Page 166 of The Lonely Road

It’s a little seedy, a little speakeasy—but I’ve played poker in places where the exits mattered more than the cards, so this feels like a private room at the Bellagio by comparison.

I am the last to arrive.

Kaz has the dealer’s chip. He shuffles with the proficiency of someone who learned in circumstances I probably don’t want to know about and doesn’t look up when I pull out the empty chair.

Mav Kincaid is beside him, filling his chair the way large men do—completely, without apology. He acknowledges my existence with “How you doin’?” I tell him good. Duke Wilder is on his other side, the two of them carrying the particular gravity of men who have been anchoring the same community for long enough that they don’t need to announce it.

Cade Mercer sits across from them—lean, dark-haired, dry in the way of a man who has made some significant mistakes and made his peace with them. Self-contained in a different way than the others. Earned rather than natural.

Hunt is slouched at the end of the table. He’s the Wilder Ranch foreman, and he’s in whatever passes for a relationship with Joy Kincaid, which is interesting given that he is as ranch as it gets and she is as Upper East Side as it gets. I don’t know much else about him except that he’s not someone you’d want to meet in an alley, dark or otherwise.

I look around the table.

These men have a different level of camaraderie with Kaz than the usual Wildflower Canyon social ease—something older and less performed. Which brings me back to the question I’ve been sitting with since he texted me the address.

Why the hell am I here?

“Drink?” Duke lifts a bottle of bourbon. It’s its own kind of welcome.

“Thanks,” I accept.

He pours without ceremony. I drink without ceremony. The jukebox bleeds through the wall.

“Five-card draw.” Kaz starts dealing. “Fifty-dollar buy-in.”

We play.

The thing about poker with men who know each other is that it takes about three hands before the actual conversation starts. They know each other—but they don’t know me, and I don’t know them. So, for me, the first hand is calibration—taking the measure of everyone else’s tells, establishing who bluffs and who doesn’t, who plays tight and who plays the room.

Cade, I notice immediately, plays very still and wins the first hand on a pair of sevens, which means he either has no tells or he has them completely controlled.

Kaz plays like what he is: someone who has spent years being one thing while being another and has internalized the discipline of it.

Mav plays like a man who can afford to lose and sometimes does on purpose, which is its own kind of tell.

Duke folds the first two hands without expression and drinks his bourbon at a pace that suggests he’s here for the company more than the cards.

Hunt plays carefully—very carefully. He doesn’t bluff. He plays his hand, and he doesn’t care who is bluffing, either. There’s a cleanness about him that isn’t suited for poker.

On the third hand, Kaz opens the conversation without preamble. “So,” he says, discarding two cards. “How many of us have catastrophically failed the woman we’re with?”

A pause.

“Raise,” Mav says.

“Call,” says Duke.

“All of us?” Cade offers.

“All of us,” Kaz confirms. “Mason’s just the most recent.”

I look at my cards. A pair of aces, a king, and two cards I don’t need. “I’d argue I’ve raised the bar considerably on catastrophic failure.”

“You photographed her files.” Mav nods. “That’s—yeah. You raised the bar.”

“Thank you.”

“Wasn’t a compliment.”