Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

Arthur Morgan knew the day was going to be a bad one the moment he woke up.

He sat on the uncomfortable stool in The Broken Wheel saloon, the only halfway decent place in Heritage that had whiskey that didn’t taste like week old piss. The most recent drained glass sat on the counter, taunting him with its emptiness, even as the world around him began to blur discreetly at the edges.

There wasn’t enough whiskey in the world to drown the storm raging inside his soul.

Arthur waved the bartender over. He was a surly man, content to linger in the corner of the bar rinsing and repeatedly washing the same glasses in an effort to appear busy. He’d given Arthur the same once over he’d grown used to all these years; it was the one that just about everyone gave him as they assessed whether or not he was a threat.

They usually decided on the latter.

“Hey, partner,” Arthur grunted as he gestured vaguely to his distinct lack of liquor. “Can I get another?”

The bartender paused in his polishing and quirked an eyebrow at his patron. “Ain’t you had enough yet?”

Arthur clenched his fist in an effort to tamp down the fiery anger that boiled quickly and hotly in his veins. “What are you, a goddamn nursemaid? Just get the whiskey and shut up.”

The bartender rolled his eyes and did as he was told, making sure all the while that Arthur was aware that he was not at all pleased to be serving him. Arthur didn’t take it personally, though the dark voice in his head whispered at him to make it so; this barkeep treated everyone like that. Arthur only drew his ire because he’d planted himself at the bar a half hour after it opened and, approximately three hours later, still hadn’t deigned to leave.

Arthur dished out the appropriate number of coins (plus one for the bartender, though his better senses told him the idiot didn’t deserve it) and turned his undivided attention to the crisp, smoky amber liquid in the perfectly polished glass.

Dutch and Hosea had taken one look at him that morning and knew precisely what was wrong. Arthur had barely slept; he never did on the night before this particular day. He’d wandered the camp while the moon made its descent towards dawn and the rest of the gang slept off the day’s labors, bottle in hand and bleary eyes unwilling to let him rest.

His mind raged all night long.

Hosea came to find him at one point, as he usually did when this day rolled around in the godforsaken calendar. The old man said nothing; he’d only taken the half empty bottle from Arthur’s hand and steered him back to his tent. After depositing his wayward son on his cot, Hosea retreated to a nearby table with his book and a lantern, intent on keeping one watchful eye on Arthur while the other passed the hours by devouring literature.

Arthur wasn’t sure if he’d slept or, if he did, how long he managed to stay unconscious. He’d only jolted from the cot an hour or two after dawn, donned his jacket and hat, and stalked to his horse without a word.

Dutch and Hosea watched from Dutch’s tent, their gazes wary and concerned. They didn’t stop him, though, and they knew better than to try.

The outlaw and sometimes human being downed his fresh whiskey and let the burn sear away memories new and old. They’d send someone for him eventually. He hoped it wouldn’t be Marston; that boy was perpetually on his last nerve and Arthur couldn’t promise John would return to camp unscathed.

If Arthur was lucky, they would just let him drink until he passed out and never woke up again.

A fresh, hellish wave of anguish lanced through his heart. He clutched his head between his hands and stared at the newly empty glass, wishing it contained enough whiskey to suffocate and drown him.

Today was the day he’d found the graves of Eliza and their son, Isaac.

Over the years since they died, Arthur found that the only proper way to dull the worst of the lingering pain was with whiskey. Sometimes it was beer and other times it was a terrible combination of the two. He’d buried the rest of the torment and self-hatred, opting instead to throw himself headlong into whatever the gang needed doing to survive. If there were people and places that needed robbing, Arthur was there; if there were enemies that needed killing, his gun was the first to leave its holster.

Eventually her sheer will and denial hardened the sharp edge of that pain into something more manageable. But he still found his way to a saloon every day on this day, whether he wanted to or not. Today, however, Arthur carried a new, fresh hurt with him.

He was forgetting what Isaac looked like.

There was a page in his journal that contained his son’s likeness. He’d drawn it, tore the page from the book, folded it, and kept it tucked firmly between a set of random pages. It was too painful to look at and Arthur was petrified that the sometimes-prying eyes that wandered by as he wrote and drew in his journal would see Isaac.

Arthur would share most anything with the rest of the gang; the memory of his son, though, was strictly off limits.

But the drawing had served a different purpose last night. Rather than feed the memory he kept harbored close to his heart, the pencil shaded and outlined image of a young boy began to replace that memory. That had been the true catalyst for picking up the bottle and letting his feet eventually carry him to the saloon, where he could drown in his own sorrow.

He ordered another whiskey, which did its job of dulling the pain for a moment or two. But there was still a lifetime of pain to manage and not nearly enough time left on earth to begin to hope to sort through it all. Arthur wasn’t even sure he wanted to, when he thought about it.

For the moment, all he could think about was the next whiskey.

*

The girl from back east was not quite desperate. She was madly, wildly desperate, which made her both dangerous and careless.

This was precisely the regrettable combination that led to her current predicament. Really, it had been the woman’s fault; her coin purse was not cinched properly. That was the problem with rich folk—they thought their fine clothes and full wallets separated them distinctly enough from the rest of society that no one, especially the undesirable sort, would think twice about accosting and robbing them.

Unfortunately for the woman, Claramae Howard was an undesirable.

Claramae—or Clara, as she preferred—found her opportunity moments after the stagecoach dropped off the woman and her companion, an equally foppish young lady with far too much money and far too little common sense. She dusted off her clothes and sauntered over to the women, feigning being lost.

When she bumped into the first woman with the loose coin purse, she apologized profusely even as the woman eyed her with a venomous mixture of disgust and pity.

It was all the opening Clara needed to slip her hand quickly into the woman’s purse and pull out a few of the hastily tucked bills.

She left them with another round of apologies and made her way down the main thoroughfare of Heritage, keeping discreetly to the shadows cast by the late afternoon sun. Stealing was one thing—instilling the casualness of innocence after said stealing was an entirely different challenge. Fortunately, it was one that Clara had grown up honing until it was damn near perfect.

Well, usually it was perfect.

It wasn’t until she’d ducked into a short alley between buildings to count the money that she heard the first chorus of frustrated cries. They were followed swiftly by the sharp call for the law in order to report a theft.

Clara cursed, shoved the money into her pocket, and forced herself to remain calm. She had to get out of Heritage before the lawmen turned out into the streets. She was an outlier in this town and an obvious one at that; her previous lack of money had prevented her from buying clothes at the nearby general store and her attire was not only in dire need of replacing; it also loudly proclaimed her to be not of this area. For now, though, she huddled in the alley while she pondered her next move.

This was what desperation got you: shitty clothes, annoying rich women, and a day that couldn’t possibly get much worse.

*

Arthur needed to piss.

That, he told himself, was the real reason he left the saloon. It certainly had not been because he’d threatened the bartender. For what, exactly, he couldn’t quite remember, but Arthur was sure it was entirely warranted. It also wasn’t because the man who’d been stupid enough to intervene put his hand on Arthur’s shoulder in an attempt to calm him down. Needless to say, it hadn’t gone very well for that feller.

He probably would’ve kept punching the idiot, too, if someone else hadn’t thrown him outside and threatened him with the law if he showed his face back at the saloon.

That was how he’d ended up in the alley outside the saloon, leaning heavily against the wooden building as he emptied his bladder of the afternoon’s stock of whiskey.

None of it—not the whiskey, the threats, the physical violence—was enough to drown out the voice in his head that whispered his failure over and over. None if it was enough to bring back the fading memory of his son’s face.

Somehow, he managed to make his way to the hitching post outside the saloon, casting one suspicious eye on the doorway. If that fool came looking for him, he couldn’t promise that he would keep his hands to himself. Arthur was halfway to Boadicea when he heard the frantic shouts of a woman.

He turned his head and spotted the source of the keening. She was young and, by the look of her dress, quite obviously from money. Her companion was equally wealthy, and his eyes darted immediately to the coin purses they kept clutched firmly in their hands. The woman currently shouting was trying desperately to get the attention of male passersby, all of whom cast dubious looks at her before hurrying in the opposite direction or muttered some incoherent apology before turning away.

If they were men, Arthur would have robbed them without a moment’s hesitation. As it was, robbing innocent women was one of the few things beneath his personal code of honor, so he turned his attention back to his horse. He had one foot in the stirrup when the woman’s yells came nearer and, as his luck would have it, focused solely on him.

“Sir! Oh, sir, please, I beg you!”

Arthur spared half a thought to telling the women to piss off (that was also beneath his code of honor, but his mood was rather sour in that particular moment) before he sighed, lowered his foot, and turned to face the women.

She was young, hardly older than twenty years old. Her companion, who appeared to be of similar age, stared at him as though he were pulled directly from the gutter, which, he supposed, was not entirely that far from the truth.

The woman in distress clutched her purse tightly and widened her soft, brown eyes. “Someone stole my money, sir. I’ve been trying to ask for help,” she explained, tossing an angry hand at the town in general, “but no one seems to want to help me.”

Arthur narrowed his eyes at her and she instinctively took a step back. His hands landed heavily on his belt as he replied, “How terrible for you. But I fail to see how this is in anyway my concern.”

Her companion tugged on her friend’s arm and whispered in ear. “Leave it, Audrey. I can pay for our ticket back home.”

The woman—Audrey—tugged her arm free and squared her shoulders. “It’s the point of the matter! That—that street urchin took my money and they deserve to be punished!”

Arthur was quickly growing tired of the woman. Her voice was grating on his already frayed nerves and he could already feel the creeping, momentous wave of anguish threatening to swallow him.

“Take it up with the law,” he grunted at her as he prepared to mount up. “That’s what they was there for, last time I checked.”

Audrey stepped quickly back into Arthur’s line of sight. “They won’t help me,” she confessed with lips pressed angrily together. “Apparently they think their time is best spent elsewhere.”

“And perhaps that’s for the best,” Arthur answered tersely. He tipped his hand to the women. “Stay safe, ladies.”

Audrey’s hand darted out and landed on Arthur’s arm. He glanced down at it then quickly back up at her, unsure if he should be feeling quite so angry at the unrequested touch.

The alleged robbery victim put on her best, most innocent expression. “I’m asking you, sir. Please help find the person who stole from me, so that we might still maintain some semblance of justice in this country.”

Arthur nearly laughed, both at her request and the idea of American justice. “Do I really look like the sort of person you should be asking for help?”

As it turned out, there was something about Arthur Morgan—outlaw, killer, and sometimes human being—that struck Audrey as the helpful type.

Besides that, she was willing to pay him, and in Arthur’s very particular line of work, money always did the talking.

When Arthur inquired just how she was going to do that, Audrey offered her companion’s money: the amount that was stolen plus another ten, a total of forty dollars. They would wait in front of the train station for him, reward in hand after the successful apprehension of the thief.

“I saw the culprit go that way,” Audrey explained with an imperious gesture toward the far end of town.

So it was that somehow Arthur Morgan found himself slightly drunk, full of festering anguish, and on an errand for a rich girl whose money was stolen.
What a goddamn shit day it was turning out to be.

*

It turned out that even shit days had the propensity to get worse when given half a chance.

Clara was used to being chased, which was unusual for a woman of her particular upbringing. She admitted with some raw humility that she was the one usually doing the chasing, but given the day’s exceptional capacity for inconvenience, it wasn’t entirely surprising that she was now the hunted instead of the hunter.

She knew she had to think and act fast when she spotted the man heading toward her general direction. Clara shoved her recently pilfered bills into her boot and darted back down the alley. A few twists, sharp corners, and shouts of dismay later, she found herself beside the Broken Wheel. Clara slid to a stop, pressed up against the building, and peered around the front.

Her pursuer, a rather larger and intimidating man, stalked angrily toward the saloon.

“Shit,” Clara muttered.

She pressed her back flat against the wall. Her thoughts whipped through her mind, each one colliding with another in an effort to take control of her actions. Whatever she was going to do, she had to do it fast.

Her eyes, which had been roving through the alley in search of a well-disguised miracle, landed on precisely that.

Clara smirked despite the gravity of her current predicament. She took hold of her miracle—a small one but beggars couldn’t be choosers when being pursued by an ominous figure—and slipped into the saloon.

One of the things her unusual upbringing instilled in her was that hiding didn’t mean wrapping oneself in shadow to avoid detection. More often than not, people were entirely content to live in ignorance of their surroundings.

Sometimes, it was best to hide in plain sight.

*

The bartender took one look at Arthur, frowned, and slammed the glass he’d been cleaning on the counter.

“Thought I told you I’d fetch the law if you came back,” he said darkly.

Arthur held up his hands in what he hoped resembled a gesture of peace. “Turns out I’m working in representation of the law. Or thereabouts,” he muttered the last bit under his breath. He leaned an elbow on the bar and made a show of glancing around the room with a watchful, imposing eye.

“Woman outside claims to have been robbed. She’s enlisted my help in resolving the matter.” Arthur turned his gaze to the bartender, who stared back at him with wide, disbelieving eyes.

Arthur nodded toward the front door. “You can ask her yourself, if you don’t believe me.”

The bartender glanced between the front door, the room, and the outlaw taking up as much bar space as possible. He looked about to protest, to find some reason why Arthur should leave, but apparently thought the consequences of such a decision to be not at all worth the trouble that he gave Arthur a single, swift nod.

“But I don’t want no trouble, you hear?” the bartender inserted quickly.

Arthur reached into his satchel and tossed the man a few coins. “You’ll get none from me. I’ll take a beer, and get one for yourself, while you’re at it.”

The bartender snatched the coins and muttered a half-hearted thank you. A moment later, Arthur had a beer in hand and a foul mood that seemed large enough to fill the entire saloon.

There were a few options, insofar as he saw it.

He could spend the time actually searching for the culprit (it dawned on Arthur that he’d retrieved next to no information concerning the thief, but he was also a thief, as it were, and would likely recognize a man cut from the same cloth), retrieve the money, and receive said money plus a bit more for his trouble.

Arthur sipped the beer and glanced around the room. Was it worth it? Probably not, but money was money, and if the gang was to eventually push back west, then every cent would count.

On the other hand, it would be just as easy to rob someone else, get twice the money, and leave the whole damn business to the wolves.

He sipped the beer and sighed. Arthur leaned back against the bar and let his eyes wander again over the faces of the other patrons. Many of them made it a point not to look in his direction; his kind were a particular breed of distasteful and better left to their own devices.

Arthur sighed, though the sound came out as more of a grunt of frustration. Matters of money warred with the half-forgotten image of a boy’s face as the beer swirled along with the rest of the alcohol filling his veins.

His heart clenched in his chest. His fingers wrapped around the bottle until the glass threatened to shatter. Maybe he should let it; maybe feeling the shards press through his skin and bleed him out would stop him from feeling so thoroughly disgusted with himself, the world, and everyone in it.

Then Arthur swept his gaze to the right. A few hunched figures lingered at the bar, each one keeping a fair distance between themselves and his imposing bulk. But there was one person at the far end of the bar that had snagged his attention.

It wasn’t the ill-fitting clothing and the dirt smeared across their cheeks that inevitably drew his notice. It was the fact that the person was already watching him. A pair of bright green eyes peered from around the other bar patrons to land directly on Arthur’s person. They were cool, assessing, and not a little bit curious.

Arthur set the bottle of beer down on the counter. He narrowed his eyes at the figure and wondered just how eyes could acquire such a captivating color. It also dawned on him that the person was looking at him with something other than contempt, which was strange in of itself.

Then the eyes widened as they discovered that Arthur had, at some point, chosen to look back.

Before he could make sense of what was going on, the figure with the green eyes sprinted from the bar and headed toward the back door.

*

Clara hadn’t intended on watching the man Audrey had sent after her.

She hulked at the far end of the bar with a beer in hand and her ridiculous disguise. Clara shifted uncomfortably in the too-large coat that smelled vaguely of piss and sweat and the hat that sat lopsidedly on her head. The drunk in the alley had been far too unconscious to notice that his effects had been taken and, at least for the moment, they served as a halfway decent disguise. She’d rubbed some dirt into her cheeks just before entering the saloon to ensure the distinctly feminine cut of her cheeks and jaw were hidden from view.

After a minor half-argument with the bartender, her pursuer settled in with a beer and took in his surroundings. Clara fought the instinct to huddle further into herself; shrinking away would only draw more attention than she needed. Besides, there were a few patrons between her and the man, which gave her a decent opportunity to sneak a few looks at him.

The first thing she decided was that he was certainly not law. There was a manner in which he held himself that reeked of swagger born from taking what he wanted without remorse. Clara leaned a little farther forward and chanced letting her eyes linger on him a bit longer.

He was imposing, to be sure. She was fairly certain he could wrestle a bear, if given half a chance, and most likely come out in one piece. His mouth had a mean cut to it, but Clara could tell that it was, for the most part, feigned; the man was wearing a mask, much as she did when it suited her best.

Something about him seemed sad and tormented. It was a feeling entirely at odds with the person Clara watched that for a moment she was certain she was mistaken. There was no way that the man, with his gun belt slung low over his hips and the brim of his hat pulled low over his face, could be sad. Angry, perhaps, and a little bit off, but not sad.

But…the longer she looked…

Clara tilted her head as her thoughts continued to wander. He was handsome, she thought, in a rugged sort of way. He wasn’t exactly the well put together kind, and the manner in which he glared at the rest of the room as if in defiance of their existence made her believe he didn’t quite fit in with regular society. Clara would know; she hadn’t been a part of that world for quite some time.

She wondered why the woman she’d stolen from had chosen this man to send after her. Perhaps she’d thought this one would frighten her into giving her the money, as it was quite clear he could frighten with hardly more than a look. Clara knew she’d have to get out of the saloon and out of Heritage before this man caught her trail.

He turned slightly and put his beer down on the bar counter. Clara was surprised to notice that his eyes, which she’d expected to be muddied and dark, were a crisp, unexpectedly bright mix of green and blue. Even at this distance and in the dimness of the saloon, Clara found herself captivated by the color.

It was only then that the realization hit her: there was only one way to determine what color his eyes were. He was looking right at her.

Clara’s heart gave one panicked lurch in her chest. Don’t panic—think slowly, act quickly, stay alive.

Her pursuer’s eyes narrowed a fraction and his head tilted slightly. He slowly pushed away from the bar to peer more closely at her. To her surprise, there was an element of curiosity in his gaze, the sort that comes with being unsure if you’ve met the person before.

Think slowly. If she stayed, his eyes would linger on her and he would be quick to find out the truth. If she ran, he would pursue her further; Clara had never been good at running, but she was positive she could at least outlast him long enough to get out of town and lose her trial. The problem was, she couldn’t tell how far he was willing to go to catch her.

That left her only one option, then.

Clara took a breath, steadied her muscles, and sprinted away from the bar.

Sometimes the only way to stay alive was to run as fast as you could and hope for the best.

Chapter Text

Clara thought she was done running.

She’d run nearly across the country to end up in New Yorkshire. Before that, she only ran away from what she was afraid to face.

Now, as it turned out, she was still running, but this time, it was toward something—something better, something exciting, something worth having.

At least, that’s what she told herself as she burst from the saloon’s back door and narrowly avoided crashing into the men lingering in the fading light.

Clara didn’t think; she let her instincts propel her forward. She darted around turns and slipped down the alleys between buildings in an effort to lose her tail. Clara didn’t bother turning to look over her shoulder at her pursuer—she could feel his looming presence behind her, gaining on her with every step.

Her lungs cried out for respite. She pumped her arms and forced her tired legs around yet another corner. Her path opened up into open ground, marred only a pig pen on one side and a row of buildings on the other. Clara gasped for breath and saw the road just beyond the open courtyard.

Shit.

“Hey! Stop, partner!”

His voice was close—too close. There was no time to make a proper decision, so Clara did the only thing she could think of.

She jumped over the low pen fences and found precisely what she’d hoped.

The alley beside this particular building—a butcher’s shop, by the iron stench of blood in the air—was littered with crates and barrels to supply the shop. This time, Clara chanced a look over her shoulder.

Her pursuer rounded the corner she’d just left and headed for the fences. Every stride was twice as powerful as hers, as though he’d been born on the run. If he hadn’t spent so much time in the saloon, she knew he would’ve caught her by now.

Clara shuffled out of her loose jacket and dropped it at the entrance to the alley. She slipped between the crates and barrels until she found a place with enough space to keep her under cover.

She pressed her back against the wall of the butcher’s shop and fought to slow her breathing. Her skin was limned with a sheen of filthy sweat and her head pounded from the effort of running.

Once she’d regained some of her composure, she shifted until her shoulder was up against the stack of crates blocking her from view. She cycled a few purposeful breaths through her burning lungs until her heartbeat was less of a roar and more of a dull thud in her ears. Then she listened.

The pounding footsteps that had chased her this far came to a sudden halt. Clara listened to his labored breathing and imagined what he’d find at the mouth of the alley.

A soft whisper of spurs told her he’d bent down and fetched her pilfered jacket. Clara’s hand slipped down to the slim sheath on her belt.

She gripped the hilt of the knife, taking comfort in the familiar presence of the weapon. Clara readied it to strike and waited for her pursuer to catch up with her. The jacket was only to ensure that he followed her down the proper path.

Running wasn’t her strong point, but this was how Clara preferred to end things: hidden in the shadows and at the sharpened edge of a knife.

*

It became almost immediately apparent that alcohol consumption was not conducive to running.

Arthur surprised himself by managing to keep up with the bastard thief. His steps were a little unsure as they pounded the dirt, and he’d had to throw out a hand once or twice to steady his pursuit, but he did it.

The world tilted to a somewhat concerning degree as whiskey and beer sloshed around in his veins. Arthur rounded the corner and gritted his teeth as he leapt over the fences that lay in between him and his target.

A mud-stained jacket lay crumpled at the mouth of the alley.

Arthur halted before the discarded cloth. He peered down at the alley and frowned at the shadows that lingered between the stacks of crates and barrels. It left far too many places to hide and not a lot of room for movement.

He should’ve just stayed at the bar and drank himself to death. That, at least, would have been preferable to this nonsense.

Arthur glanced over his shoulder. No one from the saloon had followed and neither had any lawmen, much to his relief. The bartender’s loyalties were quite obviously questionable, and Arthur had half expected him to send the sheriff’s men rushing after him, particularly after that little white lie about working in their favor.

He bent and inspected the jacket. Arthur sniffed, winced, and turned away at the distinct smell of day-old piss and sour, rotting sweat.

“Jesus,” Arthur muttered as he kicked the pile of worn fabric away. He faced the alley again and laid a hand on the revolver at his hip.

There were two ways of playing this.

The thief had left the jacket intentionally; if he took the bait, then the target would likely escape in the opposite direction.

Or, the target was down this alley, and was hoping Arthur was stupid enough to wander away and leave the matter dead to rights.

As it turned out, bullheadedness could often be mistaken for stupidity, and money generally led people to do stupid things.

He took a step into the alley, keeping a watchful eye on the crates, and cleared his throat. “I know you’re here, partner. Why don’t you come out and make matters easy on yourself?”

There was no answer. Arthur hadn’t expected one.

He took another step, then another. Soon he was approaching the halfway point of the alley, where a sizeable stack of wooden crates stamped with labels from Saint Denis and Annesburg loomed to his right.

Being raised as an outlaw had given Arthur a somewhat respectable talent for noticing when things were not as they should be. To the naked eye, the alley was just that: loaded with crated and teeming with shadows crafted from the late day sun. But Arthur Morgan knew that it wasn’t just the eyes on needed to rely on in order to stay alive.

You had to know when your instincts told you to watch your back.

Arthur stopped just before the tall stack. He pulled in breath after steady breath; even inebriation wasn’t enough to dull his cool-headed sharpness.

His fingers tightened over the pearlescent grip of his revolver. Every muscle in his arm was primed and ready to draw at the first sign of trouble.

“I ain’t asking you again,” he growled. His eyes never left the crates.

After a long, tense moment, Arthur heard a soft sigh. “If I come out, do you promise not to hurt me?”

Something about the voice wasn’t right.

Arthur took another step forward until he was even with the crates. “I won’t hurt you,” he said in as soothing a voice as he could muster. “Just come on out now, and we’ll sort out this mess.”

Nothing happened.

He was losing his patience. Arthur stormed forward, intent on wringing the upstart little shit by the neck. The woman had better pay him double for his trouble; if she didn’t, he might just have to rob her on principle.

He didn’t get very far.

Arthur hardly took two steps forward before a knife was at his throat.

The tip jutted into the skin just below his throat. Arthur froze, tightening his muscles in an effort to keep the blade from slipping to its final destination.

Hot, insatiable fury lanced through him. This thief certainly had a pair of balls on him, if he thought threatening a man like Arthur Morgan would end well for him.

But the moment Arthur lifted his eyes to memorize the face of his oppressor, matters took on a strange, entirely unanticipated turn.

The face that glared at him was smeared with sweat-streaked dirt. Filth did nothing to dampen the cool, verdant depths of the thief’s eyes. It took him a moment longer than he would’ve liked, but Arthur could just make out the distinctly feminine swell of cheeks and the sloping cut of the jaw.

Arthur held up his hands in a gesture of peace even as his mind whirled. The thief didn’t have balls, after all—it was a god damn woman.

She kept her eyes firmly on his. The blade at his throat didn’t move an inch, proving her steady hand to be more than capable at wielding a knife. She’d obviously had practice, then, Arthur reasoned, even as he forced his thoughts to center on escape.

The thief squared her shoulders and lifted her chin. Despite Arthur’s pressing predicament, he found his eyes wandering. She was shorter than him by a hand or two but certainly not petite. She wore men’s clothes, but Arthur could still make out the swell of her chest through the worn, dirty shirt. Her waist and thighs were thicker than the average woman’s, but Arthur could sense the power and intent behind her movements.

“You understand by now that I’m not going with you,” she said, enunciating each word as though he were a simpleton.

Arthur, his assessment of the woman momentarily forgotten, narrowed his eyes at her. “Do I look like the sort that cares very much about a rich girl’s wallet?”

The woman tilted her head. The blade didn’t move. “Then why are you chasing me?”

He shrugged, feigning indifference. “Money’s money.” Arthur held her gaze. His eyes wandered again and memorized as many details as he could. If she got away, then Arthur would know precisely who to look for.

She smirked at his obvious scrutiny. “Weren’t expecting to be accosted by a woman, I’m guessing?”

]Arthur replied, “Can’t say that I was. But, as they say, ‘hell hath no fury like a woman’s scorn,’ or some such bullshit like that.”

He waited a beat. Arthur became fixated on the steady pulse that throbbed in the vital vein in his neck. One wrong move and the blade would sever it and end the mess he called he a life in an instant.

The woman smiled. “Shakespeare. I’m impressed.” She lowered the knife slowly and took a healthy step back. “Why don’t we just chalk this up to a misunderstanding and both go our separate ways?”

Arthur said nothing. He lowered his hands a fraction.

She sheathed the knife and nodded to him. “See you around, cowboy.”

He waited until she began to turn around. Then Arthur wrapped a thick arm around her chest. With her footing gone, she fell back against his chest. He drew his gun and pressed it to the small of her back.

The woman writhed something awful. Arthur, powerful as he was, wasn’t prepared for the manner in which she thrashed against him.

“Just calm down,” he ordered through gritted teeth. “I ain’t gonna shoot you unless you give me a reason to.”

She elbowed him in the gut. Arthur grunted and cursed the moment he’d chosen to wake up. “Let me go!”

He pressed the barrel of the revolver into her back. The woman winced and stilled long enough for Arthur to tighten his grip around her.

She was warm. Arthur didn’t realize how cold and unfeeling he’d been until he felt the flush of heat from her body. Though she was filthy and in need of a bath, Arthur could just make out a floral scent beneath all the mess.

If he didn’t miss his guess, it was lavender and mint.

Her cheeks were painted red with fury. Her chest heaved with barely restrained desperation to get away. But the woman was still, and the hands that she’d reached up grapple at his arm fell away.

“Now,” Arthur said with satisfaction, “I’d suggest you give me that money. Wouldn’t want someone to get hurt over a few bucks, now, would we?”

She glared at him from the corner of her eye. “Says the one holding a gun to my back.”

“I wouldn’t have put the gun to your back if you hadn’t put the knife to my throat,” Arthur countered. “Seems we both ain’t too good at being reasonable.”

The woman thrashed once more but this time Arthur was ready for it. He cocked the gun and her movements ceased.

Arthur waited a moment. Then he said, “Give me the money and I’ll forget I ever saw you.”

She scoffed. “You won’t remember me, anyway. Especially not with all that whiskey addling your brain.”

Arthur chuckled dangerously. “I have a good memory, miss.” Besides, a small part of him knew that he wouldn’t forget the green of her eyes.

Finally, she sighed. The woman agreed to give him the money so long as he maintained his promise to let her go. Arthur released his grip and raised the gun until it was leveled with her chest.

The woman turned to face him. “Actually, I have a better idea.”

Arthur raised an eyebrow. “And what’s that?”

She took a step toward him. Arthur’s heart lurched in his chest and he trained the gun to match her movements. The woman kept her eyes on his even as she closed the distance between them.

Arthur became acutely aware of the way her chest pressed against his. In fact, he was having a rather difficult time not thinking of the way her body molded against his.

“How about this,” she said in a low, soft murmur. “How about we split the money and call it a day?”

He furrowed his brow at her. Whiskey and close proximity weren’t doing much to help him formulate coherent thoughts in that moment. “What?”

The woman stepped away from him and held up a wad of cash. She grinned and said, “Thanks for this.”

Arthur blinked.

She was running and out of the alley before he had time to process what had just happened. Fury fueled by bitter embarrassment boiled through his blood.

“Get the hell back here, woman!” he roared as he chased her yet again.

*

All told, Clara thought that had gone better than it could have.

Now, the only problem was making sure she got away with the money.

She careened onto the main street through Heritage. The sun slanted toward the horizon, draping the town in long, heavy shadows. Clara hoped they would be enough to hide her escape from the brute chasing her.

Her arms pumped at her sides as her legs carried her toward the end of town that gave way to the grassy, rocky plains beyond the town’s border. It would be smart to steal a horse, she thought as she darted in and out of the town’s shadows. All she had to do was get back to her hiding spot, gather her belongings, and leave this town behind.

Clara didn’t expect his eyes to be so blue.

The thought crashed through her suddenly, startling her with its clarity. His eyes weren’t just blue; they were green and blue with a bit of sunlit gold at the centers.

Unfortunately, the momentary loss of focus cost her.

Her body jerked to a halt and she was thrown violently backwards. Clara landed on the ground in a cloud of choking dust with the air knocked clean from her lungs.

She coughed until her throat was raw. It took a moment for her to realize between breathless gasps that she’d been lassoed.

Clara cursed and fought against the bond. Some of the townsfolk gasped and mumbled under their breaths as they took in the sight of her writhing and spitting out ungainly phrases.

The hulking mass of her captor loomed over her. He smirked at her, his summer eyes flashing like cold steel, and said, “I think you took something of mine by mistake.”

Clara fumed, her mind pouring over ways in which she could escape. Her fingers flexed uselessly for the hilt of her knife, which sat out of reach in its sheath. Every time she moved, the rope bit through her thin shirt and into her skin. He’d lassoed her with precision; the rope sat just above her elbow, leaving her little room to maneuver her arms.

He searched her for the money. Clara tried to twist out of his grip, but he held her firmly by the rope. He found the stash she’d stolen from Audrey and, after a moment more of searching, discovered his own wad of cash.

The man waved the cash in front of her face. “This,” he said in a low and brooding tone, “is mine now.”

Clara grunted as he hoisted her to her feet. She made a feeble attempt to twist away but he yanked her backward. Clara focused on keeping her breathing even and her thoughts clear.

“Come on,” he said with a sharp pull. “Let’s go have a chat with the lady you stole from.”

This wasn’t the first time Clara had been placed into a rather disagreeable situation. Admittedly, she hadn’t been lassoed before, but there was a first time for everything. She shuffled along, shooting daggers at her captor, and pondered how best to remedy her current situation.

Killing him was out of the question—at least for now. When she was free and if he continued to annoy her, maybe she’d contemplate putting a knife in him. No—for now, it was best to play along. She wagered that the man likely wouldn’t turn her over to the law. He didn’t seem the sort that got along well with sheriffs and deputies.

“Shouldn’t have run,” he chastised as he dragged her along.

She exaggerated her gait until her shoulder crashed against his. He cut a glare toward her and she shrugged nonchalantly. “You every try being less of a bastard?”

He chuckled mirthlessly. “Now, that ain’t very ladylike language, miss. And I have tried being less of a bastard.” The man smirked and added, “It didn’t take.”

They made their way back toward the saloon. The man halted unexpectedly in front of the building. Clara peered around him, anticipating the sight of Audrey, and was greeted with someone else.

An old man sat on the saloon steps. His eyes were trained directly on the man who had her lassoed.

“There you are, Arthur,” the man said with some relief. He rose stiffly from the step and made his way toward them. His eyes lingered on her the closer he got.

The man—Arthur—sighed. “Hosea,” he muttered by way of greeting.

“Thought I’d find you knee deep in whiskey by now,” the man said as he came toward them. Hosea looked from to Arthur and back again. He asked, “What’s going on here?”

Arthur glanced at her. Clara raised an eyebrow back at him. He turned back to Hosea and muttered darkly, “She stole my money.”

Hosea blinked. “I’m sorry, it sounded like you said she stole from you.”

Clara grinned triumphantly. Arthur, on the other hand, simmered in irritation. “I ain’t the only one she stole from,” he told Hosea defensively.

The old man glanced at her. Clara shifted uncomfortably under the weight of his gaze. Hosea seemed able to see through the veil she wore and into the person that lay beneath. She expected him to find her wanting, to look upon her with disappointment and a bit of disgust. That was something she was used to, and Clara was already braced for the sting.

But the old man’s eyes sharpened into keen interest and mildly amused curiosity.

Hosea said to Arthur, “Seems you found yourself another outlaw.”

Arthur gaped at Hosea and then at Clara. “An outlaw?”

Clara decided to speak up. “I’m not—”

Hosea waved away their dispute. “We know our kind when we see it, miss. And if you can steal from this one,” he said with a jab in Arthur’s direction, “then you’ve got more gumption than most people.”

The old man paused and asked Arthur, “Where you taking her?”

Arthur quickly explained the predicament in which they’d both been wrapped up. Clara stood by all the while and wondered if she should take her chances in escaping now or wait to see how this played out.

Hosea seemed a rather interesting character. She decided to stick around.

“You got your money,” he said to Arthur. “And besides, I saw that girl leave on the train a while back.” He looked once more at Clara, nodded, and said, “We’ll take her back to camp.”

Clara pondered this for a moment. Camp implied that there more of them and, judging by Hosea’s earlier comment, it was likely a camp filled with outlaws. A camp of outlaws meant weapons, but that also meant something more important than weapons: money.

Maybe being captured wasn’t such a bad thing after all.

Arthur scoffed at Hosea’s suggestion. “She’s more trouble than she’s worth. I say we give her over to the law and let them deal with her.”

Hosea frowned at him. “Come on, Arthur. You know as well as I do that if she stole from you, she at least deserves a bit of recognition.” He turned and began to make his way to his horse. “We’ll let Dutch talk to her and see what he has to say.”

Arthur glared at Clara. “Seems you’re intent on making a mess of things, ain’t you?”

She grinned at him. “At least you get to spend more time with me, Arthur.” Clara dragged out the syllables of his name in a saccharine manner she knew would infuriate him.

“And won’t thatjust be the highlight of my afternoon,” he said sarcastically. He pushed her forward and grunted, “Come on, woman. And do us both a favor, will you, and keep your damn mouth shut.”

Arthur hoisted her effortlessly onto the back of his horse. She shied a bit, clearly agitated by her master’s foul demeanor. Clara wondered how often the poor beast had to suffer Arthur’s moods. He climbed into the saddle and settled with the reins. He was a man clearly comfortable astride a horse—and more at ease with them, too. Arthur leaned forward and patted the horse’s neck while murmuring soothingly into the beast’s ear. Arthur had kept her hands bound and Clara worked at the knot, but it remained resolutely firm.

Hosea wheeled his mount around. He nodded toward Clara and asked, “What’s your name, miss?”

She looked at him for a moment. Clara wondered which name she should give him and decided on the one closest to the truth. “Mae,” she replied.

In truth, she didn’t like the nickname very much. It brought with it only bad memories of the person she used to be and the person she’d thought she wanted to be. But it would serve for now.

“Miss Mae,” Hosea said respectfully. He gestured toward Arthur. “Our mutual friend here will escort you to our camp. Now, you seem like a level-headed girl, albeit it a bit of a foolish one. I’ll advise against trying anything silly on the way to camp.”

She nodded. Arthur set his horse to follow Hosea’s and turned over his shoulder. “That rope too tight?”

Clara frowned suspiciously at him. “A bit,” she answered cautiously.

Arthur nodded solemnly and kicked the horse into a canter. “Good.”

Clara chuckled softly despite the situation. Arthur glanced at her every now and again, as if to reassure himself that she was still bound and unable to flee.

It turned out that even the shittiest days had the ability get a bit more interesting.

Chapter Text

The girl was infuriating.

Arthur had remained resolutely silent on the way back to camp. Hosea, ever the character, tried his best to eke more information out of the woman as they traveled.

Every now and again, she would make pointed comments about him. Arthur would glare at her and she’d fall silent but not without the ghost of a smirk still on her lips.

It escaped his reason—however limited that might be during times of duress—how a person who was entirely at the whim of thieves and killers could be quite so cavalier.

She was sarcastic and hubristic, to boot. Hosea apparently found this amusing, as well as the fact that the girl had so brazenly robbed a rich girl and Arthur in the same night.

The old man had turned to him at one point and said, “She’s a bit like you, Arthur. A bit less blockheaded, I’d say, but certainly quick with her tongue.”

His hands had clenched on the reins. Arthur had seriously considered throwing her off the horse and leaving her to the wolves.

But they’d arrived back at camp all the same. Hosea drifted off to talk to Dutch about the girl and left Arthur with orders to have the other women see to the girl’s comforts.

Arthur had staunchly refuted the necessity of his proffered hospitality. The old man only gave him a hard stare, told him to do it or he’d show himsome hospitality, and left Arthur to do his bidding.

Hosea didn’t tell him not to keep her tied up, though.

Arthur stretched out his legs and took a long, satisfied pull on his cigarette. He flicked away the ash and sighed a thick cloud of smoke.

“Do you have to do that right here?”

His eyes slid to the girl. Her hands were bound in her lap. Arthur ensured that the rope was still secure and let his gaze wander up to her face. Miss Grimshaw oversaw her cleanliness while the other women scrounged up some spare clothes. Her hair, which had been wild and filthy, now hung in a tightly wound braid over her shoulder. The shirt and pants she’d worn in town had been discarded (likely burned by Miss Grimshaw, who was a stickler for hygiene) and instead she wore a skirt and a plain shirt.

Arthur was pleased to discover she looked miserable.

He blew out another plume of smoke in her general direction.

The girl wrinkled her nose. “Idiot,” she mumbled under her breath.

“Better watch yourself, miss,” he cautioned her as he flicked his cigarette. “You’re in our territory now. Might want to moderate your approach to indecent language.”

She didn’t reply. She settled her back against the tree and glowered at the rest of the camp. Arthur tossed the cigarette butt to the ground and stomped on the ashes.

Hosea also hadn’t told him not to antagonize the woman.

“And look at you,” he drawled with a smirk. “Why, you look almost like a lady now, don’t you?”

She looked at him sidelong. “Please stop talking.”

Arthur leaned forward a bit. She wasn’t all that unpleasant to look at, now that her face wasn’t covered in dirt and day-old sweat. Her eyes blazed like the camp’s fire as she pointedly stared off into the night. There was a hint of defiance in that gaze and Arthur discovered something rather interesting.

The girl wasn’t afraid. A little on edge, perhaps, but Arthur saw no fear in her.

“What you say your name was again?” he asked.

She shifted a bit and tested the bonds on her wrists. “Mae,” she replied through gritted teeth.

Arthur watched her for a moment. As an expert in lying, he’d grown accustomed to recognizing the same quality, or lack thereof, in others. It was clear to him, then, that the girl wasn’t entirely telling the truth about her name.

“Sure,” he drawled, “and I’m Landon Ricketts.”

She sighed and pressed her lips together. “It’s not exactly untrue,” she said.

Arthur shrugged and settled back against the seat. “Whatever you say, Mae.”

At that moment, Micah Bell sauntered toward them. Arthur tensed and fought back the immediate urge to throttle him.

The man sauntered over to where Arthur kept watch over the girl. There was a glint in his eye that set Arthur’s teeth on edge. A wry, sinister grin crossed his lips as his eyes settled heavily on the girl.

“Looks like you caught yourself a rather interesting animal, there, Morgan,” Micah said.

Arthur clenched his hand into a fist to avoid reaching for his gun. He watched Micah’s eyes slide up and down the girl’s body. It wasn’t difficult to imagine what sort of thoughts were running through his useless head.

“Micah,” he growled both in greeting and warning.

The girl shifted uncomfortably where she sat.

Micah ignored him. He nodded toward the girl and asked, “And who might you be?”

She turned upon him a withering, entirely disgusted glance. “Nobody.”

Micah’s smirk grew. “Well, Miss Nobody, I’d love to…shake your hand, if you wasn’t all tied up.” He angled his body toward her in a way that made Arthur’s blood boil.

The girl didn’t back down from his unwanted stare. Instead, that defiance Arthur had sensed flared to life in the presence of Micah’s unwanted attention.

It seemed even the scrutiny of unknown men was not enough to daunt the newest addition to the camp.

Arthur crossed his arms and leveled a cool gaze at Micah. “You got nothing better to do than ogle a tied-up woman, Micah?”

“I ain’t ogling,” he retorted with a sneer in Arthur’s direction. “I was just…enjoying the view, as it were. Better than looking at your ugly mug for days on end, that’s for damn sure.”

Arthur nodded sagely. “No doubt.” He watched Micah until he began to walk away and, when he was sure he wouldn’t come back, turned his attention back to the girl.

Her defiance was muted by something darker, something more insidious. She’d retreated into the recesses of her mind, leaving her expression blank.

He swallowed and felt his chest constrict just a bit.

“Don’t listen to goddamn Micah,” he muttered with a dismissive wave in his direction. “He ain’t much more than a viper in a hat with a ridiculous mustache.”

She chuckled softly and the tightness in his chest lessened just a bit.

“Arthur!”

Both of their heads swiveled at the booming, commanding sound of Dutch van der Linde’s voice.

He rose instinctively from the chair. Arthur’s hands dropped to his gun belt as he watched Dutch and Hosea approach.

The gang’s leader and savior gestured toward the girl. “For God’s sake, Arthur, untie her.”

Arthur gaped at him in surprise. “But—”

Hosea cut in. “Just do it, son.”

Arthur gave them both an affronted look and stalked over to the girl. She kept one eye on Dutch as she held out her bound wrists to be cut.

He bent beside her and drew his hunting knife. He let it hover over the rope and murmured, “You try anything and I will tie you to that tree until you learn some manners. Understood?”

Still, she was unafraid. She gave him a swift nod and held out her wrists a bit further. His knife slid swiftly through the rope, effectively severing her bonds.

Arthur straightened. He waited a beat and then extended his hand to help her up.

The girl glanced at his hand and then back him. Then she rose on her own, leaving his proffered hand empty.

Arthur had a feeling that that wouldn’t be the last time the girl would try to get the better of him—and succeed.

*

There was a fine line between charismatic and poisonous. Dutch van der Linde toed that line with finesse that both surprised and disturbed Clara.

She stared at him, unable to take her eyes off him and enraptured by every movement. He was different than the other two; his fingers were adorned with rings and a gleaming gold chain draped from the pocket of his vest. A voice whispered at the back of her mind to be cautious, to remember why she’d fled the east in the first place. Men like him—like Dutch—were everywhere, and they took and took until there was nothing left.

And yet, Clara found herself falling still. His presence demanded your attention and simultaneously instilled a sense of calm. Everything will be alright, his stark, persistent gaze seemed to say, as long as you do what I say.

Dutch gestured with a hand toward Arthur. “You’ll have to excuse my friend, miss. He ain’t so well versed in the finer points of civility.”

Arthur glowered beside him, subdued by the commanding undertone laced through Dutch’s words. He shifted on his feet and his summer eyes landed squarely on her. It was clear that Dutch was the one in charge here. Even Hosea and his advanced age weren’t enough to dampen the power that Dutch maintained.

Dutch gestured toward her. “I see you’ve been given some new clothes. That’s good. And you’ve been fed, I presume?”

Clara nodded.

He shared a look with Hosea. Then the gang leader asked, “What’s your name, miss?”

The pointed way in which he asked told Clara that all three men knew she hadn’t given her real name—or rather, her full name. She said nothing for a moment as she pondered the weight of providing a man like Dutch van der Linde her name.

She was still on the run. She’d come a long way and somehow managed to evade every tail he’dsent after her. But even good luck didn’t last forever and there was no telling whether or not this gang would turn her over or keep her safe.

Or, she thought with some distaste, kill her just for the fun of it.

In the end, she knew she could take care of herself, should matters go south. And if they killed her, then it was a far better fate than the one she’d left behind.

Clara let out a breath, met Dutch’s persistent gaze, and said, “Claramae Howard. I prefer Clara.”

The ghost of a smirk crept onto Arthur’s lips. Of course, he’d already guessed she wasn’t telling the entire truth.

“Miss Howard,” Dutch greeted with a nod. Clara wasn’t sure if she liked the way her name rolled across his tongue, like he was claiming each of the syllables as his own. It sounded too much like…

The gang leader’s expression turned stoic. “You stole from Arthur, Miss Howard. You do realize by now that we ain’t exactly the sort to be stealing from.”

Clara was desperate for the comfort of her knives. Arthur had disarmed her the moment they got to camp; there was no telling where her weapons were or if she’d ever get them back.

She steeled her will and lifted her chin. “I did what I had to do to survive. Besides, he wasn’t the only one I stole from.”

Hosea nudged Dutch on the shoulder. “See? I told you.”

Dutch held up a hand to silence him. Arthur crossed his arms and glanced at the two men at his side.

“Thievery is very unbecoming of a young lady,” he said. Dutch tilted his head as if to inspect her further. “Where did you say you were from?”

Clara pressed her lips together. “I didn’t.”

She couldn’t be sure, but Clara thought she saw the barest hint of a smirk on Dutch’s lips. “You from another gang, Miss Howard?”

Arthur’s eyes narrowed. His voice was low and filled with hate as he asked, “You an O’Driscoll, woman?”

