The end of summer meant cattle muster, when the stock was rounded up and brought in for routine medical treatment, branding, and either sale or send offs to winter pastures. The process was arduous, super chaotic, and nowhere near as exciting as it sounds.

But all hands on deck meant anyone who rode, did, and I couldn't exactly back out given the all-too-public display of my riding prowess.

Besides, Jake wanted me on Satan. He'd managed to get him to accept the saddle and thought it would be a good time to take him out on the field.

Might as well.

But not before I checked the saddle myself. Trust, but verify. That was the motto these days, on all fronts. Ever since my conversation with Beth, I'd been a paranoid mess.

Things with Jake were a little shakey too. Well, that's not true- we were at a standstill, floating in limbo. But this time, the onus was on me. He knew something was off, but pretended not to, which was fine with me because I wasn't sure what I wanted to do about all this yet. All I knew was whenever we were together, the only thing I could think was: Electra Beaudry. Electra Beaudry. Electra Beaudry.

Her ghost haunted me. She peered out from shaded corners, cried softly in my ear in the dark of the night and sometimes, I even dreamt of her. I was obsessed with the mysterious girl, and I didn't even know what she'd looked like. It was some really freaky shit and the whole thing was starting to turn obtrusive, an infected boil that needed to be lanced.

Only I couldn't figure out how to go about it.

At six forty five in the morning, I headed out of the house dressed in jeans, riding boots, a long sleeve shirt and baseball cap. I was already sweating through the ensemble but sunburn would be far worse.

Besides, fall was coming, bringing with it welcome winds from the plains, sweeping away the oppressive heat that had agonized us for the past months. In another few weeks, Peyton would leave, the grass would yellow, the skies would darken and I wondered if it would feel as lonely as I did in the years past.

The crew had been at it since dawn and the first of the cattle were being treated by the field vets. Bypassing them, I made my way to the old stables where Jake had left Satan for me.

At the flick of the switch, the fluorescent lights came to life, making the air vibrate with a low hum. At the same time, something crashed in Satan's stall. I squealed and jumped.

Calm down. It's just a feed bucket getting knocked over.

But just in case... "Who's there?" I called out, loud and clear.

No answer.

Duh. Rats can't talk. Or maybe Satan knocked the bucket over himself, and he can't talk either.

Or maybe it's Electra.

Stop being ridiculous. It's just a rat.

Still, a lingering doubt gnawed at my gut.

Should I go get someone? Have them come back with me? No, no one has time for your drama.

Taking a deep breath, I pushed forward, relaxing only when Satan came into view, looking as handsome as always. He even greeted me with a soft nudge that made me smile.

"Never fear, Layla is here. And she brought... apples!" I produced them from behind my back and presented them to him, one in each hand.

"Be good today, okay?" I lifted the stall door and stepped in, just in time to see a pair of boots disappearing over the side wall.

"Charlotte!"

No one else around here wore English riding boots.

By the time I'd scrambled out after her, she was nonchalantly heading toward the door, as if she didn't have a single care in the world.

"Charlotte!"

She turned with the most ridiculous expression on her face: pleasant surprise. "Oh, hi Layla! I didn't see you there."

Since the funeral, Peyton had been keeping her under lock and key, so it was jarring to see her out and about. As she stood there smiling at me, memories of Peyton's bruised and battered flesh flooded my brain. Hatred bloomed in my chest, indignant rage on his behalf surging through my veins.

"Bullshit! What were you doing in Satan's stall?"

Her composure never faltered. She just shrugged one shoulder. "Nothing."

"Don't lie to me, I saw you going over the wall."

And it was fucking athletic. Who knew?

"You stay right there," I said. If she'd hurt Satan, I'd have her drawn and quartered if it was the last thing I did. I went back into his stall. 

It didn't take me very long to figure out what she'd done. The billet straps to his saddle had been filed down, the leather sliced through and frayed.

It wouldn't have held for the day.

The anger stemming from a threat to your life was primal. The world around me warped, all my senses zeroing in on the source of the danger: Charlotte.

Powered by bloodlust, I lunged at her, blindly grabbing fistfuls of her hair. I shoved her up against the wall and shook her until her teeth rattled. And then I punched her, over and over again, for me, for Peyton, for Electra.

Just kidding.

