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The light was harsh that afternoon, flat and yellow, hammering the scrubland outside Dry Creek Ridge. The sun hadn’t moved much in an hour, just hung there like a heavy coin over the horizon while the heat sank into the dirt and stayed. Grass crackled under hoof, brittle and faded. Even the wind felt tired.
Colt Mason rode with his hat low and his eyes half-hidden, following the edge of a dried-out ravine more out of habit than intention. He’d been on the trail since morning, skirting town on purpose. Dry Creek meant noise, questions, and whiskey he didn’t drink anymore. All he needed was flour, salt, and a few nails. The sort of things a man couldn’t trap or dig up out of the land.
He didn’t want conversation.
From a distance, he looked like any other rider in worn trail clothes. Up close, you’d see the pieces that didn’t quite heal right—an old burn scar that crept up his neck, the way his shoulders stayed slightly tense even when nothing was happening. Four years earlier, a chimney spark and a hard wind had taken his cabin, his wife, and the unborn child she carried. Since then, he’d lived alone on a stretch of ridge country nobody else wanted. He worked just enough jobs to keep himself in coffee and ammunition and spent the rest of his time convincing the world to leave him alone.
Trouble, of course, had never listened.
His horse slowed of its own accord as they neared a patch of low brush. The animal’s ears pricked forward; its breathing changed. Colt felt the shift before he saw anything, a tightening in the air, the wrong kind of stillness. No insects buzzing, no birds calling from the cottonwoods, just a flat silence pressed against the land.
He pulled the gelding up and scanned the clearing ahead.
That’s when he saw her.
At first, the shape hanging from a low-limbed juniper looked like a bundle of rags or a hunter’s game bag left too long in the sun. Then the bundle moved, and the movement was too slow, too human to be anything but a person.
Colt was off his horse before he’d fully decided to be. Boots hit dirt. His hand brushed the grip of his revolver out of habit, but he didn’t draw. He approached in a wide angle, eyes sweeping the treeline, the grass, the rocks. If this was a trap, someone had gone to careful trouble.
She hung by her wrists, rope thrown over the branch and cinched cruelly tight. Her arms stretched above her, shoulders sagged from exhaustion. Her bare feet barely touched the ground. She was young, early twenties at most, with dark hair matted to her face and a deerskin dress torn at the shoulders. The beadwork and shells that decorated it were smeared with dirt and dried sweat.
Her eyes lifted when she heard his boots.
There was no scream, no pleading—just a wide, raw terror that had already burned past shouting. Her mouth parted like she meant to speak, but only a dry breath came out.
Colt raised both hands slowly, keeping his voice level.
“I ain’t here to hurt you,” he said. “I’m gonna get you down.”
She watched the knife he pulled from his belt. Her fingers twitched in the rope. The skin around her wrists was raw and broken, blood streaked down her forearms in thin, dark lines. She’d been there a long time.
He stepped up on a flat rock beneath the branch, braced her shoulder with one hand, and sawed at the rope with the other. The fibers were thick, stiff with sweat and resin. It took two short cuts before the rope snapped.
Her body dropped.
Colt caught her under the arms, nearly losing his balance with the sudden weight. She let out a sound that was half grunt, half sob, but she didn’t fight him. Her knees buckled; her feet slid in the dust. He lowered her as gently as he could to the ground, letting her lean against the tree trunk.
“You hurt anywhere worse than the wrists?” he asked.
For a heartbeat, he thought she wouldn’t answer. Then, in a voice that scraped like sand on stone, she whispered, “I’m… still here.”
“Do you speak English well enough to understand me?” he tried again.
She nodded once.
“Good.” He took a step back, giving her space. “Name?”
Her eyes flicked up to his face as if weighing whether the truth even mattered. “Asha,” she said.
“Colt.”
He went for his saddle, grabbed his canteen, and crouched in front of her again. When he offered it, her hands shook so badly that water spilled down her chin. She didn’t bother wiping it away. She drank like someone who hadn’t been allowed a full swallow in too long.
While she drank, her gaze flicked past him toward the ridge.
Colt saw the change instantly—that hard, sharp focus snapping into her eyes. He turned at the same time the shot cracked from the treeline.
Bark exploded from the juniper trunk inches from where his shoulder had been.
“Move,” he snapped, grabbing her arm.