Clara’s brow furrowed. She’d never heard that name before, but it was quite obvious from Dutch and Arthur’s reaction that there was bad blood there.

She shook her head. “I’ve never heard that name before.”

Arthur took a step forward. Here was the outlaw she’d only caught a glimpse of before: every inch of his body seemed cut from ruthlessness and his eyes burned with hot, long-simmering fury. “Don’t you lie to me, Miss Howard.”

“I’m not lying,” she replied as her own anger rose up to meet his.

“Then tell the truth,” Arthur demanded. “You already lied about your name. Why should I believe you ain’t an O’Driscoll?”

Hosea frowned at him. “Arthur,” he cautioned.

The outlaw turned an incredulous look at the old man. He tossed a hand at Clara and said, “We should just cut her loose. She ain’t worth all this.”

Clara gripped the chair in an effort to control her roiling ire. “I am not an O’Driscoll, nor have I ever heardof them. I’m not even from here, for Christ’s sake! I’m from New Jersey!”

There it was, then. For better or worse, these three men knew her real name and where she’d come from. All that remained to be seen now was what they did with that information.

The three men all shared a knowing glance. The anger and tension that had existed between Clara and Arthur only a moment ago now fell away, leaving behind only the encroaching night and her own truths laid bare.

Dutch turned his attention back to her. There was a sense of triumph about his movements, as though everything that had just happened had all gone according to plan. “You enjoy stealing, Miss Howard?”

What an odd question. Then again, this trio seemed rather unconventional, as it were. Clara shrugged. “I’ve been doing it most of my life, among other things. I don’t know if I’d use the word enjoy, exactly, but I don’t feel bad about it.”

The gang leader smiled. Clara knew by that simple gesture that her fate had been sealed.

“Why don’t you stick around a spell, Miss Howard, and show us what you’re made of?” Dutch nodded toward Arthur. “After all, if you can steal from himand live to tell about it, then you certainly got something in you worth keeping around.” Here, he grinned knowingly. “For now, at least.”

*

A week passed in which Arthur Morgan managed not to kill Claramae Howard.

That wasn’t to say she didn’t test him at every turn. Miss Grimshaw put her to work around the camp with the other woman, though it was clear after the first couple of days that she was not at all suited to such work. Clara’s energy was too chaotic, her will too powerful, to be subdued even by the likes of Miss Grimshaw.

By the third day, the camp matriarch marched up to Dutch, Hosea, and Arthur, and informed them that if they didn’t do something with “that girl”, she’d kill Clara herself.

Strangely enough, Tilly, Karen, Abigail, and Mary-Beth all took to Clara the way women did when they knew their wills combined were enough to outnumber the rest of the men at the camp—and one camp matriarch to boot.

When she wasn’t terrorizing Miss Grimshaw, Clara found new and different ways to push the limits of Arthur’s restraint. They could hardly speak for a more than a few minutes without arguing with one another. The rest of the camp found this amusing, much to Arthur’s chagrin. On more than one occasion, Dutch and Hosea both agreed that it was about time they found someone equal to the task of keeping Arthur in line.

This did nothing to alleviate the sudden, inescapable burden that was Clara Howard.

One day, Arthur had just finished his morning coffee and was hoping for a calm afternoon (preferably away from Clara) when Dutch cornered him.

It was time, according to the gang leader, to see whether or not Clara was as useful as she wished them to believe. Arthur had orders to take her to town for some good old-fashioned bounty hunting. This required not only giving the girl her knives back but arming her with a gun.

He informed Dutch that the idea was akin to sharpening a cougar’s teeth, and he might as well just shoot Arthur now for all they good it would do them later.

Needless to say, arguing with Dutch had never worked out so well for Arthur as a teenager, and it was damn near useless now.

So it was that Arthur ended up on a wagon with Clara on the way to Heritage, wondering every minute if he’d gone insane or just complacent.

Maybe it was a bit of both.

They were about a mile outside of town when Clara tapped him on the arm. “Stop here a minute, will you?”

Arthur glanced at the spot where she’d touched him then back up at her face. “No,” he grunted and snapped the reins.

Clara didn’t let up. “I need to get something.”

He threw out a hand. “You mean something in all the nothingthat’s here?” He shook his head. “We ain’t stopping ‘til we get to town.”

She sighed in frustration. “But my—”

Arthur glanced sharply at her. “There something about the word no that that escapes you, miss?”

Clara’s nostrils flared as she pulled in breath. Then she half-stood in the wagon bench, braced her hands on the sides, and leapt off.

For a moment, Arthur didn’t comprehend what he’d just seen.

Then he saw Clara pick herself up, brush the dirt off her skirt, and make her way toward the tree line.

“Jesus Christ,” he snarled in alarm. He tugged hard on the reins to slow the horses. Arthur barely waited for the wagon to stop before leaping to the ground and chasing after the girl.

He should have known she’d try to run.

Arthur caught up to her just before she disappeared through the trees. He grabbed her by the wrist and pulled her to a stop. Clara whirled and faced him, her face red and written with impudence.

Arthur snarled, “You are really fixing to get shot, ain’t you, Miss Howard?”

Clara tried to pull her wrist out of his grip and failed. “Let me go,” she demanded through gritted teeth.

“No,” he said with a shake of his head. “I don’t think I will, not until I’m sure you ain’t gonna run.”

It was then that Arthur noticed just how close she was standing to him.

He could feel the sharp rise and fall of her chest against his as she fought to control her breathing. Arthur’s grip was tight on her wrist and, if he stayed still long enough, her quickened pulse hummed against his palm.

Clara’s eyes were greener than he thought. They reminded him of the first days of spring, when the world rekindled its strength after long, bitter winter. Hidden strands of red wove in and out of the earthen strands of her hair, the unique color brought to light by the sun. The air around her was filled with the distinct scent of lavender and mint.

Arthur swallowed. He wasn’t sure why, but his chest felt tight and his brain addled.

She took a long, deep breath and let it out. “I wasn’t running,” she explained tersely.

He narrowed his eyes at her. “Then why did you jump off the wagon like a goddamn maniac?”

Clara sighed, as though something about the matter was entirely beyond his comprehension. “You wouldn’t stop when I asked.” She nodded toward the trees and explained, “I stashed some of my stuff here before I moved into Heritage.”

Arthur inspected the trees as though they would confirm or deny her admission. But he knew, in the end, that there was only one way to find out whether or not she was lying.

He held up a warning finger in front of her. “If I let you go and you run,” he cautioned, “then I will shoot you and sleep all the better for it.”

Clara rolled her eyes.

The woman actually rolled her eyes at him.

Arthur was so stunned that for a moment, he forgot what he’d been so angry about. He’d just threatened her, and she’d looked at him as though he were trying her patience.

“If I wanted to run, you’d know it,” she replied. Clara raised her eyebrows and her eyes flitted to her trapped wrist. “Well?”

He really shouldn’t let her go. There was no way to trust her, not after the ridiculous stunt she’d just pulled. Who was to say Clara wouldn’t try to escape through the trees after dragging him to some godforsaken location in the forest?

Arthur slowly unwound his fingers from her wrist.

Clara pulled it away and frowned at the angry red evidence of his fingers on her otherwise pale, unmarred skin.

He looked away, unwilling to look too long at what he’d done.

She gestured with her chin toward the trees. “Come on, it’s not far.”

Arthur remained where he was. He watched her as she slipped into the trees, the hem of her skirt brushing against the fallen leaves and tall grass. Each step was measured with purpose. He continued to watch her, even when he became mostly sure that she wouldn’t run.

Arthur shook his head and heaved a great, heavy sigh. “What a bunch of foolishness,” he muttered under his breath.

Clara paused, her hand braced against a nearby trunk. She threw up a hand and shouted, “Are you coming or not, cowboy?”

And, in contribution to the aforementioned foolishness, Arthur followed.

Chapter Text

Clara cursed and yanked the hem of her skirt from the fingers of a voracious branch.

“Goddamn skirts,” she hissed under breath as she stalked on through the woods. Every now and then she glanced over her shoulder to find Arthur glowering in her general direction.

He hopped over a protruding tree root. “Ain’t the skirt’s fault that you’re making us trample through the woods like a pair of goddamn fools,” he called out.

He was making it very difficult to concentrate.

She paused, pointedly ignoring Arthur’s comment, and examined the trees. Clara held a hand above her eyes to shade the worst of the sun from view and let her gaze linger on the trees in front of her. If she’d gotten her bearings right after jumping from the wagon, then the spot should be this way. But, if that were the case, they should’ve come across the first of the marked trees by now.

Arthur trudged up beside her. His hands landed heavily on his gun belt as he peered at the trees. He tossed up a hand and asked, “You mind tell me what the hell you’re doing?”

“Be quiet,” she mumbled irritably, “I’m trying to concentrate.”

He sighed, shook his head, and fell silent.

It took a moment but then spotted it. Clara walked over to the nearby tree and pressed her fingers to the mark carved into the bark. It was simple but small enough that only her eyes would have been able to catch its presence.

Arthur loomed over her shoulder. He narrowed his eyes at the x in the tree. “You looking for buried treasure or something?”

Clara rolled her eyes. She pushed away from the tree and, now that her bearings were on target, stalked off in the proper direction. “Just trust me, will you?”

He chuckled harshly. “Trust you? I hardly know you.”

She shrugged and called over her shoulder, “You’re going to have to start sometime, you know.”

It didn’t take long to come to the spot where she’d stashed her things—which was good, as Arthur hadn’t stopped complaining since she found the first marked tree.

“Every timeI think I won’t get roped into nonsense,” he muttered angrily as he side-stepped a tree. He ducked beneath a low hanging branch and straightened the hat on his head.

Clara sighed and wiped a bit of sweat off her brow. “You didn’t have to come,” she said over her shoulder. She paused, allowing Arthur a moment to catch up, and tapped his chest with the back of her hand. She nodded toward a fallen log and announced, “Here we are. Maybe nowyou’ll shut up.”

Arthur glanced down at the spot where she’d touched him. He frowned at her, clearly affronted by the unsought touch.

“Thank Christ,” he said in a gruff and quite inconvenienced tone. He stabbed a finger in her direction and added, “You try anything and you’ll regret it.”

“Yeah, yeah,” Clara mumbled with a dismissive wave of her hand as she bent in front of the long. “Or you’ll shoot me, I get it.” With a grunt of exertion, she tugged free her worn, slightly mossy pack.

Arthur tilted his head as he examined the pack. “That’s what you jumped off the wagon for?”

She ignored him and inspected the contents. Her extra set of pants and shirt were still inside and mostly none the worse for wear. Her satchel with what few provisions she’d used to get away from the east lay folded and a bit squished beneath the clothes.

Clara frowned. Her heart pattered in her chest as she dug her hand in the pack, searching for the other two items that should have been there.

“Where are they?” she whispered harshly to herself. “I know I put them in here.”

Arthur leaned forward and peered into the pack. “What?”

Clara sat back on her heels. Her mind whirled as she played back the last few days. The knives hadto be here; she’d come with them from the east and had hid them here, opting to keep only the smaller, more discreet ones to avoid unwanted attention.

Where had they gone?”

“Just leave it,” Arthur said. “We’re buying a gun for you, anyways. Ain’t no sense in staying out here for a pair of lost knives.”

Clara’s biting retort was cut off by a sharp, sudden sound.

Arthur already had his revolver out by the time she got to her feet. Her hand went instinctively for the knives that were lost and, cursing her luck, reached instead for the smaller one in its sheath on her belt.

Arthur shifted to stand in front of her. He held his gun at the ready. “Stay behind me,” he muttered, “and trynot to get me killed.”

Another sound—the quick burst of a snapping branch—echoed throughout the trees. Clara clutched the knife in her hand and eyed their surroundings. Her gaze landed on a nearby boulder, its moss-covered mass just large enough to hide her.

She bent low and crept to cover. Perhaps they had managed to scrounge up an ounce of luck and been spotted by bandits.

The worst-case scenario, though, was the one that flitted through Clara’s head like the edge of her own knife. Because the hiding place for her pack wasn’t obvious to the naked eye, there could only be one reason why her weapons had gone missing.

Figures came into view. They were shadowed by the canopies above, though their footsteps crashed through the underbrush with purpose.

Clara gripped the knife and fell seamlessly into the swift current of battle. Her eyes flitted to Arthur, who stood just in front of her hiding spot.

The first of the figures stepped into view. Clara examined each face and was relieved to find them unfamiliar. She loosened her grip on the knife by a fraction.

Arthur aimed his weapon. He was unafraid as he faced the three men from the woods, all of whom had their own weapons drawn and trained directly on him.

The one in front cautiously stepped forward. “Easy now, partner,” he said. “We don’t mean you no harm.”

Arthur didn’t move an inch. “You sure? ‘Cause all them guns deliver quite a different message than the one you’re spouting, friend.”

The man paused, seemed to consider something for a moment, and then holstered his gun. He turned to the others and nodded, signaling for them to do the same. Only when the rest of the men disposed of their weapons did Arthur lower his revolver.

He made a point of refusing to holster it, though.

“Bit strange, don’t you think?” the man said with mock casualness. He gestured toward Arthur. “Walking alone through these woods in unknown territory.”

Arthur shrugged. “Maybe I like a little peace and quiet. Don’t see how that’s any concern of yours.”

The men strode forward. Clara watched them, eyeing each minute movement. They weren’t afraid but they were on edge; she could see it in the way they held their shoulders. One wrong move on either side, and this could end up being a very bad day for everyone.

She hoped that it would just be a very bad day for someof them, herself and Arthur excluded.

The man who’d been speaking held up both of his hands. “We’re just looking for a girl, is all.”

Clara froze and held her breath.

“Girl?” Arthur barked in response. “I ain’t seen no girl in these woods.”

The man tilted his head and narrowed his gaze at the outlaw. “You sure about that?”

Arthur lifted his gun again. “You calling me a liar?”

Clara wondered if she should act. The men were a bit farther than she’d like, but if she could angle herself properly, she might be able to take one of them out and leave the others to Arthur’s gun.

But before she could do anything more than think, a thick, heavy hand clamped over her mouth and she was yanked forcefully to her feet. Her knife fell uselessly from her hand.

She kicked and writhed. Her thoughts shifted, focused only on escape. Clara tried to jab her assailant with an elbow, but he held her firm. He dragged her out from behind the rock, smothering her shouts and curses.

Arthur whirled around at the sound of her distress. His summer eyes, normally cool and collected, blazed with barely contained fury.

She was brought to stand just behind him. The arm around her chest tightened with every move she made.

Then the arm was gone. Clara braced herself and readied her arm to deliver a single blow to the man’s middle with her elbow.

The cool press of steel bloomed against her forehead.

Clara froze.

“Now, now,” her assailant murmured against her ear. “Wouldn’t want this to accidentally go off, now, would we, Ms. Howard?”

*

That voice.

She recognized the sly, cajoling tenor that radiated in her ear.

Clara dug her nails into Marcus Reynold’s hand and hissed her displeasure.

He only chuckled and pressed the barrel of his gun harder against her temple. The sound of his laugh was jarring; it collided with her nerves, intent on fraying them to the point of submission.

It had worked for Wyatt Byers, Marcus’ superior. Why, then, should he not be able to learn from the best?

“Now, now, Mae,” he cooed as she writhed and tore at the hold he maintained. “Let’s not cause any undue trouble, especially for your friend, here.”

Her eyes cut to Arthur. His gun was still leveled at Marcus’ chest. One shot—one single shot—and the man would be dead before he had time to fire off the weapon currently knocked against her head. But there was no way he could manage it, not with three of Byers’ other lackeys lingering just beyond her line of sight.

Clara felt Marcus nod in Arthur’s direction. His eyes were blazing, and his mouth pressed into a thin line. Every now and again Arthur would keep his frighteningly ill-tempered gaze on Marcus, but they were, for the most part elsewhere.

For the most part, he kept them trained on her.

Marcus called out to Arthur, “And who might you be, friend?”

Arthur’s face was terrifyingly blank. “Nobody,” he replied stoically. He flicked his gun toward Clara and said, “Let the girl go.”

“Oh, I don’t think so,” Marcus replied coolly. Clara tried to ignore the pressure of the gun. “She’s a bit overdue for an appointment back east, I’m afraid.”

Clara was not often afraid. There came a time when fear no longer served any purpose. It became a weight tied at the ankles, intent on sinking you when you least expected it. No—Clara had done away with fear, at least with the sort that insisted on crippling her into nonexistence.

After all the time she’d spent honing fear into a weapon, there was only one thing left in the world that still invoked the primal fright she’d so ardently tried to keep at bay.

His face rose unbidden in her memory, a ghost with no boundaries. Even after all this time, Wyatt Byers, whether specter or flesh, was still enough to turn her blood to ice.

Clara took a shuddering breath. “I’m not going back,” she managed to croak.

Marcus’s tone became hardened steel. “Yes, you are.” He turned his attention to Arthur. “You seem the reasonable type, mister. You let us take her out of here without trouble, and you get to carry on with your day.”

She saw Arthur weigh his options. He was outgunned, outnumbered, and left with only one option.

Clara knew he would be stupid not to take it.

*

Once, in what seemed like another life, someone had the gall to threaten Mary Gillis in front of Arthur.

He couldn’t remember where they’d been, what exactly had been said, or even what month in which the event had taken place. All Arthur remembered, on the rare occasion the memory resurfaced, was the blind rage that immediately followed the event. If he tried, he could also see the flicker of blood on his knuckles, a fleeting imaged attached to an equally fleeting memory.

The rage, though—thatwas always simmering just beneath the surface. It was a blessing and a curse, darkness and light, judge and executioner. Despite what some of his brethren might think, Arthur rarely allowed himself to feel this sort of ire. It was all-encompassing and dangerous; there had been plenty of times, both recent and distant, in which Arthur found himself lost within the bloodthirst.

He couldn’t explain why it resurfaced the moment the man pressed the gun to Clara’s head. Even later, in the privacy of his own thoughts, Arthur could not manage to piece together the truth behind the occurrence.

Maybe it was the fear he saw climb into her eyes, despite the hard set of her mouth that ignited his almighty fury. Maybe it was the audacity of the men who’d ambushed them. Arthur could—would—never be sure.

All he knew in that moment was that he would kill every single one of those bastards before they so much as touched a hair on her head.

The man narrowed his gaze at him, even as pinned Clara to his chest. Her face was red from exertion, her green eyes lit up with the sort of anger born from insipid fear.

He said to Arthur, “Don’t be stupid. You don’t even know her.”

He wasn’t wrong. In fact, the woman had hardly been in the camp a week and had already mastered the art of pushing every single of Arthur’s buttons with an expertise that bordered on suspicious.

But the blinding blood rage nipped at Arthur’s consciousness, begging him to let it in. These were tenuous moments; too much, and Arthur would have to wade through a river of blood back to camp. Too little, and Clara would die.

It was that threat that opened the gates and let the blood rage in.

Time slowed.

Arthur’s vision narrowed until all he saw was his target. He fired a single shot, pivoted on his heel, and faced his other assailants.

The bullet landed precisely where he’d meant it to: in the center of Marcus Reynold’s head.

The moments dragged out and bled seamlessly into one another. Arthur’s rage-sharpened eyes found the hearts of all three men in the tree line. His hand delivered a single bullet to each one.

When the time slipped back into place and the world continued to spin on its proper axis, Arthur felt the rage slip away. He buried it deep and locked it away, at least until the next time it would serve its purpose.

He turned back to Clara.

She reeled away from the crumpled body of her erstwhile assailant. Blood painted her cheek, neck, and the collar of her shirt and for a moment, Arthur was terrified that he’d hurt her.

But Clara swiped angrily at the bloodstains and stared down at the body at her feet. Then she looked back up at Arthur. The fear was gone, replaced now by apprehension.

Arthur wasn’t sure which hurt him more.

Clara peered over his shoulder at the fallen men behind him. “How did you do that?”

Arthur holstered his gun and ducked his head. “Don’t matter,” he mumbled. He nodded toward her, his throat tight and his words clumsy in his mouth. “You okay?”

She frowned at the blood staining her fingers. Clara swallowed and clenched her hand into a fist. “Yeah,” she replied stiffly. “I guess.”

Arthur knew that tone. He used it far more than he cared to admit. It was the one reserved for moments when memories and feelings were too closely intertwined to separate. It was the sound of a splintered resolve slowly being pieced back together and the knowledge that, no matter what you proclaimed, you were decidedly not alright.

He let out a breath and felt the final dregs of adrenaline and focus leave him. Arthur inspected her one more time, assured himself that she was relatively unscathed, and gestured toward her forgotten pack.

“We should go,” he said. “Get your things and we’ll head back to the wagon.”

Clara nodded absently. She retrieved her pack and joined Arthur as he began the trek back to the wagon.

She paused beside the body of her captor. “Wait,” she muttered. Arthur watched her bend down and search his pockets. When that turned up nothing, Clara shoved her hand into his boots.

Arthur was just about to question her actions when she pulled out a pair of knives.

“That bastard,” Clara cursed as she rose to her feet. She inspected the weapons and, upon deciding that they were fit and definitely hers, shoved them into her pack. “I should have known better.”

He waited for her to join him. They walked in silence for a few moments before Arthur chose to breach the tension with a question.

“Who was he, anyhow?”

Clara pursed her lips. He could tell she was deciding what to tell him. Her jaw worked a moment before she answered, “He worked for the people—person—I left behind.” She shifted the pack on her shoulder. “I guess I didn’t cover my tracks well enough. I guess it doesn’t matter now, though; now Marcus Reynolds is just a ghost.”

Arthur didn’t ask her anymore questions.

He knew when to pry and when to remain silent. He also knew when it was crucial to use that silence as a means to garner any information that might lead to one conclusion or another.

Conclusions, Arthur reasoned, that might lead Dutch and the rest of the gang toward the knowledge Clara Howard insisted on keeping at bay.

They slipped through the trees and back into the open air. Surprisingly, the wagon still lingered on the side of the rode. The horses had set to grazing where they could, limited by the harnesses and reins that held them in place.

Clara paused, took in the scene, and sighed.

“Thank you,” she whispered. “For what you did.”

Arthur didn’t think he deserved her thanks.

But he took it all the same.

*

Arthur leaned on the railing and sighed.

“Well?”

Clara frowned up at the sign that loomed above their heads. She raised an eyebrow at him and asked, “Are you sure I have to buy a gun?”

It was a truly astounding feat of character, Arthur thought, that the woman could be both tolerable and incredibly aggravating in the course of an hour. He rolled his eyes, steeled his temper, and tossed a hand toward the gun shop. “I was thinking you could regale the people of Kingston with a song and dance.” He clenched his teeth and bit out, “Yes, you have to buy a goddamn gun.”

She gave him a rather distasteful look and made her slow way up the steps. “You don’t have to be so sour about it,” Clara muttered as she sauntered past him. “It was only a question.”

Arthur followed and wondered if he shouldn’t just put his own gun to his head and put himself out his misery.

It took nearly half an hour for Clara to make her selection. She pestered Arthur with questions after having summarily irritated the gunsmith so thoroughly that he retreated back into his office. Arthur was fairly certain she’d done it on purpose, particularly after she muttered something about his incompetence after his disappearance.

Arthur thought he’d faint with relief when she finally chose a plain but powerful cattleman revolver.

On the way back to camp, Arthur caught Clara peering curiously at the revolver.

“You have seen a gun before, ain’t you?” he asked with a smirk.

Clara cut him a hard, unyielding glare. “I hope you’ve figured out by now that you are really notat all amusing.”

She popped open the chamber and peered at the empty slots. Arthur flicked his wrists and snapped the reins. He nodded toward the gun and asked, “You know how to use one of those?”

Clara slid the chamber closed and pointed the gun off into the distance. “Sure. You point and pull the trigger.”

Arthur stared at her and, when he was sure she was being serious, wondered how long it would be until she accidentally shot herself, or worse, him.

He laid a hand on the barrel of the revolver and lowered it back into her lap. “Bit more to it than that, I’m afraid,” Arthur replied.

Clara looked at him, shrugged, and said, “Fine. Then teach me.”

Arthur flat out refused. Clara only sighed, rolled her eyes, and vowed to have one of the other gang members teach her. Perhaps John Marston, who seemed equal to the task of teaching her the fine art of killing.

The very thought of Marston teaching anyone how to use a gun—especially Clara—was nearly enough to send Arthur straight to his grave.

He gestured toward himself and said, “I’m the one as taught Marston how to shoot. All these years and he can still barely hit a tree a mile wide.” He set his jaw and trained his eyes on the road. “I’ll teach you,” he acquiesced tersely.

Clara said nothing. After a few a moment, her lips curled into a knowing, slightly sinister smile.

Arthur got the distinct feeling he’d just dug himself into a hole with no way of escape.

Chapter Text

Clara had every intention of drinking her coffee and spending the majority of the morning reading peacefully by the water’s edge.

The previous afternoon had seen her engaging on her first big job with the gang. She’d ingratiated herself fairly quickly, a fact for which she was immeasurably proud. It hadn’t been quite enough to steal from Arthur Morgan, the top enforcer of the infamous van der Linde gang; once she’d showed them how adept she was at using her knives, particularly in situations that required a delicate, stealthy touch, they’d welcomed with her open arms.

All of them, that is, except Arthur.

They fought like cats and dogs, on their best days. Clara found him stubborn as a mule and as dumb to boot, though she suspected there was more to him than met the eye. She’d often catch him glaring in her direction, his eyes burning holes in the back of her head when he thought she wasn’t looking.

So, she’d flip him off, most times when he was looking, which set him off muttering and stomping in the opposite direction.

He’d been on the job with her yesterday, though they had done little but argue and mutter indistinct verbal barbs at one another. The target had been a stage on the road toward Kingston. The tip, as procured by John Marston and Lenny Summers, had indicated that the occupant was a jeweler, intent on selling his custom-made, rather expensive jewelry.

They’d taken it from him, with surprisingly little persuasion, though the driver had unfortunately suffered a mortal gunshot wound.

Hosea vowed to find a manner in which to sell the jewelry without drawing suspicion. It would take him a few days to sniff out a lead, he’d insisted upon their return to camp, but he would find one nonetheless.

So, while Clara was intent on spending the morning with the privacy of her own thoughts, it was Hosea who decided her plans had abruptly changed.

“Miss Howard,” he announced as he approached her. “Just the lady I wanted to see.”

“Hosea,” she said by way of greeting, lowering her tin cup.

He sat beside her, his slightly wrinkled face beaming with excitement. “Listen,” he said, leaning forward and emphasizing each word with his hands. “I’ve got a lead for that jewelry but I’m going to need a delicate hand for this one. Seeing as how you’re ruthless anddelicate, I want your help for the job.”

Clara fought back a smile. Ruthless and delicate—she liked the sound of that. She nodded and said, “Count me in.”

Hosea smiled and clapped her on the shoulder. “Perfect. Now, we’re going to need one more person.” He turned, glancing over his shoulder. Clara followed his gaze and frowned the moment she spotted the person coming toward them.

He called out to Arthur and beckoned him over. The old man glanced at her with a smile that was both pleased and slightly concerning. “Ask and ye shall receive,” he muttered to her.

Clara fought hard not to up and leave.

Arthur, clad in dark colors and his usual hat, strode toward them. His eyes landed first on Clara, their usually bright depths hardening as he met her gaze. He shifted them to the old man at her side and said, “What you want, Hosea?”

Clara bristled and shifted on the log. Apparently, it was beyond his capability to greet someone with some semblance of pleasantry.

“I was just talking to Clara,” Hosea explained with a gesture toward her. “I’ve got a scheme cooked up to unload that jewelry and make some real money. We can always use an extra hand, and a gun, if it comes to that. What do you say?”

Arthur narrowed his eyes a fraction. He nodded toward Clara and asked, “She coming?”

She couldn’t keep quiet this time. “Yes, she’scoming.”

Hosea paused, his eyes darting between the both of them for a moment. “Well, Arthur?”

He looked away and sighed, his shoulders sagging as if beneath a great weight. Arthur adjusted his hand and let his arm drop at his side with resignation. “I guess. What’s the play?”

Hosea stood and held out his hand to help Clara. Normally she’d brush it away, but she liked the old man and he’d welcomed her almost immediately into the fold. She took his slight hand and rose, joining the two of them as they made their way toward the hitching posts.

“I’ll tell you on the way,” Hosea said over his shoulder. He seemed invigorated by the prospect of a good con. Clara and Arthur walked beside each other, each of them glancing at the other with tremulous expressions.

Hosea mounted Silver Dollar and gestured toward the wagon that contained the jewelry haul. “You two ride on the wagon,” he ordered.

Arthur paused and glanced at Clara incredulously. He pointed at her and asked, “You want us to ride together?”

Clara blinked at him. “Is that a problem, Mr. Morgan?”

“Not at all,” he replied flatly. “Long as you don’t try to rob me on the way.”

A small part of Clara reveled with glee. He’d likely hold the circumstance of their first meeting against her as long as he possibly could.

This would be a fun trip.

Clara patted him mockingly on the shoulder. Arthur stiffened, glanced down at her hand and back at her face. “If you’d stop making it so easy,” Clara said with sickening sweetness, “then maybe I’d stop doing it.”

“Easy?” Arthur exclaimed as she hopped up onto the wagon. “Tell me, Ms. Howard. How many people did you rob back in…wherever the hell it is you’re from?”

Hosea cut it, waving a hand dismissively at their argument. “That’s enough out of you two. Now, get on the wagon and play nice. We’ve got a job to do and it ain’t going to get done with you two bickering like two spoiled children.”

Arthur hung his head and stalked angrily to the wagon. “Ain’t no one spoiled here but this one,” he said, cutting a hand in her direction.

Clara kicked up her heels on the front of the wagon as Arthur climbed up. “Says the one currently throwing a fit.”

Arthur snatched the reins and threw himself onto the bench. Clara glanced at him; his expression was sour, his lips pursed angrily. He smelled like smoke and musk.

Clara, despite her eagerness to rile him up, didn’t think it an unpleasant scent.

“Why don’t you do us all a favor, Ms. Howard,” Arthur said as he snapped the reins and urged the horses on, “and keep your mouth shut until we get this done.”

“Arthur,” Hosea warned.

“What?” he snapped back, his tone reminiscent of a petulant child.

“If you can’t behave,” Hosea began, “then I’ll take John on this job instead.”

Clara inspected her nails. “At least he’s better company.”

“And that’s enough out of you, too, Clara,” Hosea added pointedly. He added wistfully, “Lord, how did I end up with such rebellious children?”

“Just lucky, I guess,” Clara said with a wide, beaming smile.

Arthur said nothing; he only pressed his lips together until they became little more than a thin, angry line. Clara could practically feel him stewing as he guided the horses and Hosea rode beside them.

It was marvelous, invigorating, and rather pleasant. She looked forward to finding new and different ways to irritate him.

When they’d gone about a mile on the main road to Kingston, Arthur asked Hosea, “So, what we doing once we get there?”

Hosea’s demeanor shifted slightly. He stood a bit straighter and his eyes narrowed in a way that made him seem pompous and entirely offended with the world around him. “Jasper Whitlock’s selling his jewelry business, you see.”

Clara peered curiously at him. He’d changed his voice to match the arrogance written in his expression.

Arthur, for his part, looked about to ready to throw himself out of the wagon. “Oh, no,” he grumbled.

Hosea gestured to the two of them. “My lovely daughter, Victoria, is to inherit the business, along with her husband, Albert.”

They both froze. Clara and Arthur turned slowly toward each other, their faces each proclaiming the horror they both felt.

“Married?” Clara exclaimed, bracing her hands on the bench to get a better look at Hosea.

Arthur jabbed a thumb at her. “You want me to pretend to be married to her?”

Hosea stalled them with a hand. “Now, poor Vickie’s mom passed recently, you see. Her mother—God rest her soul—lived just long enough to see our only daughter married. Not my first choice, mind you—he’s a bit dumb and rough around the edges, but he does well enough. Even you can handle that, Arthur.”

Arthur cringed and tilted his head back in resignation. “Hosea, please.”

Clara gaped at the both of them, dumbfounded at the prospect of such an outrageous venture. “Thisis the plan you came up with?”

“Just let me do all the talking,” Hosea explained. “Albert, you bring in one of the boxes so Vickie and I can show off our wares.”

Arthur cut a withering look toward Clara. She frowned and turned away, crossing her arms to make it quite clear that she disagreed with the plan.

Imagine being married to the man. She could hardly talk to him for five minutes without contemplating strangling him.

“I’ll only do it because you asked me, Hosea,” Clara said. “Hopefully this won’t entirely turn me off to the idea of marriage.”

“Gotta find someone dumb enough to put up with you first,” Arthur bit back.

Clara slapped him on the arm. “Shut up.”

Arthur gaped at her, entirely affronted by her personal attack. He jabbed a finger at her and said tersely, “You do that again and I’m throwing you off this wagon.”

“That’s enough out of the both of you,” Hosea called sharply. “If you both can’t handle this, you can turn around and forget about your cuts. Otherwise, be quiet and follow instructions.”

Clara and Arthur brooded the rest of the way to Kingston but, at least they did as they were told.

At least there was money in it, Clara reasoned as they drove on. It would take quite a big cut to put up with Arthur Morgan for an entire afternoon.

*

It took a bit of convincing, but Hosea Matthews worked his magic and the jewelry was sold.

Even more impressive was the price he’d managed to secure for them. Vickie and Albert’s story of tragedy and found love seemed to win over the foppish shop owner, who’d lost his own wife only a year prior to typhoid. He wished them the best of luck and gave them a hefty sum and they were swiftly on their way.

Arthur and Clara each received two hundred dollars for their troubles. She considered it worth enduring Arthur’s foul mood, particularly as she counted the bills and secured them in the pocket sewn into her satchel.

When all was said and done, Clara assumed they would head back to camp. But as they made their way toward the wagon, Hosea stopped them and said, “I have a few other matters to attend to while we’re here.” He waved his hands dismissively at them and added, “Go on and find something else to do.”

Arthur immediately stepped forward and said, “I’ll go with you.”

Hosea stopped him and shook his head. “No, no. You’ve done enough for one day, Albert. Why don’t you run along and find some other poor saps to take advantage of?”

Clara frowned and her mood darkened. “You want us to go…together?”

Arthur shook his head. “Great,” he mumbled irritably.

“Meet me back at the wagon in a couple of hours,” Hosea ordered as he sauntered off toward the far end of town. “And leave him in one piece, will you, Ms. Howard?”

Clara glanced sidelong at Arthur, her expression as dubious as her mood. “No promises.”

Arthur scratched at the back of his neck and sighed. He turned to her and asked, “Well?”

She threw up her hands. “Well what?”

Kingston thrived around them. Horses and people lined the streets and the doors to businesses were flung open against the afternoon heat. Clara couldn’t seem to quiet the buzzing of her thoughts as she pondered how best to survive dealing with Arthur for another couple of hours.

Arthur glanced to the nearest building. His body seemed stiff with awkwardness, tied up with the desire to be anywhere but with her. He indicated the saloon and asked, “How ‘bout a drink?”

That would probably dull most of the pain, she reasoned.

Clara made a beeline for the building and shrugged in resignation. “That’s the best thing you’ve said all day.”

*

They were on their second beer before Arthur worked up the wherewithal to ask her a question.

He had been content to sit in quiet for the duration of Hosea’s time in town. Clara stewed beside him, holding her beer bottle with an iron grip. She could barely stand for a moment without fidgeting, doing anything from tapping the heel of her boot on the floor to glancing out the window as though she were expecting a visitor.

It was making him anxious and irritable, a combination that often concluded with disagreeable results.

Arthur sighed, braced himself, and asked, “So. Where you from, again?”

Clara gave him a withering look. “Back east.”

Her tone didn’t exactly leave room for further questioning. But the beer was decent in Kingston and he’d already had enough to muddle the finer points of better judgment. “New York, then?”

She took rapid sip from the bottle and placed it firmly back on the bar. “New Jersey.”

Arthur hung his head. This was going nowhere fast. He was doing his best to be patient—or, more accurately, doing his best to attempt to be patient, but the woman insisted on being impossible to deal with.

“Look,” he said, turning to face her full on, “I ain’t happy about this, either. Bad enough Hosea made us follow through with that charade.”

Clara scoffed. “Damn straight. Guess that explains why you aren’t married.”

Arthur bristled. A spike of pain forged from memory shot through his heart. He indicated the saloon with a sharp cut of his hand and replied tersely, “And I don’t see no husband of yours around here, so what, exactly, does that say about you?”

She slugged the rest of the beer and faced him. Her eyes were as cold as ice, but Arthur could tell she saw more than she let on. It was clear enough by the way she spoke that she was far more intelligent than him; judging by the astuteness in her gaze, the way she took in the room—and him—with a level of assertiveness that bespoke her character, she was a hard woman to love.

He couldn’t blame the men, really. Claramae Howard was more likely to chew them up and spit them out rather than love them until death did them part.

Clara leaned in close, her lips tugged into a smirk. “It means I’m better with knives than hearts, Mr. Morgan. Much better with knives.”

Arthur felt a strange, indeterminate flutter in his chest. He wasn’t entirely sure if he wanted her that close; she was liable to stab him if he wasn’t careful.

Besides, he’d seen what she was capable of when trying to take men off guard.

Perhaps, then, it would be better to try to take heroff guard.

He nodded toward her belt, where she kept her revolver, dual sheaths for her fighting knives, and a slew of throwing knives.

“Care for a wager, then?”

Clara raised an eyebrow. “What kind of wager?”

Arthur pondered for a moment. He’d have to make this worthwhile, if he was going through all this trouble in the first place. “Target practice—best two out of three. Loser buys a bottle of whiskey.”

She furrowed her brow. “What about the winner?”

Arthur’s smirk matched hers. “They get said whiskey.”

Clara pondered for a moment. Then she held out her hand, her eyes gleaming mischievously. “You’re on.”

He hoped he wasn’t about to make a fool of himself, that his accuracy with knives was better than he gave himself credit for. Arthur slapped his hand against hers and gave a firm, agreeable nod. “Done.”

It was just a handshake---one firm, deliberate jolt of their conjoined hands to seal the deal on their wager.

He couldn’t explain what it was that he felt when he touched her hand. In some ways, it was reminiscent of the first days of thaw after a long, brutal winter. In other ways, it was like being struck by lightning and knowing your heart would give out at any moment.

It was the strangest, most thrilling sensation he’d ever felt.

Because of that, the feeling absolutely terrified Arthur.

His eyes were locked onto hers, his hand unable, at first, to disengage from hers. Clara’s brow furrowed slightly, and her eyes narrowed a fraction.

She was the first to drop her hand from his. Clara turned away, brushing her palm against the side of her trousers as if to forget the feeling of his skin on hers.

Arthur did the same, hoping that the unsettling feeling would dissipate.

It did not.

But the wager was still on and there was whiskey to be had. Arthur focused on that, as well as the very inspiring thought of putting Clara Howard in her place, and promptly buried the strange exchange in his memories.

*

They found a space not far from the back door of the saloon. It was far enough from the building that they wouldn’t have to worry about an errant knife finding an unwilling target and spacious enough to appropriately conduct their business.

Arthur carved an X in the trunk of a decent sized tree and proclaimed that their target.

Clara handily won the first round.

Arthur’s aim was uncannily accurate, which was not what she expected. He was damn near perfect with a gun, a stark contrast to her passable ability with a revolver, but he could still throw a knife to kill.

But just as she thought, her talent exceeded his, and in the end it was Arthur who cursed and grumbled his way back to the saloon to purchase a bottle of whiskey.

When he returned, he shoved the bottle at her. “Your libation, Your Highness,” Arthur said in a mocking tone.

Clara rolled her eyes and took a slug from the bottle. She winced as the liquid burned down her throat and left a sour, bitter taste in her mouth.

“Christ, did you piss in the bottle?” She smacked her lips and shuddered. “This doesn’t taste like whiskey.”

Arthur gave her a withering look and took up his set of throwing knives. “You do anything besides complain, Ms. Howard?”

She passed him the bottle and replied, “I throw knives better than you. Drink some of this. I won’t be the only one to suffer through this.”

He took the bottle and tipped it to his lips. Clara felt vindicated when he almost spit it out. “This is shit.”

Clara flicked her fingers at the bottle. “You can keep that.”

“You’re too kind,” he replied sarcastically. “Maybe you’ll let me have the scraps from Pearson’s stew later.”

She hefted her throwing knife, relishing the careful, expert balance of the blade. She turned to Arthur who, despite being put off by the whiskey, took another pull from the bottle.

“Ready for round two, Mr. Morgan?”

He swiped the back of his hand across his lips. “Damn straight.”

Clara initially intended to wipe the floor with him for the next two rounds. But the more Arthur drank—which was quite a bit—the worse he got and the louder he cursed. Eventually she let him win both rounds, if only for the opportunity to hear him whoop and holler every time he managed to hit the target.

The fool could hardly stand up straight by the time they reached the bottom of the bottle. Clara grabbed him by the arm and steered him toward the saloon. She reasoned it was better to find him a solid place to sit; Hosea would be done soon, judging by the sloping sun, and she had a feeling Arthur would wander off if he weren’t stationary.

“I think you cheated, Ms. Howard,” Arthur slurred as they made a valiant attempt to mount the stairs.

Clara excused their presence from the patrons milling about in the saloon. Arthur, who was large and burly enough as it was, had next to no concept of personal space. He bumped into several folks, barking, “Open your eyes, fool,” each time he affronted them.

So it fell to Clara, who had inadvertently found herself playing nursemaid, to ensure a brawl didn’t break out.

“I didn’t cheat,” she said once they’d made their way into the saloon proper. “You won two rounds, Arthur. How could I have cheated?”

He fell heavily into a chair at one of the saloon tables. Arthur took a moment to steady himself from the swaying that overtook his body. “I don’t know what you did, but you cheated.”

Clara patted him on the shoulder and he swatted her away. “Whatever you say, Mr. Morgan.”

Arthur glanced around the table as if searching for something. When he came up short, he threw up his hands and glanced at her, his eyes bright and glazed. His mouth was turned into a deep frown as he asked, “Where’s my whiskey?”

Clara leaned on the table, one hand propped on her hip. “You drank it all, you idiot.”

He tried to stand and promptly fell back into the chair. “I’ll get some more,” he said, though the words were chained together in a way that made them barely comprehensible.

She shook her head and pushed him back into the chair. “No, you won’t. I’ll get you some more as long as you stay in this chair.”

“Sure, boss,” he replied, holding up his hands.

Perhaps it was a bad idea to supply him with more liquor. But Clara hadn’t taken nearly as much from the bottle as Arthur and it was rather interesting to see him so detached from his usual hard-hearted demeanor.

There might also be of fun to be had, she reasoned with a smirk as she brought over two glasses of whiskey.

Arthur downed his in one go. He slammed the glass down on the table and he leaned forward on the table, eyeing her with glassy-eyed scrutiny. “Why you so ornery, anyhow?”

Clara sipped her drink. “I like being ornery. Mostly because you seem to enjoy it so much.”

He shook his head and wagged a finger at her. “No, it ain’t that. Something happened to you back in…where is you from again?”

“New Jersey.”

“New Jersey.” Arthur frowned and asked loudly, “Why the hell is it New Jersey? Where’s the old one?”

Clara was trying very hard not to laugh. “There’s a Jersey in England. You see, the English once had control over this country and a little matter of war—”

“Oh, shut up,” Arthur growled. He grabbed her whiskey and downed it.

Clara held out her hands and gaped at him. “That was mine!”

Arthur dropped the glass on the table. It clattered loudly on the wood and began to roll toward the edge. Somehow, he managed to catch it before it fell to its inevitable shattering end.

He picked up the glass and held it tauntingly in front of her. He grinned at her and said, “It ain’t yours no more. Now,” Arthur said as he placed the glass back down with laughable, deliberate care, “you didn’t answer my question.”

Clara tapped her fingers on the table. “Bad things happened in New Jersey. That’s all you need to know.”

Arthur nodded sagely. “Oh, I know all about bad, Ms. Howard. And you are running with the worst of them all.”

She cupped her chin in her hand. “Especially you.”

“Exactly,” he slurred. Arthur glanced toward the bar. “I’m getting more whiskey.”

Clara rose from the chair. “You can hardly stand. Let me get it.”

“Stop your fussing, woman, and let me get my own damn drink.”

She let him get his own drink. Clara didn’t think there would be much harm in the matter; the bar wasn’t far, and he was, for the most part, still able to shuffle his feet in a pattern that resembled walking.

What Clara didn’t expect was for Arthur to almost immediately insult someone and subsequently get into a shouting match.

She was up and out of the chair in an instant, her mood instantly shot to hell.

Arthur shoved the man in the chest and shouted, “Get lost, pal.”

“The hell is your problem, mister?” the man growled, his hands clenching into fists at his sides.

Despite his astounding level of inebriation, Arthur still looked intimidating. A small bite of worry nipped at Clara as she slid up to them; there was no telling what he might do if he got too angry.

Clara placed a hand on both of their shoulders, holding them firmly apart. She looked at the affronted man and said, “Look, sir, you’ll have to excuse my friendhere,” she explained with a pointed look at Arthur. “His momma didn’t raise him to be cordial, you see, and it falls to me to keep him in line—unfortunately.”

The man glanced at her strangely. He pointed at Arthur and said, “He took my whiskey.”

“Weren’t yours, partner,” Arthur countered.

Clara glared at him. “Will you shut up?” she hissed between clenched teeth.

The man straightened his jacket. His eyes fell on her again and this time there was something distinctly unsettling about his demeanor. “Tell you what, sweetheart. Let’s forget about this fool here and enjoy a drink together. What do you say?”

Arthur stepped forward, nearly toppling her over. “Are you out of your god damn mind?”

The situation had officially gone from bad to worse.

Clara shoved Arthur backward and faced the man. She tried to put on a smile, but it felt twisted and wrong. “Sure, I’ll have a drink.”

“No, she won’t,” Arthur cut in from behind her. He draped an arm around her shoulder and pulled her close. “She’s with me.”

Clara froze, unsure what to make of the unexpected contact. She could feel the strength and power in his body as he held her against his side. He reeked of whiskey, but she could still detect his usual scent beneath the acrid burn of liquor.

Clara looked up at him, feeling both taken aback and irritated at his indiscretion. Arthur met her eyes, their ocean blue cores smoldering and burning brightly.

His hand tightened on her shoulder. Clara wanted to push him away, wanted to rage at him for being so impudent as to think he could touch her without her permission.

But she thought about their earlier handshake and the feeling that had come with it. It wasn’t unlike what she felt now, and that’s precisely what made her uncomfortable.