If I had that in me, I wouldn't have found myself in this position to begin with. I was too petrified to react. This was so serious, so far beyond the scope of anything I could imagine handling that I couldn't even bear to turn around and look at her face.

And this is why everybody dumps everything on Peyton's shoulders, isn't it?

"I want to apologize. I'm sorry. Truly. I don't know what came over me, I was upset and-"  Her voice inched closer.

Mine shook as I struggled to get the words out. "Don't come near me! Please!"

She stopped.

"Charlotte," I said, my voice barely a whisper. "This could've killed me."

"I know! I know!" she cried, and by the sound of things, she'd burst into tears.

I steeled my spine, wrapped my arms around my torso and turned.

She stood about five feet from me, her face buried into her hands. And when she started to weep in earnest, her thin little shoulders hunching forward and shuddering as she gasped for breath, my heart softened for her. She looked so fragile, so breakable right then, as if she'd shatter in the blink of an eye. And when all was said and done, if she were truly sick, she deserved compassion.

But she'd just tried to kill me. So... What do I do? What do I do?

I guess I wasn't all sugar and spice and everything nice because I turned my back on her. "Whatever Charlotte, please, just go. Leave."

She hesitated. "Are you going to tell him?"

"Of course I'm gonna tell him! This is crazy! You tried to kill me!"

Her face turned purple and crumpled beyond recognition, her sobbing growing so violent that it racked her entire body with spasms. "You can't! Please, help me, Layla."

She hugged her stomach with one arm and held the other over her heart, her expression beseeching as tears streamed steadily down her face.

Peyton's words rang in my head: "Stay away from Lottie, Layla. Promise me."

She took a tiny step forward. "I don't mean to do it, but it keeps getting worse, harder to control and-"

"What, the voices?"

Oh God, Layla, for once in your life, shut the fuck up.

I thought I saw contempt flash in Charlotte's expression but it was gone before I could be certain.

Okay, Peyton, if you were ever going to ride in and save me from anything, please come save me from this. Jake? Anyone?

"Urges. I have to do it, or I can't breathe."

"Is that why you killed Electra Beaudry?"

I didn't mean to say that either, it just slipped out.

Her demeanor did an about-face, her features twisting into an expression of unconcealable disdain. The tears and the supplicant posture all vanished. "She's not dead, you fucking idiot." Agitated, she paced, back and forth, and back and forth again, looking every inch the caged panther. "Christ Layla, you're so fucking dumb it makes my brain hurt to talk to you."

Whatever, I'm not the murderous psycho here. "Then where is she?" I demanded with my newfound bravado.

"How would I know? Mexico, probably, that's where he said he was taking her."

"He who?"

She sighed heavily and rolled her eyes. "I don't know, some guy who used to work at the ranch."

I forced myself to step closer to her despite all my misgivings. I couldn't shake the feeling that maybe, just maybe, I could help. Not Charlotte, but Electra. And Beaudry. And Jake. And Peyton.

"Charlotte, what guy?"

She laughed, but it was dry and humorless. "What does it matter now? He's as good as dead. Jake made sure of that, didn't he?"

"I don't understand."

She looked down her nose at me with utter disdain and disgust. "What's there to understand? Her slut of a mother wanted her, so she took her."

"I... uh, still don't understand."

Charlotte scoffed. "What did Beaudry expect when he married a trashy showgirl from Vegas? Loyalty? Fidelity? Please. Laney Beaudry ran off with some bigwig Mexican drug lord and sent someone back for Electra."

"But... but... I thought... you..."

Her eyes were bright and shiny, her tone mocking. "Yes, yes, yes. I brought her where they'd told me to so he could take her. What's the big deal? If only every girl had a mother that cared so much about her!"

Except I didn't think that was all there was to it. The degree of Jake's violence, Peyton's penance, Beadury's never ending search, it didn't add up. But I believed it was what Charlotte truly believed.

The silence was heavy. "Why?" I asked finally.

"Because I hated having her around. Oh, you should've seen the two of them, him always trying to make her laugh, carrying her around, bringing her treats when I was his sister, his family, not her. He was supposed to love me, not her."

"But Peyton does love you. So much. How can you not see that?"

Her face turned into a mask of white hot fury. "Not like I wanted him to, not like daddy would."

My blood solidified into ice in my veins. Surely she didn't mean... And the part about her father, surely... Ravings of a lunatic, I tried to tell myself. It had to be.