She flinched, but she came with him. There was no strength in her legs; he half-dragged, half-carried her toward the brush. Another bullet hissed past, low and wild. Whoever was out there wasn’t trying for a warning. They’d meant the first one to kill him.
They barreled into a tangle of scrub and rock, sliding down the side of a shallow ravine. Dust filled his mouth. Asha stumbled and would have gone face-first into the dirt if he hadn’t tightened his grip. Her breath came in ragged bursts, each step jarring the damage done to her shoulders.
By the time they dropped into a narrow wash hidden between two broken cedar stumps, the gunfire had stopped. No yelling. No commands. Just a heavy, listening silence.
Colt pressed his back against the rock and listened.
The men up on the ridge were patient. That told him more than a glance at their hats ever could. Drunk cowhands fired wild and shouted threats. Hired hunters and traffickers conserved ammunition and waited.
“You all right?” he murmured.
Asha’s head rested against the stone, eyes half-closed. Her breathing was too fast, but it was steady. She nodded once.
“They’ll come down,” she whispered. “They don’t let things go.”
“You know them?”
Her gaze slid away. “I know their kind.”
He studied her for a beat: the branded wariness in the way she held herself, the stubborn straightness of her spine despite the pain. He’d seen prisoners of war before, in another life on another battlefield. That look—of someone who’d already learned what people were capable of—never left completely.
He dug into his saddlebag, pulled out a small tin of lard and a strip of clean cloth. When he reached for her wrist, he stopped short.
“May I?”
She hesitated, then gave a small nod.
The rope burns were deep, skin split and swollen. He smeared the lard along the worst of it with careful fingers, then wrapped each wrist in cloth. She watched him without speaking.
“You got folks looking for you?” he asked.
“No one left,” she said. “Not for me.”
“Same,” he replied. It slipped out before he could pack the word back down where it usually lived. He saw something flicker in her eyes, something like recognition.
They rested only long enough for her breathing to even out. The afternoon heat pressed down heavy. Somewhere up on the ridge, a branch snapped.
Colt’s jaw tensed. “We move,” he said. “I know a cut in the rock west of here. Water, cover. We can hold there till dark.”
She pushed herself to her feet without waiting for his hand, swayed, then caught her balance on a stone. Her moccasins were worn through; blood had seeped into the leather. She didn’t mention it.
They moved in single file through the brush. Colt led, scanning ahead and behind with the practiced eyes of a former cavalry scout. Asha followed, close enough to touch his shoulder if she stumbled, far enough to feel she was walking under her own power. No one spoke. Sound felt like it had weight out here, and they weren’t about to waste it.
By the time the sun leaned toward the horizon, they reached the sandstone cut Colt had remembered from years back. A narrow cleft carved into the bluff opened into a hidden pocket of ground, just wide enough to shelter two people and a horse. A shallow spring pooled under one wall, clear and cold, feeding a strip of stubborn green grass.
“Camp,” he said. “For now.”
He checked the approach twice while she sank slowly onto his trail coat spread over the dirt. Her shoulders trembled with fatigue. He could see every jolt of pain in the way she held her ribs.
“Those men,” he said when he finally sat opposite her, “they hunting you… or whoever stops to cut you down?”
“Both,” she said, voice flat. “They tied me up as bait. First buyer lost me. The ones after him decided I was worth more if I dragged someone else into their sights.”
“That what they told you?” Colt asked.
“No,” Asha replied. “That’s what I figured out waiting there.”
He believed her.
They ate in silence—jerky, hard cornbread, sips from the canteen. The shadows climbed the rock walls. The sky shifted from hot yellow to bruised purple as day bled into evening.
“Why’d you stop?” she asked finally.
Colt looked up. “Because you were hanging from a tree.”
“Plenty of men would’ve decided it wasn’t their problem.”
“I ain’t plenty of men.”
A corner of her mouth twitched, not quite a smile. “No,” she said. “You’re not.”
Night settled cold and fast. They shared the lee of the rock wall, the small fire he built no more than a bed of coals tucked under a flat stone to hide the glow. Asha sat with her back against the sandstone, arms wrapped around her legs, watching the narrow ribbon of sky.
“You don’t sleep much, do you?” she said. He hadn’t realized she was studying him in return.