The man glanced harshly at the both of them. He saw the protective way Arthur held her and sneered at Clara. “You trying to play us, miss?”

Clara looked at him incredulously. “Play you?”

He looked her up and down. Clara bristled, feeling an age-old pain shoot through her soul. She knew precisely what he was seeing: too-wide hips, a full bosom, and a full, far from petite figure. “Girl like you,” the man drawled, “only wants one thing. You was thinking, why not get it from me and pretty boy, here?”

For a moment, nothing happened. Then Arthur dropped his arm from her shoulder, wheeled back, and punched the man square in the jaw.

*

“So,” Hosea said as they made their way back to camp, “which one of you is going to pay me back the ten dollars it took to bail you out of jail?”

As it turned out, the bartender hadn’t taken kindly to the brawl Arthur had started. A few tables had been broken in the process and, despite being clearly inebriated, Arthur handily won the fight, save for the single punch the other man had delivered to his jaw. It had on incensed Arthur and, in an attempt to salvage what was left of their afternoon, Clara inserted herself into the fray with every intention of removing Arthur from the saloon.

She didn’t ask to be unceremoniously groped by a filthy, leering drunk.

The law had arrived soon after she knocked the man to the ground and held a knife to his throat.

Arthur and Clara glanced sidelong at one another. His jaw had taken on a deep purple hue and her pride was sorely wounded. Arthur’s sobriety had decided to make a comeback but not without some rather nasty side effects.

He’d thrown up twice—once inside his jail cell and the other once the wagon started moving.

Clara shook her head and crossed her arms. “I’m not paying him.”

Arthur gaped at her. His eyes were red-rimmed and his complexion on the paler side. “Fine. I’ll pay Hosea and you can owe me ten dollars.”

“I’m not paying you anything, after that debacle.”

“It seems to have escaped your memory,” Arthur said tersely, “that you were involved in that debacle.”

Clara glanced over her shoulder at him. “And if you hadn’t been so drunk, we wouldn’t have gotten into that mess.”

Arthur turned on the bench and faced her head on. “You get dropped on your head as a child, Ms. Howard? ‘Cause that’s the only explanation I can come up with for you being such a lunatic.”

Clara narrowed her eyes. “Yeah, well, you probably—”

“Price goes up a dollar every time you insult each other,” Hosea quickly cut in. “Now, pay up and shut up, if you please.”

In the end, Arthur paid the money, though he made certain to inform the universe just how displeased he was about it.

Clara didn’t let it bother her until later that night. She told herself it was because it was the right thing to do; it wouldn’t do well for the rest of the gang to distrust her over Arthur’s lack of propriety.

But after she’d stomped up to him and slapped a wad containing fifteen dollars (the extra five was to replace the shirt he’d ruined, she told herself) into his hand without a word of explanation, Clara couldn’t help but feel sore and irritable at a single, turbulent memory from that frantic afternoon.

She could still feel the ghost of Arthur’s handshake, his rough and calloused hands brushing against hers. It was a feeling that was both ruthless in its cunning and delicate in its touch; she couldn’t help but liken it to the single spark that usually heralded a wildfire.

Perhaps she wasn’t the only ruthless and delicate touch Hosea required on the job. The old man saw and knew more than he let on, of that she was sure.

And that, Clara decided, was surely going to be a source of persistent frustration in the future.

Chapter Text

The sheriff of Kingston sat back in his chair and eyed the two individuals before him.

His fingers stroked the length of his moustache. Clara frowned at him, her arms crossed over her chest and her mood bordering on sour. Arthur, on the other hand, stood coolly beside her, his hands clasped on his gun belt.

“So,” the man said as he kicked his heels up on the desk. “You’re interested in the bounty.”

There was a single deputy in the office, who sat at the far end of the room with his hand only an inch or two from the gun at his hip.

“Depends on what you’re offering for him,” Arthur answered.

The sheriff’s eyes fell on Clara again. Her blood boiled beneath her skin as his muddy gaze took in the sight of her: loose cotton shirt, pants, the belt with her revolver and knives strapped across her too-wide hips.

The man pointed between the both of them. “Both of you want this bounty?”

There was a single moment where Clara seriously considered cutting that finger off.

This time, though, she interjected before Arthur could respond. She placed her hand on her chest and asked, “Did you think I was here to clean your office?”

Arthur’s head whipped in her direction. She didn’t need to look at him to know his face would be etched with anger.

The sheriff frowned at Clara and turned his attention swiftly to Arthur. “Price is forty dollars, but I want him alive.” He shifted on the chair, settling back with a pompous air that made Clara clench her hand into a fist.

“The man’s as crooked as a politician,” the sheriff explained, once more directing his attention strictly to Arthur. “Been scamming innocent folk out of their hard-earned money in nearly every town between West Elizabeth and New Yorkshire.” The sheriff held up a cautionary hand. He pointed to Clara and added, “Might want to leave your woman at home, though. Bounty hunting ain’t no place for a lady, even one as…interestingly dressed as this one.”

Clara took a step forward. Her hand went directly to the knife on her hip. “I’ll show you interesting—”

Arthur’s arm blocked her assault and held her back. Clara writhed against him as the sheriff watched her with mild curiosity.

“We’ll see what we can do,” Arthur ground out over his shoulder. He gripped her shoulders and promptly wheeled her out of the office, much to the amusement of the sheriff.

Arthur dropped his hands from her shoulders the moment they cleared the doorway. “One day, Ms. Howard,” he ground out as he shook his head in disappointment. “Just one day I would like for you to act like a normal human being.”

Her hackles were still raised as she shot an angry glare back at the sheriff’s office. “That man is an asshole.”

Arthur tossed his hands up in the air. “Of course, he’s an asshole but he’s an asshole willing to pay us money.”

Clara took a deep breath and let it out in an attempt to quell the fury bubbling beneath her skin. It wasn’t the first time she’d dealt with Sheriff James Parker. If memory served her, she’d wanted to stab him within the first few minutes of meeting the sorry excuse for a misogynistic buffoon.

The first meeting had been with John, who’d very nearly encouraged her to teach the sheriff a lesson before reasoning that the end result wasn’t likely to make Dutch happy.

She fussed with the rolled ends of her sleeves. “If he speaks to me like that again, I’m going to stab him. And I am not your woman,” she added pointedly, as though Parker’s comment had somehow brought the matter into dispute.

Arthur glared at her and scoffed. “Thank god for that,” he muttered.

They held each other’s gaze for a moment before turning angrily away.

“Excuse me,” a voice called from behind them.

Arthur and Clara turned and spotted the sheriff’s deputy leaning heavily against one of the thin columns that framed the porch. Once again, his hand lingered close to his gun, as if he were waiting for them to give him an excuse to use it.

He gestured vaguely in the direction Parker had told them they would find their bounty’s last known location. “Might want to tread lightly up in them hills.”

Arthur’s hands landed on his belt, his familiar—and often infuriating—swagger returning at the condescending tone in the deputy’s voice. “And why’s that?”

Clara crossed her arms and made sure the deputy knew just how unwelcome his tone really was.

Unphased, the young lawman only scratched absently at the stubble on his too-thin cheeks. “We been hearing rumors of a gang just outside of Devil’s Ridge.”

Deepwater Pass was just north of Devil’s Ridge. Arthur and Clara stiffened at the mention but kept their faces blank.

“Thanks for the warning,” Clara blurted. “We’ll be sure to keep that in mind when we both go looking for this bounty you can’t seem to catch on your own.”

Arthur sighed before nodding at the deputy and turning away.

He held up a single finger as they stalked toward their horses. “If you kill him, I am going to be very upset.”

Clara shrugged and gave him a mischievous smile. “If it will make you upset, all the more reason to do it.”

*

Sheriff James Parker considered himself to be a reasonable man.

It had taken quite a bit of work to obtain the position he currently held. It was a fast-moving town, well on its way to becoming the hub of the small state of New Yorkshire, and one that had not been kind to his humble beginnings as the son of a blacksmith.

He was, much to the chagrin of his inherited deputy, a bit of a lenient man. But James Parker prided himself on picking the right sort of fights with the right sort of men, an edict that provided the basis for his rather limited list of closely held morals.

Given this, he wasn’t entirely opposed to having a man such as the one who’d just strode into his office seek out the bounty that had been a thorn in his side these past few months. No one was willing to touch the man, seeing as how his alleged miracle tonic had done something in the towns he’d stopped through. The problem was that his tonics were nothing more than a bit of watered down liquor—and the bottom shelf sort, at that—and all it did was get the men drunk enough to blot out the nagging of their women, and get the women riled up enough to spend their inebriated husbands’ money on bottles and bottles of the stuff.

Needless to say, when the headiness of the tonic wore off, this left the men in a rather precarious position, both with their wives and their wallets.

It was a tame bounty, compared to the sort that he’d listed in the past. He hadn’t recognized the man who’d come in inquiring about bounties, but he was burly and hard-edged enough that Parker was sure he’d be relinquished of the set aside forty dollars before sunrise tomorrow.

It was the woman who’d accompanied the man that set his teeth on edge.

He’d seen women dressed like men before. It wasn’t his sort of thing, and it was a bit ridiculous for her to be traipsing around with the sort of man she’d come with, but that was all beside the point.

The message he’d received a few days prior rose unbidden in his mind the longer he’d looked at her. Those piercing green eyes, the hard set of her mouth, and the long, braided red-brown hair prodded at his memory.

It was this message he sat pondering when Deputy Hawkins slipped back into the office, his mouth set into a grim line.

The young, eager to please man jabbed a thumb over his shoulder. “I don’t like the look of that one.”

Parker steepled his fingers and kept his vacant gaze on the nearby wall. “The man or the woman?”

Hawkins rolled his eyes. “Something about them seemed…off.”

Parker nodded absently. Hawkins, sensing he wasn’t getting anything else out of his boss, sauntered back to his desk. A moment later, the sheriff was struck hard with the sudden realization of the memory that pestered him.

“Hawkins,” he called over his shoulder, “you still got that message we received the other day?”

The sound of shifting papers was his first answer. “You mean the one about the murders in the woods?”

Parker pondered this. Four men had been killed in the woods nearly a week ago, but that wasn’t the strangest aspect of the still unsolved case. The men were nearly ten yards apart from one another and, by the look of their corpses, had been killed at roughly the same time.

“The other one,” Parker replied. Something was brewing in his mind and he chased it, sensing the answer to all his problems looming just out of reach.

Hawkins took another moment to find the requested message. “The one from New Jersey?”

Parker let his heels fall from the desk and turned around in his chair. His veins hummed with the promise of discovery. “That’s the one.”

Hawkins raised a questioning eyebrow and reviewed the message. “It just mentions that this feller’s men went missing.” The deputy paused and pointed a finger at the letter. “Says here that he has reason to believe a fugitive—and one he’s been trying to catch up with—might be to blame.”

He was getting closer. The pieces were lining up in something that resembled the truth he sought. Parker nodded and flicked his hand toward the letter. “Does it mention what to look out for?”

Hawkins shrugged as his eyes scanned the paper. “The fugitive might be traveling alone, or with another gang. And to be on the lookout for—"

The deputy paused. After a moment, he glanced up at Parker, his eyes alight with the same realization that had been nagging at the sheriff’s thoughts.

The fugitive would be armed with knives.

And, as it turned out, the girl who’d strode so confidently in to inquire about the bounty had been carrying not only a revolver, but several knives.

Parker’s body thrummed with excitement. Here was a new thrill, a new chase to be had. He smiled, sat back in the chair, and directed his attention to his still stunned deputy.

“Send a message back to him,” Parker ordered. “Ask him for a more thorough description of the fugitive.”

Hawkins nodded emphatically. “Do you think—”

“Seems that way,” Parker interjected. “Certainly seems that way.”

The deputy smiled eagerly but frowned a moment later. “But that gang…”

Parker waved away his concern. “Their time will come. Besides, if they’re harboring a fugitive, then we kill two birds with one stone. Pinkertons been after quite a few gangs lately, anyhow.”

The deputy nodded and ticked off the names on his fingers. “Jack Halls, O’Driscolls, and van der Lindes, if I recall.”

All of them gangs, and all of them with their time swiftly at an end. As a sheriff, there wasn’t much Parker could do to assist the Pinkertons. But the man who’d written him had made quite a few interesting propositions in his thorough and rather interesting letter.

Hawkins cleared his throat. “Boss?”

Parker nodded toward him. “Write the man back. Ask for that description. Then, we’ll wait and see what comes our way.”

If he’d learned anything as the son of a blacksmith, it was that the best sort of work took time to complete. Patience was a virtue, and one sure to win him the prestige he’d spent years cultivating.

*

On the surface, the deputy’s cautionary warning had given Arthur and Clara a very important piece of information.

The law in Kingston had an idea that they were in the area. Not where, precisely, but even an idea was far too close for comfort, and the gang couldn’t afford to be rooted out unawares.

But the more Clara pondered the deputy’s warning and the strange, assessing looks she’d received from both him and the sheriff she so despised, the more the nagging sensation at the back of her mind rose to overwhelm her senses.

Something about the matter didn’t feel right.

She tried her best to push it aside as they traveled the roads that would lead them toward Virtue, the small town that lingered at the border of New Yorkshire. It was a couple hours’ ride from Kingston and just east of Devil’s Ridge and, by all accounts, a town with little to offer but cattle, shit, and suspicious folk.

Clara shifted in the saddle and tried to dismantle the apprehension lingering at the back of her mind. They’d ridden in silence most of the way, save for the few moments when Arthur directed her to follow him onto one path or another.

She surprised herself by wishing he’d talk to her.

It would help in dispelling the terrible suspicions that hung like a black cloud over her head and heart.

Arthur slowed Boadicea until he was even with her pace. His hat was pulled low over his face in his usual fashion, but even that was not enough to deter the crystalline depths of his eyes from finding hers in the afternoon sun.

“So,” he began, his hand holding the reins loosely and confidently, “you ain’t spoken much about that little incident we had a while ago.”

This was precisely the conversation Clara did not want to have. It was at the root of her worry, of the black thoughts that flitted like angry wasps in her head.

Clara shrugged, feigning nonchalance, and replied, “What of it?”

Arthur’s expression remained passive but there was enough of a glint in his eye to make Clara entirely sure that his mind was rife with assumptions.

Most of which, if she had to warrant a guess, were not favorable.

“That one who grabbed you in the woods,” Arthur explained, his jaw tense. “He knew you—you knew him. Ain’t hard to figure out that he’s part of that mysterious past in New Jersey you keep alluding to.”

Clara forced a nonchalant smile on her face. “You seem to remember more about that afternoon than I thought you did, Mr. Morgan.”

Arthur’s expression remained unchanged. “I ain’t gonna tell Dutch,” he said in a low, cautionary tone, “at least not until you give me a reason to.” He leaned forward in the saddle, just enough for his large shadow to loom over her. His eyes lost a bit of their observant sharpness and narrowed to a more dangerous focus, one that set Clara’s teeth on edge.

“Should I tell him, Ms. Howard? All that nonsense back there,” he said with a flippant wave of his hand toward Kingston, “weren’t just because you don’t particularly care for that fool sheriff.”

Clara clenched her fingers over the reins. She shrugged off his threat and turned her attention to the road ahead. “Go ahead and tell him, if you want. It’s not like you know anything.”

And he didn’t—of that, Clara was sure. The sheriff, on the other hand…

Arthur watched her for a moment more before letting his gaze cool and slide back to the expanse in front of them. If he’d taken them on the direct route, they should be near the bounty’s last known location by now.

“Secrets have a way of getting you killed, Ms. Howard,” Arthur said stiffly. “And you ain’t just worrying about yourself no more.”

The warning was clear. Clara pressed her lips together and shot him an impudent look. “If you’re suggesting that I don’t care about the gang—”

“I ain’t suggesting nothing,” Arthur countered. “Point is, you ain’t given me much of a reason to trust what you say.”

Her first instinct was to tell him precisely what he could do with his trust—or lack thereof. But, on one of the few occasions she chose to think before letting her mouth do the talking, Clara thought better of her instinctual response.

Instead, she paused, pondered, and then said, “I only knew the man that grabbed me. I didn’t know the others.”

It was as far she was willing to go; the rest, she thought, was better off buried in the past.

If it stayed there, she thought with a shiver of apprehension.

Arthur said nothing. After a moment, he adjusted his hat (yet another one of his nervous habits, Clara determined) and looked away.

He wouldn’t tell Dutch—not yet, at least. She was sure of it. But Arthur still suspected that there was more to her reaction in Kingston than met the eye and, if she was being honest, he’d hit the nail right on the head.

But she pressed her lips together and followed him, hoping he wouldn’t press the matter. It wouldn’t do to worry about matters that were hardly more than errant imaginings.

For now, anyway.

*

“That looks like the feller we’re after.”

Arthur gestured with his chin toward a rather pompous man seated atop an equally pompous looking wagon. The wood seemed freshly painted, replete with vibrant, sweeping letters that proclaimed their bounty found.

Dr. Bonne-Chance’s Miracle Tonic!

The small farming town of Virtue spread out in a flat expanse of mud, grass, and barn pens. Situated at the center of the cluster of cattle raising properties was the bounty: Lester Cartwright, also known as Dr. Bonne-Chance. His tonic was about as miraculous as the landscape around him, but it wasn’t his lackluster reputation that concerned Arthur.

He was priced at forty dollars, which was far more than the idiot seemed worth.

Clara narrowed her gaze at the rotund man as he called out his wares. The curious and gullible folk of Virtue wandered away from homes and chores to peer at the brightly colored wagon with a mixture of interest and mild suspicion.

“That’s the man that Parker couldn’t catch?” She snorted and shook her head. “That sheriff is as much a fool as he is lazy.”

Arthur glanced at her. A part of him was still hung up on that business with the sheriff; the other part of him reasoned that he’d killed enough men before and it wouldn’t do to worry about a few more along the way.

But the way that man had grabbed Clara in the woods still tore at his memory. It scraped against his conscience and warred with the distinct lack of information she’d provided on her past.

The deputy’s warning rose unbidden in his mind. There was still time before they’d have to worry about leaving; he’d still tell Dutch, but Arthur had known the gang leader long enough to know that running at the first hint of suspicion was enough to truly draw unwanted attention. Besides, there were still other gangs in the area that would likely draw any unwanted scrutiny from them, at least for the time being.

Arthur rose from his crouch and strode to his horse. He replaced his binoculars and drew his repeater from the saddle.

He held it out toward Clara, who glanced at the weapon as though it were liable to bite. “You keep watch. I’ll go down and get this fool before he scams anyone else out of their money.”

Clara looked at him, back at the rifle, then back at Arthur. “You want me to use that?”

Arthur fought the urge to roll his eyes. “You can throw a knife and shoot a revolver, but you’re afraid of a repeater?”

“I didn’t say I was afraid,” Clara countered. “Besides, you’re the better shot. Why don’t you let me handle this one?”

He chuckled and shook his head. “Not a chance in hell, Ms. Howard.”

She placed her hands on her hips. Below them, they could just make out the voice of their bounty calling forth all willing participants in an experiment that was sure to stir up a bit of trouble.

“You just said that I haven’t given you any reason to trust me,” she reasoned. “Wouldn’t this be a good opportunity to prove myself?”         In reality, what he’d said wasn’t entirely true. Arthur didn’t exactly mistrust Clara Howard, but nor was he inclined to believe every single word that came from her mouth. He had spent the better part of his formative years honing his instincts to know when to trust and when to push away, and if he’d learned anything from his mistakes, it was that the line between trust and mistrust was thinner than most people cared to believe.

But he’d felt the very same sort of apprehension with each new member of the gang they’d acquired over the years. Over time, Arthur had learned to find the truth buried beneath the lies they used as shields and weapons.

He supposed it was time he started to do a bit of that with Clara.

Arthur lowered the repeater a fraction. “What you got in mind, Ms. Howard?”

Clara’s thin-lipped expression melted into the ghost of a smile. “If I told you,” she teased, “then it would take away the overall effect.”

Arthur’s hackles rose. “Oh, no,” he said with a shake of his head. “I ain’t playing games with you, woman. You tell me, or the deal’s off.”

She had the nerve to raise an eyebrow at him. “Deal?”

A burst of fiery annoyance nipped at his better judgment. “You about done playing dumb?” He used the repeater to indicate their bounty below. “Can we get on with this already?”

He waited as her eyes lingered on the gun. Finally, she sighed sharply and grabbed at the weapon. “Fine,” she grunted with reluctance. “I’ll keep watch. But I can’t promise that I won’t shoot you if the mood strikes.”

Arthur grinned slyly at her over his shoulder. “If you can shoot me, you mean.”

He left her on the ridge with the repeater, knowing full well he was going to pay for that comment at some point or another.

Arthur made his way carefully down the short hill, keeping closely to the outskirts of the town. Dr. Bonne-Chance’s voice carried through the air, promising miracles for those who bravely stepped forward to try the tonic in front of their neighbors.

When he was sure he could meld into the crowd without attracting too much notice, Arthur stepped forward in an effort to alleviate the burden placed upon Dr. Bonne-Chance’s much-maligned customers. Arthur fought the urge to look back up at the ridge; if an observant townsperson caught him doing so, it would draw unwanted attention. Besides, he did suppose he should try to trust Clara Howard.

That woman.

She was liable to get him killed before the law ever caught up with them. Clara made it a point to see how many of Arthur’s nerves she could flay by sundown, a fact which served to pester Arthur continuously while serving as amusement for the rest of the camp.

Even Dutch had ceased listening to Arthur’s complaints about her. Hosea, on the rare occasion Arthur now deigned to mention her at all, said something that Arthur supposed was wise but only made him feel less like he was in control of…well, anything.

He slid into the crowd and focused his attention on the bounty. Two men, one young and one middle aged, stood beside him as he proclaimed the miracle of his tonic. A single drop, he shouted with triumph, was enough to cure even the fiercest of ailments.

One of them was lumbago. Arthur spared half a thought to buying the useless tonic for Uncle, just to see what the old man would do.

Arthur eyed the crowd. The women lingered at the fringes of the gathering, eyeing the alleged doctor with a wary yet somewhat curious eye. The men, both young and old, hung about the man’s words with an air of possibility that made Arthur almost feel sorry for them.

Almost.

He’d have to wait for the right opportunity to make his move. If he made a scene, some of the folk would likely call for the law, which would only serve to create more of a mess than Arthur cared to deal with. Waiting too long meant that he would run the risk of having to chase the man, which was also an option he did not exactly prefer.

Arthur was still formulating a plan when a sudden movement caught his attention.

At first, he wasn’t sure he was seeing things correctly. Arthur broke away from his focus on Dr. Bonne-Chance to ponder why his eyes insisted on showing him something that clearly could not be real.

Clara Howard sidled up to the edge of the crowd. Not a single person paid her any attention—that is, except for Arthur, who could not quite determine if he was furious or confused, or a heady mixture of both.

She turned her head a fraction in his direction. Clara’s gave him a smile and a wink before turning back toward their bounty.

Arthur was stunned.

It was a feeling rarer even than remorse, and it was entirely disconcerting. He stared at the woman as though she were a hallucination; surely, she was still at the top of the ridge where he’d told her to be, and not at all here, in the crowd, doing something that was sure to throw them both headlong in a great big pile of shit.

Dr. Bonne-Chance announced that his chosen participants would take a draught from his miracle tonic. The crowd, he proclaimed, would only be responsible for assessing the quality of said miracle before being expected to buy the supply he’d brought with him.

The moment the man handed his participants each a bottle of tonic, Clara darted forward through the crowd.

Arthur’s heart leapt in his chest.

He followed, shouldering through the crowd, his thoughts focused solely on ensuring she didn’t get hurt.

No; in trouble. He wanted to make sure she didn’t get in trouble.

“Sir!” she cried out as she threw her hand up in the air. “Dr. Bonne-Chance, please!”

The crowd parted immediately for her. Suddenly the spotlight was not on the fraud but on Clara, her face now etched in barely contained panic and her chest heaving as though she’d just run full tilt into the crowd.

Arthur slowed his approach. He kept his eyes on her, watching every movement.

The bounty, clearly put off by the unwarranted interruption, glanced uneasily in her direction. Ever the showman, he straightened his shoulders and beckoned Clara forward.

“My dear,” the man drawled with one eye on the crowd, “What seems to be the matter?”

Clara’s face was etched with barely contained panic. “Sir, it’s my husband.”

The men who’d been given the tonic glanced at the bottles, unsure of what to do. One of them took a swig of the tonic while the doctor’s back was turned.

Dr. Bonne-Chance’s lip curled as he sensed an opportunity for advancement. “There, there,” he said as he patted Clara’s hand. “What ails your poor husband?”

Clara looked away and feigned a sob. “He’s sick, sir. I’ve sent him to the town doctor, even sent for the one in Kingston, and neither of them could fix him.” She turned a pair of wide, beseeching eyes in his direction. “They say your tonic can work miracles. Will you…will you help him?”

The crowd was riveted by her performance. Even Arthur, furious as he was, couldn’t help but watch her.

And of course, Dr. Bonne-Chance agreed.

Clara held back when the doctor pulled her eagerly back into town. “Doctor,” she murmured softly yet loud enough for the townsfolk to hear. “My husband—he doesn’t know I’ve asked for your help. He’s a proud man, sir, and rightly so, and I’m afraid that if these fine folks rush our doorstep…” She let the explanation drift off, her expression innocent and pleading.

And so, the doctor agreed to attend the false husband without the aid of the crowd. They muttered in protest but remained where they were as Dr. Bonne-Chance followed Clara eagerly back into town.

Arthur waited a beat and, when he was sure the rest of Virtue was firmly planted in anticipation of a miracle, let out a swift string of curses and slipped away to capture the bounty.

*

Arthur tried his best to be furious with her.

In a way he was; she’d deliberately gone against their agreement and put the entire operation at unnecessary risk. If it had been John, Sean, or any other member of the gang, Arthur would have made sure they knew just how unappreciated their transgression was.

But, despite his best effort, Arthur could not bring himself to be entirely angry with Clara. A small part of him—a very small part of him—was actually impressed with the way she’d single-handedly taken control of the situation.

Subtracting, of course, the fact that she’d left him entirely in the dark.

They pulled up into camp after spending the majority of the ride in silence. Every now and then, Arthur would glance over at her and expect her to utter some form of apology.

He wasn’t at all surprised when she’d catch him looking, lift her chin in that imperious way of hers, and dare him to say anything to contradict their success.

Arthur didn’t want to admit it, but her performance had reminded him so starkly of Hosea that, for a split-second, it was hard to believe that he hadn’t spent the last twenty years raising her, just as he’d done with Arthur and John.

But just because he wasn’t entirely furious with her didn’t mean Arthur could let her off the hook.

He stalked over to her after they’d both dismounted. Arthur pointed at her and squared his shoulders in as menacing a way as he could.

“You pull a stunt like that again,” he growled dangerously, “and you’ll regret it.”

Clara looked at him, sighed, and crossed her arms.

For a brief moment, Arthur wondered if he’d lost the ability to frighten people.

“You know what, Mr. Morgan?” she asked tersely as she sauntered closer to him. Clara leaned forward a bit, her green eyes narrowed with purpose, and said, “I don’t think you like the fact that I had a plan and you didn’t.”

Arthur furrowed his brow. His hands landed on his belt as he loomed in front of her. “Excuse me?”

Clara stood toe-to-toe with him. “You heard me.”

He took another half step forward, daring her to do the same. She met the challenge with a defiant lift of her chin, her green eyes unwavering in their obstinance.

Arthur placed a hand on his chest. “I had a plan.”

Her lips quirked up in a grin. “You sure about that?”

He sucked in a breath and narrowed his eyes at her. “You’re infuriating.”

Clara blinked at him. “You’re impossible.”

Arthur leaned forward until his shadow dwarfed her shorter form. “Witch,” he ground out.

Her grin only widened a fraction. “Idiot.”

They held each other’s gaze, each one daring the other to walk away first.

After a moment, Arthur realized they were standing close enough that he could just detect the lavender and mint scent of her perfume. He took a deep breath of it before he could wonder why the inclination to do so had come over him.

Her cheeks were painted just the slightest shade of pink. Arthur could still make out the smattering of her trademark freckles.

Why did she smell like that?

Why was his heart pounding?

“Arthur!”

The sound of John’s voice broke whatever spell had come over him. Arthur stepped back and, with one last lingering look at Clara, went to seek out John.

But even after he left her at the hitching post, the sweet scent of Clara’s perfume still lingered at the edges of Arthur’s senses.  

Chapter Text

Sean Macguire slapped twenty dollars on the table, sat back in his chair, and smiled triumphantly at his companions.

He swept a hand at the bills and announced, “Anytime you’d like to congratulate me, I won’t stop you.”

Lenny Summers raised an eyebrow at the bills. Clara Howard cupped her chin in her hand and kept her expression firmly blank.

Sean’s grin faded just a fraction. He said defensively, “Oh, don’t tell me that you’s both got more money than this.”

Lenny and Clara shared a glance. “It ain’t like twenty bucks is all that much,” Lenny said.

The Irishman scoffed and waved away the comment. “It’s sure as hell more than you lot got, that’s all I know.”

Lenny reached into his pocket. He deposited a handful of bills and revealed his take.

Thirty-five dollars.

Sean’s eye’s flicked between one stack of cash and the other. “Bollocks,” he said decisively.

The saloon clamored around them. The midday rush of workers from Kingston and neighboring Heritage filtered in for a drink or three to ward off the worst of the afternoon slump. The air was filled with the raucous sound of men eager to drink, play poker, and grab a hot meal before embarking on the rest of their day.

Clara sat back against the chair and crossed her arms. “You’re the one who concocted this whole contest,” she said with a gesture toward Sean. “You can’t be mad if you don’t win.”

Sean had the grace to look affronted. “Of course I can.” He leaned forward and nodded toward Clara. “Besides, you haven’t shown your hand yet, have you, lass?”

Lenny leaned back and eyed her with mild curiosity. “How much you get, Clara?”

She shrugged and made a show of inspecting her nails. “You both know I didn’t want a part in this.”

The challenge had been this: steal as much as possible in three hours. End up in jail, and you lose, plus any earnings are divvied up to those left standing. Win, and you buy a round of drinks at the saloon.

Clara, who’d spent the better part of her life proving that she was just as capable as any other man, took on the challenge wholeheartedly.

But, she was still a lady; she couldn’t make herself look too eager.

“You were the first one on your horse!” Lenny exclaimed.

The Irishman rolled his eyes and sighed. “Just get on with it, will you?”

Clara sighed. She slowly reached into her satchel and pulled out a handful of bills. The boys watched with bated breath as she made a show of counting the money, her mouth twisted into a frown. Sean tapped his fingers impatiently on the table and Lenny watched her with a knowing look.

She placed her cut on the table and sat back.

“Oh, for Christ’s sake,” Sean bit out.

Lenny shook his head and took back his money. “Should’ve known.”

Clara had managed to procure fifty dollars during the course of their afternoon heists.

The next few moments were peppered with wild questions from Sean and more sensible comments on Lenny’s part. Mr. Summers had already ridden with Clara long enough to know that there was more to her than she let on. Sean, on the other hand, simply didn’t like being shown up.

Lenny shoved her money back toward her. “First round’s on you, then.”

Clara made her way toward the bar. A few of the men clutched their drinks possessively as she leaned on the wooden bar top. Some of the others let their leering, hazy gazes linger on her for a moment more than was strictly necessary.

She bore it all, as she’d done for years, and waited patiently for their drinks.

It didn’t stop it from bothering her, though. As numb to scrutiny as she’d become, the implications that lived in the eyes of most who looked upon her still struck a sour chord in her soul.

Arthur never looked at her like that, though.

Clara’s heart lurched in her chest and her cheeks warmed. What did it matter how he looked at her? She swallowed thickly, buried the thought, and took the drinks the bartender passed to her.

When she turned, she nearly collided with Micah Bell.

*

None of the van der Linde gang members could be considered entirely good people. They were a raging torrent of both, one more than the other, at times, but Clara knew there was good buried beneath the surface. No one could be all one or the other—at least, Clara didn’t think so.

Until she met Micah Bell.

It only took a single look in Micah’s eyes to know that whatever good had once been there had been twisted and tortured into vengeance, hatred, and indifference.

“One of those for me, Ms. Howard?” Micah quipped.

Clara stiffened but kept her precarious hold on the drinks. She took a steadying breath and nodded toward the bar. “You’re welcome to buy yourself one.” She slipped around him, eager to make it quickly back to the table.

Micah slid in front of her. His lips curled into smirk that made Clara’s skin crawl.

“Why don’t you let me help you with those?” he asked, reaching out a hand for one of the glasses. “Wouldn’t want you to go spilling anything on that shirt of yours, now would we?”

It was meant to be an offhand comment and, if anyone else had said it, Clara would have likely played it off as such. But this wasn’t the first time she’d seen Micah looking at her like this—or any female, for that matter.

Clara jerked back. A little whiskey from one of the glasses fell onto her hand. She’d rather the touch of the liquor than to be so near to Micah.

He tilted his head and looked at her. She didn’t know why, but Clara got the distinct feeling that Micah was measuring the strength of her fear.

As if he thrived on it.

Micah drawled, “Ain’t no need to act like that, miss.” He splayed a hand across his chest. “It ain’t me you need to worry about.”

Clara lifted her chin and forced some nonchalance into her expression. “Then who is it I’m supposed to watch out for?”

His lip twisted up into a grin. “Everyone else but me. Including Morgan. Ah, now, no need to deny it. I seen both of you spending quite a bit of time together.”

She didn’t like where this was going. She frowned and cut a glance over Micah’s shoulder back to the table. Lenny and Sean were talking to one another and paying no mind to her.

“You say that like I specifically spend more time with Arthur than I do with the rest of the gang.”

Micah’s moustache twitched along with his lips. He leaned forward a little, his hands lingering on his belt in a way that Clara knew wasn’t just out of habit.

“Oh, you certainly don’t. I don’t see you spending any time with me.”

“That’s because spending time with you is likened to being flayed alive,” said a gruff voice behind Micah’s shoulder.

Arthur Morgan stepped into view. He sidled up beside Clara, his shoulders squared and his crystalline eyes smoldering with undisguised disgust.

Micah rolled his eyes. “Oh, Morgan, you’re here. How wonderful.”

Clara let out a breath she hadn’t realized she’d been holding. A bracing, steady calm washed over her and her heart, which had been pattering wildly in her chest, slowed to a more reasonable pace.

Arthur leveled a dangerous look at Micah. “Go find someone else to bother with your nonsense, Micah.”

Micah’s eyes lingered on Clara. “We was just having a conversation, Arthur,” he said, his mouth curling around Arthur’s name. “Don’t see how that’s any concern of yours.”

Arthur took a step forward. “I said, find someone else to bother.”

Micah held up both hands and took a step back. His eyes slid back to Clara as he said, “Sorry to have bothered you, miss.”

His venomous, oily tone told her that he was by far and away not sorry.

Arthur only relaxed when he was sure Micah left the saloon.

“I leave you alone for five minutes,” he said as he turned to face her, “and you still get into trouble.”

Clara rolled her eyes and held out the drinks toward him. “Just shut up and make yourself useful, will you?”

Arthur took one of the drinks carefully in his hand and accompanied her to the table. He peered at the glass and asked, “You buy all these drinks?”

She smirked at him. “Yep. I won the challenge.”

His brows knit in confusion. “What challenge?”

Clara summarized Sean’s brilliant idea and her subsequent victory.

“Ain’t no way you got no fifty dollars in three hours without killing someone,” Arthur replied immediately. He lifted an eyebrow. “You kill someone, Ms. Howard?”

Clara sighed dramatically as they reached the table. “Men,” she lamented. “Always so unwilling to admit when women best them.”

Micah Bell was entirely forgotten in the wake of Arthur’s presence. Clara found breathing easy again, though she was loathed to admit it was because he’d come to her rescue. Arthur hadn’t, obviously. Micah was just as irritating to him as he was to Clara and to everyone else in the camp besides Dutch.

She took a long sip of her whiskey and looked over at Arthur. He was listening to Sean regale him with the tale of his own heist, his hands cutting through the air and his voice booming with the natural born storytelling capabilities that came with his Irish descent.

It was just nice to know that he didn’t look at her like she was another conquest, another person to be smothered and controlled until the air was choked from her lungs.

No—somewhere along the line, Arthur Morgan had taken to looking at Clara like she was solid, real.

Like she mattered.

*

Arthur had woken that morning to the cold press of mountain chill and the distinct feeling that something was missing.

When an hour had passed after finishing his morning coffee and Clara Howard still hadn’t shouted for him or sauntered up demanding one thing or another, he knew precisely why the day had dawned in such a strange and incomplete way.

Her absence could only mean one thing: trouble. At least, that’s what Arthur told himself as he debated whether or not to go out and find her.

When Hosea informed him that she’d already gone off with Lenny and Sean, Arthur’s worst fears manifested into something inescapably heavy that sat in his chest.

He threw back another whiskey as he listened to Sean and Lenny trade stories of the heists they’d pulled off in the afternoon. Clara had left just before with the errand of collecting the gang’s needed supplies from the store before they all made the trek back home.

“You have all the money,” Lenny had said when Clara protested being chosen for the mundane task. “That’s the price you pay for victory.”

Arthur hadn’t been worried much about Clara and Lenny getting into trouble. The kid was eager but level-headed; Sean, on the other hand, was about as volatile as a barrel of whiskey over an open flame. If anyone was going to be the catalyst for trouble, it was that little Irish bastard.

Dutch always said that Sean was just like Arthur at his age. Not only was this insulting, it was entirely inaccurate.

Arthur was entirely sure he’d been much worse.

He turned his head toward the window again as his fingers tapped idly on his empty glass. Though Arthur had dismissed Micah (who hadn’t accompanied them on their challenge, as Sean had so boisterously declared; he’d merely shown up, unwanted and unasked for) he still had the crawling sensation that Micah was lingering around somewhere. Likely the man was skulking in the shadows, as he was often found doing.

Arthur’s hand clenched around the glass as he thought of the way Micah had been looking at Clara. It was the same way Micah looked at most women: like they were a strung-up piece of decorated flesh waited to be carved up, piece by vulnerable piece.

It wasn’t like she was his problem. Arthur wasn’t her nursemaid or her protector, but she still didn’t deserve to be treated like that, particularly and especially by a snake like Micah Bell.

Lenny nudged Arthur’s arm, startling him out of his reverie.

“You alright there, Arthur?”

Arthur tore his eyes away from the window and forced his shoulders into an indifferent shrug. “Sure.”

Lenny nodded toward the window. “You been staring out that window since Clara left.”

Arthur frowned and brought the glass up to his lips before he remembered it was empty. “Rather than worrying about what I’m doing,” he said as he passed his empty glass to Lenny, “why don’t you go get us more whiskey?”

The young outlaw gave him a flat look. “That supposed to be your way of avoiding the truth?”

“It ain’t my way of avoiding anything,” Arthur countered gruffly. “Except maybe Sean’s goddamn stories. Hence, the whiskey,” he said with a gesture toward the glass.

Lenny rolled his eyes, took the empty glasses, and made his way toward the bar for refills. Sean had already taken to sharing his stories with the men at the neighboring table, all of whom looked torn between keen interest and telling him to fuck off.

Arthur tried not to look out the window again, but he did.

Something didn’t feel right. They didn’t need much for the camp; he and Charles had gone hunting a few days before and the quarry had been good enough to last them a week or more, depending on Pearson’s whims. It shouldn’t have taken his long for Clara to come back.

He sighed, scratched his chin, and reasoned that she was more than capable of handling herself. Whatever trouble she got into was her own fault; he’d told her more than once—a thousand times—to be more careful.

And yet, despite the flimsy assurance, Arthur still found himself striding for the door.

*

Clara packed the last of the supplies in her saddlebag and patted her horse’s neck.

With her money rapidly depleting, Clara thought it might be best to leave the men to their own devices and head back to camp before they ordered more whiskey. But, upon second thought, it wouldn’t do to leave them wondering what’d happened to her.

Lenny wouldn’t cause a disturbance, and neither would Arthur; Sean, on the other hand, might set the town on fire just for something fun to do.

“Soon, girl,” Clara said softly to Marion. She gave the horse one more pat and turned to head back to the saloon.

A shadow in the alley caught her attention. Clara’s hand went instinctively to her belt. Her fingers curled against the handle of her knife as she took a few steps toward the mouth of the alley.

It was Micah, head bowed and a cigarette smoking between his lips.

“Jesus,” Clara said as she adrenaline softened in her veins. She let her hand fall away from the knife. “What the hell are you doing, hanging around like that?”

Micah pulled the cigarette from his lips and looked up. That look was in his eyes again; even here, in the open air, Clara couldn’t help but feel like she was suffocating under the weight of his gaze.

“You know,” he said as he flicked away a bit of ash, “I ain’t quite sure why you’re so intent on hating me, Ms. Howard.”

She wasn’t in the mood for this. Her eyes went to the saloon as she debated on simply leaving Micah behind with whatever opinions of her he’d already crafted. Men like him didn’t change their minds; they just destroyed anyone who thought differently.

Clara shrugged. “I don’t hate you,” she replied. The lie slipped easily between her lips.

Micah pushed away from the wall and tossed his cigarette. “Most folk don’t like me because they don’t understand me.” He gestured toward the saloon. “They don’t understand me. Never have, never will.”     She stiffened. His voice fell over her like oil, suffocating and poisonous. “What is it you think they don’t understand about you?”

Micah chuckled darkly. “Men like Morgan,” he said through clenched teeth, “don’t have a vision, Ms. Howard. They don’t see the bigger picture; only the little bits and pieces that don’t matter.”

Clara swallowed. He was too close now; she could smell the reek of alcohol and smoke wafting from him. She turned away and tried not to reach for her knives or her gun.

She kept her voice steady as she replied, “Sounds to me like you just don’t like Arthur.”

Micah sneered. He paused in front of her, his hat tilted forward just enough to drape his features in shadow.

“I’d like for you to get to know me a little better, Ms. Howard,” he murmured. Then he reached out a hand and pressed it to her cheek.

The feeling was so abhorrent, so immediately unforgiveable, that Clara was almost too taken aback to react.

Almost.

She smacked his hand away and jolted backward. “Don’t touch me,” she sneered.

Micah, undaunted by her rejection, strode forward and grabbed hold of her arm. Clara struggled, shoved him, tried to knee him where it would hurt most, but he held firm.

He dragged her toward him. Micah grabbed her chin with his other hand and held her head still.

“Got a little fight in you,” he said with a sinister chuckle. “I like that in a woman.”

Clara had been here before.

She’d lived this exact moment a hundred times, a thousand times, though the face had been different then. But the hollow, carved out emptiness that infiltrated her chest was familiar; the absence of thought and reason that replaced her fight or flight instinct was second nature.

It didn’t matter how many people she conned, threatened, or killed. It didn’t stop you from feeling helpless when the odds weren’t in your favor.

Until you changed the game.

Clara focused on her hands. She forced them to open, made her fingers clench around the handle of her knife. In one swift motion, she lifted it between their bodies and brought it to Micah’s neck.

“Let me go,” she hissed between great, heaving gasps, “and I won’t kill you.”

Micah’s face lost its sniveling humor. Swift, decisive anger took hold and his grip on her arm tightened.

So did Clara’s hand on her knife, though her fear was less easy to command.

He gritted his teeth. “What exactly is it that you’re hiding, miss?” Micah wrenched her back when she made an attempt to twist away. “I know it’s something. You and Morgan are always cavorting around together. If you won’t tell me, maybe he will.”

The cold hard steel of a gun barrel pressed against Micah’s head.

Clara watched it, frozen for a moment by the swift turn of events, and let her eyes slide along its length to the wielder.

Arthur Morgan’s mouth was curled into a feral, enraged snarl.

“Get your goddamn hands off of her,” he demanded between tightly gritted teeth.

Micah didn’t let go. He laughed, the sound mirthless, even as Clara pressed her knife more firmly against his neck.

“Always the hero, ain’t you, Morgan?” Micah let go of her arm and she scrambled away, holding the knife in front of her. “I was just having a conversation with our mutual acquaintance.”

“Like hell you were,” Clara spat.

Arthur shifted to stand in front of her. His revolver was still aimed directly at Micah’s head. “I think it’s best if you head on back to camp while I still allow it.”

After a moment, Micah held up his hands in a gesture of peace. He let his gaze linger on Clara a moment longer before he slipped back down the alley and out of sight.

Clara slammed her knife into her sheath. The weight of what had just happened settled on her shoulders, its weight heavy enough to drag her straight to the ground. Already her body trembled with the task of remaining upright, her mind whirling and tumbling all the while.

Arthur holstered his weapon and checked over his shoulder to ensure he hadn’t drawn any attention from the law. When he turned to her, his eyes were hard with lingering anger.

But he didn’t pity her. It made Clara feel a bit steadier.

“You alright, Mae?”

The name coursed through her blood like ice. It toyed with the memories Micah’s actions had brought back to the surface, twisting them into vipers that nipped at her thoughts.

Clara took a shuddering breath and murmured, “Don’t call me that.”

Arthur frowned. “That’s your name.”

She shook her head. Clara clenched and unclenched her hands at her sides in an effort to do something, anything, with the fear and hatred that rose up from the dead. The ghosts of days passed whispered in her ear and she couldn’t shut them out.

Clara pushed past Arthur. “It’s Clara,” she said sharply over her shoulder, “and I’m fine.”

Arthur hesitated before following her. “No, you ain’t.”

It took two tries to grip the saddle long enough to pull herself up. The tremors were threatening to shatter her, but if she’d survived this long, she could make it a bit longer.

Clara looked down at him. “I didn’t ask for your help.”

Arthur lingered near her, his expression torn between a biting retort or something a bit more reasonable. He tossed his hands in the air and asked, “What was I supposed to do?”

She forced the bitterness into her words so it wouldn’t eat her alive. “I had it covered, Arthur,” she answered flatly. “Next time, just worry about yourself.”

*

Clara didn’t cry until she was well out of town.

She hated herself for crying.

She hated Micah Bell not for what he did but because he reminded her that she would never be rid of her ghosts.

But mostly Clara cried because of Arthur.

They could hardly talk to each other without arguing, but he would have shot Micah for her.

And that, she decided, was almost too much to bear

Chapter Text

There were two types of men in the world: those who fought for control and those who held it.

Wyatt Byers was the former.

He tipped the decanter of glittering, amber whiskey into the highball glass on the table. It was the good stuff from Scotland, imported directly to their doorstep at the behest of Wyatt’s father, Edwin Byers.

