I keep Daryl pinned.
Then the cabin door opens again.
Briar steps out with my rifle in both hands.
The whole mountain goes still.
She is shaking. Not much. Enough. Her hair is wild around her face. Dirt streaks her legs. Her eyes are bright and hard and nothing in them is running now. She comes down the porch steps slow, the barrel already lifted.
Daryl sees her and starts to laugh. “That’s right. Bring it here, girl. Show him who taught you what to do with your hands.”
Briar keeps walking.
One step. Then another.
The rifle does not waver.
Gabe’s finger rests easy on the crossbow trigger, waiting to see which man twitches first.
Briar stops a few feet away.
Daryl’s grin slips.
Her throat works once. Her jaw sets.
Then, in a voice scraped raw but clear enough to split me open, she says, “I was never yours.”
That’s right, sweet girl, he doesn’t get to live inside you anymore.
The shot cracks through the clearing.
Daryl’s head jerks back. His body goes loose under my hand so fast it feels unreal. One second there is fight in him, filth in him, life in him. The next there is nothing but dead weight and blood soaking into the dirt.
Silence lands hard.
Not one of his men speaks.
One of them reaches, stupid and slow, for a dropped knife.
Gabe’s bolt takes him through the forehead before his fingers close.
He folds where he kneels.
“That’s done,” Gabe says.
Boone hauls another bastard up by his collar and slams him face-first into the ground. Elias drives a boot into a wrist until bone cracks and the last rifle skids away. Silas looks down at Daryl’s body, then at Briar, measuring the shape of what happened and finding no reason to question it.
Briar stands there with the rifle hanging in her hands, chest heaving, eyes fixed on the body at my knees. Her face has gone strange and still. Not numb. Not frightened. Like something old and poisoned tore loose from inside her and left room behind.
One heartbeat the clearing is blood and smoke and hard breathing. The next Mama Rue stands at the edge of it, cane planted in the dirt, her face carved out of old mountain stone. I don’t know where she came from. The forest might have spat her up whole.
Her gaze passes over the bodies, over the blood, over Briar holding the rifle.
She nods once.
“Dead men don’t tell no tales,” she says. “And the mountain keeps her secrets.”
Boone and Elias move at that, wordless and sure. Silas jerks his chin toward the trees. Gabe steps forward to cover them while they drag the living and dead into the shadows beyond the clearing. No one asks questions. No one looks at Briar like she did wrong.
