Grey Horse gave the smallest nod, as if the man were a thing not worth air. He swept the tepee flap aside and slid into the night like a shadow.
Violet followed, crouched, the small pistol heavy in her hand but not yet cocked. Ezra fired once from behind a water keg, then ducked as a ball tore chips out of the tepee pole near his head.
Thomas advanced with Cole, Rafe, and Joe by his side, rifles in their hands.
Grey Horse met them before they reached the circle’s center. He moved low and swift, his lance in his hands like a long thought he had finished too often to get wrong. He drove it into Rafe who folded with a grunt. Cole cursed and fired, the shot cutting a star out of the tepee skin behind Violet’s head.
“Down!” Ezra shouted.
Violet dropped. More shots rent the night air and Violet shuddered under the attack but held her position. She would survive. Violet felt that in her bones.
Then Thomas’ voice. “Violet! Violet, come here!”
She straightened slowly, getting to her feet, the pistol tight in her palm. A figure stepped out from shadow at the far edge of the circle and crossed the firelight into full view. Thomas. Hat gone, hair wild, blood clotted at his temple, rifle in his hands and rope at his belt as if the night itself might need tying down.
His gaze slid across the ring of tepees and fixed on Grey Horse’s tepee, on the shape of Violet in front of it. His mouth twisted into that same broken smile she had seen when he spoke of taking her back. Two men flanked him.
Thomas raised the rifle and fired at the lodge pole two feet above her head, the wood spitting splinters. “You think you belong here?” he snarled. “You’ll learn.”
Violet backed up, retreating into the tepee.
“You can’t get away from me,” Thomas said, an evil sneer on his face. He strode toward her, not running, not hiding, as if the whole world were something he had paid for and could claim any way he liked. Cole and Joe covered him, watching left and right.
Grey Horse angled to cut Thomas off, but a tepee rope caught his ankle and in that single tangle of chance Thomas reached the tepee’s mouth.
He grabbed the flap and tore it wide.
Violet was not where he had expected. She had slid sideways from the door into a band of shadows. When Thomas lunged through the opening, she moved, fast and deliberate, the pistol brought up in both hands the way Ezra had shown her days before. Thumb stiff along the frame, elbows soft, eye on the front sight and nothing else.
“Stop!” she said.
His eyes snapped to her. He laughed, an ugly sound. “Now you talk bold? Give it here, girl.”
He stepped in, hand reaching for her gun.
Her thumb crushed the hammer back. The click felt like a door closing somewhere inside her. She did not think of Boston, of writing “I will come” by lamplight. She did not think of Pale Moon’s warning. She did not think of Grey Horse’s hands in her hair, of the carved bird warm in her palm. She thought only of the simple truth in front of her: this man would kill whatever he could not own.
“Don’t!” she said once, not as a plea but as a warning.
He took one more step.
She fired.
The pistol bucked like a small, furious thing in her hands. The shot tore the space between them and struck Thomas clean below the chest, a hand’s breadth right of the midline. He jerked as if yanked backward by a rope, his mouth opening to bite at the air. The rifle clattered from his hand. He stumbled, then sagged to the ground, leaving a smear of himself in the dirt.
For a breath the world held. Violet’s ears rang. Smoke coiled in her nose a second before the powder sting did.
Thomas dragged one knee under himself, stubborn even now, reaching for the dropped rifle as if the handle were a promisehe could still keep. Violet cocked the pistol again with a motion that surprised her hands with their own certainty. She stepped forward, putting her body between Thomas and the rifle.
“Don’t,” she said again, lower.
His eyes came up to her face. Whatever had once lived in him that could pass for feeling was gone. What stared at her was only want and rage and the small, greedy shock of a man who at last understands the world will not shape to him.
“You,” he breathed, blood covering his teeth.
Grey Horse appeared at her side. He did not lift a weapon. He stood, one palm open at his side, the other reaching without hurry to settle on Violet’s shoulder. It was more vow than touch.
Thomas’s hand twitched toward the rifle one last time.