Personally, Wyatt thought whiskey was hardly more than piss in a bottle, no matter what country it came from. But it was the everyman’s drink, or so it seemed, and it was just the thing to make men pliable enough that Wyatt’s work was made much easier.

He handed the glass carefully to his guest, leaving his untouched and empty on the sideboard. Wyatt sauntered back to his chair and sat, stretching his legs out beneath the large, exquisitely carved mahogany desk. He steepled his fingers and eyed the man before him with the same sense of curiosity and scrutiny of a hunter assessing his prey’s weaknesses.

It was easy, really. All men wanted the same thing, whether or not they were willing to admit it. The problem with humanity wasn’t its propensity for cruelty or its disenchanted perceptions of what constituted society.

No—the problem with humanity was that it lacked the firm, unyielding hand of control. All that nonsense about freedom and the pursuit of happiness was nothing more than the ramblings of men too old and tired to do anything more than sign over their hope for a better, brighter future.

That was where the men with control came in. That was where they wrenched these disillusioned saps from the streets and twisted them into an image better suited for this world. Society wasn’t industrialization and progressiveness; it was cutthroat, bittersweet, and a game of survival designed for only the fittest to survive.

The man before him gave the whiskey a tentative sip. His eyes never left Wyatt’s and, after the first sip, felt comfortable enough to lounge back in the chair.

Wyatt raised an eyebrow.

His guest tapped his finger against his glass. “He’s on board.”

“Of course, he is,” Byers replied smoothly. “I didn’t bring you over here to have some of my father’s Dalwhinnie just for that. What else do you have?”

Eden Bennett took another sip. He was one of Byers’ top men—the top man, he supposed, now that Marcus Reynolds had gone and gotten himself killed.

Byers didn’t spare much thought for his former top enforcer. In the end, Marcus had been all talk, and talking only did well for men like Byers and his father.

Eden rubbed his thumb across his bottom lip. “Parker says it’s her.”

A swell of bolstering triumph washed over Byers. This was precisely the result he’d expected. It seemed Eden and Sheriff Parker were good for something, at least.

“She’s not alone, though. Parker says she’s seen most often with a man. ‘A big ol’ bastard,’ to quote him.”

Byers had expected this. Women like Claramae Howard didn’t do well on their own. She’d suckled from his teat until she’d had her fill and then fled like the whelp she was right into the arms of another man.

But he would forgive her. He always did.

He lowered his arms and leveled his gaze at Eden. “Do we have a name on the big ol’ bastard?”

Eden raised his eyebrows and took a sip of whiskey. “Apparently, it’s Tacitus Kilgore.”

“That’s quite the mouthful,” Byers commented blithely.

“And clearly not his name,” Eden added. He settled back against the chair. “So, what’s next?”

Byers took a moment for thought. After a moment he pushed up straighter in the chair and reached for his fountain pen. He’d left the document before him untouched until now.

He swept his signature across the bottom and waited for a moment while the ink dried. Then Byers folded the document and handed it over to Eden.

“See that Parker gets this,” he commanded. “Let her think she has the upper hand until the time is right.” Let her think she’s safe until the wolves are nipping at her heels.

Eden took the document and looked at dolefully. He placed it carefully in the pocket of his coat and asked, “That’s it?”

Byers bristled. “Was there something about my instructions that was elusive to you?”

He swiftly shook his head and downed the rest of the whiskey. “Just making sure you don’t need anything else, is all.”

Byers rose and Eden followed. They reached out and shook hands, as befit proper businessmen.

“When the time comes,” Byers said as Eden made for the door, “I expect you’ll be ready.”

Eden nodded and slipped out of the office.

Byers sat back down and heaved a great, world-weary sigh. It wasn’t easy to hold the balance of the future in the palm of one’s hands. There was no need to wonder if Parker or Eden would follow through with his instructions. Parker wanted prestige and money; Eden’s family debts had been supplanted by the Byers railroad fortune. Both men were willing to trade freedom for assurance.

They were the puppets and Byers was the puppeteer.

Once he got Clara back, all would be well. He’d have to teach her a lesson, of course; no one overstepped their boundaries without some form of punishment.

But that was a worry for another time.

For now, she could rest easy. The wolves would come for her soon enough.

Chapter Text

Clara sat back against the gravestone and settled her newly pilfered book in her lap.

It had been easy enough to steal the gold pocket watch and money clip from the man just outside of Heritage. Feigning the need for directions and loosening the top two buttons of her shirt had been enough for the man to blissfully ignore the hand that crept to her belt and gripped her knife.

By the time the blade was propped precariously at the pulsing artery in his neck, he’d been all too amenable to proffer his valuables.

The book had been an unexpected—but very pleasant—turn of events.

It had slipped out of the man’s satchel. Since it wouldn’t do to have such a tome lying useless in the dirt, Clara snatched it up, tucked it beneath her arm, and submitted her thanks to the individual for his generosity. She’d left him cursing on the side of the road as she slapped his horse and sent it gleefully away toward the nearby hills with their generous supply of fresh, crisp grass.

It hadn’t been exactly necessary, but the man was anything but virtuous. One look at the tops of her breasts had been enough for him to forgo any sense of propriety. Men were entirely too predictable and frustratingly unreliable: the man on the road, her drunk of a father, the manipulative uncle who raised her, Wyatt…

Clara stiffened at the memory. Instead, she focused on the book in her lap and ran her fingers over the printed gold letters on the cover. There was only one man who’d never let her down.

William Shakespeare.

Her Uncle Eustace, bastard that he’d been, had at least had the good grace to instill within her a love of reading. His efforts to make her a lady had begun with studying Shakespeare. With her efforts of the day fulfilled, she’d decided to relax and wait for Arthur in the prearranged meeting spot: The Heritage Church of the Redeemer. By the looks of it, the building was ill kept and not well attended. To be sure wandering eyes wouldn’t spot a woman idling among the headstones, Clara chose a rather auspicious one to hide behind while Arthur concluded whatever business he had in town.

She flipped open the book of Shakespeare’s collected works and landed on a sonnet. The tenuous relationship that already existed between Clara and Arthur became all the more strained after the events outside the saloon in Kingston. Dutch had forced Micah to apologize and, while Clara accepted it, she’d only done so to please the gang’s patriarch.

Arthur, for his part, had leaned against the post of Dutch’s tent while Micah made his half-hearted amends, with a deep-set and rather dangerous looking frown on his face.

A part of her thought it might do well for both of them if she explained what exactly had made her so upset. The other part of her—the more resistant, stubborn part—insisted that it wasn’t any of Arthur’s business and wanted to keep it that way, thank you very much.

Clara sighed and let her eyes wander over the page. Shakespeare understood human nature in a way that still astounded Clara. Now, if only Shakespeare could have been around to analyze the innerworkings of Arthur’s mind…

“Well,” said a deep, gruff voice off to her left, “ain’t this a pretty picture?”

Well, so much for reading.

She looked sharply up at Arthur. He leaned against the pompous headstone of Giles P. Henry with arms folded across his barrel chest. His lips were turned up in the just the slightest hint of a smirk.

“Mr. Morgan,” she replied stiffly. Then she promptly turned her attention back to the sonnet, hoping he’d piss off and let her read for ten minutes.

Instead, Arthur tucked a cigarette between his lips, swiped a match along the headstone, and took a deep, long breath. When he blew out the smoke, he at least had the grace to turn his head slightly away from her.

He gestured toward her with his cigarette. “That what you been doing all day?”

Clara narrowed her eyes and held up the book. Arthur squinted at the tiny print on the pages. “I already did my part. Besides, reading is good for you,” she said smartly as she dropped the book back in her lap. “You might want to try it sometime.”

Arthur’s expression shifted in one of dark humor. “That depends. Does it pay well?”

She heaved an irritated sigh, slammed the book closed, and reached into her satchel. She placed the pocket watch and money clip on the ground beside her, crossed her arms, and smiled triumphantly.

Arthur frowned, tossed his cigarette, and shook his head. “I simply do not understand you, miss.”

“No,” Clara replied as she opened the book again, “and I don’t expect you ever will.”

Silence fell as she made a show of reading. Clara shifted against the head stone, her shoulders heavy with the weight of Arthur’s gaze. After a moment he pushed away from the head stone, sighed, and sat down beside her.

Clara shot him a look from the corner of her eye.

He sat back, his legs tented in front of him. Arthur draped his arms across his knees. He fidgeted, at first looking at her, then the book, and then off into the distance beyond the churchyard. Finally, he cleared his throat and nodded toward the book.

“What you reading?”

She tilted the cover toward him. “It’s Shakespeare,” Clara answered.

He looked sharply up at her. “William Shakespeare?”

Clara rolled her eyes. “No, the other one.”

Arthur stretched one leg out and gave her a flat look. “You always wake up this ornery, Ms. Howard, or do you save it special just for me?”

She gave him a sickeningly sweet smile, patted his knee, and said, “I save it just for you, Mr. Morgan.”

Arthur’s eyes darted to where she’d touched him. He shifted a bit, swallowed, and looked back at the book.

Arthur waved a hand toward the open page and said, “I’m guessing you stole that, too?”

Clara lifted her chin. “It’s better off with me, anyway.”

Arthur let out a sharp burst of laughter. “Sure,” he mused. He glanced anxiously between Clara and the book and said, “Why don’t you read some?”

Read? To him?

She blinked at him and, finding him serious, shrugged. “I ain’t too sure you’ll understand all them big words,” she said in a mocking, sarcastic imitation of his drawl.

Arthur gave her a withering look. “Just read.”

Clara smirked and glanced at the sonnet down at the page.

“‘In faith, I do not love thee with mine eyes, for they in thee a thousand errors note,” she read, letting the words fall off her tongue in a lilting, pleasant pattern. “‘But ‘tis my heart that loves what they despite, who, in spite of view, is pleased to dote.’”

She waited for Arthur to scoff at the words. Clara expected him to poke fun at the language, to insinuate that Shakespeare was nothing more than a long-dead poet.

But he didn’t.

Instead, when Clara looked at him, she spotted him watching her with a look of mild curiosity. His summer eyes glinted against the brightness of the afternoon sun, their depths sparking with a sharp, astute intelligence.

Then Arthur’s lips tugged up into the ghost of a smile. For a moment, Clara was entirely unsure what she was seeing.

“That was real nice,” he said after a moment, his voice unusually soft and lacking the usual gruff roughness around its edges.

Clara looked away, surprised at the smile inching onto her own lips. Wyatt had hated Shakespeare; Arthur didn’t seem to mind it so much.

Maybe, she thought to herself, he wasn’t so bad, after all.

*

What Clara didn’t know was that Arthur was all too familiar with William Shakespeare.

When he’d been rescued by Dutch and Hosea, the men had set to molding him into something that vaguely resembled a human being. One of the monumental tasks set before them was teaching their vagrant-turned-adoptive son to read and write. It had been Dutch who’d scrounged up every scrap of newspaper, pamphlet, and, incidentally, wanted posters (none of which contained the visages of his saviors) in order to begin his tutelage.

Arthur picked up reading much faster than he did writing. After nearly a year of reading from beat up scraps, Hosea finally moved to more intensive, daunting texts. One of them had been a volume of the collected works of Shakespeare.

Arthur had disliked Hamlet. He hadn’t minded Romeo and Juliet.

They left the churchyard and headed back toward their horses. They weren’t fighting, which was a shock in of itself, and Arthur preferred to keep it that way for his own sanity. Instead they walked in companionable silence for the first time since they’d met, with only the words and lessons of Shakespeare lingering between them.

It wasn’t until they’d reached the post where their horses stood in wait that things took an unsurprising turn for the worst.

Clara froze, the book tucked beneath her arm, and looked with wide-eyed surprised toward the main road.

“Shit,” she hissed.

Arthur followed the track of her eyes. A rather disheveled looking man stood near the town center beside a lawman. The disheveled man’s hands cut through the air in sharp motions that decried the tribulation he’d suffered.

Arthur turned to Clara, his lips curdling into a frown.

“Let me guess,” he said as his hands landed heavily on his gun belt, “that’s the feller you stole from.”

Clara sighed in frustration and nodded. “Come on,” she said as she sauntered toward their horses, “just act natural.”

So much for companionable silences. “As opposed to acting how, exactly?”

“I forgot. You’re the opposite of normal,” Clara said sharply over her shoulder. “Just shut up and get on your horse, will you?”

The afternoon had other plans, however.

“There she is! That’s her! That’s the woman who robbed me!”

Arthur glanced over his shoulder. The disheveled man was pointing emphatically in their direction.

“Shit, shit, shit,” Clara cursed as she quickly tucked the book into her saddlebag.

“Shit is right,” Arthur agreed. He gave a quick nod toward the direction in which they’d come. “Just keep your head down and walk.”

Clara followed his lead, her movements a bit jerky and hurried. She leaned a bit closer to him and whispered, “This is your grand plan?”

He narrowed his eyes at her. “Sorry it ain’t quite up to your standards, Ms. Howard. Then again, I guess you was too busy stealing a goddamn book to think about anything else.”

Arthur knew there were two ways this could go: either the lawman would mix them up with the other travelers filling the streets of Heritage, or—

“Hey, you two! Stop right there!”

He sighed, took half a moment to curse his foul luck, and delivered his grand plan to Clara.

“Run.”

*

Clara didn’t wait.

She pushed off into a run and darted for the nearest alley between buildings. Clara forced the air in and out of her lungs and resisted the urge to look over her shoulder.

Arthur was right behind her.

The hurried, purposeful steps of the lawman echoed at their heels. He shouted repeatedly for them to stop. She darted left, narrowly avoiding a collision with several unsuspecting folk. They cried out as she wheeled around them, barely managing to keep her balance and momentum. Arthur cursed behind her but kept up easily.

Clara’s lungs burned. Her legs begged her to stop and her arms had long since begun to ache. She slid around a tight corner, grabbing the wall to slow her momentum. They’d reached a small alcove on a side street, one quiet and shadowed enough to hide them for a moment.

Arthur ground to a halt beside her, his chest heaving from the run. The sound of the lawman’s pursuit faded, giving them a blessed, brief moment of reprieve.

His hands landed firmly on his hips. Sweat glistened on his skin and his cheeks burned a bright pink from exertion.

“All this for Shakespeare,” he grumbled irritably. He glanced quickly out onto the street from which they’d come to ensure their safety.

Clara held up a finger as she fought for breath. “And a gold pocket watch and money. Don’t forget that.”

Arthur shook his head. “You know, I’ve outrun the law more times than I can count,” he said as he leaned against the opposite wall. “I am almost certain that you’re going to be the death of me.”

Despite their rather tremulous situation, Clara smirked. “I thought you liked Shakespeare, Mr. Morgan.”

He gave her a flat, unimpressed look. “I like living better.”

A voice cut through their banter. “They went this way, I saw them.”

Arthur glanced at Clara. He pushed off from the wall, clearly ready to run again.

An idea crashed suddenly through Clara’s mind.

Later on, she would wonder if she’d just been heady from outrunning their pursuer, or if she’d finally slipped into the realm of insanity. Either way, the explanation remained elusive.

They both glanced carefully out toward the street. The lawman walked slowly and purposefully toward their hiding place, his eyes roving for his quarry.

Clara stopped Arthur with a hand to his shoulder. “Wait,” she whispered. “We need a distraction.”

The lawman was close—too close.

Arthur frowned at her. “Where are we gonna find—”

The lawman came toward them, his hunting eyes dark and unrelenting.

So, Clara did the only thing she could think of. She grabbed Arthur by his suspenders and gave them one swift tug.

Arthur, who was clearly taken aback, was helpless to do anything but stumble forward, nearly slamming into her. He braced his hands against the wall on either side of her head.

Clara took a breath and pressed her lips to his.

The burning in her lungs cooled. Her heart slowed its pace, lulled into a sense of complacency. Her thoughts, which before had been wild with panic, stilled into a gentle calm. Clara’s fingers, which were still wrapped tightly around the straps of his suspenders, loosened of their own accord.

Arthur’s lips were warmer and softer than she’d thought.

Not that she’d ever thought of kissing him before this moment of necessity.

He was rigid beneath her. For a moment, Clara could feel his instinctual urge to pull away. But then Arthur’s muscles began to relax. The tightness in his arms and shoulders loosened as he leaned just a fraction closer to her.

For a moment, Clara forgot they were supposed to be distracting the lawman.

For a moment, it seemed like the world had slowed just long enough for this collision of worlds to occur.

The lawman stalked passed them, hardly sparing them more than an uncomfortable glance. Then he moved on, heedless of the fact that the ones for whom he searched were tucked in the shadowed alley, their lips still locked together.

Clara let Arthur’s lips linger on hers for a moment more, just to be sure they were in the clear. Then she pulled away and dropped her hands firmly down to her sides.

Her heart stampeded wildly in her chest.

Arthur sucked in a breath. His eyes looked feverish and wild in the gloom of the side street. His chest rose and fell in sharp, steady gallops.

“Don’t ever do that again,” he breathed.

She struggled for a moment to use her words. “It worked, didn’t it?”

His eyes still hadn’t lost their spark. “That ain’t the point.”

“There they are!”

The lawman had doubled back and spotted them.

“Goddamn it,” Arthur growled. He gripped her shoulder and pushed her back down the side street. “Run!”

*

“How about this one? ‘Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day? Thou art more lovely and more temperate.’”

Arthur’s horse plodded along beside hers. Clara had chosen to read from the sonnets rather than endure the persistent silence on the road back to camp. He seemed irritable, though she couldn’t quite determine if it was from being chased or from their kiss. It wasn’t like she’d wanted to; it was the only that came to mind, and if she hadn’t, they’d likely both be in jail by now.

But, if she was being honest, Clara might have admitted to herself that she read the sonnets in some small part to distract her from remembering what it was like to kiss him.

Arthur grunted. “You callin’ me pretty, Ms. Howard?”

“Sure,” she replied with a shrug. She paused and then added, “Pretty frustrating.”

“Might I remind you that it were you who damn near got us arrested over a goddamm book,” he replied, his voice rising dramatically at the end.

So, he was still a bit sore about that, then.

Clara shut the book with a snap and tucked it in her saddlebag. She gripped the reins and kept her eyes firmly forward. “You about ready to let that go, Mr. Morgan?”

She felt more than saw him roll his eyes. “Sure,” He answered as he placed a hand on his hip and turned full on to look at her. “You about ready to start acting like a normal person?”

Clara raised her eyebrows incredulously at his comment. “I am not a person, I am a woman, and I am perfectly normal.”

Arthur shook his head. “Normal is not a word I would use to describe you, Ms. Howard.”

Clara’s temper flared. “Idiot,” she bit out as she kicked her horse into a gallop.

“Witch,” he called out after her.

So much for distractions, Clara thought bitterly.

Chapter Text

Arthur Morgan was thrown from his first horse when he was twelve years old.

Lyle Morgan had been dead for a year. It had been nearly a full week since Arthur had eaten something substantial. The last bit of money he’d stole off a portly, ignorant man had run out. Young Arthur was a walking storm, crafted from fury and desperation, which drew him to one inevitable decision.

He was going to steal a horse.

Stealing, as it turned out, was one of the methods that Arthur had developed to channel the worst of his murderous rage. Fighting was another, though ever since his last run in with the law, he’d become slightly more careful about curbing the urge to hurt someone. Stealing was a purpose and purpose kept him from tearing the world apart with his bare hands.

Despite his ill-minded intentions, the horse threw Arthur almost immediately after he’d scrambled onto the animal’s back. He’d landed roughly in the dirt, shockingly without more than a few bruises and scrapes to show for it. The horse’s owner, however, had a bit more to say about the matter than did the horse, who’d only sauntered away looking mildly put off. Arthur spent the night in jail before the sheriff, idiot that he was, took pity on the angry, unruly teenager and let him loose back unto the world.

This was the incident that trailed through Arthur’s memory as he dragged the thick brush against the roan mare’s coat.

The beast whickered and gratefully shoved its cold, wet nose against Arthur’s neck. He chuckled and patted the mare’s neck. “There’s a girl,” he muttered with the rare bit of sentiment he displayed only for animals.

Mostly horses, as it were; despite his earlier misgivings with said animals, Arthur had inevitably grown immensely attached to them and them to him. When he’d come across an old, hard-up stable owner begging for someone to care for his horses, Arthur simply couldn’t say no.

It was also a paying job, which, if he was being honest, was largely the incentive for taking on the task. The man, who’d recently injured himself in an accident entirely unrelated to horses, offered Arthur fifty dollars for a full day’s work. It was coming up on the beginnings of evening, as he could tell by a quick glance through the slats of the horse stable.

His body ached fiercely from all the mucking, brushing, feeding, and maintaining he’d done for the past few hours. Arthur had even managed to tame one of the owner’s most unruly horses; it had been no small feat but one that gave Arthur a small measure of pride.

It also earned him five extra dollars.

Arthur stowed the brush and affectionately scratched the mare’s ears. “You behave for your master, now, you hear?”

The mare huffed and bucked her nose against Arthur’s hand. She was neither agreeing nor disagreeing to his request; she only wanted more scratches, whereupon she might then decide to behave.

Arthur turned his head at the sound of footsteps. “Just about done here, sir,” he called out, assuming it was the owner and his current, albeit temporary, employer. He murmured a few more compliments to the mare, who nibbled at his fingers in earnest thanks.

The crest of a head peeked over the stable wall. A pair of curious green eyes landed on him.

“So, this is what you’ve been doing all day.”

Arthur gave the pair of eyes a withering look. He picked up the brush again. “Ain’t you got somewhere else to be, Ms. Howard?”

Clara grunted as she tugged herself further up onto the top of the stall wall. She crossed her arms and watched him brush the mare. “There’s nothing to do in this town,” she lamented in frustration. “All I got was twenty dollars.”

Knowing that his peace had been irrevocably shattered, Arthur took to brushing with furious focus. “Twenty dollars is better than nothing,” he observed.

She remained blessedly silent for a few moments. Arthur tried to ignore the bothersome feeling of being watched. He focused on the brushing, the feeling of the heavy object in his hand, and the strong, muscled frame of the horse beneath his hand.

Clara laid her chin on her folded hands. “How much is this paying you, anyway?”

Arthur paused and sighed.

“I’m just asking,” she replied defensively.

His eyes cut to hers and narrowed them. “I have known you for nearly three months,” Arthur answered tersely, “and you are just about the nosiest damn woman I ever met.”

She only smiled in response.

Something in his chest twisted and tightened. He looked away and grunted, “Fifty dollars.”

Clara nearly fell off her perch on the stall. “Fifty dollars? For brushing horses?”

“That ain’t all I been doing,” Arthur explained tersely. He waved a hand toward the rest of the relatively small barn. “I been cleaning up this entire place while you been doing—what, exactly?”

Clara made a face at him. “Shut up.”

Arthur pointed toward the barn door. “I should’ve brought Marston along, too. Then I could’ve seen what happens when two half-brains make a whole one.”

She gasped in mock surprise. “Did you work on that joke all day, Mr. Morgan?”

Arthur’s smile was akin to a viper. “Sure. And it still got me more money than you.”

Clara slid off the stall wall. “Idiot,” she muttered as she sauntered directly into the stall.

The mare glanced up at the newcomer.

Arthur didn’t have time to tell her to wait. Clara stepped forward, her hand outstretched, just as the mare took a few eager steps forward. He cursed and grabbed for the reins, ready to hold the horse back if she shied at the unexpected presence.

But the mare only nuzzled at the oats Clara had collected in her palm. Her tail swished in pleasure and her ears perked up as she scooped up the unexpected treat with vigor.

Clara smiled as she carefully, gently, stroked the mare’s long face. Her fingers slipped behind the mare’s ears and scratched at the sensitive points. The mare, her treat finished, showed her thanks by nuzzling Clara’s neck.

He watched as Clara let out a soft chuckle of amusement. She patted the side of the mare’s head, her green eyes sparkling with mirth. The sun slipped through the high window in the stable and, if Clara turned her head at just the right moment, he could see the strands of red that ran like rivers through her earthen hair.

Arthur’s hand loosened on the reins. The horse, bolstered by Clara’s laughter, continued her nuzzling in the hope of obtaining more oats. Clara playfully tried to elude the horse’s affection, even as her hand wound through the horse’s mane and scratched absently at the freshly brushed coat. For a moment, Arthur wondered why his chest suddenly felt so constricted, as if his lungs had run out of air.

The problem was this: Arthur Morgan was at that very moment having a rather difficult time forgetting what it had been like to kiss her.

The gesture had been entirely inappropriate and, more to the point, unwanted. But even now, as the stable filled with the pleasant sound of her laugh, Arthur found his mind wandering back to that moment.

Arthur frowned and his jaw tightened. She’d had some nerve, touching him—kissing him—without his permission. It didn’t matter that she tasted sweeter than he’d thought she would.

His heart gave a single, terrible lurch. He cleared his throat and dropped the reins. “Well,” he grumbled as he swiped his dirtied hand on his trousers, “guess that about does it.”

Clara followed him out and waited as he spoke to the owner. Arthur thanked the old man as he gratefully took the stack of bills, instinctively counting them before tucking them away in his satchel. The owner was insistent that Arthur come back whenever he could; he had a way with horses, the man said, and he’d pay.

“So,” Clara said as she pushed away from the barn where she’d been leaning. “Why don’t you buy us a round of drinks, Mr. Morgan?”

He looked at her. “That how you sweet talk all the men?”

“Oh, I wouldn’t dream of sweet talking you,” she answered. “Especially since any compliment I could muster would certainly go right over your head.”

He scoffed as they traversed the main thoroughfare of the town toward the saloon. “I’m disinclined to believe that you are capable of uttering a single complimentary remark.”

Clara sighed and pressed a hand up her forehead. “Talking to you is like talking to a wall.”

Arthur’s hands slid to his belt. “And talking to you is akin to breathing underwater: useless and liable to get me killed.”

Clara narrowed her eyes at him and nodded toward the saloon. “Oh, just be quiet and buy me a drink.” She tossed her braid over her shoulder and added sarcastically, “The more I drink, the more I can drown out the sound of your voice.”

Arthur rolled his eyes and followed, hoping that there was enough whiskey in the saloon to get him through the rest of the afternoon.

*

They didn’t make it to the saloon.

Clara and Arthur had hardly made it to the front door when a sharp, distinct cry cut through the relative quiet of the afternoon.

Arthur spun around toward the sound. He knew it immediately for what it was: the sound of a child’s desperate, wild cry.

For a moment, Arthur Morgan felt his heart nearly snap in two. How long had it been since he heard that sound? How long had it been since he’d been able to hold a crying child in his arms, to use what little ability he had to comfort those cries?

Then the world snapped back into place like a whip. He was back on the steps of the saloon, head swiveling up and down the street in search of the source of the sound.

Clara was doing the same. Then her eyes focused on one spot as a new, fresh cry broke through the air. She pointed beyond the shadow of the nearby hotel. “It’s there.”

She was off like a shot before he could stop her.

“Jesus,” he grumbled as he darted after her. Arthur narrowly avoided several collisions as he kept his eyes firmly locked on Clara’s swinging braid. He followed her as she rounded the corner of the hotel and nearly barreled into her as she came to a sudden stop.

There are moments in one’s life where the heart shines through even the hardest, most cruel exterior. In many ways, it’s like the sun breaking through a persistent string of clouds with the intention of lighting the world’s way back to waking. Arthur knew this because, as much horror as he’d witnessed and in which he participated, there were still moments such as these that managed to surprise him. Very rarely was he ever the one allowing that light to shine through; his was a heart too encapsulated by darkness. He saw it most often in other people, and sometimes it was enough to fool him into believing that there was more to this life than killing, cheating, and lying.

Arthur would remark on all this later, in the privacy of his own thoughts. For the time being, he watched as one of those precious moments unfolded before his very eyes.

That moment belonged to Claramae Howard.

He watched as Clara bent before the child, soothing him until the cries were hardly more than whimpers. Somehow, her voice lost all the venomous edges and tart, biting sarcasm; this sound was soft and lilting, like a cool breeze on a summer’s day. Clara introduced herself and the boy, after a moment’s hesitation, revealed his name to be Daniel.

Once, Daniel’s eyes slid to Arthur. They widened in fear and Arthur swiftly buried the raw, scraping feeling of self-hatred that followed it.

The boy revealed in halting, hiccupping sentences that his father had gone to the general store nearly an hour beforehand. He’d told Daniel to wait for him right there and he had, obedient child that he was, but he was afraid.

He’d seen two men drag his father out of the general store a few minutes ago.

Clara looked toward Arthur. Her eyes were afire with conviction. They held his gaze for a moment before darting in the direction of the general store.

Arthur, who did not pretend to understand Clara in any capacity, knew precisely what she was thinking in that moment.

She straightened and held out her hand to Daniel. The boy swiped the back of his hand against his wet nose and tentatively took her hand.

Clara smiled at him and promised that she would find his father.

Which, as Arthur had already guessed, meant that his day had suddenly taken a turn for the unexpected.

*

“The answer is no.”

Clara paused on the steps of the hotel. “I haven’t even said anything yet.”

Arthur loomed at the base, hands firmly on his belt. That infuriating aura of cowboy swagger haunted his resolute stance. “I see the wheels turning in that head of yours, Ms. Howard. I ain’t about to let you drag me on some rescue mission for some stranger’s sake.”

She crossed her arms. The hotel proprietor had agreed to take Daniel in—for a small fee, of course. But Clara remained resolutely unsatisfied; the boy’s cries still haunted her thoughts. She knew what it was like to lose a parent. She still remembered the absence of safety and security in the wake of that loss.

If Daniel’s father was still alive, she’d bring him home.

“And what about Daniel?” she questioned, taking the steps one at a time. “You’re okay leaving a frightened boy alone, when his father could still be out there somewhere?”

Arthur looked away. The brim of his hat shadowed his eyes, but it didn’t hide the brief flash of darkness that flitted across his face. “The boy’ll be fine,” he muttered. “This ain’t what we came here to do.”

Unfortunately for Arthur Morgan, he still had yet to understand that Clara’s will was ironclad. She straightened and delivered unto him her hardest, most resolute stare.

“I’m doing this, Arthur,” she replied sternly. “I won’t leave that boy alone.”

She pushed past him and made her way to their hitched horses. Clara’s blood thrummed in her veins as she tugged free Marion’s reins. Time felt restricted around her as she pulled up into the saddle. Any more delays could mean the difference between the man’s survival and a cruel end.

Arthur swung up onto Boadicea’s back and faced her. The late afternoon sun seemed to charge his crystal blue-green eyes, highlighting the barely checked anger hidden in their depths.

“I’m not asking you to come,” she said tersely.

Arthur tightened his grip on the reins. He gestured with his chin toward the road out of town. “Just drive.”

*

It wasn’t until they were a few miles outside of town that Arthur was absolutely certain that this excursion was nothing more than a terrible, half-formed idea.

They kept close to what they were certain was the track that would lead them to Daniel’s purloined father. Admittedly, Arthur wasn’t exactly the best tracker; Charles Smith was much more suited to the task. But he did his best, despite the frustration that limned nearly every single of his thoughts, and so the recovery effort continued.

The track led them down the steep, rocky slopes that bolstered the Hurn River, one of the spill offs from the mountains of Devil’s Ridge. Clara kept silent as Arthur watched the road, his eagle eyes scouring the landscape for any sign of the boy’s missing father.

His hands tightened on the reins. He didn’t understand how he’d let her drag him on this fool’s errand. They weren’t in the business of saving lost men, let alone those who’d likely gotten into trouble of their own accord. Arthur had said as much to Clara, who’d staunchly ignored him and insisted that they get the boy’s father back.

Clearly, it hadn’t dawned on her just yet that this entire enterprise reeked suspiciously of foul play.

Arthur took his eyes from the track and let them drift to where Clara rode beside him, her neck craned around the copses of trees that lined the Hurn. The line of her jaw was set with grim determination and her eyes had that all too familiar look of defiance that Arthur knew he’d be hard-pressed to fight.

He watched her for a moment. Why she cared so much about helping the boy, he didn’t know. But there was something about the hard set of her mouth and the way her verdant eyes gleamed with good, well-meaning intention that ensnared Arthur’s attention.

He shifted in the saddle. He wasn’t the right man for this sort of job; he wasn’t well-meaning nor was he good in any sense of the word. But, despite this, Arthur simply couldn’t leave her to do the job alone.

If he’d spared half a thought for honesty, perhaps he would have been willing to admit that a part of him—a larger part than he would’ve imagined—wanted to see her satisfied.

Arthur was so caught up in his own twisting thoughts that he almost didn’t see the shadow that crossed between the trees on their left.

Clara slowed Marion. “Did you see that?” she murmured.

“Yes,” Arthur growled, damning his amateur slip. His hand slipped to his revolver as he urged Boadicea on. He turned over his shoulder to Clara and said, “Keep moving.”

They led the horses down to the riverbank. The world quieted around them, shifting and allowing room for the first seeds of wariness to settle in their hearts. A few yards away, the Hurn slipped along the rocky shore toward its final destination; around them, the trees jutted from the upper bank with purpose. Arthur kept his eyes on them, suddenly untrusting of the way the light and shadow played between their trunks at their roots.

Clara sighed in frustration. “Did they cross?”

Arthur shook his head. He couldn’t be sure; there were tracks, small disturbances, in the pebbled soil at their horses’ feet. He dismounted and held up a hand to Clara, silently instructing her to remain astride while he bent to inspect the tracks.

Finally, Arthur sighed and straightened. He swiveled around to inspect the trees once more as his trained wariness rose to a steady, persistent hum at the back of his head.

“I can’t tell,” he said. “But something ain’t right about all this.”

Clara slid off Marion and came to stand at his side. She shook her head and bit out, “We’re wasting time. We have to find him, Arthur.”

He threw out his hands. “What is it you’d like me to do, miss? Send smoke signals in hopes he’ll find us instead?”

She looked sharply at him, her lips pressed into a thin line. Clara jabbed a finger at him and snarled, “Stop pretending you don’t want to help the boy.”

Arthur furrowed his brow, his wariness momentarily forgotten. “We tried,” he reasoned. “His father ain’t here. If he ain’t dead by now, he will be soon. Now, come on,” he said with a wave of his hand. “Best get back to camp before dark.”

         Clara grabbed his arm and gave it a swift tug. Arthur spun around, his mouth open to protest, but Clara inserted herself directly in front of him. Both of her hands were firmly on her hips and her eyes—both of them alight like embers—landed directly on his.

She was close enough that Arthur could smell the scent of lavender and mint that drifted off her skin on the back of the wind.

“I don’t know what’s gotten into you,” Clara said tersely, “but you’re better than this.”

Arthur’s hackles rose. He squared up in front of her until Clara was drenched in his shadow.

“You don’t know me,” he growled.

“Yes, I do,” she countered. “Give me one good reason why we shouldn’t keep looking.”

What was he supposed to say?

That the boy reminded him of Isaac? That Arthur didn’t think he could bring himself to help the man without being reminded of his own failures? That the moment he heard the boy crying, all he could think of was his lost son?

Arthur wanted to scream at her, to let his rage pour forth until Clara understood why he couldn’t help. But all he did was open his mouth in the hopes that he’d say something convincing and caustic enough for her to get back on her damn horse and leave the rest of the world to its own devices.

But, right at that moment, a voice cut through the air.

“Please, help!”

Clara turned instinctively toward the sound. Her expression lost its tight-knit anger and embraced the spirit of hope.

The sight of it nearly cut Arthur to the quick.

“Come on, Arthur,” she said eagerly as she took off toward the sound.

And, because he was a fool, Arthur followed her, knowing full well he wouldn’t have gone anywhere other than where she went.

*

A man lay in a crumbled heap along the riverbank nearly fifty yards away.

How had they missed him?

She let her feet carry her toward Daniel’s father. They had only to rescue him, tend to the wounds she could see staining through his worn and slightly torn clothing, and bring him back to his son.

Then she would be able to still the disquiet that pervaded her heart.

She slid to a stop beside him and barely managed to keep her footing before tumbling headlong into the Hurn. The man’s face was buried in the sandy rock, his fingers clawing through the mess of silt and mud at the edge of the river. Clara’s eyes roved over his body, taking in the sight of the blood and filth that covered his arms, torso, and legs. From what she could see of his face, the same mess marred his features there. But he was breathing—that was a start.

Arthur skidded to a stop behind her. He kept his distance, his eyes cautious, and his hand still lingering on the handle of his gun.

Clara placed a gentle, consoling hand on his shoulder. “Sir,” she murmured. “Can you hear me? We’re here to—”

Then something rather unexpected occurred.

Daniel’s father—or so Clara had assumed—violently pushed off the ground. She stumbled back just as the man grabbed for one of the knives on her belt. Before she could process what happened, before she could even think of defending herself, the man shoved her hard into the ground. The breath fled her lungs just as he placed her knife against the throbbing pulse point in her neck.

She blinked at him. Clara heard the sounds of a scuffle and a deep-throated grunt from just beyond her peripheral vision.

Arthur. What was happening to Arthur?

The man loomed over her. Clara gritted her teeth and forced herself to remain still. Even the slightest movement would send the knife edge into her throat.

All of this—the boy, the rescue attempt—had been nothing more than an elaborate ruse, crafted from deceit so thorough that even her years of lying hadn’t been enough to see through.

But for what?

“Sorry, miss,” her captor drawled. “It’s ain’t nothing personal. Just business.”

He slammed the hilt of her knife against her head and her world went black.

*

One minute Claramae Howard was in the folds of oblivion, her body long forgotten and her soul tethered to the blackness.

The next minute she was pulling a sudden, staggered breath into her aching lungs as she stumbled back into her battered body, her consciousness returning with a fury.

She blinked her eyes open, fighting against the heaviness that insisted they stay shut. The knife edge of hot pain sliced through her head, nearly pummeling her back into unconsciousness.

It turned out death wasn’t all that pleasant, after all.

Clara took a few more steadying breaths until the pain receded. She lifted her eyes open slowly until the blackness faded from her vision and allowed the world to come back into focus.

The smell of cooking meat wafted through the air, punctuated by the stench of burning wood. Clara winced as a bout of nausea roiled through her stomach. The side of her head throbbed from where that son of a bitch had hit her; if she turned her head slowly and carefully enough, she could feel the crackling of dried blood flake off her cheek.

“That was too easy,” her attacker said. “What are they wanted for, anyhow?”

Clara blinked again until the campfire and the shadowy figures around it came into focus. She was going to enjoy carving them from stem to stern for what they did to her.

She started. No—to them. Where was Arthur?

Panic flooded her veins. Clara shifted and bit back a grunt of pain as her head wound roared in protest. Movement revealed that they’d tied her up against a tree; her arms were bent back and her wrists tied behind the thin trunk pressing insistently into her spine.

Clara glanced down. Her ankles were tied, too.

The second figure spoke around a mouthful of meat. “Didn’t say. We was just supposed to capture them and bring them back to town.”

She swallowed against the stark dryness in her throat. Night had fallen since she’d been unconscious; the shadowed moonlight revealed that they were on open land, likely far from the nearby towns. Trees spotted the landscape along with hulking masses of rock.

But where was Arthur?

Her attacker stretched out along the campfire. “How’d you manage to take down the big one?”

His companion straightened a bit where he sat upon an errant rock. “Managed to get him on the side of the head,” he answered with a pantomime of the action. He chuckled and added, “Even the big ones can fall with the slightest push.”

She stilled, her heart pattering wildly in her chest. If they hurt him, she’d make sure she broke every single one of their bones before she stabbed them through the heart.

Her captor took another bite of food. “Don’t see what all the fuss is about,” he mused as he pondered the meat speared on the tip of his knife. “Don’t see how a woman and a big ol’ bastard like that can be much trouble.”

The other man shrugged. “What does it matter? The money’s coming from some bigwig back east. That’s all I care about.”

Clara froze. Fear clutched her heart and drowned out the pain with its ferocity.

She should have known.

A rustle sounded behind her. She jumped and immediately regretted the action when her vision blackened at the edges. Clara tried to reach for her knives before remembering her hands were bound.

Her eyes tracked a shadow cut away from the surrounding darkness. Clara pressed up against the tree as she tried desperately to think of something, anything, that she could do to defend herself.

The shadow bent beside her. The campfire sparked, letting loose a bright burst of flame that just barely illuminated the familiar outline of Arthur’s face.

She sagged with relief.

He was okay.

Arthur held up a finger to his lips. His hunting knife glinted in his hand. The men had likely been more concerned with tying him up than disarming him.

He cut effortlessly through both of her bonds. Clara slid along the trunk and stretched out a hand to catch herself. The world tilted dangerously for a moment and she closed her eyes against the roiling sensation.

Arthur’s hand clamped down on her shoulder. His grip was firm, real, and it steadied her. “Stay still,” he whispered. Clara closed her eyes as he gripped her chin and slowly, surely, tilted her head until the wound faced the night.

He swore under his breath. When she opened her eyes, she saw Arthur glaring at the wound with vehemence that would have frightened even the most hardened criminal.

Arthur let the barest hint of his fingers brush against the edges of the wound. Clara winced and he pulled away.

“Can you stand?” he breathed with a quick glance over his shoulder.

Clara gritted her teeth, steeled her nerves, and tried to lift up off the ground. The breath fled from her lungs and her vision blackened as she immediately fell back against the tree.

Arthur reached out and caught her, helping her back into a seated position. His mouth was set in a grim line.

“Stay here,” he whispered. He lifted his hunting knife and cut a dark, smoldering glance at their captors. “Stay quiet.”

Clara could do little else but give him a slight, barely perceptible nod. Arthur let his eyes on linger on her for half a moment more before he slipped back into the shadows toward their unsuspecting captors.

Safe for the moment, Clara leaned her head back against the bark of the tree and let sweet oblivion take her.

*

Clara pressed the cool cloth to her head and laid back on the cot.

She blew out a sigh as the cold nipped at the throbbing ache that spread like wildfire across her skull. The dizziness had finally abated, thanks to whatever tonic Strauss had given her. It’d tasted questionable, but the result was nearly instantaneous. The German man had nothing for the headaches, which Clara wasn’t entirely sure she believed, but he’d insisted that they would eventually subside.

Clara considered whacking him on the side of the head just to see if his opinion remained the same.

The cool cloth did wonders for the blazing headache. She hadn’t exactly been herself since Arthur had somehow managed to drag her back to camp. While her wound hadn’t required stitches, the lingering effects left her at their mercy.

He hadn’t said so, but Clara knew that he’d killed both of those men. She hadn’t said so, but she knew he’d been right to question the validity of her impulsive instinct to help what had seemed to be an innocent child who’d lost his father.

Because of course his father hadn’t been lost. The hotel owner had taken the clearly vagrant child in without a second thought, which should have been her first inclination that something was off.

He was looking for her. And if she wasn’t careful, he was going to find her.

Clara lowered the cloth from her head and settled back against the pillow. The worst of the pain was gone but the knowledge that her trail had been followed was near enough to make the ache rise again.

Someone lifted the tent flap back a fraction. Clara winced at the sudden bright burst of sunlight that cut through the otherwise dim interior.

“You decent, Ms. Howard?”

She sighed and draped her arm over her eyes. “Yes, Mr. Morgan,” she replied dully.

Arthur slipped into the tent. Clara watched him from beneath the shadow of her arm as he took a seat in the nearby chair. She didn’t need the sunlight to tell that he was angry.

His crystalline eyes slid up to hers. Carefully checked fury lingered in the corners of his frown and in the shadows cast over his eyes. Arthur nodded with his chin toward the bruised and scabbed wound on her head.

“Charles said you nearly fell off your horse today.”

Clara clenched her jaw. She had, in fact; she’d been out with Charles and John with the intention of following a lead on a job. A bout of dizziness had swept over her and nearly forced her to tumble from the saddle. Had it not been for Charles, she would have certainly fallen. Leave it Charles Smith to be too righteous for his own good.

“I got dizzy,” she replied stiffly. “He caught me before any damage was done. I’m alright now.”

Arthur said nothing. The silence dragged on until it became its own entity, the heaviness of its presence sifting between them until they could do little else but acknowledge its existence.

He kept one arm on the back of the chair and an ankle propped on his knee. The other was clenched into a fist, which he kept in plain view in his lap.

“It were all a sham, weren’t it?”

She said nothing. The tension crawled across her skin and ate whatever words she could have said.

Arthur’s jaw worked. “There weren’t no wayward son, no father gone missing,” he hissed, his deep baritone dripping with ire. “There weren’t no reason for you to insist on getting caught up in some goddamned hare-brained scheme that almost got you killed.”

Clara pressed her lips together. She lowered her arm and faced him, daring him to ask the question she knew was on the tip of his tongue.

After a moment, Arthur asked, “Who were they, Mae?”

There, at least, she didn’t have to lie, though she bristled as his casual use of her moniker. “I don’t know.”

Arthur leaned forward in the chair. His eyes formed narrow slits that left just enough of his cold, sharp-eyed glare to fall upon her.

“You best come up with a lie I’m willing to believe, Ms. Howard, because I’m just about through with the bullshit you been spinning as of late.”

Anger spiked through her. She opened her mouth to protest but he held up a hand to stop her.

“First there was that man in the woods, and now this. It’s best you start figuring out your place in all this.”

Clara’s jaw clenched tightly. “I know my place.”

“There’s a difference between being a liar and lying for a living,” Arthur said, plowing over her insistence. He waved a hand in the air and continued. “Your past ain’t none of my business. We ain’t saints in this gang, that’s for damn sure, but the lies we tell keep us safe—they keep us alive. Maybe it ain’t the way you’re used to, but with us, you either have our backs, or you don’t. It’s that simple.”

She waited. Then she took a breath, chose her words carefully, and said, “I didn’t know those men, Arthur. I don’t know why they did what they did.”

It wasn’t exactly honest, but nor was it entirely untrue. Something else was at play besides the thing she feared the most.

But Arthur wasn’t inclined to believe her. The anger that pervaded his face shifted into something else, something softer. Clara thought it looked something like disappointment. He pointed a finger at her and muttered darkly, “Stop lying to me.”

Before she could think of something else to say, he rose from the chair and paused at the tent flap. Arthur glanced over his shoulder at her, his face tilted just enough that the shadows in the tent cut across his visage.

“Who’s back you got, Mae? Yours, or mine?”

That was how he left her: in darkness spun by the lies she insisted on telling, wondering if he’d ever come to trust her.

And whether or not she'd ever be deserving of that trust.

Chapter Text

Arthur Morgan woke up with every intention of it being a normal day.

