And yet, even in the quiet, she knew Thomas’s shadow followed. He would not be content to lie in the dust forever.
But when dawn bled pale across the river, she rose with a new strength. She was not his. Not anymore.
She was hers.
And perhaps—though she dared not say it aloud—she was Grey Horse’s, too.
?
The world came back to Thomas in fragments: heat pressing on his face, the taste of iron in his mouth, and the heavythrob behind his eyes like a smith’s hammer striking metal. He groaned, rolled onto his side, and spat blood into the dust.
The clearing lay quiet now, only the hush of wind through the grass and the buzz of flies around his sweat-wet skin. Thomas clenched his teeth, furious: Violet was gone. His rifle was gone.
Memory sharpened in cruel flashes: her scream, her twisting free of his grip, then that red-skin bastard slamming into him like a thunderbolt. Grey Horse. He remembered the fists, the knee, the blow that had toppled him into the dirt and defeated him.
Thomas pushed himself up on one elbow, then to his knees. The world tilted, but rage steadied him. His head rang with pain, but pain was a thing he had lived with his whole life. Pain meant nothing.
He touched his temple and his fingers came away red. Blood, sweat, and dust streaked his skin. He laughed once, low and bitter. “She thinks she’s escaped from me,” he muttered.
But she hadn’t. She couldn’t have. It wasn’t possible. Because she was his. Bought and paid for with coin he’d sweated to earn, with miles he’d ridden, with the promise of a home he’d written into letters. He had laid claim, and no savage or slip of a woman was going to tear that claim away.
Staggering to his feet, Thomas swayed and spat again. He turned in a slow circle, scanning the ground. The signs were clear even to his blurred sight: footprints pressed deep, broken brush, the outlines of hooves. They had gone toward the river.
He smiled then, a broken thing twisting his mouth. “Run, Violet. Run as far as you like. I’ll take you back in the end. And when I do—” His voice cracked with hate. “You’ll wish you’d never set eyes on me.”
He gathered himself, wiping his sleeve across his brow. He’d go back to the ranch and get another gun and his horse, and maybe some help if he could find it. And once he did, he’d ride until he caught her. He’d tell any man who asked that savages had stolen his bride, and he had God’s right to reclaim her.
Grey Horse’s face flared up in his mind again: the dark eyes, the braids, the fists. Thomas’s lip curled. “I’ll gut you yet, too” he whispered.
Chapter Twenty-Five: Hounds on the Wind
Thomas’s ranch sat hunched under the sun like a dog that’s been beaten too often. Thomas stomped inside his cabin, and yanked open the chest by the bed. Powder horn. Shot. Pouch. A long rifle came down off the pegs and into his hands as simple as breathing. He checked the nipple, ran a rag down the bore, then slung a canteen and grabbed a length of rawhide rope.
On his way out, his eye fell on a shirt of his Violet had mended neat as any Boston parlor maid might. He grabbed it and threw it on the floor, grounding his heel on it until the itch under his skin quieted. Then he stormed out of the cabin, slammed the door, mounted, turned the horse’s head, and kicked hard.
His bay gelding stood in the paddock where he’d left it. The animal skittered at his approach, perhaps at the sight of his blood-streaked face or the stink of rage coming off him, but he crooned a lie until the horse stilled enough to be caught. He saddled it, checked the cinch with shaking hands, swung up, and sat a moment while the ground tried to tilt him back into the dust.
The ache at his temple throbbed with his pulse. He welcomed it. Pain sharpened him; it kept a man from drifting. He wiped hismouth on his sleeve and tasted iron and dust and the bitterness of being bested by a savage in front of the woman he’d paid for.
He turned the horse roughly in the direction of a neighbor’s ranch. He’d grabbed a gun, cartridges, and a coil of rope from his cabin. Now he’d raise help. His story would convince people to help him: kidnapped bride, savage thief, a white man’s right. Yes, folks would ride for that.
He smiled, split-lipped. “Run,” he said aloud to no one. “Run if you want to Violet. I’ll have you back soon.”
The bay laid its ears back as Thomas spurred it and then stretched into a lope, dust boiling up behind.
?
Grey Horse, Violet, and Ezra moved at a steady, ground-eating pace along the river’s bend, the water bright as hammered tin where sunlight struck it clean. Ezra set the line through scrub and shadow, avoiding open flats when he could. Grey Horse kept his pony walking calmly for Violet’s comfort. He knew she must hurt.
She did not complain. Every time pain crept up from her feet to bite her again, she thought of Thomas’s heavy breath and the way his hand had grasped at and clamped her. The memory drove her like a spur. Once, when the trail narrowed between willow clumps, the pony stumbled and she gasped, bracing back against Grey Horse. He shifted to take her weight as if the act were natural as breathing.
“Tracks,” Ezra murmured from ahead, crouching to touch a V of prints pressed into damp soil. “Deer, not men. Good. Keep to where their hooves have softened the ground. Our sign will muddle in theirs.”
“Are your people close?” she asked, her breath low. The braid Grey Horse had worked threaded down Violet’s back, tight and sure, some part of her anchored by its quiet presence against her skin.
Grey Horse lifted his chin as if listening to something downriver that she could not hear. “Closer each mile.”
“Good,” Ezra said. “Because once he finds his horse and shakes the cobwebs, he’ll be hungry to ride. Man like that won’t show his bruises to daylight if he can help it. He’ll replace them with anger quick as he can.”
