“I have patience,” Grey Horse replied.
The silence stretched. Then Ezra gave a single nod. “I’ve no stomach either for leaving her to that fate. But if we do this, we do it smart. Quiet. When she walks out on her own.”
Grey Horse inclined his head in agreement.
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The fire crackled softly between them. In the dark beyond, an owl called, solemn as a vow.
And so the first threads of an unlikely alliance were tied.
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Grey Horse lay awake long after Ezra slept. His gaze turned upward, to the stars wheeling cold and distant. He thought of Violet, her hair in his hands, her eyes wide with longing and fear. He thought of the promise she had once written to another, and the unspoken promise she had made to him in the quiet of her heart.
He would not let her spirit be broken.
The hunt had only begun.
Chapter Twenty-One: Into the Night
The days blurred together for Violet, each one carved with the same tasks, the same dread. She rose before dawn to stoke the hearth, fetch water, sweep the dust that never seemed to vanish. She boiled beans, salted pork, kneaded bread with aching arms. Her hands cracked and bled from lye soap, her back burned from bending.
Thomas offered no thanks. He only found fault—the stew too thin, the fire low, the floor not scrubbed enough. Each word was a lash, each glance a reminder that she was his possession, not his partner.
At night, she lay stiff on the bed while he drank from his jug and muttered about cattle, fences, debts. Sometimes his hand reached for her, heavy on her wrist or shoulder. She froze, praying he would stop, praying that Ezra’s words—roads fork—might prove true.
But each day the road narrowed.
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Violet’s only comfort came in stolen moments. At the creek she lingered, listening for the call of a hawk, for a sound in the brush that might be more than wind. Once she thought she sawa shadow slip between trees, tall and still. Her heart leapt. Grey Horse. She whispered his name, though she dared not speak it aloud where Thomas might hear.
That faint hope kept her spirit alive. But despair grew heavier, a weight pressing her ribs until she could scarcely breathe.
She remembered Pale Moon’s words:His heart belongs to the past. If freed, it will be mine.She remembered the braid Grey Horse had woven, the warmth in his eyes. And she remembered Thomas’s letters, the false promises of comfort, of a hearth waiting for her.
Each memory cut sharper than the last.
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Thomas grew restless. He drank more, scowled harder. He muttered that the land was cursed, that he had wasted coin, that Violet was soft and slow.
One night, as she laid a thin blanket across the bed, his voice cut through the silence, rough with liquor.
“I’ve waited long enough.”
Her hand froze. “What do you mean?”
His eyes gleamed in the candlelight, small and hard. “I’ve had my fill of patience. You’re my wife in all but word and paper, and I won’t be made a fool any longer. A man has needs, and a woman has duties.”
Fear spiked through her chest, cold and sharp. “Thomas … please … you promised to take me to town and marry me before a preacher before we, before you…” She couldn’t even say the words. Although she had dreaded the day she’d become his legal wife, she had hoped beyond hope that something would intervene before then and she would never ever have to become Thomas McBride’s bride. She had hoped and prayed Grey Horsewould rescue her before that day. If he took her forcibly from Thomas, she would not need to feel guilt. Or would she?
Thomas rose, belly straining his shirt, his steps heavy on the floorboards. “I don’t need any preacher or any vows to claim what’s mine, what I paid for. No more excuses. No more delays. You’ll give me what’s mine.”
Her breath came shallow, her heart hammering.
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