Of course, normal was a bit of a stretch when it came to their lifestyle. An average day consisted of suffering through Pearson’s coffee, which Arthur swore the man made with mud and shit, and a breakfast consisting of equal parts leftover gristly stew, somewhat fresh biscuits, and whatever other food like substances that weren’t covered in mold or half-eaten by rats.

All told, Arthur did have to admit that Pearson worked wonders with what meager rations they were able to procure. Besides, he couldn’t rightly complain; as one of the biggest men in the camp, food was less a necessity and more a raw, strangling desire for him.

Arthur sat at the campfire with his coffee. The sun was just beginning to peek over the sharp, craggy hills that kept Deepwater Pass hidden from the main path through the mountains of Devil’s Ridge. John, Hosea, and Bill Williamson were also seated at the fire. There was talk of a few jobs in town, though only a handful had any real potential.

He was content to sit and listen, at least until a more enticing prospect came up in the course of conversation. Arthur sipped his coffee and let the warmth settle into his aching, tired bones.

“There you are,” a voice said behind him.

Arthur immediately stiffened. For a moment, he considered not turning around. If he did, he knew he would be roped into something absurd and, after the last debacle with the supposed lost father that ended in a half-formed kidnapping, Arthur was in need of some normalcy.

Until, of course, he realized that there was no such thing as normal, especially where she was concerned.

He sighed, steeled his nerves, and turned to see Clara Howard, hands on her hips, and her eyebrows raised in expectation.

“Ms. Howard,” Arthur grumbled in greeting.

“You said you’d teach me to shoot properly,” she said, as if this were an entirely obvious fact.

Hosea, John, and Bill all ceased conversation and focused their attention on Arthur and Clara. This only served to make Arthur all the more irritated.

He took another slow, deliberate sip of coffee. “I’m a little busy right now,” Arthur replied with curt sarcasm.

Clara shrugged. “Fine.” She shifted her attention John. “Mr. Marston, are you free?”

Arthur’s fingers clenched around the cup. His eyes went straight to the main in question, his blue eyes filled with venom.

Marston? She was really going to ask Marston, who could barely shoot the broad side of a barn to save his life?

John looked up from where he was worrying over his revolver. He looked between Arthur and Clara for a minute before shrugging, shaking his head, and turning his attention back to his gun.

Clara rolled her eyes and sighed. “Bill, how about it?”

Arthur’s lip curled ever so lightly. His blood scorched his veins as his fingers clenched a fraction tighter on the cup. Asking John was one matter; soliciting Bill’s services was damn near laughable.

And aggravating. Really goddamn aggravating.

“Listen,” Bill said with a dismissive wave of his hand. “Don’t drag me into this. I got enough to worry about.”

And, because matters hadn’t already soured enough, Micah Bell chose that moment to saunter toward the campfire, his leery, lingering gaze falling straight on Clara.

Arthur’s hackles rose.

“You looking for someone to teach you to shoot, miss?” Micah asked in his lazy, slithering drawl. His lip curled into a sinister, ill-intentioned smirk. He held out his arms and announced, “Look no further.”

Hosea and John shot unfavorable looks over their shoulder. Bill remained staunchly uninvolved in the matter of Clara’s tutelage.

Arthur, on the other hand, weighed the consequences of shooting Micah.

He still hadn’t forgiven Micah for that day outside the general store. Dutch had inserted himself into the resolution of the matter by forcing Micah to apologize to Clara. She’d accepted the lackluster apology, but Arthur staunchly refused.

Not that it mattered very much what he thought or how he felt about the matter. Clara had, on more than one occasion, made it abundantly clear that she was more than capable of taking care of herself. Unless, of course, it involved getting herself wrapped into some godforsaken rescue attempt gone wrong.

Clara’s expression soured. She crossed her arms and cleared her throat. “I think I’ll manage well enough on my own,” she said as she made to circle around the campfire back to her tent.

Micah cut off her advance. Arthur half rose from the log upon which he sat, his mind devoid of little else except for how much he wanted to wipe that goddamn grin off Micah’s face.

“Come on, now, Ms. Howard,” Micah said. “Allow me this opportunity to make amends for my previous transgression. Besides,” he added, cutting a look to Arthur, “don’t you want to learn from someone who ain’t quite so pompous as Morgan?”

Clara stiffened and took half a step away from him. She lifted her chin, met Micah’s gaze, and replied tersely, “I’m fine on my own.”

Micah chuckled and the very sound of it was enough to make Arthur’s blood boil. “That’s a shame. I would love to see what you can do with a gun.”

His tone was clear enough for all present to know that very clearly did not mean a gun in the literal sense.

Clara’s hands clenched into fists at her sides.

Arthur was up and in between them before he could think twice.

He squared up in front of Micah, daring him to say or do anything that would give Arthur an excuse to shoot him. Arthur silently begged for it, if only to spare the world from his poisonous, wretched presence.

And God help him if he ever spoke to Clara like that ever again.

“Come on, Ms. Howard,” Arthur ground out between clenched teeth. “Better leave now while the getting’s good.”

Hosea rose stiffly from his seat. “I’ll join you,” he said with a wave in their direction. The old man’s eyes knowing gaze cut sharply to Micah as he added, “Seems the morning’s been ruined enough as it is.”

Arthur kept his eyes on Clara’s back as they walked hurriedly to the hitching posts. His ears were attuned to the sound of Micah’s voice, or the sound of his pursuit.

When he deigned it safe enough, Arthur mounted and indicated their path with a flick of his head. “This way,” he said as Boadicea followed obediently. “We’ll need a spot where you won’t be likely to shoot anyone as don’t rightly need it.”

Clara smirked at him. “Oh, come now, Mr. Morgan. I wouldn’t shoot you on purpose. This time, anyway.”

Hosea cut in. “If you two are going to do this the entire time, I might be inclined to shoot you both before the afternoon’s done.”

*

Arthur wanted to be angry at her.

He wanted to keep the simmering ire carefully concealed in his heart over what she’d put them both through with Daniel’s alleged father. He wanted to twine his budding suspicion over her past into something, anything, that would keep her at bay.

Theirs wasn’t the sort of life where you could trust someone so easily. If he kept his walls up, if he kept his armor on tight, then he wouldn’t have to worry when she eventually betrayed him.

Because that’s how it always ended up.

They always left him in the end.

But when Clara turned to him in a moment of reasonably companionable silence, he could see something strange and unexpected glinting in her eyes. It took him a moment to remember that this was the look of vulnerability, of opening at least one of the cracks around one’s bolstered heart to let something other than numbness inside.

“I have your back,” she muttered quickly.

Arthur had looked sharply over at her, his brow furrowed.

Clara had swallowed and looked away, keeping her eyes firmly on the road in front of them. “But there are some things about me that are better left unspoken.”

That was how they’d left it. Hosea rode on ahead, heedless of the whispered conversation that had taken place between them.

Where only a moment before Arthur had been prepared to push Clara as far from him as he could, he felt himself opening up—just a fraction, hardly more than a sliver in the darkness that still pervaded his heart.

But even that fraction was enough for him to see what lay on the other side.

And he wasn’t sure he was ready for that.

*

The key wasn’t to keep your eye on the target.

The key was breathing, slowly, surely, and with emphasis on exhalation.

Clara gazed down the slim barrel of the carbine repeater, setting her sights on the target that lay twenty-five yards away. Her shoulders pulsed with a dull ache, but she squared them anyway, intent on hitting the target dead center this time.

She let out a long, steady breath. Then she filled her lungs with fresh, clean air.

Clara emptied her lungs and pulled the trigger.

She braced for the kickback, balancing her weight evenly on her feet. A flock of birds, disturbed by the thunderous noise, burst from the nearby copse of trees, squawking their displeasure in their wake.

Clara lowered the repeater. The air was filled with the scent of gunpowder. She let it calm her racing nerves as she peered at the target: a mottled tin can balanced on the top of a wooden fence.

The bullet hit just left of center.

“Shit,” she cursed, shaking her head in frustration. This was why she preferred knives.

Clara turned around, anger burning hotly under her skin, and spared a glance at Arthur Morgan, who watched from the crest of a small hill behind her. Hosea sat on the ground beside him, a book nestled in his lap. The older man made it very clear that he wanted no part in their exchange.

Arthur sighed in frustration. “Ms. Howard, I know you ain’t inclined to listen to instructions,” he drawled as he joined her, “but you could at least pretend to listen to what I’m telling you.”

Clara glared at him. “I am listening, Mr. Morgan.”

“Clearly not.” He jabbed a finger at the can, which at least had the grace to look sorry for itself. “You should’ve hit that dead on, and you damn well know it.”

She flashed a look of frustration in his direction and lowered the weapon. “I almost hit the center,” Clara reasoned with a flick of her chin to the can. “You can at least give me that.”

Arthur gave her a withering look. “Sure. See where almost hitting an O’Driscoll gets you.”

Clara bristled and tightened her hands on the gun. This was what she got for trying to bridge the tension that had pushed them apart since their last excursion. Clara hadn’t lied about what she’d said to him; she did have his back, despite the ghosts that still haunted her every step.

The less Arthur knew, the better; the less he had to hold against her, to let Dutch hold against her, the safer she’d be. For now, anyway.

Though his surly attitude was beginning to make her question that decision in the first place.

It had felt…different, reaching out to him like that. Clara had spent so long hiding from the world, dedicated every waking moment to ensuring that her heart and soul remained protected from those that sought to tear her down. It’d been difficult—more so than she cared to admit—to utter those words to Arthur. Clara couldn’t shake the feeling that they made her vulnerable in a way that she wasn’t quite ready to acknowledge.

And yet…

It didn’t feel quite so daunting—not with Arthur.

A strange, dizzying feeling twisted in her gut, made worse the longer Arthur looked at her.

“Even Marston can shoot a gun better than that,” Arthur said with a withering look at the put-out tin can. “And that’s saying a lot, seeing as how he’s as dumb as a boot that’s lost its pair.”

Clara ground her teeth. She flicked her chin out toward the fence and said, “How about you go stand out there and we’ll see if I can hit you from this distance?”

He chuckled. “Sure,” Arthur replied with a smirk, “seeing as how I’m absolutely sure I’ll survive, what with your shit aim.”

So much for trying to make amends. Apparently, her deliberate attempt at an apology had fallen on deaf ears; this man insisted on testing the very limits of her patience.

Then an idea struck her. Clara shifted and aimed the weapon at the center of Arthur’s broad chest.

He started, instinctively throwing up his hands. His mouth dropped open in shock.

“What in the hell is wrong with you?” He shouted incredulously.

Clara grinned and narrowed her eyes along the barrel. “I tried to be nice to you, Mr. Morgan,” she called out. “I think I’m getting tired of that.”

Hosea looked up from his book. “Go ahead, Miss Howard,” he shouted down to her. “I’ll kindly ask you to avoid hitting any vital organs, though.”

Arthur spared a single, furious glance at Hosea before returning his attention to Clara.“Nice?” he blurted in surprise. “First of all, you ain’t never been nice to me. Second, if this is your idea of nice, I ain’t too sure I’d like to see you pissed off.”

Clara lifted her head a bit. “Then stop trying to piss me off.”

Arthur held out his arms and glanced around, as if the answer to his problems lay somewhere in the world around him. “I ain’t done nothing more than teach you to shoot. Other people.”

She shouldn’t even bother with trying to get a point across to him. All Arthur knew how to do was shoot first, talk later, and conversing with him would be like trying to convince a tree to stop growing.

She didn’t know why she cared at all.

It wasn’t like she…

The repeater dipped lower.

No. It wasn’t like that.

Arthur’s expression shifted into one of puzzlement. He tentatively lowered his hands, unsure if she were about to train the gun on him once more.

But Clara’s mind reeled, each thought spinning around the other until there was nothing but the noise of tumult echoing across her skull.

It wasn’t like that. It wasn’t like she cared.

Right?

Something new and alarming clamored through her. Clara lowered the weapon and disarmed the trigger. She was never going to shoot him.

She just wasn’t prepared for whatever this feeling was.

“Well?” Arthur called out. “You gonna shoot me or not?”

Clara looked down at the gun. The world, for a moment, slid back into place, returning her back from whatever strange place her thoughts had taken her.

But the feeling was still there—the sensation that she was teetering on the edge of something dangerous, something unknown; every grasp she made at reason and stability slipped through her fingers, leaving her once more to fight for precarious balance.

Before she knew it, she was striding across the grass, hoping that each step would land firmly on the ground. Arthur watched as she slapped the gun into his hands, turned on her heel, and headed straight for her horse.

Maybe if she put as much distance between them as she could, things would start to make a bit more sense.

*

“Christ alive,” Arthur muttered angrily as he lashed the repeater to his saddle. Every movement was jerky and unstable, every thought clouded with…something he couldn’t quite name.

Hosea peered at him. “You’re going to have to try a bit harder than that, I’m afraid.”

Arthur snorted. “For what?” He tugged violently on the strap of his saddlebag, Boadicea twitched beneath him, unhappy with the sudden and sharp gesture.

“She can’t shoot worth a damn,” Arthur continued after Hosea remained resolutely silent. “And I ain’t about to suffer whatever foul mood she’s decided to be in today.”

In truth, Arthur couldn’t help but feel uncharacteristically out of sorts.

I have your back.

He couldn’t stop hearing the echo of her edict, couldn’t stop the way her admission had opened up an infinitesimal fracture in the fortress around his heart.

It was one thing to know that the rest of the gang had his back: Charles, John, Lenny, and the others. But, for reasons he couldn’t begin to articulate, Clara’s admission had meant more to him than all the rest.

It was enough to taint his thoughts with confusion, which in turn was more than enough to sharpen his anger to a point.

“I’d say she’s a pretty good shot,” Hosea countered reasonably, “But that’s not what I was talking about, Arthur.”

Arthur turned and eyed the man with some consideration. “You was going to let her shoot me.”

Hosea crooked an eyebrow at him. “That,” he said pointedly, “was not about shooting.”

Arthur was most certainly not in the mood to pick apart the minutia of Hosea’s meaning. The woman had threatened to shoot him, for Christ’s sake, and he was fairly certain it wouldn’t be the last time she’d try, either. He let his eyes wander to the tree line, where she stood brushing her horse.

She was a maniac.

She was childish and rash and, if he was being honest, goddamn annoying.

Then why did it feel like the bottom had dropped out of his stomach?

The sound of rustling book pages filled the otherwise terse silence in the air. “Seems there’s a quite a bit left of this world for you to discover,” Hosea commented, his voice wry with amusement.

Arthur said nothing. He only watched Clara for a moment longer, his eyes following the careful, affectionate way she drew the brush across Marion’s coat.

His heart stirred in his chest, as if suddenly and deliberately prodded back to life.

Arthur straightened the hat on his head, sighed, and decided it was high time they left this all behind and headed back to camp. At least there, he could count on things to make sense.

“I’m heading back,” Arthur muttered as he grabbed the saddle to swing up. “You coming?”

Hosea shook his head. “I’m not leaving and neither are you.” He gestured with a finger toward Clara. “Not until you speak with her.”

“Why?” Arthur blurted. He tossed a hand in her direction. “You taking her side, now?”

The old man sighed in annoyance and narrowed his eyes at his adopted son. “I know you’re a bit dull, Arthur, so try to keep up.” Hosea looked toward Clara as he continued, “Talk to her. And no, not in the manner in which you’ve apparently grown accustomed. I mean actual conversation, insofar as your blockheaded brain will allow.”

Arthur gaped at him, his mouth parted in surprise. Was everyone out of their goddamn minds today?

“What am I supposed to say?” Arthur asked with a shrug. He couldn’t shake the feeling that Hosea’s cleverly phrased words were attempting to allude to some ulterior motive, one that sent Arthur’s stomach swiftly into knots.

Never trust a con artist. Especially not one who raised you on the art of telling lies.

Arthur forced himself to meet Hosea’s gaze. The last time he’d tried with some sense of earnestness, Hosea’s iron-clad will had forced him into the guise of a gentlemen in order to attend a high stakes poker game.

The old man had had an exorbitant amount of fun dressing Arthur for the occasion, complete with a ridiculous top hat, silk cummerbund (stolen, of course), and a forced session of grooming that ended with a pompous, swooping moustache that Arthur had been forced to endure for weeks after the heist.

He wasn’t going to win this fight, but he at least had to try.

Hosea blinked at him, entirely unphased. He pointed swiftly at the woman and said, “If you don’t go over there, I will make sure she finds out just how marvelous you look in a woman’s skirt.”

Arthur blanched.

That particular incident had been the very last time Hosea had ever forced him to dress up.

And, clearly, had been the foundation for the old man’s particular affinity for blackmail.

“Jesus Christ,” Arthur growled as he cast a single, dark look at Hosea before forcing his steps to take him toward Clara.

Arthur knew the man wouldn’t shut up until he did it. But the more he looked at Clara, the more he felt like the world was shuddering beneath his feet. A stray thought persisted at the back of his mind, but he pushed it away. Even the barest touch of that thought unsettled him enough to know he wanted no part of it.

But his feet carried him to the tree line all the same.

And all the while he couldn’t help but feel as though he was about to walk straight off the edge of a cliff with no hope of getting back up.

*

There was only one other time in her life when Clara had fully allowed herself to trust a man.

Wyatt Byers had been charming and rich to boot; while the circumstances of her connection were solely the result of her now deceased uncle’s proclivities, Clara hadn’t minded, at first. Her father had been largely absent from her life, save for the few lucid moments in which he’d taught her how to sharpen, use, and care for her knives. Her uncle hadn’t been much better; while he’d taught her the finer points of being lady, he hadn’t hesitated to ensure she used her newfound knowledge strictly for his and, eventually, Byers’ services.

It turned out that trust was entirely too easy to give and nearly impossible to earn.

And yet, despite all that, Clara had somehow allowed herself to do the unthinkable.

She’d started to trust Arthur Morgan.

Clara did her best to quell the din of anxiety that plagued her with the simple act of her brushing her horse. Despite her best intentions, Marion skittered beneath her touch, sensing her mistress’s quiet distress.

Footsteps sounded behind her. Clara threw herself into the brushing and didn’t bother to look at Arthur when he approached her. She focused instead on the sounds of the wind rustling through the trees and the birds that fluttered in their nests high above her head.

He paused somewhere behind her. “Miss Howard—”

“I reckon it’s best to stay away from me at the moment, Mr. Morgan,” she ground out, chewing each word at the bit.

He stood his ground and leveled a hard stare at her. “You got a problem with me, Ms. Howard? Because it sure seems like you do.”         Of course she did. He was the problem. Clara paused in her brushing and turned to face him fully, her disquiet barely in check. Her fist clenched around the brush until her knuckles were white.

“I’d like to be left alone,” she muttered stiffly.

Arthur held up his hands. “I’m only asking what it is I’ve done to piss you off.”

Her disquiet roared in her head. It was difficult to sift through the mess for long enough to form simple words. “Nothing,” she muttered.

Arthur’s gaze sharpened. He took half a step forward. “You ain’t been acting right all morning.”

She scoffed and shook her head. “And you haven’t been acting right since I met you.” Clara returned her attention to her brushing, dutifully ignoring the way her hand trembled slightly as she pulled it across Marion’s coat.

Arthur looked about to say something but then clamped his lips closed. He shot a dark, seething look over his shoulder toward Hosea, who sat upon his hill, idly reading as if two very different worlds weren’t about to collide.

He turned back to her, his lips still pressed tightly together. His summer eyes shifted into winter ice, cutting through the air toward her with all things Arthur wanted to say but couldn’t find the words to utter.

“Ain’t no use talking to you,” he finally spat out. He sliced a dismissive hand through the air.

“Yeah, well,” Clara murmured even as her blood hummed in her veins, “you aren’t exactly a picnic yourself.”

Arthur shifted on his feet, seemingly caught between wanting to stay and fight and dropping the matter altogether. Clara, Marion’s brushing now useless and forgotten, watched Arthur’s inward battle as her own raged deep in her heart.

This wasn’t like her.

This wasn’t supposed to happen.

He covered the distance between them in sudden, staggered steps. Clara turned to meet him, her heart thundering loudly in her ears.

Arthur’s expression was blank, but the hardened steel of his anger was carved into the solid slant of his clenched jaw.

“What is it, exactly, that you can’t tell me?”

It took her a moment to realize what he meant.

Clara took a breath, forced her nerves into steadiness, and lifted her chin. “That’s none of your business.”

“Oh, but it is,” Arthur replied darkly. “It were your business what got us into that mess with what’s-his-name’s father.”

“Daniel,” Clara replied through tightly clenched teeth.

Arthur plowed on. “It were your business what nearly got us killed in the forest.” His hands landed on his belt, each movement cut with the swagger of an outlaw. “Your business ain’t just yours. If you’re in this gang—if you have my back, as you say—then it is most certainly mybusiness.”

All those years.

All those years she spent believing that the things he’d forced her to do were the only things she was capable of. All those years spent believing that the sting of his words and the tremor of his hand against her were her fault. That was all the purpose she’d had; that was all the love she’d known.

How was Clara supposed to shrink all those years into a few useless, pandering words that would fall woefully short of all she’d endured?

Clara’s chest tightened as she fought back the horde of ghosts that threatened to suffocate her. Arthur wouldn’t understand; it wasn’t his burden to bear.

And she didn’t want him to look at her the way everyone else did. Clara didn’t think she could survive that.

Arthur leaned toward her until Clara couldn’t look anywhere but at his face, until she couldn’t see anything but the glint of edging betrayal in Arthur’s eyes.

“When am I supposed to start trusting you, Mae?”

Clara bristled. “Please don’t call me that.”

He asked flatly, “Why?”

Because that’s what he used to call me. “Because I’m asking you not to,” Clara answered, her words tight with strain.

Arthur pressed on, unrelenting. “And I’m asking you to be honest. Seems neither one of us is quite able to do what needs doing.”

Clara clenched her fists. She felt frayed at the edges, liable to be pulled apart by a sudden gust of wind.

There was so much that needed saying and so little time in which to say it. They looked at one another: one an outlaw, the other an outlier, daring the other to take the first step toward…what, exactly?

They were both leaves dancing in a hurricane, helpless to do anything but wait to be torn apart.

Clara was the first to speak. Somehow, she mustered enough strength to form words.

“Just leave it alone, Arthur,” she whispered. All her vigor, all her stubbornness faded. She felt hollow, with only her ghosts for company. “Please.”

Arthur’s brow furrowed and his face lost all of its hardened edges. “I didn’t mean—”

A gunshot shattered through the air.

Clara instinctively ducked and covered her head with her arm. Marion neighed and reared at the sharp sound. Clara shied out of the way and stumbled for a moment before she caught herself against something warm and solid.

A flock of birds squawked their displeasure and fled from the nearby trees. She waited, her pulse pounding in her ears. When the thunderous echo of the gunshot faded away, leaving the thick silence of apprehension behind, Clara lowered her arm and looked up.

Right into Arthur’s face.

He had been the warm and solid net that had caught her. One hand had already drawn his revolver in anticipation of a fight. The other was wrapped protectively around her arm, holding her close and keeping her safely out of harm’s way.

Clara took one breath, then another. Each one was laced with the scent of smoke, leather, and sun-kissed skin.

His broad chest rose and fell sharply with each breath he took. His brow creased with doubt and confusion, as if he’d suddenly woken from a dream to find himself in this rather precarious situation.

Clara didn’t move.

If she did, she’d touch him, and that didn’t seem like a good idea.

“What was that?” she blurted breathlessly.

Arthur blinked at her. The hand on her arm loosened a fraction but seemed reluctant to leave entirely. “I ain’t too sure.”

He tore his eyes from her and looked up toward the hill. Clara peered around his bulk and frowned at what they both saw.

Hosea held a still-smoking gun in the air, his eyes drifting lazily across the pages of the book in his lap. His eyes flicked up to them and, finding them in a satisfactorily compromised situation, nodded to himself, holstered his gun, and shut his book with a decisive snap.

He rose from the ground carefully and not without a few groans and grunts. He walked stiffly over to Silver Dollar, who pranced nervously in the wake of the near sound of gunshots.

“Well,” he called over to them, “now that you’ve settled your differences, I’d say it’s about time we head back to camp.”

Clara balked at the old man. Settle their differences?

They turned back to each other.

Clara waited for him to pull away.

It wasn’t until another moment passed that she wondered if maybe…maybe she didn’t want him to. The thought was near enough to crush her beneath its weight.

As if he’d heard her thoughts, Arthur dropped his hand and took a half a step back. His hand swept up to the back of his neck as he shifted nervously on his feet. “I’m sorry,” he said haltingly. “I didn’t mean to…”

She wondered why the distance between them felt far longer than a few handspans. Clara cleared her throat. “It’s fine.”

Arthur nodded. He turned over his shoulder to glance at Hosea.

He pointed awkwardly in the old man’s direction. “We should get going.”

She nodded. “Sure.”

His eyes, which had been kept firmly in every direction other than the one in which she was standing, flicked up to hers for a fraction of a moment before darting away again. Arthur opened his mouth, closed it, and turned on his heel back to where Hosea waited.

Clara watched him go, feeling more frayed at the edges than she’d ever felt before.

The thing was, she had felt protected with him.

Panic flooded her thoughts.

This wasn’t right.

This wasn’t supposed to happen.

Clara turned resolutely back to Marion. She braced her hands on the saddle and slipped her boot into the stirrup, ready to mount up and join Arthur and Hosea for the journey back.

But she paused. Her heartbeat was a tremor cascading through her body, threatening to shatter her with the slightest touch.

Clara’s hand tightened on the saddle. She’d made a promise to herself when she left home, when she’d made the choice to bury the past and embrace the unknown future: Don’t let anyone in.

That was how you got hurt.

That was how the world chewed you up and spat you back out.

But despite the promise, Clara could feel the first stirrings of doubt seep into her heart. It was better to leave her walls up, to hold them steady even when the world was intent on shaking her to the core.

So, when Clara mounted Marion and guided her on the path back home, she decided to do what was necessary.

Clara buried the feeling, locked it away alongside the rest of her ghosts and threw away the key.

Chapter Text

Clara sat down at the table and heaved a great, weary sigh.

The day had been far too hot for her liking, which only served to add to her already trying day. Heritage, usually a town ripe with bounties and paying jobs, seemed to have stemmed the tide of opportunity. And, because the weather was equally unwilling to cooperate, Clara had spent the majority of the day suffering from the blazing, unrelenting sun.

She glanced down at her bare arms and frowned. Clara ran a finger over the distinctly pink skin and winced as the beginnings of sunburn nipped at her flesh.

There was only one person to blame for this, she reasoned.

Clara glanced over at the bar and found the responsible party in question.

Arthur Morgan was a hard man to miss. He was bigger than most of the men in the saloon, a fact which did not go unnoticed by many of the patrons. Some eyed him with apprehension while others—particularly the bartender—remained undecided on whether or not Arthur was a threat.

He took a long swig from the bottle and kept to the corner of the bar. Clara watched him for a moment, noting the somber yet somewhat peaceful air about him. Arthur seemed content to linger outside the bounds of conversation; he wasn’t much for meaningless chatter, after all.

She was about to get his attention when she noticed a buxom girl sidle up next to Arthur.

Her skirts swished as she swung her hips in a decidedly suggestive manner. The corset she wore was purposely a size too small, which left little room for her generous breasts. The girl pressed her body against Arthur’s arm and leaned over, providing just enough gravity for her assests to practically slide from the corset top.

Arthur looked at her. His expression tightened with discomfort as he pulled away slightly. The girl remained undeterred, however, and only closed the distance between them.

Clara watched her trail her hand along the thick, solid muscle of his arm and curl around his wrist. She pressed her lips close to whisper in his ear and Arthur’s eyes widened a fraction.

Clara’s chest felt tight and hot. Her hand clenched into a fist and she was on her feet before she could think twice.

She sauntered up to where Arthur and the working girl stood. They glanced up at her approach. Arthur looked perplexed and the working girl was unmistakably irritated at the unwelcome interruption.

Clara slid a smile onto her lips and daggers into her eyes. “There you are, Arthur,” she cooed as her gaze firmly held Arthur’s. “I’ve been looking all over for you.”

The working girl looked her up and down. Clara bore the brunt of the scrutiny and waited until the woman’s eyes slid back to hers.

Clara’s mouth twitched into a daring smirk.

Arthur straightened and stepped politely around the working girl. “If you’ll excuse me,” he muttered in half apology, half relief.

The working girl moved onto her next, more willing target.

Clara sat back down at the table and tried to quell the strange, unexpected flare of irritation that sat heavily in her chest.

“I would say thank you,” Arthur said as he raised an eyebrow in her direction, “but I ain’t entirely convinced you won’t stab me if I do.”

She took a breath and shrugged. Her muscles felt tight and she winced at the sting of her sunburn. “I’m not inclined to at the moment.”

He sipped his beer and kept his eyes on her. Arthur glanced back toward the working girl, who was currently leading a most willing man up the nearby staircase. “What was that all about, anyhow?”

Clara was having a rather difficult time controlling her anger. “You mean the woman soliciting you for sex?”

Arthur’s expression hardened at her tone. His eyes narrowed a fraction as he asked, “I’m just curious, Ms. Howard. Are you ever in a more pleasurable mood?”

The biting remark flew out of her mouth before she could stop it. “Oh, you mean more pleasurable than her?”

His mouth twisted into a grimace. Arthur leaned across the table and replied tersely, “Last time I checked, my intentions weren’t no concern of yours.”

Her blood pumped hotly with her anger. Clara knew that her anger was unfounded; but the more the seconds ticked by, the less she was able to determine why she was so put off.

Clara sat back in the chair and lifted her chin. “I don’t care what you do,” she began stiffly. “I just think it’s a bit ridiculous that you’re seeking a means to your own end when we’re supposed to be getting money.”

Arthur’s eyes widened incredulously. “You think I was gonna go through with all that?”

She shrugged. Her heart was pounding, and she was suddenly desperate for a beer. Clara let her eyes wander toward the bar and to the other patrons, even as she felt Arthur’s eyes lingering on her.

He sat back and shook his head. “I weren’t—”

Arthur paused and Clara looked up as someone came loudly through the saloon door. John Marston filled the doorway, the brim of his hat pulled low.

Clara let out a tense breath of relief. She called out to him and John joined them at a table.

“Glad I found you two,” he said as he settled into the chair. John leaned forward and added in a low voice, “I think I found something good.”

Clara, who hadn’t known John that long, pressed forward eagerly to hear what he had to say. Arthur, who had known John longer than he cared to admit, sighed in resignation and braced himself.

John explained, “There’s a house just outside town, used to belong to a local who died a few years back. This feller I been working with on a ranching job told me the house ain’t occupied, but there’s supposedly a whole shitload of money stored in the place.”

Arthur raised an eyebrow. “That don’t make no sense.”

Clara reluctantly agreed. “If the house isn’t occupied, what makes you think the money’s still there?”

Their comrade huffed in frustration. “The lady what owed it was some sort of local witch-woman.” John shook his head in the way one does when searching for the proper words. “I think the feller said something about—Spiritualism, or some such nonsense. Widow was big on that, used to do readings and such in town and at the house. Made quite a bit of money on it, too, if the rumors are to be believed.”

There was a pause in which Clara and Arthur considered the information John provided. Marston waited expectantly as his eyes slid back and forth between them.

Arthur was the first to speak. His expression was flatly blank. “Spiritualism.”

John nodded emphatically. “Yeah, that’s what he said.”

Clara propped her elbow on the table and cupped her chin in her hand. “You do know what that is, don’t you?”

She heard Arthur mutter something about John hardly knowing how to put his boots on the correct feet. It was clear after a moment that John actually had no idea what Spiritualism was.

“Did you two hear what I said about the money?” he asked incredulously. John tossed a hand up in the air and said, “It don’t matter what Spiritualism is.”

“Except if you know what it is,” Arthur grunted as he took a sip of his beer.

Clara sat back in her chair and crossed her arms. “Essentially, the widow convinced people she could talk with the dead. That’s what your friend meant when he said readings.”

John frowned. “Talk with the dead?”

Arthur slapped his now empty bottle back on the table. He got up from the table and said to John, “I’ve endured more years of your brilliant ideas that I care to think on, Marston.” He clapped a hand on the man’s shoulder and added, “But this is by far the dumbest idea you’ve ever had. And that’s saying something.”

Clara turned to John and said, “I’ll go with you to check it out.”

Arthur gaped at her. “You can’t be serious.”

“There’s money here, Arthur,” John insisted, heedless of the disbelief that ran rife at the table. “Even if it ain’t cash, then there’s gotta be stuff worth taking.”

Clara watched as Arthur pointed at each of them in turn and muttered, “You two are both out of your god damn minds.” He stood from the table and gestured toward the outdoors. “Let’s get the hell out of here before Marston decides to try raising the dead.”

But she remained resolutely in her chair. She leveled a hard, unyielding gaze at Arthur, who met her stare with his own resistance to compromise. She had not quite forgotten the way it’d felt to see the working girl insert herself so brazenly into Arthur’s personal space, nor the way it had taken Arthur longer than she would have thought to dismiss her advances.

Since these particular feelings were far too complex to sort through, Clara decided then, as she rose from the chair and laid a hand on John’s shoulder, that the only way to manage them was to go robbing—and maybe, somewhere along the line, teach Arthur a lesson.

“I’m going with John,” she announced.

Arthur stiffened and his jaw clenched. “No, you ain’t.”

Clara lifted her chin in defiance. “My choices are not yours to make.”

John’s head bobbed between them.

“Both of you ain’t going,” Arthur countered, squaring up behind John in his most intimidating fashion. He swept a hand toward the door and ordered, “Let’s go. Now.”

Clara stood unafraid and undaunted. “I am going with John and that’s final.”

John, who’d endured and participated in more arguments with female counterparts than he cared to think about, sighed and chose to remain silent.

Arthur nearly barreled through John to get to Clara. “I ain’t playing with you, woman. You are this close”—he held his forefinger and thumb close together—“to making me very irritated.”

Clara tugged on John’s arm and swept past Arthur. The heady sensation of blistering triumph slipped through her veins. She made sure to bump her shoulder against Arthur’s on the way to the front door.

Arthur caught her arm at the elbow as they reached the top of the saloon steps. His grip was tight but remained loose enough for her to easily twist away, which she did with emphasis. Clara glared at him as John followed them out and kept a purposeful distance away from the two.

“Don’t touch me,” she hissed at him. Clara jabbed at their mounts and added, “We are going to see what this house is all about, Arthur. You’re either in or you’re not. Which is it?”

Arthur heaved a heavy sigh and his shoulders sagged with the weight of the decision. He glanced at John, who said and did nothing to alleviate the situation. Clara raised an eyebrow and placed her hands impatiently on her hips.

He scowled and took a deep breath. “Fine,” he blurted as he leveled an accusatory finger at each of them in turn. “But if by some miracle this turns out be more than a farce, I’m keeping half the money.”

Clara wouldn’t admit it aloud, but she wasn’t convinced that John’s presumptive venture into the world of Spiritualism would yield much in the way of monetary value, but her ulterior goal had been completed.

She’d paid Arthur back.

“Deal,” she acquiesced. Clara held out her hand for a shake.

Arthur eyed the outstretched proffering with some dubiousness. He took her hand in his after a moment and gave it a single, firm shake.

His hand was warm and his palm rough. It was large enough to encompass her own and, though it was only a handshake, Clara was shocked to discover that there was a certain measure of comfort that could be found in the action.

Clara let out a breath she hadn’t realized she’d been holding.

Then she winced as his rough, calloused hand brushed against the sunburn coating the back of her hand.

Arthur dropped it immediately and frowned. “Sorry.”

She shook out her hand and replied tersely, “Wasn’t you. It’s this damn sunburn.”

John looked at her arms and pointed at the puckering pink skin there. “It’s all over you.”

Clara rolled her eyes. “Yes, John. Thank you.”

Arthur gestured toward her rolled-up sleeves. “Well, why the hell didn’t you roll your sleeves down?”

“I didn’t want to.”

“Lot of good that did you,” Arthur muttered with a shake of his head. “Good news is, you can get yourself a hat with all that money Marston’s promised you.”

Clara peered at him as a thought crossed her mind. Then she reached out and plucked Arthur’s hat from his head and put it atop hers.

Arthur’s hand darted instinctively to his now hatless crown. His eyes landed on the familiar item as Clara settled it firmly on her own head. “The hell are you doing?”

She tugged on the worn brim until the hat sat comfortably. It was a bit larger than she’d anticipated, though the bulk of her braid fit snuggly beneath the material.

“I’ll need protection from further sunburn until I can buy myself a hat, as you so astutely observed,” Clara answered. She smirked at Arthur and added, “It was ever so kind of you to off your hat in the meantime, Mr. Morgan.”

She went down the stairs to her horse, leaving John and Arthur at the top of the stairs.

John blinked and looked over at his fellow outlaw. “What was that all about?”

Arthur, who was clearly brooding over the entire exchange, frowned deeply and tossed a hand to indicate Clara. “Reason ain’t got nothing to do with her.”

But John, who wasn’t remarkably intelligent but passable with deciphering intuition, heard the usually hardened edges of Arthur’s voice soften just a bit as he spoke of her.

The woman in question, who sat atop her horse, wrinkled her nose and took Arthur’s hat off her head. She gave it a single sniff and made a face of abject disgust.

“Jesus,” she called out. “When was the last time you bathed, Arthur?” Clara twisted the hat around as if searching for the offending odor. “This hat reeks.”

Arthur let out a low growl. “I still wonder how I ain’t strangled her yet,” he muttered to John.

John, who’d grown up on the outskirts of Arthur’s young, passionate romance with Mary Gillis, gave his brother in arms a knowing smirk. “Sure. Strangle her.”

But Arthur only glared at him. “Just get on your damn horse,” he bit out angrily as he stomped down the stairs.

*

It wasn’t the trip that had set Arthur’s mood in the gutter.

The house in question was nearly an hour outside Heritage. The roads were relatively clear and lined with trees; the lack of chaos and bustling town nonsense set Arthur’s perpetually heightened adrenaline at ease.

What truly detracted the entire enterprise was that Clara rode beside and spoke to Marston the entire time.

Arthur knew why, of course. It wasn’t that John was the highlight of civil conversation—the man could hardly string sentences together in a manner that could be considered language. Arthur still recalled the early days of John’s youth, when the twelve-year-old scamp had come into the fold that had once been only Arthur, Dutch, and Hosea. The boy had come to them half-starved and bloodthirsty; he’d been hardly more than a feral child, left unable to speak more than a handful of sputtered words at a time.

It was because of this history that Arthur knew Clara’s indulgence in conversation with Marston was not because of quality: she was deliberately shutting him out.

And she hadn’t even given back his hat.

Arthur frowned and leaned back in the saddle. His eyes wandered for the thousandth time to his hat, where it sat atop Clara’s head. The braided rope of her hair jutted from beneath it and lay draped over her shoulder. Her face was turned toward John, her lips curled back into the hint of a smile. The sunlight played across her face, highlighting the bare hint of freckles that speckled the tops of her cheeks.

His frown deepened until it resembled his trademark scowl. It wasn’t that he wanted to talk to her. Arthur took enough of a verbal beating from her on a good day, for Christ’s sake, and he didn’t need it now.

Arthur just didn’t understand why she had to talk to Marston like he was the only one there. And she didn’t have to smile like that, either, not when he was already beholden to Abigail (though Arthur could only use that term loosely, given how much those two argued), and when he had half a brain to begin with.

He grunted, looked away, and flatly refused to acknowledge the tightness in his chest.

Arthur cleared his throat, which effectively interrupted Clara and John’s conversation. “So,” he said loudly and abruptly, “tell us about this house of spirits, Marston.”

John glared at the dripping tone of sarcasm in Arthur’s voice.

“Feller who told me about it didn’t have a whole lot to say,” he explained as he scratched at his chin. “He said the woman’s name was Ava May Hildebrand. Supposedly, she made a fortune off them readings she did—even did some with Harry Houdini, if what he says is true.”

Arthur scoffed. “Which it probably ain’t,” he muttered.

“Oh, shut up, Arthur,” Clara said bitingly. She nodded toward John and gave him an encouraging nod. “Go on, John. I’m listening.”

Arthur’s fingers clenched into a fist as anger rose swiftly and hotly in his veins.

John glanced between the two of them. Then he explained, “Some folks in Heritage believed in what she did; others felt it weren’t but a bunch of bullshit.”

“What a surprise,” Arthur cut it in.

His comment went ignored. “Depending on who you talk to, she were the vengeful sort. Rumor has it she put a curse on the house, filled it with ghosts—all the other people what tried getting in never came out or went insane soon after.”

Clara tilted the brim of Arthur’s hat up. Her brows were knitted in concentration as she mulled over the information. “If they went insane, how did the rumors spread about the money?”

Arthur raised his eyebrows expectantly. He had been wondering the same thing.

John shrugged dismissively and said, “That ain’t the point! If that’s the case, then the money’s still in there!”

Arthur scratched at his chin. This was going to be an incredible waste of time. Then again, most of Marston’s ideas fell under that category, and he was mildly looking forward to having Clara’s imperious attitude taken down a notch or two.

His eyes wandered to her again.

Clara’s eyes were on him already.

Arthur blinked at the weight of her verdant gaze. He’d swear that, at times, she could see right through him. It was a fact that both unsettled and intrigued him.

Then she turned away and their journey resumed.

*

The house was a dump.

Shattered windows like broken teeth glared out from peeling yellow painted facades. Moss covered the crumbling tile roof and gave way to creeping vines that darted from roof to floor and across the entire house. Spears of elaborate white columns adorned the front of the Hildebrand home—long forgotten symbols of the wealth that supposedly lay hidden within the home’s depths.

Clara tilted her head. She frowned at what was once would have surely been an architectural masterpiece. There was still some lingering charm, to be sure, but whatever marvels had once pervaded its being were now lost to the dregs of time.

Arthur stood between her and John, his arms crossed over his broad chest. His eyes were narrowed at the house, as though he intended on willing the money to appear.

Clara tilted the brim of Arthur’s hat away from her face and smirked at him. “You can’t intimidate a house, Mr. Morgan.”

He turned a slow withering look in her direction. “And what are you gonna do, Ms. Howard? Stab it to death?”

Her hand went instinctively to the sheaths on her gun belt. “Just for that,” she replied tersely, “you aren’t getting your hat back.”

Arthur turned toward her. His arms unraveled and his hands slid to his gun belt. That familiar swagger fell across his person and his lips curled into a wry smirk.

“Oh, I’ll get it back,” he assured her. Arthur leaned forward slightly and muttered, “And you ain’t gonna like it when I do.”

Clara scoffed and rolled her eyes. “I’m not afraid of you.”

John stepped forward and interrupted their banter. “Will you two stop dancing around each other? We got money to find.”

Clara and Arthur gaped at John as he headed up the creaking front steps of the Hildebrand house.

With a backwards glance at Arthur, Clara followed John up the stairs. The heels of her boots echoed hollowly on the weakened wooden steps. The columns rose around her, shadowing the sun that slanted heavily in their direction. For a moment she paused at the threshold, peeking into the darkened interior of the home. Clara’s hands felt cold and her heart pattered rapidly in her chest.

Something didn’t feel right.

The stairs creaked behind her and Clara whipped around to find Arthur looming behind her, his head ducked slightly as he peered through the door.

Clara swallowed and tamped down the anxiousness that shivered across her skin. A voice whispered at the back of her mind to turn and leave, but she remained resolutely where she stood.

She wouldn’t tell him, but Clara felt a bit steadier with Arthur’s imposing bulk at her back.

His eyes cut to her. They lost the tightness of careful scrutiny and filled instead with concern.

Arthur asked, “What’s wrong?”

Her first instinct was to say nothing. The feeling was so unusual and so out of place that she was sure Arthur would poke fun at her. But Clara shifted uncomfortably where she stood, her eyes still darting to the foyer of the house.

“This house,” she murmured softly. “Something about it feels…off.”

He glanced inside the house and then back at her. Arthur’s lips curled into a slight smile. “I didn’t take you as one for believing in ghost stories, Ms. Howard.”

Clara huffed and crossed her arms. “I knew you would say something stupid.”

Arthur let out a low chuckle. He nudged her shoulder with his hand and nodded toward the house. “Go on. Let’s just get the money and get out of here.”

She nodded and, despite having been initially irritated with Arthur, found that the joke functioned in precisely the way he’d intended. It had gotten her mind off of the unsettling feeling of the house.

Clara stepped into the foyer just as John shouted for them to follow. Arthur followed her. He leaned forward until his head was beside her right shoulder and muttered teasingly, “Wanna take bets on how long it takes ‘til Marston gets spooked?”

She looked at Arthur. A smile curved onto her mouth, matching the conspiratorial grin on his.

“Oh, for Christ’s sake,” John shouted from across the foyer. “Will you two stop it already? We got a job to do.”

*

It didn’t take long for the trio of outlaws to admit that the house was little more than a half-crumbling ghost with no secrets to tell.

Arthur slammed the derelict drawer closed and sighed in mounting frustration.

“There ain’t nothing here,” he grumbled as he kicked away a piece of broken furniture. The rooms on the first floor were stuffed full of ornate furniture, nearly all of which sagged beneath the weight of forgetfulness and time. The air reeked of mold and dust, which only furthered Arthur’s irritation.

That, and the fact that Clara sat resolutely in the only unbroken chair in the room, her legs tossed over one arm and an open book propped against her legs.

His hat still lingered on top of her head.

Arthur turned and glared at her. He waved a hand in her direction and asked bitterly, “You planning on doing anything at all, miss?”

Clara looked up, blinked at him, and frowned. “What?”

Arthur clenched his hand in to a fist.

“Oh, don’t mind me,” he said with acidic sarcasm, “I didn’t mean to interrupt your reading.”

Clara raised an eyebrow at him. A small stack of books sat on the floor at her feet, all of which had been recently procured from the study’s bookshelves. Whatever discomfort she’d experienced when they’d first entered the house was immediately dispelled the moment she set her eyes on the tomes.

Clara shrugged and said, “I don’t know why you’re so upset, Mr. Morgan.”

His hands shifted to his gun belt as he sauntered over to her throne. “We wasted an entire day traipsing around this piece of shit”—he gestured toward the house—“and we ain’t got nothing to show for it except a couple of books.”

That was assuming that John, who’d gone to search the back rooms of the sprawling first floor, found anything of value. Arthur wasn’t holding his breath on that account.

She snapped the book closed and eyed him critically. Even in the dim light, Arthur could make out the sharp, crisp color of her green eyes. “I don’t see how that’s such a bad thing.”

He reached out a hand and rubbed his fingers together. “I want money, Ms. Howard.”

