Shot me, she gasped when he dropped to his knees beside her. Through the wall, didn't even see it. Don't talk. Save it. He lifted her, ignoring the fresh scream of pain tearing through his own wounded shoulder.
She was heavy. God, she was heavy. But adrenaline gave him a strength he didn't know. He still had left in him, and he carried her toward the door. As the barn groaned and shifted violently around them both, beams cracking loose somewhere overhead, like the whole structure was counting down its final seconds.
They burst out into open air just as the roof gave way behind them. A deafening collapse of fire and timber that sent sparks showering up into the gray afternoon sky in a wide burning ark. Jed carried her clear of the worst of the heat laid her down gentle in the trampled yard grass, pressing both hands hard against the wound at her side. Her face had gone gray, blood pumping warm and fast between his fingers, no matter how hard he pressed down against it. " Stay with me," he said, voice breaking apart around every word. "
Don't you dare die on me. Not you two. Not again. I can't do this again. Her eyes fluttered, fighting hard to stay open against a weight he couldn't see.
Did we win? She whispered. You're alive. That's the only win that matters to me right now. Reeve dead, Jed said, then paused.
Something uneasy sitting heavy in his chest. The puzzle piece that hadn't quite clicked into its proper place yet. Except his aim, Jed said. So slowly. It was wrong.
Too high. He warned me. Desa gasped out, each word visibly costing her something now. Warned me days ago. Said he was done following orders.
Said he'd stand on the right side of it, even if it cost him. Guess he meant it then. Died proving it. She coughed. Blood on her lips now dark and terrible against the pale gray of her skin.
Jed, I'm here. Listen to me. Her hand gripped his arm surprisingly strong even like this. In my coat, inside pocket, papers, my father's land deed. Desa, don't.
Save your breath. Listen. Her voice cracked open, desperate now, fighting through the pain to get every word out before might be too late to say them at all. 40 acres near the border. It's mine.
If I die, you're not dying. If I die, she pushed on anyway. Refusing to be stopped. It's yours. Build something there.
Something good with what's left of it. Build it yourself, Jed said roughly fiercely, refusing every single word of it with everything he had left in him. Because you are not dying, I will not allow it. Do you hear me? I won't.
Stay awake, he thought the franticness, his own mind stumbling over itself. Stay with me. Don't close your eyes. Don't you dare close your eyes on me. She smiled, faint blood staining her teeth.
You can't always get what you want, Rancher. Watch me, he said, and meant it with absolutely everything left in inside him. He worked through that whole night like a man possessed by something bigger than exhaustion. cleaned the wound with hands that wouldn't stop stop shaking no matter how hard he willedled them. Still dug the bullet free with a knife blade heated over the fire.
Desa's whole body seizing rigid against the pain, even half conscious. A low animal sound tearing out of her that he'd hear again in his sleep for years afterward. Stitched the wound closed with thread meant for saddle leather because it was the strongest thread he owned, and strength was the only thing that mattered to him now. She slipped in and out through the long hours of darkness. Sometimes lucid, sharpeyed, and present.
Sometimes lost somewhere far away, murmuring things in a language he didn't understand. Words that sounded to his exhausted ear, like her mother's voice reaching across a distance neither of them could properly measure. In the moment she surfaced, she talked about her father. The about the long trapping seasons up near the crossing, about a childhood split clean down the middle between two worlds that had both at different points. Told her plainly she didn't belong to either one.
I think I found it, she whispered once deep in the black hours before dawn, her hand finding his without her eyes even opening. The place I belong right here with you. The stay, Jed said throat tight, barely able to push the words out. to stay and help me rebuild. Is that a proposal, Rancher?
Maybe if you live long enough to hear the whole thing done properly. She laughed, weak, broken apart halfway through by a wse of pain. You're a hard man, Jed Callaway. Takes one to no one. By the gray light of morning, the fever that had gripped her through the very worst of the night finally broke.
Desa slept then fitfully at first, but naturally her breathing evening out slowly into something that finally sounded like survival instead of struggle. Jed sat beside the bed, his own bed, the one he'd surrendered to her that very first night, so she'd have somewhere soft to heal, and watched them climb slow and pale over the eastern ridge. The barn was gone, reduced to blackened timber and drifting gray ash. But the cabin still stood, scorched along one wall, but standing all the same. The land remained beneath his boots, scarred, but stubbornly, entirely unbroken.
And so, against every terrible odd stacked up over the past 6 days, did they? Wit found them there hours later, riding in hard, dust flying into a yard that looked like it had survived a small war. Reeve Slate's body still lay where it had fallen. Amy's moss long gone. Likely still running.