With the quality of attention that separates the primary problem from everything else. Decker blinked, then laughed. The laugh of a man who has decided what he's seeing is less dangerous than it is. "A woman." He said.
That's the rope moved. Cole had roped cattle his whole working life. Good at it, better than most. What Kaya did with that rope in the next 2 seconds bore the same relationship to what Cole did as surgery bears to a kitchen knife. It flew.
It opened. It went around Decker's ankles with the mathematical certainty of something that had always been going to land exactly there. She pulled. 230 pounds of Rail Decker went horizontal. The back of his skull met the wooden floor with a sound that ended all the sounds he'd been making.
The second man yelled, drew something. Lunged. Kaya stepped sideways. Not a step, the motion of water moving around a rock. She was there and then she wasn't.
And the man's momentum was carrying him past where she'd been and she added something small to that momentum with one arm and he hit the table. The table hit the floor. Two chairs didn't survive. The man lay in the wreckage making a sound that suggested he was present but not participating. The third, young, 20 maybe.
The youngest and the most frightened. Cole had noted this from the start as the most important factor in the room. He looked at Decker on the floor, at his companion in the furniture, at Kaya standing in the center of the room breathing exactly as she had before any of this started, rope still in hand. He dropped his knife. It hit the floor.
He looked at Kaya. She pointed at the door. He went through it so fast Cole heard him trip on the porch step, then running, getting smaller, then nothing. True silence. Decker was moving, slowly, getting his bearings back from wherever the floor had sent them, blood on his nose.
The dazed expression of a man whose confidence has recently been restructured. He looked up at Kaya. Something moved across his face. Fear dressed in an older word for it. "Witch," he said, almost an observation.
"What are you?" Kaya took one step toward him, just one, unhurried, inevitable. Decker made a sound that did not belong to the man who'd walked in 20 minutes ago. He grabbed at the floor, got his feet under him, grabbed his companion by the collar, and got them both through the door in a movement that was more falling than walking. Then the sound of horses leaving in a hurry.
Then nothing. Cole was against the wall, had been the entire time, had not fired the Colt once, which he was taking a mo- moment to fully come to terms with. His wife had handled three armed men completely, while he held a gun he never used. He looked at the ceiling, at the beams, the fine beams, the structurally sound beams. She hadn't been skeptical about them on day one.