Clara frowned and snatched up the book. She waved it at him and insisted, “These are just as valuable as money, Arthur.”

Arthur really shouldn’t have expected anything else. “Really?”

“Yes, really,” she bit out.

He smirked at her. Then he snatched the book out of her hand.

Clara’s mouth dropped open. “Give that back!”

Arthur swiftly bent and scooped up the rest of the books from the floor. Clara darted from the chair and leapt at him. Arthur twisted easily out of the way and casually flipped through the books as she growled and slapped at his arms in attempt to retrieve her bounty.

“Pride and Prejudice?” Arthur frowned. Clara’s hand reached futilely for the book as he held it up and out of reach. “That don’t sound like it’ll fetch me much money.”

Clara huffed, crossed her arms, and planted her feet in front of him. “You wouldn’t know a good book if I hit you upside the head with it.”

Arthur looked up at her and gave her a wry grin. “Seeing as how you ain’t got any books to hit me with, I ain’t too worried about it.”

Clara took a step closer to him. The air was suddenly filled with the floral scent of lavender and mint. For a moment, Arthur lost his train of thought. She opened her mouth to deliver what he was sure would be a biting retort.

Another voice spoke in her place.

It wasn’t loud, but nor was it entirely soft; it flitted through the air like a pair of wings, carrying the sound until it whispered against their ears and then disappeared back into the nothingness that pervaded the house.

A chill rattled up his spine and spread a deathlike chill across his skin.

Clara took a step closer to him. “What was that?” she whispered.

Arthur replayed the sound of the voice in his head, twisting and turning it all manner of ways to make out any words. It had sounded strangely female, a voice that belonged only to someone on the edge of a dream. And, if Arthur wasn’t mistaken, the voice had sounded as though a woman were calling out to someone.

He swallowed and shook his head as cool-headed reasoning slipped in through the cracks of his suspicion. The rumors of ghosts and dead spirits was playing tricks on them both. “Probably just—”

Clara shook her head immediately. “No, it wasn’t John.”

Arthur glanced at her. Her body was stiff, her eyes focused intently—and a little fearfully—on the door that led back to the main hall. Her fingers tightly gripped her arms until her nails were white with the strain.

He shifted her books in his grip and lifted his arm before he stopped himself. Something else, something far more worrisome, slid into place beside the strangeness that had broken suddenly through the dull, frustrating afternoon.

Arthur had been about to reach for her—for what?

His heart leapt in his chest. His instinct had been to comfort her, as it had been when they’d first arrived. Arthur wasn’t used to seeing the strong-willed, irritating outlaw who threatened him on a nearly daily basis so put off by a house.

And he didn’t very much like seeing her so out of sorts.

Clara, heedless of the confusing whirlwind of thoughts raging through Arthur’s addled brain, took a few hurried steps toward the hallway.

“Mae, wait,” Arthur blurted as he started after her.

She cut one angry glance at him over her shoulder—he could practically hear her admonishing him for calling her by the nickname she apparently so disliked—before she turned attention to the hall.

Arthur peered over her shoulder, her books tucked under his arm. Together, their heads swiveled through the derelict foyer. Distantly, if they strained hard enough, they could just make out the sound of John ransacking the rooms on the other end of the house.

“He’s too far away,” Clara breathed, her tone as strained as her muscles. “We shouldn’t be able to hear him from here. And that voice sounded—”

“Like a woman,” Arthur finished. His eyes landed on the stairway leading up to the second floor. The seemingly well-kept wooden steps cut up and away at a sharp angle, leaving the rest of the house a mystery.

Clara nodded and looked up at him. Arthur turned his attention to her and stiffened.

Clara took a breath and shook her head. “I don’t like this place.”

She was afraid and trying resolutely to hide it.

Something raw and desperate clawed at Arthur’s chest.

He opened his mouth to say something—likely something stupid, if his luck had anything to do with it—but something else beat him to the punch.

The soft, tentative sound of a footstep came from the stairway. They both started, their heads darting immediately to the source of the noise.

The distinct black outline of a head peered around the corner where the stairs rose to the second-floor landing. A moment after Clara and Arthur laid eyes on it, it darted away.

A terse, expectant silence filled the air around them. It became a heavy thing, a nearly tangible thing, so much so that Arthur could feel it writhing against the cold that hadn’t left his skin.

There was no one else in the house—not besides them and John, anyway. They’d made sure of it when they first arrived. If someone else had come upon the estate of Ava May Hildebrand, they would have been discovered already.

For perhaps the first time in his life, Arthur had no rational explanation for what he had seen.

Clara didn’t turn as she asked, “You saw that, right?”

He nodded though she couldn’t see him. “Yes.”

“Arthur,” she said with some difficulty, “I think we should leave—”

Pounding footsteps cut her off. Clara jumped and fell back against Arthur’s broad, barrel chest. Instinctively, Arthur reached out and grabbed her arm with his free hand, ready to put her behind him if the need arose.

John Marston hurried into the main hall.

Arthur dropped his hand from Clara’s arm. She took half a step away from him.

John glanced between the both of them and said, “We got a problem.”

*

The storm tore through the sky with unmatched vengeance.

Arthur sat upon something that vaguely resembled a table, though half of it was nearly sawdust. He’d been leery about sitting on it but, seeing as how Clara had commandeered the only functional chair in the room and he didn’t rightly care much about Marston, who currently fussed with the fire in the dilapidated hearth, Arthur had taken the chance.

Miraculously, the wood of the former table creaked loudly in protest of his weight but held.

A bout of heavy thunder boomed through the air and set the fragile house to shaking on its foundation. Arthur gritted his teeth and braced himself, ready for the ceiling to come crashing on all their sorry heads, but the house insisted on still existing.

Once the threat of danger passed, Arthur resumed enduring his gloomy thoughts. The strange figure on the stairs pervaded nearly every other thought that flitted through his head like the rain that pounded against what was left of the windows.

Arthur tried and tried to rationalize what they’d seen; he’d never been one for the fanciful, despite being raised under the rather lofty ideals of Dutch van der Linde. Arthur had favored and adopted Hosea’s precise manner of thinking, of piecing together what made sense and what didn’t.

He glanced sidelong at Clara, who’d resumed her reading in the chair, though her air of resilient calmness had left her entirely. Arthur leaned his elbows on his knees and watched her for a moment, searching the tight, resolute lines of her face for any sign of distress.

Then he tore his attention away and frowned.

The woman could take care of herself, as she’d astutely reminded him on more than one occasion. She didn’t need his fussing—which he wasn’t doing, thank you very much. Arthur was only…concerned, in a very mild and broad sense of the word.

His throat tightened a bit. It was just that he didn’t like her being frightened, that’s all.

There was nothing wrong with that…was there?

His eyes slipped to her again. Clara’s legs were folded beneath her in the wide base of the chair and her book balanced in her lap. She cupped her chin in her palm and her braid fell casually over her shoulder.

Arthur’s heart nearly leapt out of his chest when she suddenly looked up at him.

She frowned and turned her attention back to her book, shifting a bit on the chair as she did so.

He cursed himself and reached into his satchel for a cigarette before he thought better of it, although the prospect of setting the entire house—and himself—on fire wasn’t entirely unappealing at the moment.

The woman was confounding in the worst way. She was irritating, headstrong, and impossible, all of which served to upend Arthur’s previously (mostly) predictable life and turn it all on its head. Honestly, she was more trouble than she was worth.

Arthur looked to her again, this time out of the corner of his eyes. It dawned on him once more that she still had his hat.

He sighed and let his arms fall limply into the space between his legs. Claramae Howard was an odd one, full of a heady mixture of strangeness and charm that left Arthur baffled at every turn.

John stabbed futilely at the fire. “Shit,” he hissed as a slew of irritable sparks danced up toward him. He’d used some of the wood from the mess around them and now struggled to maintain the heart of the fire.

“Tell you what, Marston,” Arthur said tiredly, “why don’t you throw yourself in the fire and save us all the trouble?”

John shot him a smoldering look over his shoulder. He sneered, “You come up with that one all by yourself?”

Arthur smirked. “Sure, and it still took me less time than it’s taking you to get us warm.”

The house shuddered at another crack of thunder. John tossed another piece of wood onto the sputtering fire and prodded it with the poker. After a few deliberate, rather violent strikes, the fire roared to life.

Clara glanced up from her book. “Oh, good,” she called sarcastically. “Now I won’t freeze to death before I finish this chapter.”

Arthur chuckled triumphantly. John glowered at Clara and tossed the poker onto the floor.

“Ain’t my fault this place was a bust,” he muttered as he searched the room for a place to sit.        

Arthur huffed and reached into his satchel for some provisions. He tossed a can of beans to Marston, who caught it handily, and kept another two for himself and for Clara.

“Except it is entirely your fault,” Arthur countered with a glower in his outlaw brother’s direction. “Ain’t nothing new there, though.”

John took up a seat in the corner of the room furthest away from his biggest criticizer. “You know, Arthur,” he said as he jabbed his knife into the lid of the can, “it wouldn’t kill you to believe in me just once.”

“Maybe,” Arthur said as he tilted his can of beans into his mouth, “but why take the chance?”

John glared at him for a moment. Then, he rose and started for the door. Clara looked up from her book at the sound of his retreat.

Arthur frowned. “Where you going, Marston?”

He paused just long enough in the doorway to turn and say to Arthur, “Away from you.”

Arthur watched him go. He thought briefly of heading after him before thinking better of it; this wasn’t the first spat they’d had, and it certainly wouldn’t be the last. Besides, Arthur thought, the idiot could take a bit of time to himself and relinquish at least a fraction of his foolishness before they set out for camp again.

Maybe then Arthur could see him as he once did, before he chose to leave Abigail and Jack behind.

Arthur consumed another mouthful of beans and chewed them thoughtfully. He wondered whether it was wise for them to be split up in a place like this. The storm had come on suddenly and without warning, its presence effectively cutting off their escape from the Hildebrand estate. If something were to happen during the course of the storm, then it might be best if they stuck together.

He looked up as Clara sat on the table beside him. Arthur stiffened and waited for the thing to go crashing to the floor. When it didn’t, he breathed a small sigh of relief.

“So,” she said as she eyed the unopened can at his feet. “Were you planning on eating all those, or am I allowed to eat, too?”

He was hungry enough to eat both, honestly, but Arthur wordlessly passed her the can. She deftly tugged one of her knives from her belt, skewered the lid, and dug greedily into the food.

They ate in silence for a moment. Arthur tossed his empty can on the floor. After a moment, Clara swiped the back of her hand across her mouth and nodded toward the door where John had left them.

“What’s that all about?”

Over a decade’s worth of memories flooded his mind. He looked away from her and shrugged stiffly. “Ain’t worth telling.”

Her silence tugged at Arthur’s attention. When he looked at her, he saw her waiting patiently for the story, her eyebrows raised expectantly.

Arthur gave her a tired, pleading look but, when she persisted, he sighed, straightened, and braced his hands on his knees.

“Marston ain’t much for intelligence,” he began, sifting through memories old and new. “He’s the sort who shoots first and thinks later. Always been as rash as he is ruthless, which ain’t always a good thing.” He paused and struggled with what inevitably had to come next.

Arthur took a breath and continued. “He left the gang a while back.”

Clara started. “Left?”

He nodded, steeling himself from the roar of still fresh anger that lived in his heart. “Right after Jack was born. Went to bed one night and by the time we woke up, he was gone.” Arthur clenched his fist and looked away.

She placed her can on the floor and remained blessedly silent for a moment. Then she asked quietly, “Why?”

Another young mother and her son rose unbidden in his memory. Another young mother and her son abandoned by a man too proud and unworthy to be the man he needed to be. Arthur buried their fading images back into the depths of his memory, where their ghosts could haunt him another time.

“Don’t matter why,” Arthur countered angrily. “He left her, and little Jack, for a goddamn year.”

Her eyes widened in shock. She looked toward the fire, her expression tight with consideration. When she finally looked back at him, she breathed, “You never forgave him, did you?”

Arthur set his jaw. “Forgiveness ain’t got nothing to do with it.”

“Abigail forgave him, didn’t she?”

She had, despite Arthur’s silent protests to the contrary. All the days and nights she’d spent tending to newborn Jack on her own, all the tears she’d shed in Marston’s name, had all been dashed away the moment he’d sauntered back into camp. Arthur had been one of the first to meet him upon his return.

If it hadn’t been for Dutch’s insistence and Hosea’s better sensibilities, Arthur would have strangled him and thrown his useless corpse off the nearest cliff.

All of this amounted to a single grunt in response to her question.

Clara reached up and took his hat from her head. She deposited it in its rightful place, shifting it a bit until it settled firmly—and nearly perfectly—upon Arthur’s crown.

Arthur reached up and tugged on the brim. If he breathed in deeply enough, he could just make out her scent as it lingered on the leather.

She sighed and cupped her chin in her palm. “We’ve all done things we aren’t proud of, Arthur. Many of those things we do in the heat of the moment, when we’re frightened of losing who we are to become to the person we need to be.”

The fire crackled in the hearth. The storm persisted around them, though Arthur realized he hadn’t been bothered by the booming thunder as much as he had been.

Clara flashed him a small smile. “We can’t let those moments define us.”

Arthur’s inclination was to immediately dismiss her claim. He wanted to choke the life from it and dash into the fire; Arthur Morgan would never be more than the man who’d left behind a life he could’ve had for one that had done nothing but made him into a killer.

All the things he could have been were lost; it didn’t matter what Clara said, he wouldn’t be more than the sum of the bullets he shed in the name of a life that seemed more and more elusive with each passing day.

She bumped her shoulder against his, startling him out of the cyclone of his dark thoughts. Arthur looked sharply up at her, surprised at the contact. The fire highlighted the playful grin on her face, the bright green of her eyes, and the bolts of crimson that played through the earthen strands of her hair.

“You’re more than what you make yourself out to be, Arthur,” she said confidently.

He wanted to believe her.

But Arthur didn’t think he could—not now, anyway.

But maybe one day.

He looked away as a grin to match hers played on his lips. Arthur tugged on the brim of his hat and let his arm fall with a sigh.

“Whatever you say, Mae,” he replied. He straightened and gave her an apologetic look. “Sorry.”

She looked toward the fire, her grin fading a fraction. “You know,” she said after a moment, “I used to hate that nickname.” Clara let out a tense breath and straightened. “It brings up a lot of bad memories.”

Arthur listened, hanging on every word.

“But I don’t think I mind it much anymore,” Clara said as she nervously wound her hands together. “At least, not when it comes from you.”

Not when it comes from you.

His mind, once a battleground of ghosts and memory, stilled to an unrecognizable silence. He listened as his heart thudded against his chest, one beat after another, ticking away the moments that stretched on into an eternity after her words.

Clara sighed and rose from the table. Arthur watched her, his eyes trailing her every movement. She looked down at him and asked, “Should we go check on John?”

Arthur’s first instinct was to say no; Marston could take care of himself, as he’d so aptly proven during his year-long absence. He meant to scoff and turn away, determined to remain in the warm embrace of the fire and the new, otherworldly feeling of lightness that pervaded his heart.

But then he looked up at Clara. Her hands were on her hips and her expression was resolute in its determination.

He shook his head, let out a chuckle, and rose to meet her. “You ain’t use to getting anything but your way, is you, Ms. Howard?”

She winked at him and gave him a sly smile. “Not at all, Mr. Morgan.”

He gestured for her to go first and he followed in her wake. Arthur’s footsteps became surer behind her, as though suddenly filled with a greater sense of purpose.

As though they were meant to follow behind and protect her.

They had barely reached the door when a voice—the same female voice from earlier—sounded from beyond the threshold.

*

Clara froze.

It was the same voice as before—the lilting, punctuated words that brushed against her hearing and fell away before she could grasp them. They taunted her, begging her to listen even as they gave way to the cold, heavy silence that followed.

Her heartbeat leapt into a gallop. Her body stiffened as a pervasive, dastardly chill slid a finger down the length of her spine.

The more she considered it, the more she thought she could just make out the breathy words that cut through the otherwise empty house.

Come to me.

Arthur was at her side in a moment. She didn’t need to look at him to know that he’d heard the voice again, too.

“The staircase,” he muttered with a dark look into the equally dark hall. Wherever John had gone, he’d gone far enough away that any light he might have created could not penetrate the gloom.

She nodded absently. The same discomfiture that arose upon first entering the house flooded her again; the instinct to run nearly overwhelmed her, the persistent feeling of eyes watching her threatened to drive her mad.

Clara took a shuddering breath and glanced at Arthur.

His hand was on his gun, his jaw set with grim determination.

Her heartbeat slowed just a fraction.

Arthur turned to her and nodded toward the stairs. “I’ll go take a look.”

Apprehension took hold and she laid a hand on his arm. Arthur glanced down at her hand and then turned his smoldering summer eyes to her.

“Not by yourself,” she said grimly. “I’ll go, too.”

Arthur opened his mouth to protest and she squeezed his arm in response.

“No, Arthur,” Clara forced herself to say. “I’m coming with you.”

Because she had his back. Because she couldn’t let him go off into the dark in this house with all its strangeness on his own.

After a long, tense moment, Arthur gave her a curt nod. Together they took one of the candles they’d managed to come across during their earlier search of the house and lit it with the flames from the fire.

All the while, Clara tried to ignore the roaring, desperate urge to leave the house.

They slipped into the dark hall as the storm continued to pummel the house. The walls shook, the broken windows rattled like broken bones, and the foundation beneath their feet trembled. Clara’s hand slipped to her favored knife on her belt and wrapped around the hilt. Her eyes swept the hall, trying to make out anything in the darkness.

Unsurprisingly, the stairs cut through the oppressive blackness without difficulty.

Arthur paused at the foot of the stairs. She was just able to make out the swivel of his head toward her. Clara pressed closer, suddenly and inexplicably wanting of his warmth.

“Stay close,” he whispered in the dark.

Clara matched her steps to his as she drew her knife slowly from its hilt. Arthur held his candle aloft, its flickering flame trying desperately to break through the stormy, black depths of the Hildebrand estate.

The darkness pressed around them, its weight heightened by the storm. They stepped lightly, both of them apprehensive of making too much noise in the oppressive, silencing blackness. Clara gripped her knife and followed Arthur’s candlelight, focusing on it instead of the raging fear that clutched her heart in a vice grip.

She wasn’t often afraid. She’d learned to bury the worst of her fear over the years, retaining only a healthy enough dose to keep her senses heightened and her instincts wary. But this was something else entirely; the voice, the dark figure on the stairs, and now their inevitable climb up to the mysterious second floor all coalesced into a storm of terror that tore at the fringes of her self-control.

Their boots echoed hollowly on the stairs. Wherever John was, their ascent hadn’t drawn him from his hiding place. Clara stuck close to Arthur and took what little comfort she could from his presence and the knife in her hand.

This house wasn’t right.

They reached the top floor landing. Arthur paused and stretched out his arm to allow the meager candlelight to penetrate a few inches of the darkness that loomed before them.

A long, dark hall stretched out to their left and right. Clara kept close to Arthur and hefted her knife, relishing in what little protection it offered.

Arthur leaned close to her, the candlelight casting thick shadows along the strong cut of his face. “Which way, you think?”

Clara nearly told him to go back down the stairs, collect John, and brave the storm back to Deepwater Pass. Her will trembled beneath the weight of the house’s eyes and the echo of the phantom voice they’d heard.

But she would not quaver.

They both jolted when at the sound of two footsteps down the hall. She turned her head and gestured with the tip of her knife toward the sound. “Right.”

Arthur nodded and pressed forward. After a few moments of silence, they reached a door. Arthur glanced at the closed door and proceeded down the dark hall with his candle.

Clara lingered, her hackles rising at the sight of the door. “Wait,” she called out to Arthur. She gestured toward the door with her chin and muttered, “This one.”

Arthur held the candle before the door. There was nothing remarkable about the wooden threshold; no markings designated it as a particular room, and Clara could quite explain the feeling she got as she stood before it.

It was a prickly sensation, one that nipped at her consciousness in a demanding, all-encompassing sort of way. The house was a particular breed of odd and this door seemed to be the heart of all that strangeness.

“You sure?” Arthur murmured as he peered questioningly at the door.

She wasn’t, not by a long shot. This house wrenched surety away and replaced it with self-doubt, but there was so little else to go on. The former owner spoke to the dead; Clara wasn’t well versed in matters of the occult, but she knew enough to believe that those who practiced it left a lingering footprint in the world of the living despite their departure to the other side.

“Yes,” she breathed as she nodded at the door.

Arthur seemed a bit unsure, but he nodded. He laid his hand doorknob, twisted, and let the door swing open.

That’s when everything went wrong.

*

Arthur took a step into the dark room. The floor creaked beneath his boot and, when he was sure it would hold, took another tentative step forward. The room was bare save for a single table and chair at its center, both of which Arthur was just able to make out in the wan light of his candle.

The prickly sensation he’d felt earlier returned with a furious assault. His instincts flared to life, blaring at him to be wary of the dark that insisted on pressing in around him. The weight of a hundred unseen eyes nearly suffocated him, made him feel disoriented and out of sorts.

He turned to check on Clara. The moment he turned back to face the door, it slammed shut with a fury.

Arthur barely had enough time to put the candle on the table before he darted to the door. He tried the knob and found it locked.

No—no, he didn’t lock it. He couldn’t have.

Arthur tried again, shaking the door on its hinges. His heart slammed in his chest.

Clara pounded her fist on the other side. “Arthur?”

He tried the door again and again. She called his name; this time, the panic in her voice was evident.

She was alone, left in the dark, and frightened.

No.

Arthur sent his fist into the door. The wood buckled but held firm. “Mae!”

“Arthur!” His name sounded desperate on her lips as she pounded on the door. Somehow, she sounded further away.

Arthur wouldn’t—couldn’t—leave her alone. He would tear this goddamn building apart piece by piece, if he had to.

Then there was silence. He froze and listened for the sound of Clara’s voice.

Arthur placed his hand on the door, his heart pounding with worry. “Mae, you alright?”

Nothing.

Cold seeped into his body. It wrapped a fist around his heart and drowned out every other thought.

A scraping, hollow whisper came from behind him.

Arthur whipped around. The cold pervaded the room; every breath he pulled into his lungs was tainted by the frosty air. His senses quaked, his instincts roared at him to flee, to find Clara, before it was too late.

There was no one else in the room. The candle sputtered and went out.

This had to be a dream.

In a moment, Arthur would wake up, and all would be as it should.

But the candle jolted back to life before settling back into its flickering, constant flame. The light was just enough to make out two shadows that lingered beside the table. One was shorter than the other—a child, by the look of it.

Arthur took a step back. His world—the one he thought he knew and understood—threatened to shatter around him.

These shadows were familiar. They whispered to him in the dead of night, infiltrated his dreams, and buried all his hope for a better future.

The shadows came forward. The candlelight illuminated the face of the smaller one, just enough for Arthur’s worst fear to be confirmed.

His breathing hitched; his gut twisted and writhed; his heart cracked and shuddered in his brittle chest.

Arthur took a shaking breath. “Isaac,” he whispered, the name as broken as he felt.

Eliza came into view beside their son, her hand protectively on Isaac’s shoulder. Their faces—young, as they’d both been the last time he’d seen them—were written with a fierceness that Arthur did not expect to see.

Arthur felt his knees buckle. He’d seen their graves; he’d mourned for them, for the life he hadn’t been brave enough to give them. And now they’d returned, bound by whatever darkness kept this house alive, and he would not be able to escape the fury he saw in the dark corners of Eliza’s eyes.

The hand holding their son clenched a fraction. “How could you, Arthur?”

He could barely breathe. “I’m sorry.”

“You said you’d look after us—after our son,” Eliza said, her voice torn by anger and disgust.

Arthur forced himself to look at Isaac’s face. It wavered in the candlelight, as though they were both hardly more than reflections on the water’s surface.

“I tried,” he muttered uselessly. “I did, I tried—”

“You forgot us,” Eliza interjected, her words a final and deliberate barb that lodged straight in his heart.

Arthur shook his head. “No, I didn’t,” he protested. His eyes slid back to Isaac. The boy’s eyes were sad, filled with pity for his lost, errant father.

“Isaac,” Arthur called, his words cloying and desperate. “Son, I didn’t forget you. I could neverforget you.”

The light sputtered again. The darkness encroached and mother and son began to fade back into the oblivion Arthur’s foolishness had sent them to.

“No, please,” he begged. The words choked him and he reached out a shaking hand toward their fading forms. “Don’t go. Isaac, Eliza, please—”

Then they were gone, and Arthur was utterly alone once more.

He wanted to wrench his heart from his chest. He wished the darkness would take him instead.

But then the light returned and with it another shadow, another form that became instantly recognizable.

Mary Gillis stood before him, her hands clasped before her and that familiar wistful, hopeful look on her face.

But…she wasn’t dead. Arthur knew this, was sure of it. But he of all people knew that ghosts weren’t just limited to the dead; they were specters of the past, born from the memories he insisted on burying beneath heartache and loss.

This Mary—his and yet not—was the same one who’d torn out his heart and left it rot in the wake of her rejection. This was the Mary who’d chosen a stranger over him, who’d promised never to speak to him again the day she’d left.

It couldn’t be real; Mary looked unchanged. But this house was full of ghosts—it was made of them—and it had already proven that to him.

This wasn’t Mary. And yet, it was. Oh, it was, and Arthur felt what was left of his heart twist bitterly in anguish.

“Arthur,” Mary breathed. “Oh, Arthur.”

He wouldn’t give in to this. He couldn’t, not if he hoped to survive. Arthur pressed his lips closed, afraid of all the things he wanted to say, terrified of all the things she would say.

The ghost of his lost Mary took a hesitant step forward. “Arthur, I shouldn’t have left you.”

He looked away and willed the darkness to spare him this.

“Arthur, look at me.”

And, because he was a fool, he did.

Those familiar eyes looked back at him, filled with all the love he knew he didn’t deserve. She reached out a hand to him. “Come away with me, Arthur. Come with me, and don’t look back.”

How many times had she asked this of him? How many times had he tried to be the man she wanted and needed and failed? And yet, Arthur felt his feet carrying him forward.

He stopped just out of her reach. Arthur steeled his will and tried to forget all the years they’d spent together and yet so impossibly far apart.

“You ain’t real,” he breathed. “You ain’t here.”

Then, the specter of Mary Gillis reached out and clasped his hand in hers.

He started and gaped at where she’d touched him. The feeling tugged at the edges of his memory; it was both familiar and yet wrong, somehow, but…she was touching him.

How?

“There’s still time,” Mary whispered hurriedly. “We can still be together. All you have to do is come with me.”

Maybe he could.

Maybe he could leave this house behind, this life behind, and finally have what he wanted.

Mary’s hand squeezed his. “I love you, Arthur,” she begged, her eyes wide with longing. “Just say yes.”

The word was on the tip of his tongue. Arthur forgot the room, forgot the darkness and the ghosts of his son and his mother. Wasn’t this what he’d always wanted: Mary clasping his hand and agreeing to be with him?

She was closer now. Arthur looked down at her as she stood on the tips of her toes and craned her head toward him. Her small, gentle hand in his grew colder and tighter.

Mary’s lips lingered just before his. “Be with me, Arthur.”

All he had to do was kiss her, say yes, and everything else would fade away.

Arthur closed his eyes and leaned forward as the cold seeped into his arm. He took a breath and prepared to press his lips to Mary’s, to leave his life behind and start a new one with her.

His senses flooded with the perfume of lavender and mint—the very same scent that still lingered on his hat.

Arthur’s eyes flew open. “Mae,” he whispered, the name grounding him back to the truth.

Reality shattered the fugue that had nearly drowned him. Mary’s specter frowned at him as she tugged on his hand. “Arthur,” she said in warning.

Arthur tried to pull away. “You ain’t real,” he said with a shake of his head. “And all that—that’s done with, Mary.”

Her painted lips curled into a snarl. “She doesn’t matter; you hardly know her.” The cold from her hand snaked its way to his heart. “I matter, Arthur. Now choose—her, or me.”

Arthur and Mary had made their choices long ago. It had taken him a long time to come to terms with it, to leave all of that hurt in the past where it belonged.

So, he made his choice.

Mary let out a terrible screech that nearly deafened him. Her visage writhed and blackened as the darkness consumed the ghost. Arthur ran to the door as the darkness enveloped him.

He braced himself against the door and waited for it to swallow him whole.

*

Clara tried not to let the emptiness of the black hallway break her spirit.

She pulled away from the door and stared at the black shape of it, silently begging for it to open. Arthur was somewhere on the other side of it; she knew that, she’d heard him calling for her and his fists crashing against it. But now all was silent; now, the house seemed to come alive with the first stirrings of her true, unbridled fear.

Clara turned, her hand still gripping her knife. Her limbs trembled and she gritted her teeth as she fought to keep the worst of the terror at bay.

“Arthur?” she called. Clara took a breath and yelled, “John?”

No answer.

Footsteps shuffled in the room before her. It was the door opposite to the one Arthur had entered and, even now, Clara could just make out the slip of golden light as it slid beneath the door.

Hope flared within her. It had to be John. She ran to the door, called his name, and twisted the knob. It opened easily at her urging.

“John, thank god,” Clara said as she bolted into the room. “Arthur, he’s—”

The words died in her mouth.

The otherwise empty room had but a small table, and a wildly flickering candle. Its sole occupant was not John Marston, as she’d expected it to be.

Wyatt Byers stood beside the table and its candle.

Clara felt the world slip away as she stared in the face of her most insidious ghost.

His edges seemed carved from darkness, from the memory that still poisoned her thoughts, and his edges flickered alongside the candle.

But it was still—impossibly—him.

He smiled at her, the same one that she still saw so often at night. It cut across his face like the edge of a knife, the expression as mirthless and cruel as the cold stone of his heart.

Clara couldn’t think. She could nothing else but stare at that smile, at the merciless darkness that still lingered in his eyes. He wasn’t real, he couldn’t be, and yet…

“Oh, Mae,” the terrible ghost greeted. “How I’ve missed you.” His voice clawed at her, filled her with the same insipid venom that it had done in all the years she’d known him.

Clara shook her head and backed toward the door. This wasn’t real; the house, the Spiritualist that once owned it, had created a phantom that would disappear as soon as she stepped back into the light.

Her shaking hand fumbled at the door. It was locked.

Panic overtook her, drowning her in its viciousness. Every plan she’d ever crafted, every preparation she’d ever made, fell away like leaves on the wind.

She turned and flattened her back against the wall. Byers had soundlessly come closer, though he kept to the small halo of light created by the candle. The smile was still on his face.

“What, no hello?” He tsked and shook his head in mock sadness. “I thought I taught you better manners than that.”

This wasn’t real. It wasn’t real, she just had to keep reminding herself of that, and then she’d—

“Come closer, Mae,” the phantom cooed as he beckoned toward her with his hand. “It’s been so long since last we saw one another.”

She shook her head. Her heart lurched wildly in her chest. “You’re not real.”

Wyatt sighed wearily, as if he were speaking to a child. “Of course I am, Mae.”

“No,” she blurted, her voice quavering. “You’re not. You can’t be here.”

Wyatt held out his hands in supplication. “Why? Because you thought you could run from me?” The smile died and was summarily replaced with the sharpness of his formidable cunning. “You think there’s anywhere you can go that I won’t find you?”

Clara took a shuddering breath. She closed her eyes and fought desperately for control, for anything that might provide her with the strength she needed. Even the knife in her hand lay forgotten in her palm, useless against the monster she’d thought she’d buried.

But when she opened her eyes, Wyatt Byers was still there, and her heart still trembled in terror.

Wyatt tilted his head and looked at her. “Come closer, Mae.”

“No,” she said, lifting her chin in what she hoped was defiance.

His jaw tightened. “I said, come closer.”

Clara shook her head and answered shakily, “I’m not listening to a ghost.”

“COME CLOSER!” Wyatt roared. The sound was pure fury, its echo strong enough to rattle the world around her. How many nights had she spent listening to that sound? How many days had she let it pummel her into nothing, until she was a fraction of the person she wished she could be?

And now, after she’d built herself up piece by piece, his anger did what it was always designed to do: make her listen.

And listen she did. She strode forward, helpless and weak, because she was nothing more than a shell of a woman who hoped she could be more.

When she was half a step away, the phantom’s hand darted out. Clara was too stunned to move and gasped when she felt Wyatt’s fingers pressed painfully into her cheeks.

He drew her face forward. Clara fought for breath and resisted the urge to wrench away. She knew all too well what would happen if she did.

“You little bitch,” he snarled at her. His face was mere inches from hers, his touch icy cold. “After everything I did for you, after everything I gave you, this is how you repay me?”

It was as though she’d stumbled into her memories. Nothing had changed; she was still the same Clara that was tied to Wyatt Byers, the same one he strung along like a puppet.

She turned her face away and he twisted it back to face him. The cold was oppressive now, numbing her face and neck as it slid down her spine.

Wyatt sneered, “You wouldn’t know what to do with freedom even if you had it.” He nodded angrily toward the door. “And that outlaw—that filth—with whom you insist on keeping company is just as bad as you.”

She said nothing. What could she say?

Instead, a single tear slid down her cold, numb cheek.

He laughed and the chill persisted. Soon she wouldn’t be able to feel anything but his touch. Clara hated the thought of it.

“You think he cares about you? You think he sees you as anything more than a woman who can’t even take care of herself?”

Of course he didn’t.

No one saw her as anything more than a helpless girl. No matter how much she played at being the person she wanted to be, Clara wouldn’t be anything more than what Wyatt Byers had made her.

Hollow. Empty. Meaningless.

His face softened, as much as a viper’s could. “Come home, Mae. Come back to me. You know I’ll forgive you; I always do.”

Her knees felt weak. Her body shuddered against the cold. It would be better to just give in…it never did her any good to fight him. She’d tried, oh, she’d tried, but he always won in the end.

Yes—it would be better just to give up. He would forgive her; he wouldn’t hurt her too badly, at least not more than she deserved.

She could take it.

“Just come home,” Wyatt murmured as he pulled her in to kiss her.

All she had to do was let go.

Mae!

Clara started, gasped. The sound of Arthur’s voice from beyond the door—the one strangled with desperation to get to her. It was the same tone that had mirrored hers, because…

Because Arthur wouldn’t leave her in the dark.

He wouldn’t break her spirit and turn her to nothing.

“No,” she managed to breathe. She suddenly felt stronger, more real.

Wyatt stared at her. “What?”

“I left you, Wyatt,” Clara said firmly. “I left you, and I’m not going back.”

“Don’t be so goddamn stupid,” he snarled. She winced and cried out as the cold bit at her, its teeth sinking deep into her bones. “Who do you think will take care of you, Mae? Me, or him?”

Clara knew the answer and spoke it with unmatched surety.

Wyatt tossed her away with a vicious, angry growl. Clara dropped her knife as she hit the floor hard. She twisted away, reached back for the handle, and cast a wary glance at Byers.

The phantom let loose a terrible, ear-splitting cry. Darkness twisted around his flickering form as the candle sputtered in distress.

Whatever the hell this was, Clara wanted no part of it.

She scrambled for the door, slipping twice as she reached desperately for the doorknob. Clara twisted it just as the darkness reached its fingers toward her, unwilling to let her go.

Clara fell into the hall, wheeled back, and kicked the door shut.

Silence filled the darkness around her. She held her knife up at the door, waiting for any sign that the specter had not been devoured by whatever terrible force lived in this house. Clara took one breath, then another, and, when she felt her body wouldn’t give out, got to her feet as quick as she could.

The ghost of Wyatt Byers was gone—for now.

He wasn’t really gone; Clara stared at the door and knew she couldn’t fool herself into believing that she’d banished him for good.

For now, at least, she could breathe a bit easier.

Clara turned and bumped into something solid and warm.

She whirled and reached for her revolver. Her grip shifted on her knife, ready to slice while she aimed her gun at the black shape in the hall.

Arthur Morgan stared at her, wide-eyed and pale, his hands cautiously raised.

Clara stared at him. Her eyes traced his form, waiting for the edges to flicker and the blackness to carve him into existence, but he remained resolutely solid.

Slowly, slowly, she lowered her weapons. At the same time, Arthur lowered his hands. They stared at one another, afraid that if the silence was broken, the other would disappear.

Clara blinked at him as a sudden, desperate urge leapt into her heart. The words she whispered were raw. “Are you real?”

After a moment, Arthur nodded slowly. “It’s me.” His voice was strangled with sadness, but it was him.

It had to be. Clara didn’t know what she would do if it wasn’t.

She sheathed her knife and stowed her gun. She forced herself to take a step forward and raised a still shaking arm. Arthur watched her, unmoving, as she held her palm out toward him.

Clara pressed it to his chest. He was firm, warm, real. She could just make out the steady thrum of his heartbeat against her hand.

He was real. Relief flooded her, overwhelming every thought and urge and feeling. Arthur was here; he was safe, and all the ghosts were gone.

Clara leapt forward and wrapped her arms around Arthur’s neck.

She held on tightly, burying her face in the soft cotton of his shirt. Every breath was filled with the smell of him. He was real; the Byers she’d met was nothing more than the ghost of a memory.

After a moment, she felt Arthur’s arm wrap around her and pull her chose. His hand came to the back of her head, his fingers winding tightly through the strands of her hair. Clara listened and felt as he took a few deep, thorough breaths, and knew that he, too, was convincing himself she was real.

They held each other as long as they dared, too afraid to let go and too frightened to hold on.

Reluctantly, Clara pulled away. Arthur dropped his arms, though she could feel the brush of his fingers along the length of his back.

She looked up at him and tried to ignore the pounding of her heart—this time, for reasons she didn’t quite understand. “What in the hell was that?”

He shook his head, his eyes never leaving hers. “Nothing good, that’s for sure.”

Clara nodded absently. “I think I’ve had my fill of this place,” she said, her voice trembling only slightly.

“Damn right,” he mumbled. He nodded toward the stairs; strangely, the hall seemed a bit less dark. “Let’s get the hell out of here.”

She made to sidle past him but stopped when she felt his hand on her arm. Clara looked up, surprised, and saw the raw concern in Arthur’s eyes.

“You alright?”

Clara gripped his hand and squeezed, suddenly grateful for his warmth. “I’ll be okay, Arthur.” She waited a beat and asked, “And you?”

He swallowed thickly then nodded. “Sure.”

They descended through the darkness just as they’d ventured forth into it—together.

*

Clara and Arthur didn’t speak about the house or its ghosts in the days and weeks that followed.

John had been found on the first floor in one of the back rooms. He’d been entirely unaware of what had occurred on the second floor and, upon seeing the startled, haunted visages of his cohorts, promptly asked what in the hell had happened to make them look so out of sorts.

Arthur could never remember what he’d said as an excuse. The storm had ended by the time they’d rejoined John, and he insisted they leave that instant.

Clara stood by, her eyes drifting every so often toward the stairs. She wrapped her arms around herself as her gaze went distant, drifting back into the memory of whatever in god’s name had happened to them.

Arthur still wasn’t sure. Even now his ghosts were fading from his memory, as if this had all been nothing more than a bad dream.

But he knew it wasn’t.

Even as they rode back to camp, he mind twisted and turned over the events at the Hildebrand estate. But it wasn’t just the haunting images of his son, his mother, and the woman he’d once loved that pervaded his every thought.

It was the choice he’d made to banish the darkness.

Because each time Arthur’s eyes found Clara’s, he knew the same had happened to her.

Now that the nightmares were gone, they’d have to sift through what was left, and Arthur wasn’t entirely sure what that meant.

What he did know was this: he would make the choice again, if he had to. He would make it again and again, because in the days that followed, he knew it was the right one.

Arthur had just always been too blind to see it.

Chapter Text

Clara Howard’s pocket was full of money and John Marston was losing the game he’d asked her to play.

There were few things that could make the night better.

The Perkins Saloon in Heritage was glamorous and wore it well. The split-level establishment, run by the old Perkins family that had helped found Heritage back in the late 1700s, was crafted with the finest, strongest polished wood from the northwest and wallpaper brought in all the way from Europe.

To hear the saloon manager tell it, it was the same wallpaper that Queen Victoria had in her bedroom at Buckingham Palace.

Clara didn’t care much for the man’s bluster—that’s what it was, for sure and certain—but she did care about the patrons that attended the upper floor’s poker table on an almost nightly basis.

Really, she couldn’t take credit for the poker scam idea. John had been the one to get it going despite the flack he’d received back at camp. No one wanted to go with him into Heritage; even Arthur, who usually didn’t pass up an opportunity to make decent money, cited having another job to take care of in town. So, it fell to Clara to join John, a fact for which he seemed vaguely surprised.

John had looked at her strangely when she told him she’d ride with him. After a long moment of what Clara assumed was contemplation (though one could never be quite so sure when it came to Marston) John gave her a quick nod and went toward his horse.

“Wear something nice,” he’d called over his shoulder.

Clara had donned a simple but pleasant enough skirt, waistcoat, and blouse, hoping that she wasn’t going to end up regretting having accompanied John when all was said and done.

On the way to Heritage, John told her that he’d heard about the saloon’s staple poker group. They were a group of old coots with more money than they cared to deal with, as he told it, but it was one man in particular that struck John’s interest

Alistair Perkins, of the very same Perkins who owned and operated the town saloon.

Clara let John call the play and, much to her chagrin, he didn’t do half bad.

Dressed to the nines and armed to the teeth, John bought in a place at the table. Clara stood behind him, her hand drifting onto his shoulder as she fell into her character. She dutifully ignored the discomfort that inevitably arose from wearing what society deemed appropriate for young women. As long as the money was good, she could forgive John for making her play dress up.

The man in question wasn’t a bad poker player but it certainly helped that the rest of the men were drunk and terrible at bluffing.

Clara, posing as John’s wife (“Don’t tell Abby,” he’d whispered to her before the sting began), made sure to refill their drinks the moment they were emptied. With drink addling their minds and their hands clumsy on the cards, it didn’t take long for the pot to grow larger than both of them had anticipated.

That’s when Clara had made her move.

She’d made a concerted effort to stumble as she loomed behind John’s chair. Clara fluttered her eyelids and placed the back of her hand to her forehead.

Then she fainted—or so the men at the table thought, as they rushed to her aid.

John joined the group of concerned men, being careful to stay close to Alistair. While the ruddy-faced man peered curiously at her, John reached into the man’s pocket and pulled out the money clip he kept there—the rather large, properly fattened money clip.

Clara rose from her feigned stupor when she was sure John had completed the task. The men tried to get her to join the women somewhere where she would be “less prone to bouts of fatigue,” but she insisted she was fine. Perhaps it had been the thrill of the game, she’d explained with a giggle that sounded absurd even to her. No, she would wait until her husband’s desire for some proper gambling had been fully satiated before she retired.

After all, she’d told them through a stiff smile and gritted teeth, that’s was the purpose of a proper wife, was it not?

John played a few more hands to avoid suspicion before bowing out. Alistair suspected nothing; when he ran out of money, the men assumed he’d spent what he’d brought with him. It was no different than any other night, as they’d explained to John and Clara.

How terrible it must be, Clara thought with disdain, to have all the money in the world at your fingertips just to piss it all away.

The evening’s adventure had eventually led to the ground floor of the saloon, where John and Clara tucked themselves into a corner booth and drank to celebrate their victory.

When all was said and done, Clara and John each got one hundred and fifty dollars, while the gang got the rest of the money clip as well as John’s winnings from the game.

John clinked his glass against hers. “Not bad for an idiot, huh?”

“Now, Mr. Marston,” Clara countered with a wry grin. “Give yourself a bit more credit than that. You’re only half idiot.”

He snorted and downed his whiskey in one gulp. “Mr. Morgan would disagree with you on that.”

Clara’s smile faded. She glanced away and muttered, “Mr. Morgan disagrees with a lot of things.”

He didn’t answer right away. John leaned back against the booth, his arm draped lazily over the top of the seat. “You two seem to have an interesting relationship.”

“Sure, John. If by interesting you mean entirely frustrating, then yes, you’re right.”

“I seen the way he looks at you, Clara,” John said. The whiskey was clearly in charge of most of his conscious thought, which wasn’t such much for the man. “Whatever it is, it definitely ain’t frustrating to him.”

Clara leveled a flat glare at him. “John Marston, stop talking before you lose what little respect I have left for you.”

He held up his hands in mock surrender. John slid out of the booth, his eyes darting quickly to the saloon entrance and back at her. His lips curled into a grin as he said, “I’ll get us another round.”

She was thankful for the momentary silence. Clara hadn’t drunk nearly enough to explain the way her stomach twisted uncomfortably at the memory of John’s words. She fiddled with her glass, desperate to do something, anything, with her hands.

What the hell did John Marston know, anyway? Clara huffed and sat back against the booth, relishing the feel of the wood against her back. It was stable, unlike her turbulent thoughts. And what did he mean when he said he’d seen the way Arthur looked at her?

Because she most certainly knew how he looked at her, and how she looked at him, and it was certainly not with any measure of fondness she could muster.

Clara’s crossed her arms and tipped her head back. She closed her eyes and listened to the ambient sounds of the saloon: the piano, doling out a reasonably pleasant tune; the men, raucous and drunk, spinning their tales of days gone past; war veterans, torn apart by the country they’d fought to save, spinning their yarns in exchange for a nickel and a drink to drown their sorrows.

And yet, through it all, one voice cut through the noise and dropped her firmly back into the present.

“What you doing here, Ms. Howard?”

Clara’s eyes flew open at the sound of Arthur Morgan’s voice.

She sighed and sagged against the booth. “Oh, great,” she groaned. This was precisely what she didn’t need. The knot in her stomach tightened just enough to make her desperate for another dose of whiskey.

Arthur huffed and shook his head. He shrugged, throwing up his hands. “What, you find politeness off-putting now, too?”

“Just your particular brand, Mr. Morgan,” Clara retorted as she leaned forward onto the table. She lifted her chin and looked him dead in the eye. “I’m here with John.”

His vague mask of irritation faded just a fraction. Arthur’s brow furrowed as he asked, “Marston? Why?”

She kept her voice cool, her demeanor as crisp as winter air. “He asked me to run a job with him.” It wasn’t true, strictly speaking, but the twist in the truth made the words feel more like weapons she was comfortable wielding.

And, just as she’d suspected, the weapons hit their mark.

Arthur’s shoulders tightened. He glanced over his shoulder as John approached, holding two fresh whiskeys in his hand. He raised his eyebrows at Arthur’s sudden appearance.

“Mr. Morgan,” he drawled as he placed the whiskeys on the table. “To what do we owe the surprise?”