She quirked an eyebrow at me as if daring me to challenge her. My knees wobbled and I had to lean against the wall to keep myself upright.

Somewhere in the deep recesses of my brain, it all started to piece together, and an overwhelming sense of mercy enveloped me.

This is why Jake is so defensive, so protective of her.

I understood it now, because I wanted to do the same for her, to shield her from further pain, patch her back together as if she were a broken doll. "Oh, Charlotte..." 

"You're the last person on earth who should be pitying anybody," she spat.

The need to fill the silence was overpowering, but my brain was mush. "He does love you though, maybe not the way you want him to, but in his own way."

What. The. Fuck. Am. I. Saying?

Quickly, I backtracked. "You're his only sister. You'll always be his first priority. Don't you see? All the things he's given up for you?"

Like me.

I blinked back tears. We could've had it all, we could've been happy, Peyton and me. I could've made him happy. I would've. Poor Peyton. 

"I'm not a threat to you Charlotte, he would never pick me over you."

"I know," she said with a smug smile. "Do you know... I told him once, a long time ago that the only way I could ever be happy was if he were dead? And he actually did it." Her face lit up and she went giddy, like a woman in love extolling her lover's devotion. "We went up to the canyons together and he jumped when told him to."

My heart stopped. I remembered that night.

"So I do know that he's loyal to me, it's not that. And I'm not threatened by you, Good God, no. All I want is for him to suffer, like I suffer. I want him to hurt. Do you see now?"

"He does hurt," I said quietly. "Every day."

She shook her head as if she were disappointed. "Look Layla, you'll never understand, you don't have the depth of character to understand. But I do apologize again for..." she waved her hand dismissively at Satan's stall. "All this. It wasn't personal, you see that now. But it won't happen again."

She glanced over my shoulder. "As a show of good faith..." She walked over to the opposite end of the barn where the back door had been bolted shut.

Bolted shut because it opened up to the path that the herd animals took when they were rounded up. It was a huge trampling risk.

Should've been, but the bolt had been cut and and latch released. Charlotte stood beside it. "The original plan was to lure you in here and back out of this door. I thought there'd be a kind of poetic justice to that, you know, slow cowpoke girl getting trampled by, well, cows. But I went with Plan B because I figured that even you couldn't be that dumb."

She slid the wood back into place and faced me, her hands clasped in front of her. "But I won't do it. So I do hope that you'll... exercise discretion."

Then, she turned on her heel and left.

I turned around too, and vomited.

***

When I stepped outside for some much needed air, the world looked different, a nasty, wicked place cloaked in a shroud of evil. The sun shined bright but all I saw were the shadows, unnamed dangers lurking for girls like me, like Charlotte, like Electra.

How vulnerable we all were.

I was the lucky one, I thought bitterly, regretting all the times I'd bitched and moaned about my situation when the truly unspeakable horrors had been happening to others.

Utterly heartbroken, I squatted down by the doors and absently plucked at a small patch of grass that grew in between the cracks in the cement.

That's how Alice found me.

"Hi, Layla."

I squinted up at her and tried to smile. "Alice? What are you doing here? I thought you were gonna get lessons from Frank."

She'd wanted to try riding, and since Beaudry and given her access to the ranch, I'd signed her up for lessons with the instructor.

"He never showed up."

"Really?" Frowning, I stood. "Let me find someone who-"

She waved her hand. "Don't worry about me. I'll just hang out and watch. This is all so very exciting." She clapped her hands in front of her and smiled, staring off into the distance.

I smiled too. Just being around this girl made me happy. Her enthusiasm for life was infectuous and she spread joy wherever she went. I hoped to god that she wasn't haboring deep dark secrets of her own.

"What are you thinking about?" I asked her, needing something to feel happy about.

"Hmmm? Nothing."

"Literally nothing or you-don't-want-to-say nothing?"

She blinked once, twice and three times. "Literally nothing."

I smiled. Sweet, but dumb as all hell.

When I told her I had to get going, she nodded and pulled a pair of giant headphones out of her bag.

"Okay, I'm just going to sit here for a while and listen to some music. Charlotte let me borrow these."

Wishing her a good time, I went back for Satan.

A/N: As always, thank you for reading and don't forget to VOTE, COMMENT & SHARE!