Likely still would be running for a good while yet. Lord above, Wit breathed, taking in the wreckage all at once. Jed, are you she's alive? Jed said before Wit could even finish the question. Barely, but alive, Wit's shoulder sagged with something close to relief.
Then his eyes caught on Reeve body and something complicated moved across his weathered face. " That's Thorn's man," he said quietly. was. Jed corrected, tried to warn us before it came to this, but tried to make it right. Near the end, aimed high when it counted most.
He shook his head slow, still turning the stranges of it over in his mind, still not fully believing it himself, died trying to pay off a debt he'd carried around 6 months too long. Whit looked down at the body a long moment. Something like reluctant respect settling slowly into the deep lines of his face. Man can spend his whole life making the wrong choice, he said finally, and still find a way to make the right one right at the very end of it. Doesn't undone.
But it's got to count for something. It counts, Jed agreed quietly. It counts for something. Inside, Desa stirred, murmuring something low and half-formed in her sleep, and Jed moved back to her side without another word, leaving Wit to deal with whatever remained scattered across the ruined yard. because burying the dead could wait a little while longer.
Watching over the living could not. Wit stayed on through that first terrible day, wrapping Reeve body careful in a horse blanket and laying him in the cool of the root cellar until the ground could be chosen properly. The cuz some duties don't require asking and because a man who tried however late to make things right deserved better than being left where he fell. He said nothing while he worked. just moved steady and unhurried, the way older men do when their bodies have long since made peace with hard labor.
Two more days passed in a haze of fever checks and changed bandages. Jed barely sleeping more than an hour at a stretch, jolting awake at every small sound, every shift in her breathing, every murmur that might mean the fever was creeping back or might mean absolutely nothing at all. On the third morning, her eyes opened clear. Really opened. Not the fever glazed half-consciousness of the days before, but something sharp and present and entirely unmistakably her own again. "
You look terrible," she rasped. Jed let out a laugh that came out sounding more like a soba, relief crashing through him so hard and so fast his hands actually shook with it. " You should see yourself," he managed. " Flattery," she said weakly. " Already this early.
Only speaking facts, ma'am." She reached for his hand, weak but certain, her fingers finding his without a moment's hesitation. " We're still here," she said. Half question, half disbelief, like the words themselves needed testing before she'd fully trust them. " We're still here," he confirmed.
Outside, Wit had already started clearing the burned timber away from the barn's old foundation. The first stubborn steps toward rebuilding something that had very nearly been taken from them entirely. A land still bore its scars plainly. The grass still held the black scorch marks of the fire, harsh against the gold of everything around it. But the spring still ran cold and clear, exactly where it always had.
The cabin still stood. And somewhere out past the ridge, a man named Malcolm Thorne sat behind his desk in a room Jed had never seen, believing, still with total unshaken confidence, that patience and money would eventually deliver him everything he'd ever wanted. He didn't know yet that his hired killer had died, trying to make amends for a debt 6 months overdue. Didn't know that his hired thug had run screaming into the wilderness, too broken by fear, to ever show his face in that territory again. Didn't know that the woman he' tried to burn out of existence, had survived the very fire meant to erase her, stitched back together with saddle thread and stubbornness, and a rancher who refused flat out to let her go.
And he certainly didn't know that Wit Sullivan, riding away that same evening, with grim purpose settling into every line of his weathered face, already carried something folded carefully in his coat pocket that end Malcolm Thorne's ambitions for good. Something that had been sitting safe and hidden for years, waiting quietly in an old friend's keeping, for exactly this kind of moment to finally arrive. A truth at long last, ready to come out into the light. Wit Sullivan didn't sleep that night. couldn't because what he carried in his coat pocket wasn't the kind of thing a man could sit down easy and close his eyes over.
He'd known Elias Lair 20 years. Long enough to trade winters with him. Long enough to sit at his table and drink his coffee and hold his infant daughter once briefly the year she was born before her mother's people and her father's world both started pulling her in directions that never quite met in the middle. And long enough, it turned out for Elias trust him with a sealed envelope a little over two years back. Just in case, the old trapper had said, pressing it into Wit's hands with a seriousness that hadn't made full sense until now.
A man like me makes enemies over land like mine. If anything ever happens, you make sure this finds the right hands. Whit had tucked it away, forgotten about it. mostly the way a person forgets about things that don't demand daily attention until 3 weeks ago when a girl bound at a creek bank turned out to be Elias Lair's daughter and the whole terrible shape of things clicked into place at once. He rode for Jed's ranch at first light.