“Not deep,” he admitted.
“Same,” she said softly.
The confession hung between them, simple and heavy. Two people who’d learned the hard way that sleep was when bad things found you.
He heard her shift, fabric rustling. When he glanced over, she’d pulled her shawl aside just enough to touch a pale scar burned into the skin near her collarbone.
“First time they tried to sell me, I fought,” she said. “They branded me so the next man would know I’m trouble.”
Colt’s hand tightened around his rifle. He didn’t ask if “they” were soldiers, outlaws, or someone who thought they were respectable. It didn’t matter.
“You still fought,” he said.
“I still fought,” she agreed quietly.
She let the shawl drop back into place. The world was full of the kinds of men who would measure her value by the mark on her skin. Colt wasn’t going to be one of them.
He shrugged off his coat and held it out. “You’ll freeze before dawn without this.”
Her fingers brushed his as she took it. It swallowed her frame, but it blocked the wind. She drew it close, studying him with that same searching, careful look.
“You keep treating me like I’m not something traded,” she said.
“That’s because you’re not.”
The fire popped softly. She shifted closer to the rock wall, then patted the ground beside her—an invitation to share warmth, not to touch. He hesitated only a moment before sitting shoulder to shoulder with her. She didn’t flinch.
For the first time in a long while, Colt didn’t feel quite so much like a man who would die alone out here.
Morning came thin and gray. Colt found boot prints on the hardpan beyond the bluff—three men, moving cautious, circling. They hadn’t found the cut in the rock yet, but they were close.
He came back to camp, loaded his rifle, and handed Asha the spare pistol from his kit.
“You know how to use that?” he asked.
She opened the cylinder with efficient fingers, checked the rounds, and snapped it shut again. “Better left-handed,” she said. “Right shoulder’s still not right.”
“If we run, they’ll run us into the ground,” Colt said. “If we stay, we make them come to us.”
“You’re choosing to fight,” Asha said.
“I’m choosing not to hand you back,” he corrected.
Her jaw worked once. “Then we stay.”
They turned the clearing into a trap. Colt built a decoy camp in the dry wash below—a blanket, an empty canteen, a ring of old coals. From the ridge it would look careless, exposed. The real position was above, wedged between two rocks with a clean view of the basin and cover enough to disappear.
By late afternoon, the men came.
Colt saw the first one as a slight disturbance in the grass, then a hat brim, then the full shape of a man with a shotgun moving low along the creek bed. Two more followed: one with a rifle, another with a spyglass. They signaled silently and crept toward the fake camp.
Colt lay prone behind his rock, rifle steady. Ten paces to his left, Asha sat with her back braced, pistol ready, eyes locked on the right-hand slope in case someone tried to flank.
His heartbeat slowed. The noise of his own breath faded. There was only distance and angles.
The man with the shotgun reached the decoy blanket and nudged it with his boot.
Colt squeezed the trigger.
The shotgunner dropped without a sound.
The man with the rifle dove behind a fallen log, exposing his leg just enough. A second shot rang out a heartbeat later—Asha’s. He went down screaming, clutching his thigh.
The third man, the one with the spyglass, fired upward wildly. Dirt spat near Colt’s shoulder. He rolled, slid lower down the rock, and came up on a new angle. Asha tracked the spyglass man’s dash toward the trees to their right. When he broke cover, she fired once.
He crumpled into the scrub and did not move again.
The wash fell still except for the wounded man’s ragged sobbing.
Colt waited, counting breaths, watching for a fourth shape that never appeared. Finally, he rose and descended the slope, rifle still trained.
The wounded man looked up, face chalk white, hands slick with blood. He was younger than Colt by a decade, fear burned into his eyes.
“Who sent you?” Colt asked.
The man’s gaze flicked to Asha, who had moved down the other side of the wash, pistol still in hand.
“They said…” he stammered. “They said she was property. Said we’d get paid to bring her back. I just needed the money. That’s all, I swear—”
Asha fired into the dirt an inch from his hand. He yelped and flinched.
“Stop talking about me like I’m a mule,” she said, voice low and steady.
Colt kicked the man’s rifle out of reach and stepped back. “You’ll live if you stop following,” he said. “Try again, and you won’t.”
They left him there—bleeding, frightened, with just enough hope to crawl back the way he’d come.
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