"How long has it been since you let yourself stay anywhere? Since you let yourself want something that wasn't just survival?" Cole didn't answer. "We're offering you a choice, Cole," Sani said. "Not between freedom and obligation."
"Between running forever and finally stopping. Between surviving and living. And I know which one I think you should choose, but it has to be yours." She stood, brushed off her skirt, and started back toward town. Cole watched her go, the weight in his chest growing heavier with every step she took.
He sat there until the stars came out, cold and distant and unchanging. Then he stood, walked back to town, and found a different room in the boarding house, one he could afford for the night. He needed to think without their voices in his head. Needed silence. But silence didn't help.
He lay on the narrow bed, staring at the ceiling, and replayed every moment of the last ten years. The canyon. The cattle drive. The ambush. A hundred small moments in between.
Shared meals. Quiet conversations. The easy rhythm of working alongside people who knew his moods and didn't judge them. Somewhere along the way, without meaning to, he'd built something. Not a home, exactly, but something close.
And now they were asking him to name it, to make it official, to stop pretending it was temporary. Cole closed his eyes and tried to sleep, knowing it wouldn't come. Dawn arrived gray and cold, the sun hidden behind a bank of clouds that stretched across the horizon like a dirty blanket. Cole dressed, splashed water on his face, and stepped out into the street. The women were waiting outside the boarding house, standing in a line like soldiers ready for inspection.
They'd dressed in their cleanest clothes, though nothing out there ever stayed clean for long. Kaya stood in the center, flanked by Lyra and Sani. Their faces were calm, expectant, but Cole could see the tension in their shoulders. He stopped a few feet away, hat in his hands. "Well?" Kaya asked.
Cole took a slow breath. "I need to ask you something first." "Go ahead." "What happens if I say no? Really."
"Not the version where you follow me forever. The truth." Kaya exchanged glances with the others, then looked back at him. "The truth is, we don't know. We've never been refused before."
"Because no one's ever been stupid enough to refuse?" "Because it's never come up." Cole shook his head. "That's not good enough. I need to know what happens to you."
"If I walk away, do you go home, start over somewhere, or do you really spend the rest of your lives chasing me?" Lyra spoke up. "We meant what we said, Cole. The debt doesn't end until it's repaid, and this is the only way we know how to repay it." "So you'd waste your lives on this?"
"It wouldn't be a waste," Sani said quietly. "It would be honoring the vow we made." "To who? Your people? Your traditions?"
"To ourselves." Cole looked at each of them, searching for doubt, for hesitation, for any sign that they didn't fully believe what they were saying. He found nothing. "This is insane," he said, not for the first time. "We know," Kaya replied.
"But it's our insanity, and we're asking you to share it." Cole put his hat back on, tilted it against the faint light. "You said marriage. All three of you." "Yes."