Clara watched as Arthur’s expression hardened. He slung his hands casually on his belt, but she could still make out the tightness in his jaw and shoulders. “Heard you two were running a job together.” Arthur tilted his head, peering closely at John. “How’d it go?”

John slid back into the booth and took one of the glasses. “We each got one-fifty. Gang’s share is one seventy-five.”

Even Arthur couldn’t help but be impressed with the results. He dropped his hands from his belt, his eyes cutting quickly to Clara before darting away again. He gestured toward the whiskey and said, “You planning on drinking away everything you earned, Marston?”

Clara cut in before John could answer. “I think we’re entitled to a bit of celebratory whiskey, Mr. Morgan. And besides,” she added as she reached for her glass, “no one asked for your opinion.”

John sipped his drink, his eyes watching her with a certain measure of incredulity.

The caustic remark was clearly enough for Arthur. He frowned at her, his hand curling into a fist at his side. “And I don’t recall asking for your smart-ass commentary, Ms. Howard.”

“You don’t have to ask,” Clara replied with a distinct, sly smirk. “I give it to you freely.”

Arthur grimaced and looked about to say something in return. His eyes smoldered, but instead he turned on his heel and stalked angrily toward the bar. Clara watched him shoulder passed a rather inebriated man. “Out of the damn way,” he grunted angrily, earning him a look of reproach and confusion from the affronted man.

Clara sipped her whiskey and expected the knot in her stomach to loosen, but all it did was sit heavily in her core, bringing with it all manner of confusing thoughts.

John shook his head at her. “And people said I’m an idiot.”

She blinked at him. “Excuse me?”

He waved away her question and spurned it with drink. “Nothing.”

“John,” she cautioned.

“I didn’t mean nothing by it.”

“John Marston.”

“Alright, alright,” John finally conceded. “Just that you two been dancing around each other for months, acting like you want to kill each other.”

Clara frowned. “The thought has crossed my mind more than once.”

John rolled his eyes. “You ain’t as dumb as you play, Clara. Don’t give me that look, you know what I mean.”

But she didn’t catch his meaning, intended or otherwise—did she?

Suddenly the knot tightened like a vice grip, pumping ice-cold sobriety into her veins. She was a jumble of nerves, a plethora of warring states of being. One second she was in control and the next she was spiraling out of it, tumbling headlong into—what the hell was this unsettling feeling?

Clara downed her drink, keeping her eyes firmly away from John. “I’ll be back,” she muttered as she slid out of the booth, desperate to move.

“Where you going?”

“I’ll meet you at the wagon in a bit,” she called over her shoulder.

She needed to lose herself in the busy saloon, among the throng of men and women with salacious intent. It was rare that she likened chaos to calm but now she was in dire need of its verity.

*

Clara didn’t intend to look for Arthur; at least, that’s what she’d told herself in the moments that came after.

It was just that she’d happened upon him toward the back of the massive saloon, seated on a stool beside the bar. She would have kept going—most likely—if it had only been him that she’d spotted out of the corner of her eye.

But it was the woman draping herself unceremoniously across his lap that brought her feet immediately to a halt.

She was a rather buxom brunette, with curls that would have been the envy of many of the girls back home in New Jersey. Her chemise—or lack thereof—left little in the way of support for her bulging breasts, which she was careful to keep well within Arthur’s line of sight. The girl had one arm draped around his shoulders, pulling him ever closer to her chest, while the other snaked up his chest, an open invitation for…well, Clara didn’t need to finish that thought.

The first thing Clara noticed was that Arthur didn’t make an attempt to push her away. She could see the girl murmuring in his ear but it did nothing to soften the blank, angry look on his face. He kept one hand on the small of the girl’s back but even that looked less like acquiescence and more like courtesy, a brace against any potential fall.

The second thing Clara noticed was the sudden, violent urge to press a knife to the girl’s throat and teach her a thing or two.

It was the second thought that brought Clara stumbling and flailing out of her fugue. Her heart pounded in her chest, hard and with enough force to make her feel dizzy and unsteady. Her skin itched in the way it did when she was primed for a fight and her adrenaline was at its peak.

Clara fought for a single steadying breath. Arthur was a man, he had needs—it wasn’t her place to feel so completely and irrationally angry at the way he let the woman hang on him.

But it did make her angry. She hated the sight of it and, without any reason behind the feeling, Clara felt out of step and prey to her wild, raging heart.

It was then that Arthur caught sight of her.

Clara froze, every muscle stiff with shock. Arthur’s face fell in surprise, his mouth parting slightly the longer he looked at her.

She darted away and up the stairs to the saloon’s upper floor.

Her constricting anxiety and quickened pulse didn’t diminish in the slightest when she crested the stairs. Clara felt out of breath, her thoughts muddied and plagued by the sight seared into her eyes.

She needed her knives. She needed to stab someone, anyone, anything, just to get out the rage that boiled beneath her skin.

Why would he let her touch him like that?

Why in the hell did she care so damn much about it?

“Mrs. Macleod?”

Clara started at the false name she’d provided during the game with John. One of the men from the poker table walked toward her, concern written on his face.

“You seem out of sorts, my dear,” he said as he approached her. “Are you still feeling unwell from your episode earlier this evening?”

Clara tried not to grimace at him. She smoothed her expression as much as she could manage and tried on a smile. It felt tight, wrong, on her lips. “I’m very well, thank you. I’m sorry, I didn’t catch your name before.”

He took up her hand and pressed it to his lips as he bowed slightly. “Remington Addison, at your service.”

Clara nodded. “Lovely to properly meet you, Mr. Addison.”

“Please, call me Remy,” he said as he dropped her hand. “Would your husband might terribly if I asked you to join me for a drink?”

This was reckless. She shouldn’t have come up here, not so soon after they’d stolen Perkins’ money. But Clara knew if she went back downstairs, she would be able to think of little else except the sight of that girl in Arthur’s lap.

Remy held out his arm to her and she took it, feeling a momentary thrill replace her ire. Clara smiled up at him and replied, “My husband’s gone to attend to some affairs. I’m sure he would be pleased to know that a gentleman of your caliber had offered to see to my needs.” She could do this. She could lose herself in the guise she’d created for a while.

Perhaps she should’ve chosen her words more carefully. Remy’s eyes twinkled in a way with which Clara was all too familiar. It wouldn’t have mattered if she’d told him her non-existent husband was waiting for her downstairs or if he’d suddenly died of a heart attack.

Remington Addison had every illicit intention of taking advantage of an unaccompanied woman—in this case, the equally non-existent Martha Macleod.

Of course, Clara would never let it go that far. But if Arthur could manage to have a bit of his own fun, then why couldn’t she indulge herself in the same manner?

*

Arthur knew the boundaries of self-hatred like he knew the back of his own hands.

The moment his eyes met Clara’s in the saloon, the moment he saw the look on her face, was the moment he reached a new horizon of self-loathing.

He didn’t even want the attention the woman had been giving to him. Arthur never did, despite the numerous propositions he received. There was a particular degree of potency to intimacy that had eluded him for years. No matter how many times he tried to drown himself in the feeling, it always ended in heartbreak. But Arthur still listened as the girl whispered in his ear all the things she could do to him, and he still sat back and let her hand wander the broad expanse of his chest.

Arthur allowed it because he couldn’t stop thinking about the way Clara had spoken to him. He couldn’t reconcile the reason why her words had hit so close to him, why the defiant lift of her chin stirred up feelings better left dead and buried.

And so, he’d decided the best course of action was to drink and forget; if he could cop a feel or two while he was at it, then perhaps the night wouldn’t have ended in such a total disaster. But even that was a half-hearted endeavor, a wish half-formed.

Because he regretted every second of the encounter when he saw Clara.

It felt worse than shame, which was saying a lot, since he and shame were old, familiar friends. It felt like being gutted, unraveled, and unmade.

And when he watched her go up the stairs, her steps carrying her farther and farther away from him, Arthur wanted nothing more than to be dead and buried and forgotten.

Arthur shuffled out of the woman’s embrace, much to her disappointment, and determined to follow Clara up the stairs.

He really didn’t know why he felt the way he did. The woman was as ornery as a cornered bear and was more liable to stab him than talk to him kindly. He was a man, after all—men had needs and he was entitled to seek the ends to the means, if that’s what he desired.

But he would have never followed that woman back to whatever backroom hovel she used to entertain her guests.

Arthur climbed the stairs, second-guessing his intention with every step. They didn’t owe each other explanations for their behavior, so why was he bothering to go after her? He hadn’t come here to be accosted by her deplorable behavior; he’d come here to…

He brushed passed a handful of drunken idiots as he reached the upper floor. Arthur frowned at his thoughts; he’d come to the saloon because, after conducting his own business in town, he’d noticed Clara and John’s horses hitched outside the building.

Arthur had tried to walk away, to leave them to whatever scheme they had cooked up. But she was with Marston, of all people.

It didn’t sit right with him, just as this matter didn’t sit right with him, either. In fact, it sat about as right as a gun to the forehead.

He stood for a moment at the top of the stairs and glanced around the crowded upper parlor floor. He peered over shoulders and around clusters of patrons until finally he caught sight of Clara’s striped blue skirt.

Arthur pressed forward, his heart leaping into his throat. He stopped dead in his tracks when he saw a man in a foppish suit looming over her, his arm draped possessively over her shoulders.

He watched, unable to do much more than that in the wake of the sighting. They were seated on a couch beneath one of the large windows that looked out onto the rest of Heritage. Clara clutched the arm with both hands, her body arched decisively away from the man’s touch. A wan smile marked her lips, her eyes turned away and as hard as stone. The man’s hands were tight on her shoulder and forearm, the fingers flexing like the writhing body of a snake around its prey.

Arthur had seen that look before on plenty of men. It was the look of someone with intentions that refused to be broken; it was greed to the highest degree, insatiable and unsavory.

How could Clara not have seen this? She was more astute than Arthur—hell, she was more astute that Dutch and Hosea, on her best day, and that was one of the highest compliments he could ever pay someone.

Unless…

“Shit,” Arthur hissed under his breath. She’d done it on purpose; of course she had, because that’s the game they played with each other.

Clara had seen him with someone, and she had thought to do the same to him. And Arthur couldn’t say that he wasn’t enraged by the very concept and execution of such a notion.

Fine, then—if this was how she wanted to play, he could roll with it.

He swaggered toward them, his rage firmly in check (for the moment, at least). When he was close enough to draw her attention, Clara’s eyes flitted up and snagged on his gaze.

The perfect, crisp green of her eyes widened just enough to make him feel a short burst of satisfaction.

“Hello, darlin’,” Arthur drawled, cutting a stern look to the viper practically smothering her with his unwanted affection. “Having yourself a fine time, I see.”

The man’s face darkened. The angles of his face were sharp enough to cut glass, his cheeks reddened from drink and the heat of the moment he shared only with himself. He stiffened and looked at Clara, his mouth writhing into a sneer. “This isn’t the man you were with earlier.”

Arthur watched the wheels turn in Clara’s head as she fought to come up with a plausible excuse. She turned to the swine, her smile fragile and faltering with every passing second.

“Don’t mind him,” she said, her voice brittle and full of unbridled anger. “He’s just a fool I used to know.”

The man’s hands tightened on Clara. She jolted and pulled away, but he held her firm, his lips pulling away from his teeth as he leered at her.

Arthur’s hackles rose. He didn’t like this, not one bit.

“That’s all the proof I needed,” he hissed at Clara. “I saw what you and the other man—your husband—did at the poker table. And after I take what I want from you, I’m going to make sure you swing for theft.”

Arthur’s hands curled into fists and he shifted his stance. “Like hell you are, mister.”

Clara’s head swiveled toward him. “Arthur, don’t.”

She grunted as he rose from the couch and dragged her along with him. Clara fought, her feet scrambling for purchase as she tried to shy away from his clutches.

But Arthur didn’t let him take a step away from the couch.

He grabbed the man by the throat and pulled him in close. “Get your god damn hands off her,” he hissed, every word drenched in venom.

“Or what?” the man asked in reply. “I saw her first. You can have your turn after me.”

Arthur didn’t think twice before connecting his fist with the man’s face.

*

Chaos erupted in less than the time it took to watch Arthur punch Remy in the face.

Shouts rang out across the upper floor. Heads turned immediately in their direction and the music downstairs faltered before stifling out completely.

Remy fell to the floor like a sack of potatoes. Clara couldn’t say she was sorry to see the sight, but they had one far larger problem on their hands.

She sighed and threw up her hands. “Well done, Arthur.”

That was when the brawl started.

Arthur fought off a handful of assailants, throwing punches, blocking, and dodging where necessary. He was bigger than most of the man he faced, the power in his swing far more than they anticipated. Clara drew her knives from her belt when she saw a couple of men approach her, albeit warily.

“Sorry, gentlemen,” she said with a smile of mock regret. “It’s nothing personal.”

She cracked the hilts of her knives against their skulls and watched them drop to the floor.

Clara stood over them. She shrugged and said, “Admittedly, it might be a slight bit personal.”

The crowd rushed at them, intending to follow through with Remy’s erstwhile threat. It didn’t take much for the more well-to-do patrons of Perkins Saloon to figure out those who didn’t belong; one look at Arthur’s brawl and Clara’s knives was enough to single them out.

She darted to the window and threw it open. Clara yelled, “John, get ready!”

There was no time to wait for a reply. Clara darted and fought her way to Arthur’s side.

He was remarkably devoid of blood and bruises. He kept his fists hovering in the air before him, waiting for his next victim. The men around him stood, stunned by his raw power, afraid to step forward and become the next in the pile of unconscious bodies at his feet.

Clara grabbed his arm and tugged. “Time to go.”

Arthur didn’t hesitate. They made their way to the window at the same time as the resounding demands for their capture echoed throughout the saloon’s dual floors.

She paused at the open window and gestured with her head toward the outside. “Go on, John’s waiting.”

Arthur shook his head. “You first.”

Clara shoved him, her eyes focused on the crowd already breathing down their necks. Some of the men had already drawn guns, the barrels aimed directly at them. “Just go!”

Arthur hesitated, his hands braced on the edges of the window. He looked about to protest but Clara sheathed one knife and drew her revolver.      

“Don’t make me tell you again, Mr. Morgan,” she ordered. Clara leveled her gun at the nearest man and held her knife primed and ready for gutting in the other.

“This ain’t the time for heroics, Mae,” Arthur countered.

She spared half a second to glance at him over her shoulder. Her lips turned up into a wry smile as she said, “Just be ready to catch me.”

Arthur gave her a reluctant nod before jolting through the window. The wagon John had brought into town was parked beneath the balcony outside; if he followed her orders to be ready, then he would be waiting for them.

The man closest to her, his thin face accentuated by a moustache heavily covered in pomade, reluctantly raised his gun at her. It took only a single moment for her to know that he had no idea how to make effective use of the weapon.

“Miss, we’re asking you to do the right thing here,” he said to her, each word enunciated as though she were an imbecile incapable of even the simplest comprehension. “Drop the gun and the knife and we’ll make sure you get off easy.”

Clara smiled.

This was something she knew how to handle.

“Sorry, boys,” she said aloud to the room. “I’m not in the business of getting off easy.”

She fired a single shot just over the head of the man who’d addressed her. Clara ducked and vaulted out the window as the first reciprocal shots cut sharply through the air around her. Lucky for her, most of the men were reluctant to shoot such primal weapons at a young lady—that, or they were entirely ineffective at wielding their guns.

Either way, there was still enough to make Clara only slightly nervous as she leapt at the balcony railing, catching it with both hands and peering over it.

John, Arthur, and the wagon waited below.

John waved frantically at her and shouted, “Let’s go!”

Clara ducked at the sound of gunfire right behind her. That was close—too close. She spared one look over her shoulder before taking a breath. Clara hopped up and used her momentum to swing her legs over the railing.

Clara Howard hated heights. She used the heat of the moment to dull the worst of the irrational fear, but the free fall still terrified her. Her stomach flipped and a scream sat in the back of her throat.

She was only dimly aware of Arthur’s arms reaching up to catch her.

The next thing she knew, her body collided with his. The breath was effectively knocked out of her lungs as they tumbled into the back of the wagon, their bones jarred by the impact and their brains addled by adrenaline.

Clara came back to herself, blinking rapidly until her thoughts cleared enough to take in her situation.

Arthur was beneath her, his hands lightly on her sides in his somewhat successful catch attempt to break her fall. Clara’s body was flush against his, her elbows braced on either side of his head.

She was aware—sharply aware—of each point of contact, of the way her curves molded to his body. Every breath she pulled into her lungs was made of his essence: musk, cigarettes, and the slight tinge of whiskey.

Clara blinked at him and tried to clear her head. Arthur’s clear, summer eyes bore into hers. It was difficult to form a single, coherent thought when all she could do was think about the way his warmth flooded into her body.

It was damn near impossible to think clearly when her mouth was only inches from his.

Clara took one breath. Then she took another. Every time she breathed in, she felt her body shift against his in a way that made her feel wild with dizziness. John urged horses on, and the wagon shifted suddenly. Clara braced against the floorboards and Arthur’s hands tightened on her.

Her breath stuttered when she felt the gentle press of his fingertips.

John leaned over the back of the wagon. “Stay low,” he urged as he threw a sheet of canvas over them. A half-hearted protest died on Clara’s lips. The canvas fell over the crates and other paraphernalia tucked into the corners of the wagon, forming a bit of a tent around Clara and Arthur, both of whom were still pieced together on the floor of the wagon.

Clara was dimly aware of the shouts and gunfire that followed in their wake. The wagon twisted and turned at John’s urging as he took turns without much care for the cargo. The back wheel of the wagon hit a bump in the road. Clara lost her balance and fell firmly and fully against Arthur. Her head went forward, her cheek landing against his shoulder.

For a moment, the only thing Clara could feel was the quick, rapid pounding of his heart against her chest. She breathed him in, wanting more of it each time she pulled his scent into his lungs. She lost herself in the feeling of his body pressed against hers—she felt safe.

There, tucked in the back of a wagon they were using to flee for their lives, Clara found that she didn’t much care what happened to them.

She took a breath, her face hovering above his. “Sorry,” she breathed.

Arthur’s eyes slid just slightly lower than her eyes before darting back up again. “You told me to catch you.”

Clara nodded. Was it just her or was it becoming harder to stay focused? “I did say that.”

Arthur’s hands slid slightly up her sides as the wagon pressed forward. Clara wondered why he was still holding her when they were safely out of sight.

She didn’t ask him to stop, though.

“Are you hurt?” he asked her. Arthur’s usually gruff, husky voice sounded lighter in the darkness beneath the canvas.

Clara shook her head. She had to fight against the urge to sink lower onto him. It had to be the whiskey, she reasoned silently to herself. There could be no other rational explanation for the tightness in her chest or the distinct, violent pull toward him, as though she were unbalanced and off center without him.

“Hold on!” John grunted as the wagon swerved violently to the right.

Clara gasped as she was flung sideways. She curled into herself, bracing against the impending impact of her back against the wagon’s side.

But it never came.

She was tucked safely in Arthur’s arms, pulled carefully and protectively against his chest. A slight shift in her position told her that she would have likely cracked her head against the side of the wagon had he not caught her—again.

Arthur’s leg was folded over hers, his boot pressed against the side of the wagon to protect her. But that meant...

Clara’s breath hitched in her throat. Her torso—indeed most of the lower half of her body—was inescapably folded against him. She felt every inch like the sun beating against her skin. Her hands lay flush against his chest. Arthur’s head was bent low toward her, his lips hovering near her left cheek.

“I got you, Mae,” he whispered. Clara shivered at the feel of his warm breath against her skin.

She tilted her head up slightly until she felt just the barest brush of his stubble against her skin.

“I know, Arthur,” she murmured in reply.

The wagon stopped. John threw back the canvas sheet, bringing the starlight and night sky into stark relief.

Arthur and Clara separated instantly, half-throwing and half-sliding away from each other. When John Marston peered over the back of the wagon, he saw them both beside each other, arms flat against their sides, their heads turned up toward the sky.

He frowned at them. “You two alright?”

“Sure,” Arthur blurted.

Clara nodded. She cleared her throat and answered stiffly, “We’re good.”

John’s eyes lingered on them for a moment longer. Then he shook his head, shrugged, and jumped off the wagon, leaving Arthur and Clara to sort themselves out in the back of the wagon.

They didn’t speak as they climbed out into the night. They said nothing as they mounted their horses, which John had the good sense to fetch before preparing the wagon for their departure. Everything remained silent as they mounted up and headed back to camp.

Clara didn’t sleep that night.

She tossed and turned in her tent. Her senses were still too full of Arthur, her nerves too on edge from the closeness of their escape.

She couldn’t quite forget how it felt to see Arthur with that woman in the saloon, nor could she set aside her subsequent retaliatory move that ended in a disaster.

But mostly Clara couldn’t stop her senses from recalling the way Arthur’s body felt against hers—how they seemed to fit perfectly together, despite the extenuating circumstances. She couldn’t quite force her memory to dismantle the lingering scent of Arthur that pervaded every thought.

This was ridiculous. She grunted, shifted violently on her side, and pulled her blanket firmly over her head. She didn’t feel anything for him. She didn’t in the wagon, and she didn’t now, despite the fact that sleep remained elusive.

Clara had felt nothing when Arthur’s hands pressed against her sides, his thumbs brushing against the tops of her hips. She remained blank when they fell onto their sides and her lower half molded to his, filling all the empty crevices that lay between them.

And she most certainly felt nothing when he breathed her name in the dark, covered space beneath the canvas.

No, she didn’t feel anything for Arthur. There was no room for that—not in this life and not in her heart.

At least, that what was what Clara Howard told repeated over and over in her mind until she finally, fitfully, fell asleep.

Chapter Text

The door hinges and lock snapped as Clara delivered a decisive kick square in the wooden door’s center.

She squared up, her knife in one hand and revolver in the other, as she twisted and turned about the room. Dust had long since settled on the sparse furniture; it hung like filmy curtains in the air and coated her lungs with every sharp intake of breath she pulled in.

Clara waited a beat, then another. Her ears strained, listening for any sound that might give away the presence of squatters or worse, O’Driscolls that had ridden ahead and tried to cut them off.

The silence would have to serve as proof for now.

She sheathed her knife and shoved the revolver into her holster. Whoever had lived—or squatted—here had long since departed, leaving behind memories and belongings in their haste. Even some family portraits lingered on the mantle above the brick fireplace, though she forced her attention away from those.

It was the heavyset chair that lingered before the empty, fireless hearth that snagged her attention. Clara hurried to it, inspecting the wood and fabric for evidence of disastrous wear and tear. It seemed solid enough, but the true test would come in a moment.

“Alright,” she called out. “It’s clear.”

Arthur grunted as he ducked beneath the low threshold. His thick hand was clasped firmly on his arm, his fingers drenched with blood. Clara, her sense of urgency renewed at the sight of him, gestured toward the chair.

Despite his wound, he glanced dubiously at the seat she offered. “That ain’t gonna hold me,” he murmured, his words tight with pain.

Clara hissed in annoyance and grabbed at his good shoulder. She shoved him forward, a nearly fruitless action given his size and bulk, and ordered, “Just shut up and sit down.”

Arthur sighed deeply and lowered himself gingerly into the chair. It creaked and groaned beneath his weight, as if the wood was indeed put off by being so unceremoniously shoved back into usage. He waited a beat after he’d settled on the brittle contraption and, when he was mildly sure he wouldn’t go crashing to the ground, allowed himself to relax as much as he could.

Clara dug around in her satchel until she found what she needed. Arthur watched as she slapped a long, thin needle, a spool of black thread, and a half-opened bottle of gin on the table.

Her face was grim with determination—and a bit filthy, he supposed, given the firefight they’d somehow gotten themselves into. The O’Driscolls had been waiting for them on the roadside, many more than they’d original thought, and it had been a near scrape to get out of there alive and, perhaps more importantly, alive and with no witnesses.

Unfortunately, Arthur had not gotten away quite as cleanly as he usually did.

Clara tossed him the bottle and he caught it with his good hand. He eyed it, frowning at the peeling label and nearly faded letters. “Jesus,” he muttered, wincing at the throbbing pain in his arm. “You sure this ain’t from last century?”

The look she gave him was nearly sharp enough to cut glass. “Sorry,” she drawled sarcastically, “I wasn’t able to get a full stock of whiskey before you got yourself shot.”

As if in answer to accusation, his gunshot wound flared up with a new, fresh round of blistering pain. Arthur gritted his teeth and rode out the fire, even as his blood continued to pump from the wound and into his clasped fingers. His eyes caught the stains that already marred his shirt and trousers.

“I didn’t get myself shot,” he countered, though the admission was half-hearted. The matter of his predicament was still up for internal debate and he was still in too much pain to sort through all that nonsense. “And you don’t gotta deal with all that,” he added, nodding his chin toward the paraphernalia she’d assembled on the table. “I’m fine.”

“You are decidedly not fine,” Clara bit back as she unspooled some of the thread. “And you’ll bleed out if I don’t stitch you up.” The thread was severed with a quick swipe of her knife. He watched as she fit the end of the thread precisely through the needle, as though she’d done it a thousand times before. “That’s not exactly a conversation I’m willing to have with Dutch and Hosea.”

Arthur peeled his hand back a fraction from the wound. The fabric was torn where the bullet had grazed his skin, leaving behind a thorough, jagged gash in its wake. By all accounts, it was certainly not the worst wound he’d ever received. The ones he’d gotten on his chin the year before Dutch found him throbbed as if in acquiescence of the thought. Incidentally, they were the last wounds he’d received at the hands of his father.

He wore them proudly; they’d survived, as did he, while Lyle Morgan rotted somewhere in the depths of hell.

Clara, her cheeks flushed and hands working furiously, paused and searched through her satchel. She cursed when she didn’t find what she needed, the tops of her cheeks brightening to an angry red. Her hands roved her shirt, tugging at the hem while she scrutinized its cleanliness. Deciding that it was better than nothing, she lifted the hem to her mouth and held it firmly with her teeth while she tore off one strip and then another.

Arthur’s eyes darted immediately to the stretch of uncovered skin. She was a bit thicker around the middle than the average woman, but this did nothing to inhibit the fact that his eyes flatly refused to turn away. Matters were not made any better when she lowered her shirt; the missing fabric left a portion of her skin still visible. Arthur fidgeted in the chair and forced his eyes to focus on something, anything, else.

It wasn’t like he found her attractive, he reasoned as he frowned through another sharp cut of pain. Clara Howard was more foul-tempered than a viper and she was never nice to him. Arthur knew he didn’t deserve niceness, not by any stretch of the imagination, but it was as though Clara had been born into the world with a chip on her shoulder and the sights of her anger set directly on him.

His eyes slid back to the exposed skin once, twice more before slipping away again.

Clara tilted the gin bottle until the contents pooled in the neck. She slid the needle into the opening and turned it, coating the sharp end in the clear, piney liquid.

Arthur frowned and pressed his hand firmly against the wound. “What you doing?”

Clara didn’t answer for a moment. She whipped the needle back and forth with her wrist in attempt to get the droplets of gin off the metal.

“Disinfecting the needle,” she answered smoothly as she planted the bottle in his hand. “Hold this for a minute.”

She laid the disinfected needle on the torn fabric of her shirt. Arthur watched with some trepidation as she peeled his bloody fingers from the wound and peered at the gash.

“It’s fine,” he muttered as he tried to place his hand back over it. Clara swatted him away and placed her own hand on the wound to staunch it.

Arthur watched in mild disgust as his blood soiled her hand. Why would she do that? Why was she going through all this trouble to stitch him up? She didn’t even like him.

“Hand me the gin,” she demanded with a flick of her chin. Arthur gave it to her, already dreading what she was going to do with it. Her eyes darted to his before turning back to the wound. “This is going to hurt,” she explained as the bottle hovered over his wound.

Arthur didn’t bother protesting. He gritted his teeth, wrapped the fingers of his good hand around the arm of the chair, and braced for impact. Clara dripped a bit of the gin on the bullet graze and Arthur’s world exploded in a haze of hot, searing agony.

He grunted and bit back a cry of pain as he doubled over in the chair. The wooden arm creaked beneath the vice grip of his hand. The pain trembled in his bones and roared like wildfire through his veins, drowning out everything else around him.

She pressed one of the strips of her shirt to the wound and wiped off the residual gin and blood. Then she reached for the needle and thread, took a steadying breath, and began to sew closed his wound.

Arthur didn’t feel the first few stitches. It was only when she reached the fourth and fifth stitches that he began to feel the first dregs of sharp, stabbing pain.

But he didn’t flinch. Everything stung and hurt but Arthur kept his eyes firmly on Clara as her hand worked swiftly and effectively, drawing the needle between the shorn edges of his flesh until the wound was little more than a red, angry seam.

She closed the end of the wound with a deft flick of her wrist and sliced the tail of thread off with her knife. Arthur put the bottle of gin to his lips and drained the remainder of the bottle in one go, swallowing through the burn and distinct woodsy taste of the liquor. While he dulled the worst of the pain, Clara wrapped the remaining strip of her torn shirt around the wound, tying a simple but tight knot to keep the newly closed wound protected.

Arthur let out a long breath and sagged against the chair. His face and chest were coated in a thin sheen of sweat from the ordeal. The mineral stench of blood hung heavily in the air, mixed unpleasantly with the dust and must of the abandoned house. It churned his otherwise strong stomach, made weaker by being shot and sewn up by the person he least expected to care very much about either scenario.

Clara wrenched the empty gin bottle from his hand and began to return the supplies to her satchel. Every move was tinged with the hint of barely concealed anger and irritation. Her shoulders were bunched in a tight knot as she tugged uselessly at the ripped hem of her shirt.

Arthur licked his lips, pulling up the last droplets of gin. His brain already felt addled from the small bit of liquor, marred only by the pain that throbbed like a heartbeat in his arm. “Thank you,” he muttered dejectedly.

Clara pressed her lips together and shook her head. “I can’t even say I’m surprised you’d end up getting yourself shot,” she mused in frustration. She slapped her satchel closed and tossed it onto the table. She glanced down at her hands, which were still stained with his blood. Clara frowned and hung her arms uselessly at her sides.

He wasn’t sure why, but his heart chose that precise moment to tighten in his chest.

“I didn’t ask for your help,” he said. Each word was laced with the sudden, stinging bitterness that filled his heart.

Clara used her forearm to wipe the sweat from her forehead. She glanced sidelong at him, her expression sour. “No, you didn’t, but you sure as hell needed it.” She sighed as she once more brushed her fingers along the tore bits of her shirt.

Arthur let the pain cut through his thoughts. He focused on the throbbing and stinging; they were easier to understand than the strange, swirling emotions that tripped and fell through his mind.

Decidedly calmer now than she’d been only a moment before, Clara reached her hand into her satchel. A brief search revealed a battered flask of water, which she used to douse her hands clean of his filthy blood.

“Why did you do that?” she asked as she wiped her dripping hands on her trousers.

Arthur knew precisely what she meant, as the question she’d posed was directly correlated to the wound currently blazing on his arm. For a moment, he thought about lying.

The problem was that Arthur still didn’t have an answer. Even after he’d realized he’d been shot (the O’Driscoll who’d had the audacity to harm him was swiftly and subsequently dealt with, specifically with a bullet between the eyes) he still couldn’t quite piece together why he’d done what he did.

At one point during their unexpected skirmish, Clara and Arthur were holed up behind a cluster of boulders. Bullets skittered off the rock, keeping them at bay and allowing their enemies to gain more and more ground. Clara, her hands wrapped around the repeater she’d purchased at Hosea’s behest only a few weeks prior, took a breath, glanced at Arthur, and darted to another outcropping in a momentary pause in gunfire.

Arthur’s heart leapt when he saw her disappear. He didn’t need to ask to know what she’d done: she was drawing the gunfire toward her to give him a chance to take them out. Clara knew he was the better shot; she disliked guns as it was.

He took out three O’Driscolls before he heard her cry out.

Running to her had been instinctive. Arthur’s head immediately swiveled in the direction of her voice. He wasn’t sure but he vaguely remembered yelling her name before he darted from behind the rocks without waiting for a break in the fire, like the goddamn fool that he was.

He was lucky he didn’t catch a bullet in the skull.

Clara had been fine, as he soon discovered. He, as it turned out, had not been entirely fine.

All of this went through Arthur’s head, accompanied by the conflicting emotions that came with the event, in the space of two heartbeats. What he finally replied with was, “I don’t know.”

Clara looked even more agitated by his non-answer. “You’re more trouble than you’re worth.”

That, at least, he could agree with. Arthur nodded and murmured, “No doubt.”

Clara grabbed her satchel and mumbled something about getting supplies from the horses. Arthur said nothing and watched her go, wondering all the while how in the hell he’d gotten himself into this mess.

But, just like most of the other wild messes he’d managed to fall into over the years, Arthur was left with nothing more than the distinct feeling of confusion and solemn assurance that this wouldn’t be the least of his problems.

*

It took longer than Clara would have liked to get the fire started.

First, she had to clear out the hearth, which was filled with a substantial and impressive pile of ashes. She cursed and grunted as she got the worst of it out of the way, leaving barely enough room for some fresh kindling. She was filthy afterwards, which only served to foul her mood further.

Luckily, the erstwhile owner of the property had cut just enough firewood to last them the night. She found it outside, stacked neatly and still useable, and carried a few of the thick and well-cut logs inside to place on the hearth.

“We don’t have to stay here,” Arthur insisted from the chair. “Lord knows you might kill me if we stay here any longer.”

Clara tossed the logs into the hearth and huffed. She tucked a thick, sweat-curled strand of her hand behind her ear before she remembered her hands were still filthy. “Just shut up,” she grumbled. “Your comments are about as useless and unwanted as you are.”

Arthur rolled his eyes and tossed his hands in the air. “The hell is wrong with you, woman? I’m telling you not to bother with all this nonsense.”

She cut her hand through the air in dismissal of his protestation. “We have to give the wound at least twenty-four hours before you do anything strenuous. I’m not about to stitch you up again.”

His expression wrinkled with incredulity. “Strenuous? We’re talking about riding horses, not climbing mountains, for Christ’s sake.” He shifted in the chair, clearly as irritated as she was.

Clara paused halfway to the door. She closed her eyes, took a steadying breath, and let it sharply out of her lungs. “If you tear those stitches,” she warned as she turned over her shoulder, “I will let you bleed out without a second thought.”

“Your concern for my well-being is astounding, Ms. Howard,” Arthur answered, his voice dripping with sarcasm. “If you gave half as much attention to starting that fire as you did to insulting me, we’d be warm by now.”

What a pain in the goddamn ass.

Clara finally got the fire started and the bedrolls laid out. When all was said and done, she was once again filthy and sweating while Arthur sat idly in the chair, watching her with an infuriatingly bemused expression.

He’d come after her during the fight with the O’Driscolls. If he hadn’t been so idiotic, he wouldn’t have gotten shot, and they wouldn’t be holed up in this filthy dump for the night until he was well enough to ride.

She angrily passed him a can of beans that she’d heated through on the meager fire. Arthur snatched it out of her hand, eyeing her with mild disdain, and hungrily dug into the canned provision. Clara barely tasted the tinny, overly salted meal. Her frustrations were burning as steadily as the flames she’d brought to life and she wasn’t entirely sure why.

It was only after her third spoonful of beans that she found the true source of her irritation.

Clara wasn’t angry that she’d had to patch Arthur up; she really didn’t have to, though she was sure she did a much cleaner job than what he’d have been able to manage on his own. And it wasn’t his stunning display of idiocy during the O’Driscoll encounter that had soured her mood, either.

Really, if she was being honest, Clara was confounded by the idea that Arthur Morgan had so selflessly and instinctively gone to her aid. He hadn’t thought twice after hearing her cry out; one minute he was taking out the enemy and the next he was flying to her side to ensure she was alright.

But…why?

Rather than continue to suffer under the weight of the question, Clara decided to pose it to him. She shoved her spoon into the half-empty can of beans and turned a fuming glare on Arthur. “Why?”

He paused, his can halfway to his mouth, and raised an eyebrow at her. “What?”

Clara reined in the biting retort that flew to her lips. She had to be sensible; he couldn’t know what was on her mind. She answered slowly, “Why did you come after me like that, with the O’Driscolls?”

Arthur quickly looked away and tipped the beans in his mouth. He chewed for a moment before he shrugged and answered around the mouthful of food. “Guess I thought you needed help, is all.”

Something warm and conflicting unfurled in Clara’s chest. She tamped it down in a panic, relinquishing it to the numbness and absence of anger instead. “I don’t need your help,” she said, her voice low and humming with embittered chaos. “I can take care of myself.”

Arthur’s expression darkened as he leaned forward in the chair. “You listen to me,” he said, his tone slipping into that of the outlaw, the dangerous killer. “I’ve had just about enough of your goddamn attitude.” He pointed an accusatory finger at her. “I thought you was in trouble and I went to your aid, as I would do for any other member of this gang.” Arthur sat back in the chair, eyeing her all the while until her cheeks burned with rage. “You want me to let you die next time? Fine. But you best not question my actions or you’ll come to regret it.”

He had hoped to frighten her into submission—that much was clear. But all the while Clara fumed, a thousand different cutting remarks floating in her head, she realized one very important thing.

Arthur was lying.

He hadn’t gone to her aid just because she was a member of the gang. Clara had seen him in action enough times with the others to know that he trusted—and expected—them all to handle their own. She had no doubt that he would assist if the situation became dire, but they all had to earn their keep, or so Dutch reminded them every day.

Arthur’s explanation was nothing more than a steaming pile of horseshit. He went back to eating his beans when he was satisfied that his play at being in charge had rendered her momentarily speechless just as that same disconcerting feeling returned to her chest.

It came with a single thought that set her off balance, so much so that she once again forced it back into the recesses of her mind. It didn’t stop the remnants of the thought from lingering, however.

Arthur had come to her side because he was worried about her. It was incongruent with their relationship (or current lack thereof) and entirely at odds with the constant stream of frustrating words and situations in which they both seemed to consistently entangle themselves.

What was worse, Clara reasoned as she set aside her unfinished beans, was that she wasn’t entirely sure that she minded the thought.

She abruptly rose from her place on the floor and stalked to where she’d laid out the bedrolls. She stooped and pulled hers off the floor, bundling it beneath her arm as she went quickly to the front door.

Arthur’s head swiveled as he watched her move about. He held out his hands in question when she reached the front door and asked, “Where you going now?”

Clara lifted her chin and sighed. “I think it’s best if I sleep outside.”

Arthur stared at her, his expression incredulous, before he slapped his hands on the arm of the chair and rose, wincing slightly as the stitches in his arm tugged at his raw and wounded flesh. He waved at her to come back in and said, “I’ll go outside. You stay in here.”

“No,” she refused.

“Just stay in here, for Christ’s sake,” he said as he bent to fetch his bedroll. “Lord knows I could do with a night under the open sky and away from your foolishness.”

Clara clenched her fist and stood her ground even as Arthur met her at the doorway. “Stop telling me what to do.”

He loomed in front of her, his head tilted slightly to the side. It was easy to see why others found Arthur Morgan so intimidating, why a single look could strike fear in a man’s heart faster than a nightmare. The man was tall and broad and built like an ox. Clara’s instincts whispered at her to back down, but she held firm; she lifted her chin and pursed her lips as she met Arthur’s cool, summer blue stare.

“Get out of the way, Ms. Howard,” Arthur ordered. Here was the rest of the cutthroat outlaw, present in every venomous syllable that fell from his lips.

But Clara had dealt with cutthroats before. She was generally on the victorious end after having dispensed of their particular breed of asshole with a swift and exacting hand. And while she knew that there was a certainly killer buried deep within the roots of Arthur’s soul, just as there was one in hers, there was one crucial element missing in the hardness of his gaze.

Conviction.

She took half a step forward. Only a few inches separated them.  Clara leaned forward a fraction. It was just far enough that she knew the whisper of her words would touch his lips. “Make me.”

Arthur’s eyebrows twitched upwards at her counter threat. Clara forced his eyes to remain on hers even as a torrent of fire flooded her veins and curled around her center.

They were close enough that she could feel his warmth brush against her skin. Her body hummed with the closeness, the feeling strong enough to addle her senses. Clara swallowed and felt a lump in her throat that certainly wasn’t there a moment ago.

Every breath she pulled into her lungs smelled like Arthur: the lingering bitterness of sweat; the metallic tinge of dried blood; and an indescribable scent of musk that seemed unique to him.

Clara’s nostrils flared. Why was her heart beating so fast?

Arthur’s eyes widened a fraction. For a moment, the hardened core of the outlaw faded and was replaced by something she didn’t expect to see: confusion and the faint, ghostly presence of apprehension.

Their proximity became momentous; tension carved through the air around them, shrouding their shoulders like cloaks against the night. Clara felt smothered by it, confused by it, whereas only moments before she had felt safe in the bounds of her anger.

Somehow Arthur Morgan had managed to dismantle all of that and turn her inside out. In a split second, Clara decided that there was only one course of action that would alleviate the sudden and oppressive confliction that warred in her breast.

Her hand darted out and clasped onto Arthur’s bedroll. Before he could think to stop her, Clara tore it from his grasp and threw it into the overgrown yard beyond the door.

Arthur blinked and his mouth fell open in surprise. His eyes darted between her and the chucked bedroll, the outlaw gone and replaced with a wildly confused and equally conflicted man.

“Actually,” Clara breathed, “I think it’s best if you sleep outside tonight.”

*

Arthur shoved his hands behind his head and stared up at the crystal-clear stars.

The night was blessedly quiet, save for the persistent hum of insects and the distant moonlit howls of hungry predators. Here, beneath the stars, everything was as it should be; here, beneath the stars, everything else fell away.

Everything, that was, except for the turmoil swirling in his head.

He sighed and threw his arms across his chest. Another burgeoning feeling of restlessness washed over him and the starlight seemed to dim just a fraction.

“Goddamn woman,” he muttered with a shake of his head. The thoughts stuck like cobwebs, clinging in all the wrong places.

All he could think of was the way her green eyes had looked as they blazed with her inward fire, bright enough even to rival the stars above his head. All he could think of was the perfume of lavender and mint that drifted from her skin, completely and utterly subduing all his other senses and instincts. How could she smell like that, living the way they did?

Arthur forced his eyes up to the sky as he pulled in another breath of clean, fresh air, which was blessedly devoid of Claramae Howard’s perfume. He let his eyes focus once more on the brightly burning centers of the universe and gave permission for the wild, open sky to swallow all his worries.

This was what he wanted—open sky, the savage unknown. And yet, despite the fact that he felt decidedly at its center, Arthur couldn’t help but feel like he was moving further and further away from that desire.

And he couldn’t help but feel that Clara was pulling him in some other direction, leading him to a place he wasn’t quite sure he wanted to go.

Arthur let out a long yawn and winced as he shifted and accidentally tugged on the stitches in his arm. There were only a handful; he’d been lucky this time, he thought as his fingers drifted to the scars on his chin. No one had been around to stitch him up that time.

And why the hell had she been so uppity about that O’Driscoll mess? She should be grateful that he even bothered to go check on her. If it had been Bill Williamson or Sean MacGuire, he wouldn’t have spared them a second’s thought.

He froze.

Maybe that was the problem—he wouldn’t have bothered if it had been any other member of the gang, despite the evidence to the contrary that he’d provided to her in explanation.

Arthur rubbed his face as a sudden and inexplicable wave of exhaustion flooded his body and trembled through his weary bones. He didn’t have the energy for concerning thoughts such as these. There were far more important matters to attend to rather than the inner workings of the perpetually confounding Clara Howard.

The moon made its slow, infinitesimal crawl up toward its zenith. There were still several hours that lingered between now and the dawn, which should be plenty of time for Arthur to achieve some semblance of rest before the ride back to camp.

He sat up and flattened the bedroll over the relatively even ground. Arthur glanced over his shoulder toward the house. The golden, flickering glow of the fire was still bright enough to be seen from the cracked and broken window. He watched for a moment more before mumbling under his breath about difficult, undeserving women and stretching out along the thin, moth-eaten bedroll.

Minutes stretched into hours and still sleep eluded him.

Arthur couldn’t seem to get the smell of Clara out of his senses, nor could his skin seem to feel precisely the same temperature of warmth that it had when she was near.

*

The matter of Arthur’s internal conflict was not made any clearer by the time they reached camp.

Clara dismounted her horse and rubbed her forehead clear of sweat. The day had dawned bright and hot, strong enough to subdue them into a tense, awkward silence on the road back to camp. But now she glanced up at him, her green eyes bright and the tops of her cheeks pink from the sun and gave him a curt nod.

“Don’t bust those stitches, Mr. Morgan,” she cautioned as she wrapped the reins around the hitching post.

Arthur nodded back at her as he patted Boadicea’s neck. “Wouldn’t dream of it, Ms. Howard.”

Clara gave him one last lingering look before she headed off into the camp proper. Arthur’s eyes followed her as she sauntered off, head ducked and shoulders sagging beneath the weight of a night ill spent.

Before he could stop them, his eyes drifted just a bit lower, to where her trousers were pulled snuggly over her backside.

Arthur’s heart leapt in his chest and his whipped back around, his face flaming with shame and stark embarrassment. Clara would likely stab him if she ever found out what he’d done, besides the fact that he didn’t think of her that way at all. No, she wasn’t attractive to him in the slightest.

Not at all.

Absolutely, definitely not.

“Well, look what we have here,” Micah Bell announced as he stalked up to Arthur’s side. He had his arms out toward him as if putting him on display. “The prodigal son, once lost and now found.”

Arthur was far too tired to deal with the likes of Micah. He rolled his eyes and waved the man away. “Not now, Micah.”

But, like any decent parasite, Micah was not inclined to leave when asked. He turned and his eyes fell on Clara, who had stopped to speak with Tilly and Mary-Beth. Arthur followed Micah’s line of sight and already knew what was going to come next.

“So,” Micah drawled, his beady eyes focusing on Arthur, “you was out with Ms. Howard.”

Arthur tried to relax the tense muscles in his jaw. “Yes,” he ground out.

Micah’s ridiculous mustache twitched as he donned his trademark smirk. He leaned heavily to one side as though making an attempt to keep a close eye on both Arthur and Clara.

“You seem to be getting awful close to our latest addition,” he said, his tone snaking around his words in an effort to bait Arthur. “And here I thought you was all sanctimonious, Mr. Morgan.”

Arthur’s brow furrowed. He didn’t like Micah’s tone on a good day but there was something about the sound of it now that made his hackles rise and instincts flare to life. “If there is a point to this conversation, get to it and get to it fast.”

