Page 53 of Carnival’s Playground

I pause with the prop halfway to my shoulder. "You named the damn Styrofoam tombstone?"

She steps right into my space to snatch the foam slab out of my grip. "Everybody names the tombstones, Wyatt. Gerald has survived three seasons, two severe thunderstorms, and a drunk redneck with a pocket knife. You don't treat Gerald like common trash."

"He's literally six ounces of painted foam, Avery."

She sets the slab gently into the preserve bin with an offended scowl. "He's family."

A low, rough chuckle tears out of my throat, raw and genuine. The sound of my own laugh still catches me off guard.

For ten years in the wind, I did not laugh at a goddamn thing that didn't involve whiskey or a fistfight. We keep tearing through the staging lot, moving in that seamless, unspoken rhythm we forged under fire.

She coils the high-voltage extension feeds while I strip the master manifolds off the foggers, our muscles burning with that deep, bone-crushing exhaustion that comes with the end of a long run.

I catch the slight grimace on her face when she bends to lift a heavy junction crate. "You holding together?"

"I'm fine." Her hand instantly flies to her lower back.

I drop my wrench into my tool roll. "Bullshit. Sit your ass down on that cable spool."

"I don't need to sit down, Carnival. We have three trailers left to pack."

I grab her by the waist and physically hoist her onto the heavy wooden spool. "I didn't ask for a debate, spitfire. Sit."

She mutters a string of filthy curses about overbearing bikers, but she stays put. I step between her knees, plant my boots in the dirt, and dig both calloused thumbs deep into the knotted muscle along her spine.

She lets out a long, ragged groan, her head falling back against my chest as the tension snaps loose under my hands. "Fuck. Okay. That actually helps."

I lean down to press my lips against the warm hollow beneath her ear. "Told you so."

Her fingers curl into the denim of my cut, her body melting against mine. "Don't get cocky, biker."

I think back to that first rainy afternoon by the front gates, how she looked ready to put a knife through my ribs for even glancing at her.

We’ve bled for this ground, bled for each other, and there's not a single piece of me that belongs to the open highway anymore.

EPILOGUE

CARNIVAL

Dutch trudges up an hour later, a stained metal clipboard jammed under his arm, his flannel shirt torn at the elbow, looking like he just survived a bare-knuckle brawl with twenty men. "You two look like hammered shit."

Avery leans her head against my shoulder. "We feel like hammered shit, Dutch."

"The good kind of shit, though." A faint, exhausted smile tugs at the corner of her mouth at my explanation.

Dutch shoves his reading glasses into his front pocket. "Paperwork is signed off. Sheriff Caffey transferred Grady Fenn to the county lockup in Abilene. Attempted murder, felony destruction of property, and domestic sabotage. The state prosecutor is throwing the whole damn book at him. He's going away for a very long time."

I snort and say, "Good. Bastard earned every second in a cage."

"Damn right he did." The old man goes quiet for a second, his weathered gray eyes studying me with a sharp, calculating weight that cuts straight through the exhaustion. "So what's the play, Wyatt? Are you packing your saddlebags and vanishing down the blacktop before sunrise, or are you sticking around?"

The question lands heavy in the quiet lot, but the old panic that used to tear through my ribs whenever roots started digging in doesn't even flicker. I lock my fingers tight through Avery's. "I'm not vanishing anywhere, Dutch. Wherever this woman goes, my boots are on the ground right behind her."

A slow, brilliant warmth spreads across Avery's face, her green eyes dark and glittering in the work lights. "Look at you. Somebody might think you're getting soft on me."

"Too late to worry about that, spitfire."

Dutch clears his throat, the sound like a shovel scraping across gravel. He taps the metal clipboard against his thigh. "If you two are done with the sickening romance, I have got a business proposition."