his father when he’d had no one.

I see Maverick hug Tomas as he crumbles.

Nadine and Vera stand together, crying. I watch them with my heart so heavy that I’m going to collapse under its weight. They take Tomas into their fold.

Maverick reaches for me. I let him hold me anyway because I’m shaking too hard to stand. His arms wraparound me tight and solid, his voice whispering something low that I can’t quite hear over the pounding in my skull.

I don’t know how long we stay like that, wrapped in grief and failure and the unbearable weight of loss.

But I do know this.

Whoever did this didn’t just sabotage a sale. They took something from me.

I’m just about to let go of Maverick and salvage?—

I don’t hear the explosion.

I feel it.

It hits like a thunderclap from the inside out—first a vibration in the ground, a dull roar in the chest, then the world lurches sideways. A bloom of orange and black lights up the pre-dawn sky, and the barn—our old red-sided, weather-beaten barn—rips open like paper, wood, flames, and shrapnel flying into the air like shattering bones.

The shockwave knocks us both flat. I scream. My ears are ringing. Smoke is already crawling along the field like a hungry thing.

“Maverick!” I cry, gasping, coughing. “The animals?—”

“They’re out!” he yells back, dragging me to my feet. “Earl moved them all to the south pasture last night, remember?”

He did.Oh, God.

I stare in horror as the barn that housed generations of equipment, saddles, feed, and history collapses inward, beams folding in on themselves, flames devouringeverything. The heat stings my cheeks. I smell burning hay, diesel, rubber, something sharp, and chemical.

“Aria! There’s someone in there!” Tomas shouts in horror.

I whip toward his voice. “What?!”

He’s pointing toward the side of the barn, by the back entrance. The door is blown off, the hinges warped, the frame split down the middle like it was punched from inside.

Maverick bolts.

I follow.

The smoke stings my eyes as we skid around what’s left of the entrance, the edges still glowing. Maverick stops short.

I do, too.

There, half-buried under debris, is a man.

A familiar one.

Hudson.

His hand is charred, twisted around a blackened device still partially intact—some kind of makeshift ignition switch. His chest is unmoving. His mouth is slack.

He’s dead. I know it. I’m sure of it.