The world blurs with too much information. They fire after me. Pain slices across my ribs, just a kiss of lead. One round bites into the horse's flank. The animal screams and lashes, bucking me, but I hang on. Another round slams into the wagon wheel and splinters wood to dust. I drive the mare into the street, using her panic as cover. Men scatter, shouting. I don’t look back.
Weaving through alleys, the mare’s feet slide on wet stone. Blood trickles warm where the cloth is torn at my side. I slap at it, taste copper, and force my jaw shut. I pull her to a low, sheltered courtyard, slide down, and press my palm to the wound. I listen. A dog barking, a cart’s axles creak. No heavy boots. Not yet.
I think of Alice on that floor, her eyes on me as I ran. For a stupid second, I let a laugh leak out. Goddamn.
I look up at the sky, a slice of pale blue cut thin between rooftops. My hand shakes against the hole in my side. “Know we had a deal.” My voice rasps out like gravel. “I said I’d go easy. No blood. No running. You keep her breathing, and I’d walk quiet into the noose.” Another laugh slips out, this one sharp and humorless. “Well, You did Your part. She’s alive. She’s standing. Guess that makes You the only one of us can keep a promise.”
I drag my sleeve across my mouth, taste the copper on my tongue. “Me? I broke it soon as she looked at me. Soon as she said that word.” I draw a ragged breath. “I’m sorry for that. Sorry I’m the man I always was. Guess You knew what You were gettin’when I prayed.” I press my palm harder into the wound, grit my teeth. “But You keep her safe, Lord. Whatever happens next, keep her safe. I’ll pay the rest.”
The matchbox.
I reach for my pocket, pulling the matchbox out. Running my thumb over that lamb, I think of Alice falling limp–the risk she took today for me. Lord, I hope they don’t make her pay for what happened in there. I slide the box open and inside there’s a scrap of paper tightly folded, small as a thumbprint. Unraveling and flatting it across my palm, I see it's a note.
My bear. My starlight. Return to me.
I press the paper to my lips before I can think better of it, breathing her name into the creases. Blood wet at my side, eyes on the horizon.
“All right, lamb,” I whisper. “I’m comin’.”
Chapter 36
ALICE
“You understand, Mrs. Sherman,” the US Attorney says, “if he’s found, you’ll still be essential to the case. More charges will follow.”
I nod, tell them what they need to hear. They write it down.
The more time passes, the more the day starts to sweep itself away—clerks close their ledgers, the courthouse hushes to a quiet drone—the more I allow myself what I ache to believe: that silence means he’s out there, alive and moving.
They call it a day. In the hotel lobby, Virgil watches me with the look of a man who has caught a thief at his table. He accompanies me upstairs and orders tea to my room. When it arrives, we sit in a small parlor there.
“I suppose,” he says over his tea, “that fainting in court was rather convenient, wasn’t it? To collapse like that right as the defendant runs.” He lets the words stew. “You must understand how it looks.”
I say nothing, but Virgil does not wait for my answer in any event.
He rises, and something in him bursts and spills out like a broken spigot. The gentleman drops away in one motion. Grabbing my wrist, he snatches me so hard my cheek catches in my teeth. I try to pull back. He flings me across the settee as if I were a sack of flour. His palm comes down on my cheek with blind, burning force. Pain surges, and a shocked yelp escapes my lips. My hands fly to my face, hot and stinging under my palm. A metallic taste rises. I’ve bitten my own cheek.
The lamps buzz, the clock on the mantle ticking.
Virgil’s face is a dark thing in the light. “You did this on purpose,” he hisses. “You set him free. You set him free, and you fell in love with him like a fool.”
He comes again. I do not fight well; all I can do is hold up my arms in an attempt to stop his blows. Each one lands—hard—against my arms, my ribs, my middle. I think of Kodiak and how he’d protect me if he could. How I wish he were here to stop this.
When he stops, it is because he wants to. He breathes hard, brushing at his cuffs as if to rid them of my scent. “You will tell no one you did this,” he says, as if I alone could stain him now. “And you will pray I find him. I will not ask the law to take him. I will find him myself. I will find him, and I will make him pay. Even if I have to kill him with my own hands.”
I taste copper, and a small part of me thinks of Kodiak and smiles, though the smile is cracked and wet with blood. I picture Kodiak’s laugh—the cocky sound of a man unafraid of death—and I laugh too.
“Do what you must,” I say.
He glares with disgust, standing a moment as if debating whether to beat me again for my insolence, then thinks better of it. He leaves me there with my palm pressed to my mouth.
I wander to the window and open the curtains. The stars over Galveston twinkle with infinite light and distant promise. The heavens helped us find one another before; what is destinedcannot be broken, no matter how hard Virgil or Pinkertons or government men may try.
The train ride north is punishing. My body aches from what Virgil did, though the bruises hide well enough beneath my collar and sleeves. He doesn’t speak to me the whole way. He reads his ledgers, checks his watch, and folds his handkerchief into smaller and smaller squares.
By the time we reach Ohio, the sky has gone pale and the leaves have begun to rust with red and orange. The inn is quieter than I remember. The road to the house is the same—gravel crunching under the carriage wheels, pines bending over the drive—but everything feels smaller now. A place I outgrew.
Virgil steps out first. He helps me down—not out of kindness but habit. There’s a man waiting by the porch, broad through the shoulders. I look twice. He’s tall and broad like my Kodiak. The reminder that my bear is somewhere out there surviving without me turns into a lump in my throat.
