Chapter 4: The Unwelcome Guests
The hot water had turned his skin a mottled pink, but the faint, raised tracks across his shoulders and back still sang a dull, persistent chorus. Weston stood in the doorway of the kitchen, a threadbare towel around his neck, his damp hair dripping onto the collar of his clean t-shirt. The room was warm, lit by the amber glow of the stove light and a single bulb over the sink. Lucas was at the table, but he wasn’t eating. He was perfectly still, his phone a small, dark rectangle in his clenched hand on the worn wood.
The silence wasn’t the comfortable kind from the tack room. This was a pressurized thing, brittle and sharp.
Weston moved softly to the counter, picking up the two plates he’d set out earlier. The promise felt like a child’s gesture now. He brought them to the table, the china clicking too loudly in the quiet.
“Stew’s still warm,” he said, his voice carefully neutral.
Lucas didn’t look at him. His eyes were fixed on the black screen of his phone as if it might attack. The muscle in his jaw jumped, a relentless pulse.
“Clean the guest house tomorrow,” Lucas said. The words were low, stripped of any inflection. “Top to bottom. We’ll need every inch of space between us and them.”
Them. The word landed in Weston’s gut like a stone. He slowly set the second plate down in front of Lucas’s chair. His fingers tingled. Cleaning the guest house wasn’t just sweeping out mouse droppings and airing dusty linens.
It was a lockdown. A purge.
It meant gathering every item that couldn’t be explained—the special rope from its peg in the tack room, the leather straps from the bottom drawer of Lucas’s dresser, the journal Weston kept under his mattress with its coded, dangerous poetry. It meant inspecting each other for any mark that couldn’t be passed off as a ranching accident. It meant a performance of such exhausting normalcy that the very air in the main house would feel like glass to breathe.
“Who’s coming?” Weston asked, staring at the back of his brother’s head.
Lucas finally moved, slapping the phone down on the table and running both hands over his face, a rough, grating sound against his stubble. When he lowered them, his expression was a mask of the Good Friar, but the edges were cracked, showing the strain beneath. “Eleanor. And she’s bringing a friend. A photographer. For a week.”
A cold trickle, separate from the shower damp, traced Weston’s spine. Eleanor. Their aunt. Lucas’s godmother. The one who wrote checks for new equipment and asked pointed questions about legacy and future plans over Christmas video calls. She’d never approved of Lucas leaving college to come home, of Weston never going at all. She saw the ranch as a dead end. She didn’t see the truth of it, the intricate, hidden machine of their lives.
“A week,” Weston echoed. The sentence stretched before him, a long, flat road of vigilance.
“She wants to ‘document the authentic ranch experience’ for some gallery show she’s funding,” Lucas said, the words laced with a quiet, venomous scorn. He finally looked at Weston, and his eyes were hard. “So that’s what she’ll get. Two respectful, hardworking nephews running a tight ship. Brothers. Just brothers.”
The emphasis was a brand. A reminder of the script.
Weston nodded, looking down at his own empty plate. The welts on his back throbbed in time with his heartbeat. “I’ll start at dawn. Get the windows open, beat the rugs.”
“The lockbox in the hayloft,” Lucas said, standing up abruptly. His chair scraped the floor. “Everything goes in there by tomorrow night. Your back…” He paused, his gaze lingering. “The shirt stays on. Even in this heat. You got careless with the post-hole digger. Understand?”
Weston understood. The story was being written already. “Yes.”
Lucas paced to the sink, staring out the black window at his own reflection. “We’ll be busy. Charmingly busy. You’ll take the photographer out on the trails. Keep him occupied with wide-open spaces and pretty sunsets. I’ll handle Eleanor.”
There was more. Weston could feel it hanging in the air between them, thicker than the scent of the stew.
Lucas turned, leaning back against the counter. The casual pose was forced. “The rules stand. But they’ll be harder. No slips. Not a single look, Weston. Nothing that anyone could see and… question.” His voice dropped, not into the dominant growl of the tack room, but into something colder, more fearful. “If they found out… what we are… it wouldn’t just be about us. The ranch, everything Dad built… it would be gone. We’d be gone.”
It was the truth, the bedrock terror under all the dominance and obedience. It wasn’t just about their secret. It was about annihilation.
Weston met his eyes. “I know.”
“Do you?” Lucas pushed off the counter, closing the distance between them. He didn’t touch Weston. He just loomed, a fortress of worry and control. “A week is a long time to remember. To pretend. Last time she visited, you could barely string three sentences together. You clung to my side like a shadow.”
“I was nineteen,” Weston said, a flicker of defiance sparking. It was quickly smothered by the memory—the sheer, dizzying panic of having to act normal for four straight days, the relief so violent when she left that he’d shattered a mug just to hear something break.
“You’re twenty-two,” Lucas stated, as if marking a prisoner’s number. “And you will be fine. You will be chatty. You will be the charming, younger Friar brother who loves his horses and his land. You will not flinch when I touch your shoulder in front of them. You will not stare. You will not go quiet for hours.” He leaned in, his breath warm against Weston’s cheek. “And if you feel like you’re going to slip, you find an excuse. You go check a fence line. You take a long ride. You come to me, and we will handle it. Privately. After.”
The promise—or the threat—was clear. The punishments would be deferred, but they would be waiting. A debt to be collected in the silent dark after a day of blinding performance.
Weston held his gaze, absorbing the edict. The dread was a physical weight, but beneath it, a stubborn cord of loyalty tightened. This was their world to protect. However crooked, it was theirs.
“Okay,” Weston said, simple and final.
Lucas searched his face for a long moment, then gave a single, curt nod. The crisis meeting was adjourned. He walked back to the table and sat, pulling his now-lukewarm bowl of stew toward him. He picked up his spoon.
“Sit,” he said, not looking up. “Eat. You’ll need your strength for cleaning.”
Weston sat. He served himself from the pot on the stove, the rich smell of beef and herbs suddenly nauseating. They ate in a silence that was now full of the ghosts of the coming week—the stranger with his camera, the aunt with her probing eyes, the great, fragile lie they had to wear like a second skin.
The only sound was the scrape of spoons on bowls and the loud, ticking clock counting down the hours until dawn.