The sun was a merciless hammer, beating down on the rust-colored earth. Beatrice limped slightly, a dull, persistent ache in her ankle a constant reminder of the previous day’s lesson in humility.
The gentle way Wes had handled her injury—his calloused fingers surprisingly deft as he’d bound the compress of crushed yarrow leaves to her skin—had settled under her own skin, an unnerving warmth that clashed with his usual brusque silence.
He was a man of contradictions, and her scientific mind, so accustomed to classifying and categorizing, found him utterly confounding. The guide, the cynic, the surprisingly tender caretaker.
She glanced at his back as he walked several paces ahead, his stride long and economical, his shotgun held loosely in one hand. He moved with a predator’s grace, a creature perfectly suited to this harsh, unforgiving world.
She, on the other hand, felt like a hothouse flower transplanted into the desert, slowly wilting.
“We’ll rest up ahead,” he said without turning, his voice a low rumble that carried easily in the still air. “There’s an overhang that’ll give some shade.”
Beatrice merely nodded, saving her breath. Her initial impulse to catalogue every specimen she saw had been tempered by the reality of survival.
Wes was right; progress was more important than documenting another variety of prickly pear. Still, her gaze scanned the landscape, her mind automatically whispering the Latin names: Opuntia, Agave, Larrea tridentata.
It was a comforting litany, a piece of her orderly Boston world she could carry with her.
They were crossing a relatively open stretch of land, a wide basin of packed dirt and stones that offered little cover. The silence was profound, broken only by the crunch of their boots and the buzzing of some unseen insect.
It was this silence that made the new sound so jarring: the rhythmic thud of approaching horses.
Wes stopped dead. He didn’t turn or look around, but his entire body went taut, a coiled spring of sudden, absolute attention.
Beatrice froze behind him, her heart giving a nervous flutter against her ribs. He slowly raised a hand, signaling for her to stay put, and shifted his weight.
It was a subtle movement, but everything about it screamed danger.
Two riders appeared over a low rise, their silhouettes shimmering in the heat. They weren’t moving with any particular urgency, their posture one of lazy arrogance as they ambled their horses toward them.
Beatrice felt a prickle of unease. These were not travelers; they were patrolling.
As they drew closer, their features sharpened. The one in the lead was a large, beefy man with a florid face and a stained duster, a wide-brimmed hat pulled low over his eyes.
The other was slighter, with a weasel-like face and eyes that darted about, taking in everything and nothing at once. Both wore Colt revolvers strapped low on their hips.
They reined in their horses a dozen feet away, kicking up a small cloud of dust that Beatrice instinctively waved from her face.
“Well now, Cobb,” the big man drawled, his voice thick with false bonhomie. “Look what we have here.
A couple of folks who seem to have lost their way.”
The smaller man, Cobb, spat a stream of tobacco juice near Beatrice’s feet. She flinched back, a gasp of indignation escaping her lips.
Wes didn’t move. He hadn’t so much as glanced at the shotgun in his hand.
His gaze was fixed on the lead rider, his expression unreadable, his face a mask of stone. “We’re not lost, Bartlett.”
The use of the name seemed to surprise the big man. His lazy smile tightened. “You know me?”
“I know your brand of trouble,” Wes said, his voice flat and cold. “You work for Croft.”
It wasn’t a question.
Bartlett’s eyes narrowed. “Mr. Croft owns this land.
He don’t take kindly to trespassers. Especially ones guided by a half-breed squatter.”
The insult hung in the air, thick and ugly. Beatrice felt a surge of fury on Wes’s behalf, but one look at his face silenced her.
He hadn’t reacted. His calm was more terrifying than any outburst.
It was the calm of a storm’s eye, a place of terrible, waiting power.
“This isn’t Croft’s land,” Wes stated simply. “Not yet.”
“That’s a matter of perspective,” Cobb sneered from his horse, his hand hovering near the butt of his pistol. “The perspective from the end of a rope is that it don’t much matter who owns the land.”
This was it. Beatrice’s blood ran cold. This was not the intellectual sparring of the university or the polite condescension she faced in Boston.
This was a raw, physical threat, stripped of all pretense. Her neatly organized world of facts and figures dissolved, leaving only the primal, gut-wrenching reality of their situation: two armed men, a vast and empty wilderness, and no one to hear her scream.
“And you, ma’am,” Bartlett said, his gaze finally settling on Beatrice, his eyes lingering in a way that made her feel vile.
“This is a hard country. Not a place for delicate things. Things get… broken out here. It’d be a shame for a pretty thing like you to get broken.”
