The horse knew something was wrong.
Caden could tell in the way she moved beneath him, picking up on the tension he was carrying in his hands and shoulders, and the rigid way he was sitting.
Horses always knew. He had learned that at thirteen, riding away from a burning estate with smoke in his lungs and nothing left behind him worth going back to.
He hadn’t ridden like this since that night.
Like something was on fire.
Like every second was costing him something he couldn’t get back.
His chest was burning. Not the wound exactly, though the wound was making its opinion known with every jarring stride, a deep pulling ache that Marta would have called tearing and he was choosing to call inconvenient. No, this was something worse than the wound.
This was the specific burning of a man
