The way men come in when they've decided surprise matters less than size. First through the door, tall, broad, a face that something had disagreed with repeatedly and won. Long scar along the right cheekbone, revolver on one hip, knife on the other. The specific posture of a man who'd been in enough rooms like this to feel comfortable. Rail Decker, Cole knew the name.
Dustfalls grapevine had its uses. The other two were younger. Less settled in their violence, still learning to wear it. Decker looked around the room, found Cole, smiled with the working half of his mouth. Evening, conversational, a social call.
"We don't want trouble." Cole said nothing. Colt visible. Wall, not the center of the room the way his father had taught him. "Trees don't stand in the open sun."
"Just looking for a few things." Decker said. "Money, if you've got it, horses, and" he tilted his head "heard there's a woman here." Apache. Nose medicine, plants.
"That kind of knowledge sells." The floor under Cole's feet felt very solid, specifically solid. The way things feel when you want to make sure of them. "She's not here." Cole said.
"That so?" Decker was already looking at the hall. "Went back to her people." Decker looked at him slowly. "Mhm."
"Thing about that, friend" "is there's a woman's clothes in this house. Something was cooked tonight that wasn't yours." "And" he took another step. "You look a lot like a man guarding something that isn't there." Cole moved.
Sideways, cutting off the hall. Decker stopped. Tilted his head the other way. "That's interesting." "Two of us can make a deal."
Cole said. "You take what's here and leave. That's the deal. The deal I'm thinking of." Something fell, except it didn't fall, it descended.
From the ceiling, from the beams Cole had told himself were fine. That he'd replaced himself 2 years ago and were structurally sound. A shape dropped into the room between Cole and Decker with the specific precision of something that had chosen its landing point carefully. No noise on impact, none. Like cloth settling, like a branch finding a lower position.
Kaya standing in the center of Cole's main room. She had not been asleep. She had not been in the bedroom at all. She had been on the ceiling. On the beams.
The ones she'd looked at on day one and shaken her head at and said nothing because she'd already said it once and wasn't going to say it again. She'd been up there long enough to know exactly what was half happening and pick exactly when to move. The ochre dress. Always the ochre dress. Fringe and turquoise and old leather that fit her like it had been made for her by time.
Her braids had loosened, one partly undone from whatever she'd been doing in the dark up there. A length of rope in her right hand, coiled with the ease of something used since childhood. The knife already on her belt. She looked at Decker, not at Cole, not at the others. At Decker entirely.