Fear, sharp and acidic, clawed at her throat. She could feel the tremor in her hands and fought to still it, clutching the leather strap of her satchel.
She looked at Wes, expecting to see a flicker of anger, of fear, of something. But there was nothing. Only an unnerving, lethal stillness.
“She’s with me,” Wes said, his voice dropping even lower, carrying an edge that could cut glass.
“You’ve delivered your message. Now ride on.”
Cobb laughed, a high, grating sound. “Or what? You gonna stop us, Callahan? Just you?”
He started to swing his leg over, intending to dismount.
It happened faster than Beatrice could process. One moment Wes was standing still, the next he was a blur of motion.
He didn’t reach for his shotgun. Instead, he closed the distance in two silent strides. Cobb was halfway off his horse when Wes’s hand shot out, grabbing the man’s gun hand and twisting it with a sickening crack of bone.
Cobb shrieked, a high-pitched scream of agony, his pistol clattering to the ground.
Before Bartlett could even react, before his hand could clear the leather of his holster, the muzzle of Wes’s shotgun was pressed firmly under his fleshy chin. Wes hadn’t even appeared to aim; the weapon was just… there.
The entire exchange had taken less than three seconds.
The lazy arrogance vanished from Bartlett’s face, replaced by the stark, white-faced terror of a man who had fatally misjudged his opponent. His eyes were wide, fixed on Wes’s. Sweat beaded on his upper lip.
“I told you to ride on,” Wes said, his voice a whisper of death. He was no longer the quiet guide.
Beatrice was looking at someone else entirely, a man forged in a crucible of violence she couldn’t begin to imagine. His past as a Ranger, a title she’d heard whispered with a mixture of fear and respect in Redemption, was suddenly on full, terrifying display.
He hadn’t just been a lawman; he had been a hunter. And he was hunting now.
Cobb was on the ground, whimpering and clutching his shattered wrist.
“Get on your horse,” Wes ordered Bartlett, his voice utterly devoid of emotion. The shotgun never wavered.
Bartlett swallowed hard, the movement visible against the gun barrel. He nodded shakily, his hands held high and away from his body.
He nudged his horse over to his groaning companion. With great effort, Bartlett hauled Cobb back into his saddle, the smaller man nearly fainting from the pain.
“Go back to Croft,” Wes commanded, stepping back but keeping the shotgun leveled.
“Tell him the next time he sends his dogs, I’ll send their pelts back to him. You understand me?”
Bartlett nodded again, his eyes wide with fear and a new, grudging respect. He yanked his horse’s reins, turning it and Cobb’s mount around and kicking them into a frantic gallop.
They fled, leaving a trail of dust and the echo of Cobb’s pained sobs in their wake.
The silence that descended was heavier than before, thick with the aftermath of violence. Wes stood watching them go, his body still coiled with lethal energy.
After a long moment, he lowered the shotgun, the tension slowly bleeding from his shoulders. He turned, and his eyes met Beatrice’s.
She saw it then. A flicker of something in their depths—regret, perhaps, or weariness.
He didn’t want her to see this part of him. The realization struck her with the force of a physical blow.
She was trembling, but it wasn’t just from fear. Awe warred with terror inside her.
She had read of such men in penny dreadfuls, of stoic, dangerous heroes on the frontier. But the reality was devoid of romance; it was brutal, efficient, and utterly chilling.
The same man who had gently explained the medicinal properties of a desert marigold had just incapacitated two armed men with a detached proficiency that spoke of long and bloody practice.
She was simultaneously more afraid of him, and felt safer with him, than she had ever felt in her life.
“Are you… are you alright?” she managed, her voice a reedy whisper.
He gave a curt nod, his gaze dropping to the pistol lying in the dust. He nudged it with his boot, then walked over and picked it up, tucking it into his own belt.
He didn’t look at her.
“We need to move,” he said, his voice back to its familiar, gruff tone. But the illusion was shattered. She knew now what lay beneath that gruffness.
It wasn’t just cynicism; it was a carefully constructed wall to hold back a terrible capability.
As they started walking again, the ache in her ankle was forgotten, replaced by a profound and unsettling new awareness. Silas Croft was no longer an abstract problem, a name on a survey marker.
He was a man who sent armed thugs to deliver threats of rape and murder. Their botanical expedition was no longer a simple quest for a rare flower. It was a journey into the heart of a violent conflict, and their lives were forfeit.
The thorny bargain she had made with Wes Callahan had just grown sharper, and she knew, with a certainty that chilled her to the bone, that more blood would be spilled before it was over.