Micah shrugged and turned his attention back to Clara. She was smiling as she spoke to Karen, who had joined the women in an animated conversation. Her hands were on her generous hips and her braid was tossed casually over one shoulder.

“Guess I never thought you was the sort to go running off with the first girl that pays you an ounce of attention,” Micah said, his smirk growing wider. “Oh, come on, now, Morgan. Don’t try to deny it; we can all see the way you look at her when you think no one’s watching.”

Arthur’s temper lanced through him, igniting a dangerous fire in his heart. He took half a step toward Micah, every muscle instinctively on edge and primed for a fight. He asked through gritted teeth, “You enjoy running your mouth like a goddamn fool?”

Micah held up his hands as if to ward off Arthur’s anger. “All I’m saying is,” he responded, “if you ain’t intending on making a move, then perhaps it’s time someone else did.”

It took Arthur a moment to realize what he meant; years of sharpening his anger into a tool of aggression meant he often sacrificed his usually astute notice. When Micah’s meaning finally caught up to him, it took all his willpower not to quite literally choke the words out of his mouth.

The laugh that fell from Micah’s mouth was near enough to set his black rage on the attack. “Oh, come on, Morgan. You can’t think a woman such as her wouldn’t have caught the attention of the other fine gentlemen of this establishment.” His eyes landed on Clara again, dipping and rising along the length of her curves.

Micah sniffed and turned his body until he faced her. “Yes, indeed,” he murmured as if Arthur was totally forgotten. “I would not mind seeing what she keeps underneath them ridiculous, unseemly clothes.”

Arthur didn’t remember reacting—that tended to happen when his rage was at its height.

One minute he was standing beside Micah and the next his hand was wrapped firmly around the man’s throat, choking off whatever foul remark was sure to follow the one he’d already made.

Arthur’s veins pumped with white-hot adrenaline. The world narrowed to the feeling of his fingers pressed into the soft, vulnerable flesh of Micah Bell’s throat.

Micah struggled but Arthur was bigger, stronger, and driven by a higher purpose. His eyes widened as his face flushed with the lack of air and effort of his unlikely escape. Arthur relished the feeling of dominance as he leaned forward until his face was mere inches from Micah’s.

“You got your ears open, Micah?” Arthur ground out. “I’m only gonna say this to you once, so you listen, and you listen good.” He squeezed his throat once to emphasize the point.

“If I see you look, speak to, or touch Ms. Howard in any way that she don’t like, she won’t be the only one you gotta deal with. You cross her, then you cross me. Is that understood?”

Micah glared at him, hatred boiling in the darkness of his eyes.

Arthur snarled and tightened his grip a fraction more. “I said, is that understood?”

For a moment, there was only silence. Then Micah nodded.

Later, when Dutch asked him what happened, Arthur didn’t bother denying that he’d threatened Micah. He did, however, twist the story just a bit to alter the disgusting, crude remarks concerning Clara that had been uttered.

What remained true, in the end, was Arthur’s steadfast declaration: whoever upset Clara would find Arthur Morgan’s unholy fury descending upon them, and that was not a position in which anyone—especially Micah Bell—would want to find themselves.

Chapter Text

When Wyatt Byers was ten years old, he made his first kill.

His grandfather on his mother’s side, John Everly, had a home in the high hills of Pleasant Valley in New Jersey’s Warren County. John Everly had been well known in the area for his marksmanship, having been an expert hunter and also having fought his way to some semblance of victory during the Civil War. By the time he returned home, mostly intact (he was missing two fingers on his left hand), his wife, Wyatt’s grandmother, had long since given up on his return.

Mr. Everly never did find out where his erstwhile wife had gone; she’d left him with nothing but a broken heart, a few pieces of himself missing, and a home that seemed cold and dreary without her.

He did, however, still have his marksmanship. Not even the war that rent the country in two was enough to deter his skill.

So it was that Wyatt’s mother, Victoria Everly, came into the world by way of John Everly’s new and younger wife, Jane, along with her younger sister Maisie and youngest brother, Ephraim. Jane Everly looked over the home and their children while John persisted in recapturing the youth that had once made him so well-respected in the boundless hills of Warren County. Inevitably, that meant he became one of the area’s best hunters; there wasn’t an animal that John Everly couldn’t track and kill, and the walls of his study were testament to that fact.

Throughout his childhood, Wyatt’s mother would often bring him along on visits to her parents’ home. Wyatt had never cared for his grandmother much; she was a meek slip of a woman who did nothing but fold beneath the weight of her husband’s iron will. (Wyatt had loved his mother, though he and his father had remained resolute in the fact that they would never speak of her again in the years following her untimely death. While Anderson Byers was not a kind man, he had loved his wife and her willingness to speak her mind, however often that will be squashed beneath her husband’s.) Young Wyatt found his greatest influence in his grandfather and the clever, calculated way in which he assessed the world.

John Everly taught his grandson that the world was compromised of two things: guns and bullets. All one had to pay attention to was whether they were the one doing the shooting, or whether they were the one being shot at.

It was a philosophy Wyatt took to heart on their frequent hunting trips, which stretched through his youth and into the days of his budding adulthood. Even after the death of Wyatt’s mother and John’s wife, Wyatt sought the comfortable, distinct way in which Mr. Everly held his gun, aimed, and fired.

His first kill had been a buck. By the time he was fifteen, he could track and kill nearly every animal in the foothills of Pleasant Valley. When he reached twenty-one, everyone in the county knew of John Everly’s charismatic, cool-headed grandson who, in their eyes, was the spitting image of the man who had once ruled Pleasant Valley with an iron fist. When John Everly finally died, he left his estate to his grandson; it was an intentional slight against Ephraim, who had grown up to be a drunken, whore-mongering fool, and had subsequently been overshadowed by Wyatt’s unsurprising successes.

And, when Wyatt came into his own, he always made sure to assess each situation as his grandfather did. Incidentally, he was always the one who held the gun.

Wyatt Byers placed the aging, yellow-edged photograph of his grandfather back on the mantel and took a step back. If he squinted hard enough, he could just make out the familiar line of his own face mirrored in John’s; the hard set of the war veteran’s mouth was a duplicate of Wyatt’s, inherited from his stern but caring mother, Victoria.

The fire crackled in the hearth as Wyatt’s attention slid to the photograph tucked beside his grandfather. Its frame was a bit tarnished, the right corner broken from when he’d tossed it across the room in a fury. He’d had the glass replaced since then, but the memory of its brokenness still hung at the fringes of his thoughts.

Though the sepia-toned photograph lacked the vibrant color of life, Wyatt knew that the pair of eyes that stared resolutely back at him were as green as the hills of Pleasant Valley. He could trace the soft, barely distinguishable track of freckles across the full cheeks with his eyes closed, and the imperious lift of the chin was as familiar to him as his own beating heart.

Wyatt’s fingers drifted over the face of Clara Howard, desperate for warm flesh and given only dead, cool glass in return.

He braced his hands on the mantel and stared into the eyes of the photograph. Wyatt knew precisely when the picture had been taken; he’d made sure the bruises had been covered before Clara sat for it. She’d promised him—she’d promised—that she wouldn’t disobey him again. And yet she had, and would again, as he could tell by the careful, purposeful way she held her chin. Wyatt could tell she’d done it just before the photo was taken. It was a dare, a small act of defiance forever etched onto film and now framed and put on display in his office.

Wyatt couldn’t help but feel as though his hand was slipping from the gun. Clara had a way of doing that to a man, he begrudgingly admitted as his fingers dug into the mantel. Even in her absence, she still found ways to make him remember—to remind him—that he wasn’t entirely in control of her.

A knock sounded from the door. Wyatt didn’t bother saying anything; he kept his eyes on Clara’s as the door opened and Eden Bennett slipped quietly into the office.

Eden had the good sense to wait until Wyatt finally, reluctantly, tore his eyes from Clara’s. He faced Eden and raised his eyebrows expectantly.

“Parker’s narrowed them down to the area of Devil’s Ridge,” Eden explained as he tucked his hands into his pockets.

Wyatt strode to his desk and sat. He gestured for his companion to do the same as he pulled his cigarette case from his jacket pocket. He offered one to Eden, who took it gratefully, and took a moment to light each one before he spoke.

“That doesn’t sound very narrow to me,” Wyatt said flatly. He blew out a plume of smoke and added pointedly, “Tell him to try harder, if he wants to earn his keep.”

Eden nodded and sat back in the chair. He let a moment of silence sit between them before he asked, “What would you like to do about her, sir?”

Wyatt’s eyes flicked to the photograph. Many things, he wanted to say, and none of them she’d like. But he turned his attention back to Eden and replied, “I thought I made it clear the first time. Make her think she’s safe. She doesn’t know we know where she is—yet.”

His companion nodded sagely. “You want me to give the go ahead, then?”

The rasping, deliberate gruffness of John Everly’s voice whispered in Wyatt’s ear. There’s only two types of people in this world, son: the ones holding the gun, and the ones getting shot. I think you know which side you belong on—which side you were born to be on.

It was time Clara was reminded that the past wasn’t something you could outrun. Her future belonged to him; whatever moments of freedom he allowed her to enjoy were running short, and it was high time she came to understand that.

It would make matters much easier in the end, when he got her back.

Wyatt tapped the ashes of his cigarette into the tray on his desk. “Send only three. We wouldn’t want to alarm her.”

Eden nodded but his expression remained wary. “If they should survive—”

“They won’t.” Wyatt knew his Clara. She would leave no stone unturned, would leave no trace of him behind. And if Parker’s information was right—if the man she’d been seen with was part one of those ridiculous gangs—then there certainly wouldn’t be anything left of his men by the time all was said and done.

Besides, he thought with a smirk, there was still time before his final act. He wasn’t entirely beyond feeling, after all—he’d make sure Clara had her freedom before he took every inch of it away.

Chapter Text

Clara Howard crossed her arms, lifted her chin, and declared with decisiveness, “No.”

Arthur Morgan let out a long, tired sigh. He gave her a withering look and said, “I ain’t asking you, Ms. Howard—I’m telling you.”

She glared at him. “I didn’t realize it was suddenly acceptable for you to tell me to do anything.”

He tossed the two prairie bird carcasses onto the ground. “Let me ask you something,” Arthur drawled as he rounded on her. “They got hunting in New Jersey?”

Clara huffed and deigned not to answer. He wouldn’t like it if she did.

Arthur’s hands gripped his belt in that infuriatingly arrogant manner he had. “I’m assuming they do. Now,” he added with a shrug and a smirk, “I’m assuming you ain’t had much experience in such matters, being such a learned lady and all, but we all gotta earn our keep.”

She snorted. “First of all,” she said as she took a few deliberate steps toward him, “I earn my keep just fine, thank you very much. Second of all, hunting was your idea—”

Arthur tilted his head back toward the heavens. “For Christ’s sake…”

Clara held up her hand to silence his retort. “And I did do my part. I shot them, didn’t I?”

Arthur bent and lifted one of the carcasses. He pointed to a slew of rather inaccurate bullet holes and raised an eyebrow at her. “You didn’t shoot them so much as butchered them,” he said. Arthur returned the bird to its place near their meager fire and leveled a pointed gaze at her. “See? Half your work’s done for you.”

She shrugged and replied dismissively, “I shot them. That’s all that matters.”

Arthur took another step toward her, closing the distance in a single step. Clara looked up at him as his presence nearly overwhelmed her. He leaned forward until every sense was filled with Arthur, sending her thoughts into a spiral.

His summer eyes locked on hers as he muttered, “You really do enjoy trying my patience, don’t you, Ms. Howard?”

Clara was desperate for air that didn’t smell of musk, leather, and cigarettes. She thought she would drown in his essence until there was nothing left of her, until there was nothing left of the world but every moment she spent with him.

She didn’t want to feel like this—out of control and yet so firmly grounded.

Clara swallowed thickly and settled back into her resolute distance. She forced a smirk onto her face and said, “I wouldn’t want to lower your expectations of me, Mr. Morgan.”

He stared at her. One moment stretched into the next until they were made of the moments in which neither of them said a word. And yet, the roaring, encompassing feeling of drowning still flickered at the edges of Clara’s being, reminding her of what remained buried and what was so desperately clawing for the surface.

Arthur’s eyes dipped toward her lips for half a moment. They returned just as quickly, this time with a stark, deliberate resolution etched into their intoxicating mélange of sky, ocean, and precious gold.

For a moment—just one, single breath of a moment—Clara wondered what it would be like to…

“I’ll skin the damn birds,” he blurted finally, angrily, and whirled away from her, his chest heaving, and his cheeks dabbed with pink. He waved toward the fireside and added, “You just sit down and relax. Wouldn’t want you to strain yourself, now.”

He stalked toward the birds, anger etched into every movement. Clara watched for a moment as he snatched up the carcasses, drew his knife, and squatted by the fire.

Clara took in her first full breath in minutes, frowned angrily at Arthur’s back, and made her way to the opposite side of the fire.

*

Arthur Morgan nearly tore the feathers from the bird carcass, tossed them to the ground, and tried desperately not to look at Clara.

She sat opposite him, her legs folded beneath her and a whetstone in her hand. Clara dragged her knife’s edge along the stone in long, deliberate strokes, each one expertly crafted and a testament to whatever hidden past she kept buried beneath snide remarks and knowing, sidelong glances.

Arthur let the sound of the sharpening blade match the pattering of his wild heart. He slid his own knife between the meat and skin of the prairie bird as he dragged the blade along the squat, sloping body of the rather skinny bird. These, at least, would sustain them for the duration of the afternoon and into the night until they made their way back to camp. The day had been long—a job in Heritage and some required hunting for Pearson, who wouldn’t shut his goddamn mouth about it—and he’d foolishly allowed himself to believe that he could escape the day’s clutches unscathed.

But, as per usual, Clara Howard’s insistent, abrasive nature got the better of him.

His knife cut free a swath of leathery skin as the herbal scent of lavender and mint taunted him. Arthur frowned and set to dismantling the carcass as quickly as he could. As long as he focused on the task—the carving, the slicing, breathing—then he wouldn’t feel so much like the ground was shaking beneath him.

Hunting was an exacting science. Arthur had to learn young, especially in the months in which his mother sickened. Lyle Morgan spent most of Arthur’s formative years stumbling between committing larceny to fueling his drinking and gambling habits and beating the hope out of his only son.

Contrary to popular belief, there was a time in which Arthur still held onto a shred of hope—for his mother’s recovery, his father’s redemption, and a life free of the bonds that steered him so directly onto the path of an outlaw. That had all faded the moment Arthur killed his first buck in order to make sure his mother had food.

She’d died soon after. Arthur had never quiet rid himself of the blood that stained his hands; instead he’d added to it tenfold, drenching his hands and body in the blood of his enemies until there was nothing left but the bullets he fired and the skulls he split in the process.

Arthur tugged free the last bit of skin from the bird and threw it aside. He paused, took a breath, and chanced a look at Clara.

The fire danced across her skin as the sunlight gave way to the slanting shadows of late afternoon. Her face was tight with concentration as she continued to sharpen her blade. If Arthur focused long enough, he could just make out the way the sunlight hit the crimson hidden in her hair.

Arthur found himself wondering what it would be like to run his fingers along the length of her tightly woven braid.

The thought crashed through him and rattled every bone in his body. He froze, his knuckles tightening around the knife as he fought for control over his thoughts. But each time he grasped for them they fell through his grip and spiraled out of his reach.

Arthur removed the meatiest parts of the bird from the carcass and forced his thoughts to focus on the things he could understand: the deliberate, exacting edge of a knife; blood staining his calloused fingers; and a lifeless, limp body at his feet.

He speared a cut of meat on the tip of his knife and held it over the fire. The birds had been lean, a bit younger than he would’ve generally cared for, but the fire crackled with their juices all the same. The smell wafted through Arthur’s senses and sent his stomach into a frenzy. He hadn’t eaten since that morning in camp—if one could call Pearson’s idea of food sustenance, that is. Arthur sighed and twisted the knife to allow the remaining raw bits to cook. He peered at the meat and, deciding it still needed a few minutes more, didn’t bother to stop his eyes as they lifted once more toward Clara.

The whetstone was gone, and her knife sheathed. Instead, Arthur discovered that she’d stretched her legs out toward the fire and unwound her braid. Clara kept the gentle waves of her hair over her shoulder as she combed her fingers through it, wincing every now and then as they snagged on a particularly troublesome knot. Her cheek was turned toward the fire, the elegant cut of her jaw placed on prominent display.

For a moment, Arthur lost himself in the way she ran her fingers through her hair. For a moment, he imagined his fingers slipping through the strands and how they would feel as they ran against his calloused, rough hands.

He hissed and cursed as the fire flared and nipped at his hand. Arthur tugged the knife back as his heart crashed against his ribs.

Once, he’d thought it innocent to allow such thoughts to have dominion over him. Mary had ignited feelings he’d thought himself incapable of, though they’d eventually drowned him in sorrow and despair. And Eliza…

He gritted his teeth and stared at the now fully cooked haunch of meat. Arthur had ruined the poor girl and suffered the consequences. If he let himself think of Clara in that way…

But he didn’t, he silently reaffirmed to himself. It didn’t matter that he’d been able to carefully construct a mimicry of what her hair would feel like in the moments he’d been watching her. It didn’t matter that Arthur was fairly certain that her hair could be likened to silk, its color precious and marvelous to match.

These were the sorts of thoughts that drove a man to madness. These were the sorts of thoughts that would twist their way around his better judgment and bring him swiftly to his end.

More than that, these were the sorts of thoughts reserved for better men, ones who did not ruin and wreck with hatred and violence.

Arthur thrust his knife and the accompanying meat toward Clara. She blinked at him as she tied a leather string on the end of her newly formed braid.

“What about you?” she asked as she held the meat up toward her mouth.

He smirked at her and nodded toward the bird nearly torn asunder by her gun. “Oh, I’m sure I’ll survive just fine on some bullet fragments and flecks of meat, Ms. Howard.”

Clara rolled her eyes and took the proffered meat from his hand. She peered at it in a rather questionable way before taking a bite.

Arthur sighed and shook his head as he began to clean the other bird. “Sorry we ain’t got our finest caviar for your consumption this evening,” he muttered as he slipped his knife into the carcass.

“You know,” Clara said around a mouthful of meat, “imagine how much more we could accomplish if you spent half as much time actually doing something as you do being unnecessarily sarcastic.”

Oh, she was one to talk. He paused in his task, his hands sticky with blood and bits of feather, and lazily pointed his knife toward her. “You mean like how you was doing things this afternoon in Heritage?”

He watched as her face darkened a bit at the dig. After delivering pointed glare, she held out her arms to indicate their meager camp. “And yet, here we are, whole and hale, no thanks to you.”

Arthur tore the rest of the skin from the second bird. “Whole and hale for now,” he said dubiously as he held the bird aloft. He was fairly certain he could get an ounce, maybe two, of meat from the bird before leaving the rest for vultures. “Before I die of starvation, anyhow.”

Clara, her dinner finished, swiped the blade on the leg of her trousers. “You could’ve had half my portion.”

He stared at her. “I don’t like it much when you’re mad, Ms. Howard, and I ain’t too keen on seeing how you act when you’re hungry.”

Clara muttered something under breath that sounded vaguely as though she were threatening to show him just how angry she could be.

Arthur settled beside the fire and cooked his meager rations. He frowned as the fire rendered what little fat clung to the bird’s thigh and left a rather thin, mottled tangle of flesh that he hoped would stave off the worst of his roaring hunger. He never thought he’d admit it, but he had a sudden longing for Pearson’s cooking.

They lingered in silence for a moment as the fire crackled around them. Arthur finished his meal (if one could call it that) and quickly cleaned his blade before sliding it back into the sheath on his belt. The afternoon waned slowly into nightfall; the forest waited for the night with bated breath as the breeze drifted off the nearby mountains and into the full canopies that stretched above their heads. Already the shadows between the trees began to lengthen; they wouldn’t make it back to camp before nightfall. Rather than risk navigating the treacherous, hidden paths back to Deepwater Pass, Arthur knew it would be better to stay the night at the base of the peaks and head off at first light.

His eyes traveled through the fire until they landed on Clara. Her legs were folded against her chest, her arms wrapped loosely around them. She laid her cheek atop her knees as she stared idly into the depths of the fire, her face a mask of blank quietude.

He hadn’t wanted to ask her on the way to their camp site. Instead they’d hunted and Arthur thought the question would bury itself in the depths of his memory. But it rose unbidden now as the fire crackled between them, lighting their way against the encroaching dark.

He hadn’t wanted to ask her then, but he certainly wanted to now.

No, that wasn’t quite true—Arthur needed to know now.

Because if his suspicions were valid, then he wasn’t sure where that was going to leave the two of them. Arthur focused for a moment on the way the bright, molten yellow flames glittered against the flecks of gold in her eyes.

Arthur didn’t want to feel like he was watching her fade from him with every second that passed. He cleared his throat. Clara didn’t move but her eyes regained their sharp focus and flitted straight to him.

“You gonna tell me what all that business was about in town?”

Her brow furrowed for half a moment as she considered his question. Arthur watched intently and saw the moment that his meaning sank in.

She lifted her head slowly and nestled her chin between the peaks of her knees. Clara shrugged and answered softly, “I don’t know what you—”

Arthur steeled his will and laced it into the two words he delivered to her next. “Don’t lie.”

Clara did not fold beneath his will. Arthur could see her defiance rise to meet it, see it rail against the imposition he placed upon her. He waited, holding her green eyes with his, until he saw her jaw tighten and the hardness of yielding slip into the corners of her eyes.

Arthur waited for her to speak. He wanted her to tell the truth—he wanted her to trust him.

But he didn’t think she would.

*

Clara had waited for him to ask about the men the moment they stepped foot into the base of the mountains.

He hadn’t said so, but she knew the slow, impossibly patient path they carved out of Heritage into the foothills and finally toward the southern base of Devil’s Ridge (a direction decidedly out of range of the hidden paths that led to Deepwater Pass) was his methodical, silent way of saying he knew there was trouble.

And that she’d been the cause of it.

She hadn’t wanted to think anything of the men that had spotted her outside of the post office. They’d already completed the job Trelawney had offered them—a stage traveling to Blackwater through the Sawmill Plains outside of Heritage—and had stopped in the aforementioned town to gather some supplies and check on the mailbox of Tacitus Kilgore.

Clara had opted to wait outside while Arthur handled business. She’d been leaning against the wooden slats of the building, staring idly at the quiet town, when the trio had snagged her attention.

At first, they seemed hardly more than the unseemly sort that traversed a town like Heritage for a day or so and, finding it wanting, slipped quietly away into memory. But they lingered like black shadows against the sun, and so Clara turned her attention toward them. A man with a fiercely red beard that rivaled the color of Sean Macguire’s hair, who was clearly the ringleader, spat a wad of tobacco onto the ground near the hitching posts. He’d delivered a surly look upon the town, as though it did him offense simply by existing. The one on his right was a bit older and more mottled by time and aggravation, judging by the pockmarked skin of his face. The third and youngest seemed eager but wary, as though unsure just what such an adventure of their particular brand might yield.

She’d been about to turn away when the red-haired one looked at her.

It was the sort of feeling that pervaded her better judgment; the sort that was penetrating, encompassing, and felt far too much like she was a helpless, gulping fish skewered on the hook of a dastardly, ill-mannered fisherman.

Clara had waited a beat and sent her own somewhat stilted look of defiance back at the man. They both looked away and Clara had glanced through the window of the post office to assess how much longer Arthur would be. The glance had revealed that he was in deep conversation with the rather wilted looking man at the desk, which she took to mean that Arthur was indeed reminding the man just who was in charge at that particular moment.

When she’d turned back around, the man was once more staring at her. This time the look had lost its morbid interest and became something else entirely.

This time it was the look a predator gave its target.

Clara had bristled and fought the urge to reach for her knives. Trelawney’s job hadn’t exactly gone to plan (that was a separate matter for an entirely different moment of consideration) but there hadn’t been any witnesses. A quick assessment out of the corner of her eye deemed them not to be the men who’d been guarding the wagon of bank funds, or anyone closely associated with the company.

The twisting, writhing feeling in her gut only worsened when the red-haired man leaned to his pockmarked companion and whispered something in his ear. He kept his eyes firmly on Clara all the while.

A singular dark thought eclipsed all the others in her mind. She felt its presence like lead in her veins, breathed in its poisonous vapors until the only thing left holding her to reality was the wood at her back and Arthur’s presence as he exited through the doors.

He’d muttered something about the postmaster being nothing more than a fool who made a living fooling other fools and paused when he’d seen the stark, burgeoning worry lingering on her face. Clara took a steadying breath as Arthur’s attention slipped to the men who, upon seeing his bulk sidle up next to Clara, chose that moment to seem intently occupied with the town’s well-being.

Arthur had gestured with his chin toward the trio. “They been here long?”

Clara shrugged and shook her head. “Not that I’ve noticed.”

He’d stared at her and she bore the brunt of his scrutiny. She tried to bury the thought that compounded all her fears, but it rose unbidden each time, breaking through her walls and into the fortress she’d made of her heart.

It couldn’t be. She was just imaging things; that’s what paranoia did to you, after all. But every time she tamped down the suspicion, she could feel its sinister presence lingering at the back of her mind.

Arthur peered questioningly at her. “You know them, Ms. Howard?”

She shook her head immediately. “No.”

His gaze slipped back to them for a moment. His face was that of the outlaw, the man you would only cross at risk of your own life. “You sure about that?”

Clara couldn’t stand it anymore. She’d pushed away from the wall and slipped down the stairs, keeping her attention anywhere but at the men. Marion whickered at her in greeting as Arthur sauntered along behind her, every inch of him drenched in the swagger that defined him. He cast a single cautiously threatening look at the men before he reached out and patted Boadicea’s neck.

He didn’t say anything to her as they traveled out of town and up their tauntingly slow path into the forest. A part of her had wanted him to ask; it would have given her a sense of relief to admit that, yes, she did think she knew who those men were.

Or, more to the point, who they worked for.

But Clara hadn’t wanted to admit her fear to Arthur. She didn’t want to give it life, to breathe some semblance of sentience into the wiles of the nightmares that so often haunted her during the day.

But now, she couldn’t escape that look in his eye.

It was the same one he’d given her the day after he’d asked if she had his back: rife with doubt and hoping against all hope that she would be honest.

Liars had a way of understanding when honesty was necessary and when it would only serve to destroy. This moment was one of the latter.

Clara considered her response and mulled over each word in turn. She forced her mouth to mold the syllables in a way that seemed true without giving too much of herself away. It wasn’t that she was afraid of what Arthur would do if she gave him too much of her past, too much of what she held close to her heart.

She was afraid of what he wouldn’t do with it.

All of this amounted to the only response Clara could give him.

“I don’t know who they were,” she said slowly, carefully enunciating each word. “I would tell you if I did.”

It was partly the truth. The rest of it she kept hidden: that Clara suspected that the red-haired man and his companions had recognized her. Recognition meant that she was sought, and the only one who sought her was…

She looked away, tucked her cheek against her knees, and prayed Arthur would believe her.

But he rose, his face dark with shadows. Clara tried not to look at him, not to see her lie reflected in the tightly knit anger of his face.

“I told you not to lie,” he replied darkly.

Clara faced him. She let her arms drop to her sides and lifted her chin. “I’m not lying, Arthur.”

The problem with lying for a living meant that they often became blended with the truth, until the world was made of lies that appeared true and truths that remained resolutely unreliable.

He leveled an accusatory finger at her. “You ain’t telling me the truth, neither.”

She pressed her lips together. “I don’t know how they knew me, Arthur. If I did, I would tell you.” Clara didn’t voice the suspicion she harbored in the darkness of her heart. She had a fair guess as to how the men had recognized her without a bounty poster or the knowledge of her real name floating among the mouths of the towns they visited.

Arthur looked away. His hands clenched into fists at his sides. The fading light of the sun and the flickering flames of the fire cast long shadows over his face, but it was not enough to dampen what Clara saw there.

It wasn’t just anger; it was betrayal, the threat of it at least, and its presence was near enough to crack through the armor shielding Clara’s heart.

Arthur wouldn’t look at her when he said, “I ain’t gonna force you to tell me your secrets.” He paused and looked at her, his eyes shadowed and brooding enough to cut her to the quick. “But you sure as hell best not expect me to defend them.”

She should tell him.

Clara mulled over the thought, turned it over and over in an effort to find a reason to dismiss it. Her secret was hers and hers alone; she harbored it not out of fear but because it served as a reminder to never open her heart again.

But the longer she looked at Arthur, the more she wondered if her secret was only hers now. She shifted where she sat, her fingers digging into the dirt beneath her. He was watching her carefully, but every moment she remained silent was another in which he pushed her away.

Clara could see it happening. The frost of indifference threatened the summer in the center of his eyes; just as she’d erected walls around her heart, so had Arthur, and he would keep her out if he had to.

Tell him.

She looked away and swallowed. Her chest felt tight, her stomach roiled, and her nails crept furiously into the ground in an effort to keep her steady.

Tell him.

Could he understand? Would he look at her the same way if he knew the worst of the secrets she carried with her?

Clara took a shaking, shuddering breath. She reached for lies and found nothing to save her from the truth she knew she should give to Arthur.

Because he wasn’t like Byers.

He wouldn’t tear her apart until there was nothing left but tatters. Arthur would never leech the life from her until she was but a shadow of the person she used to be.

Arthur was different. Clara knew it but was too afraid to admit it.

She faced him. Clara opened her mouth, formed the words, and thought about how they would sound when she finally, finally, gave them life.

But before she could utter a single word, three shapes slipped out of the shadows between the trees and into the camp.

*

Arthur Morgan knew secrets were as dangerous as they were valuable.

He harbored more than a few of his own; they haunted him in the night, followed him like ghosts in the day. He paid for them in blood and took them with the barrel of a gun, and still they would not leave him in peace. He didn’t deserve that peace, that much was for sure and certain.

And yet, he stood by the fire and watched Clara through the flames, begging her to share hers with him.

Arthur had no right to demand this of her. But the men in the town had made him unsettled, and the look the red-haired one had given Clara just before Arthur stepped back outside had made his blood burn hotly in his veins.

Secrets demanded more secrets; they were never satiated, never satisfied with less than what they felt they were owed. Arthur knew this and still wanted more from Clara than she was willing to give. And he had the audacity to stand before her, his own secrets clawing away at his heart, reluctant to share them aloud in exchange for hers.

She would scoff at him if he told her about Mary; she would never look at him the same way again if he told her about Eliza and Isaac.

Arthur couldn’t bear that—he would bear anyone else’s hatred, had already done so for more years than he could count, but he could not survive it if it came from Clara.

He watched her open her mouth.

He waited for her to say something, anything, to make the world stop feeling like it was listing and sending him off balance.

But before Clara could speak, something shifted at the corner of Arthur’s vision. His head whipped toward the disturbance, his hand sliding instinctively to his revolver. His hackles rose as three shapes cut themselves out of the afternoon shadows and into the lingering rays of sun that swept across their camp.

Arthur didn’t take his eyes from the men as he turned his head slightly toward Clara.

“Mae,” he muttered, “get up to the ridge.”

Clara was already staring at their new arrivals. She rose, her movements wary and stiff, and shook her head. “I’m not leaving you behind.”

Arthur drew his weapon as his eyes slid to a flaming beard. His mouth twisted into a grimace as he growled, “I’ll hold them off and follow when I can.”

She hesitated a moment. Arthur’s hackles rose as the men drew ever closer. If she didn’t go now, then…

He tore his attention away from the men and hissed at her, “Now, Mae. Go!”

Clara gave him a single, tortured look of indecision before darting off into the trees behind their camp. The ridge wasn’t far; Arthur could see it just between the trees, rising above the rest of the forested landscape. It wouldn’t take Clara long to get there.

That allowed him just enough time to have a much-needed conversation with these intruders.

Arthur’s focus narrowed to the men as they lingered on the boundary of the camp, their heads swiveling around as they searched for something they couldn’t see.

They wouldn’t find her—not if Arthur had anything to say about it.

And, unfortunately for them, he wasn’t at a loss for words.

“You boys look a little lost,” he called out as he sauntered toward them. He nodded toward the southern slope of the hillside and said, “The main road’s back that way.”

The man with the red beard—clearly the one in charge, given that the other two were hardly more than a whelp and a mottled-looking fool—had the good sense to raise his hands slightly as he approached Arthur.

“Don’t mean you no harm, friend,” the man said with clear, cool confidence. “We’re just looking for someone, is all.”

Arthur silently damned himself for not taking better care when laying the false trail out of Heritage. He’d been so preoccupied with the secrets Clara held that he hadn’t been focused enough to hide them properly.

He leveled a sharp, unyielding gaze at the man. “Like I said, road is that way. Might want to move on before dark.” Arthur let the warning sink into each word as the grip on his revolver tightened.

“‘Fraid I can’t do that,” the man replied while his companions watched Arthur with wary expressions. “Now,” he said as he his hand slipped slowly to his weapon, “Where is she?”

Arthur bristled and lifted his gun. “I ain’t too sure who you mean.”

The red-bearded man nodded to his two companions. They stepped into the camp, their eyes swiveling along the remnants of their dinner and the packs they’d taken off the horses.

Arthur aimed his gun at the nearest one.

In an instant, the red-bearded man’s gun followed suit.

He breathed slowly, evenly, and let the familiar cool steel in his hand drain every thought from his mind, save for one.

If they harmed Clara—if they so much as threatened her—he would deliver them to the gates of hell himself.

The red-bearded man chanced a step forward while his companions leveled their own weapons at Arthur. He paid them no mind; the skewed odds weren’t enough to topple Arthur’s purpose.

“I ain’t asking you twice, friend,” the man snarled. “We saw you with her earlier; we tracked you all the way from Heritage.”

Arthur stared him down across the barrel of his gun. “That’s too bad. She ain’t here.”

The man sneered at Arthur. “Bullshit.”

Arthur took half a step toward the man, his muscles tight and itching for a fight. “You calling me a liar, partner?”

His opponent’s eyes flicked over Arthur’s bulk, quite literally sizing him up and weighing his chances of victory. The gun lowered a fraction, but the man’s beady eyes continued to bore into Arthur’s.

“Listen,” he growled, “I don’t know you from Adam. We’re being paid to fetch the girl, not to kill folk as don’t need killing.”

Arthur narrowed his eyes at the man. “Who wants her?”

All he needed was a name—a breath of a name. His gun and his fury would do the rest.

For a moment, his only response was silence. Finally, the man relented; he sighed and cursed bitterly under his breath. “Man by the name of Bennett wants her.”

Arthur seared the name into his memory. He’d find out the rest another time. For now, though, he had other business to attend to.

Arthur pulled in a sharp breath and held it in his lungs. The world shifted and narrowed, blotting out the forest, the fading sun, and the ridge on which Clara waited. All he could see were the heads of the three men. All he could see were three targets that needed to be eliminated.

Arthur fired three shots in rapid succession. Their bodies fell to the ground before they could think to return fire.

He frowned at the bodies. Then, he holstered his weapon and turned to begin the trek to the ridge.

A shot rang through the air, forcing Arthur to duck instinctively.

“Shit,” he cursed as he skittered toward the trees. He drew his revolver again and sidled up along the trunk of the nearest tree.

Shouts rang up from beyond the trees.

Of course there would be reinforcements.

*

Clara pressed her back against the boulders that blocked her from sight on the ridge. She gritted her teeth and gripped her knife until her knuckles went white.

She should have told him.

She should have told him before he dismissed her from the camp to face the men alone. Clara should have told him before she ran through the forest, the branches whipping at her cheeks and her lungs shrinking with the desperate effort of her breathing.

Three shots rang out, thundering through the air and cutting her regret to shreds.

The forest quieted in the wake of the gunshots. Clara listened, straining her ears for the sound of Arthur’s approach. Her blood pumped hotly in her veins and her pulse quickened; her heart tightened in her chest as though caught in a vice grip.

Arthur had made it.

Clara let the thought sink in until it anchored her pulse and steadied her breathing. There wasn’t a gun out there, hired or otherwise, that could face Arthur and expect to win.

Arthur had made it, because if he didn’t…

Another shot crashed through the air. This time, Clara paid little heed to caution. She pushed up onto the rock, carefully holding her knife and her revolver in her hands. Clara stayed low, hoping the shadows of oncoming night would keep her out of sight.

For a moment, she heard and saw nothing.

Then she spotted a figure expertly ducking beneath branching and leaping over errant rocks and other obstacles of the forest.

Clara let out a breath and felt the sweet wave of relief crash over her. It was Arthur.

A moment later he scrambled up the ridge. Clara slid back down the rocks and sheathed her knife as he joined her. He crouched beside her, his brow beaded with sweat, as he cast a dark look over at the rocks behind them.

Clara frowned at him. “You didn’t kill them?”

Arthur shook his head. “‘Course I kill them.” He nodded toward the crashing sounds of pursuit. “Seems your friends had more friends.”

Her breath hitched in her lungs.

She should have told him.

“I guess you’re quite popular with the vagrants, ain’t you, miss?” he said with dripping sarcasm.

Clara let out a bitter laugh. “And I thought you were a gunslinger, Mr. Morgan.”

He rolled his eyes and glanced over the top of the rocks. Another shot rang out in warning. Arthur ducked again and murmured, “Stay low. Don’t move until I tell you.”

The crashing footsteps slowed and lingered just beneath them. Clara listened and did her best to assess the number—three, maybe four men. She set her feet, steeling herself against the ache in her legs, and gripped her knife to make it easier to strike

Arthur whispered to her, “They’re below us.”

A voice called up from below them. “We want the woman. We ain’t leaving here without her.”

Clara’s heart pattered wildly in her chest. She glanced at Arthur; his back was flush against the rock, his revolver held at the ready. It wasn’t easy to miss the tight, grim expression on his face.

They weren’t going to stop until they had her—he wasn’t going to stop until he had her. And now Arthur…

She sucked in a breath and whispered, “Arthur.”

He didn’t look at her, but she saw his eyes flick in her direction.

Clara tried to steady the sound of her voice. “They won’t stop until they have me.” She tried to ignore the slight waver in the words, as though they rippled across the surface of untamed waters.

Arthur said nothing.

She swallowed tightly. “Arthur—”

His frown deepened. “They ain’t getting you.”

Clara shook her head. “You don’t understand.”

This time, he turned and looked at her. The embers of his summer eyes smoldered. “Oh, I understand just fine.”

His words were venom. Clara felt their sting as they hit home, nearly sending her reeling with their potency. He didn’t trust her, then—how could he, when she hadn’t been entirely honest with him?

But Arthur set his jaw and said, “They want you, but they will not have you, Mae.”

It was rare that Clara Howard was left speechless. Words were as useful as her knives, at times more lethal than steel, and she harbored them as closely as the secrets she carried. But this time, she could only gape in wild shock at the deliberate conviction in Arthur’s words.

Even though he’d ask for her secret and she hadn’t told him, even though he’d told her he wouldn’t defend those secrets, Arthur still hadn’t given up on her.

A strange, rather unsettling feeling crept in just beneath the apprehension that sat heavily in her chest. She tried to name it, tried to find a way to hold onto it, but it slipped away as the men below the ridge called out once more.

“Claramae Howard!” The man shouted her name like a curse and the forest seemed to shudder beneath its weight. “Come out now, or we’ll start shooting!”

Grim, unrelenting resolve filled her heart, swiftly replacing the chill of fear. She wasn’t going to hide and cower anymore. If Byers wanted her, he was going to have try a lot harder than this to get her back. Perhaps she couldn’t outrun her past, but she sure as shit could outwit it.

Arthur straightened a bit and placed his hand on the rock for steadiness. Clara laid a hand on his arm.

“I have a plan,” she whispered with a decidedly cunning smirk.

*

Clara stumbled only once as Arthur led her down the ridge toward the men.

His hand was tight on her arm—a falsehood to make her look like a captive but a steady, reassuring grip in disguise. It was his hand that held her upright as she feigned an attempt to twist out of his grip once the men were in view. It was his hand that had pulled her swiftly back to her feet when her boot slipped in the mess of leaves on the ground.

She kept her hands raised when the barrels of the men’s guns finally swiveled and landed on her.

Clara turned her head a fraction toward Arthur. “Just follow the plan.”

He grunted and made a show of shoving her forward. The barrel of his revolver hovered just above her right temple.

Arthur had flatly refused to hold her at gunpoint when she’d revealed her plan. To be fair, he’d protested the plan in its entirety, but Clara insisted that he follow her through it.

“Trust me,” she’d whispered to him. It wasn’t a statement designed to alleviate the reluctance she saw in his eyes; it was a plea, a silent beg for him to do what she had no right to ask of him. But Arthur had insisted that he take out the men one by one—he was the better shot, after all, and if they didn’t know where she was, they might be able to get out of this unscathed.

Clara had shaken her head and declared firmly, “We do this together, or not at all.”

She’d expected him to dismiss the notion. How could they do this together when harboring the ghosts of her past inevitably kept them apart?

But Arthur had relented. He’d trusted her, when she hadn’t given him enough reason to do so.

Clara eyed the men carefully. The other three had been more put together, more the sort that Byers would have hired in order to track her down. These men were a ragtag group—all of them were weathered with age, their hands gnarled and nearly fitted to the grips of their guns.

These men weren’t here to capture her.

They were meant to remind her that there was nowhere she could hide where Byers wouldn’t find her.

Arthur stopped a few yards away from the men. His stance shifted until Clara felt the entirety of his bulk at her back. “How much is she worth?”

One of the men stepped forward and Arthur tightened his grip on her arm. He pulled her back against his chest and Clara let her body mold to his solid, carved muscle.

The man lowered his gun as he eyed the revolver near her head. “Price ain’t for you, mister.” The man gestured to himself and the three men behind him as he added pointedly, “It’s for us.”

Clara ran through the plan again. Thinking kept her steady; thinking kept her from making a mistake.

Arthur’s drawl sounded beside her ear. “Well, that ain’t exactly fair now, seeing as I’m the one who’s got her.”

The man was quickly losing patience. Clara eyed the men behind him, her gaze flitting over the weapons they carried. There weren’t many; clearly, they weren’t expecting much of a fight in order to capture a woman.

She fought against the smirk that tried to slip across her lips. It was always more fun when men underestimated her.

“We ain’t looking for a fight,” the man blurted impatiently. “Just give us the woman and be on your way.”

Clara felt more than saw the dangerous, cutting grin on Arthur’s lips as he snarled, “You’re looking in the wrong place if it ain’t a fight you’re looking for.” His hand tightened on her arm. “I want a share of the money.”

The man shook his head. His eyes darkened as his fingers clutched his gun. “All you’re gonna get is a bullet in your head if you don’t give her up, son.”

Clara braced herself. Adrenaline pumped hotly through her veins as Arthur made a show of considering the man’s offer.

We do this together, or not at all.

She took a few shallow breaths as Arthur let go of her arm. Then he shoved her hard enough to send her stumbling forward before she collapsed on her knees.

Right where she wanted to be.

Clara kept her head down as the man reached down and grabbed a handful of her shirt. She huddled inward and grunted as the man tried to wrench her to her feet.

He never saw her slide the knife out of her belt. The shadows of the forest hid the gleam of her knife from his sight as she buried it in his gut.

The rest unfolded in a rhythm of bullets and blades. Clara withdrew her knife and let the body fall lifelessly to the ground. She pivoted, gripped the knife despite the blood coating the handle and her hand, and threw it at the man to her left.

He dropped before he could fire his weapon.

Arthur fired on the other two. They fell heavily to the ground as the last of the gunshots echoed around them before being swallowed up by the fading afternoon shadows.

Clara bent and retrieved her knife. Her cleaned in on the fallen enemy’s shirt, staining the fabric with what was left of his life.

She straightened and sheathed the blade. Her eyes lingered on the men that littered the ground. Her breathing came in staggered gasps as the heat of battle left her feeling cold and barren in its wake.

It wasn’t often that she killed. But this is what evading Wyatt Byers got her: bodies and blood, hopelessness and fear.

Arthur holstered his weapon and took a few careful steps toward her. Each step was careful, deliberate, and not all full of the rage that pervaded Clara’s heart.

“Mae? You alright?”

She stared at the unseeing eyes of the man at her feet. It had to be done; he would have taken her back to the one person she simply could not stand to see again.

Arthur reached out a tentative hand toward her. “Mae.”

This was all Wyatt’s fault. He was rage and terror and death and he’d made her into what she was. Clara could feel the void spreading in her heart, swallowing everything in its wake. She could have been anyone, anything, and instead she was this: a wanted woman with nothing else but the past to haunt her and drive her forward.

And then Arthur’s hand was on her shoulder.

Clara started beneath his touch, but he pressed his fingertips into her flesh, holding her as steadily as he’d done before. Clara let out a shaking breath as the world tilted beneath her, despite the touch Arthur provided to keep her grounded.

Both of his hands landed on her shoulders. Clara’s pulse slowed as she felt his solid, unshaken presence behind her. She pulled in one breath, then another, and let the weight of his touch banish the emptiness that would have otherwise swallowed her whole.

“Come on,” he said softly. “Let’s get out of here.”

*

Arthur tossed another log on the fire as Clara let out another blistering curse.

She sat beside him on her bedroll, her knee propped in front of her. The leg of her trousers was rolled up, putting the bloodied cut on her knee on full display.

He frowned as she gingerly dabbed the cut with a water-soaked cloth. Apparently, Arthur had shoved a bit too hard, and the subsequent landing on her knees had resulted in the decidedly mild injury.

“Hope you don’t need stitches,” he muttered sarcastically.

She didn’t look at him though her frown deepened. “Shut up, Arthur.”

“You know,” he continued with a quick wave toward the knee, “that wouldn’t have happened if you’d let me do things my way.”

Clara turned to him and gave him a dark, brooding look. “I think you don’t like following my plans, Mr. Morgan.”

He chuckled sourly. “Of course not, seeing as how I usually end up getting shot at when I do.”

Arthur stretched his legs out toward the fire. It wasn’t the matter of getting shot at the bothered him. Hell, he didn’t consider it a normal day if he wasn’t being shot at. It wasn’t even the plan she’d hastily concocted, though Arthur hadn’t been keen on following it in the least.

And he wouldn’t have, if she hadn’t said what she did.

We do this together, or not at all.

The words still swam in Arthur’s thoughts. Being in the gang meant that everyone did their fair share for everyone else; there was no sense of solidarity where they were concerned. Arthur had held onto those bonds until they were the only thing tethering him to reality, to the flimsy belief that he might still have some sort of purpose in this world.

He shouldn’t feel like those tethers were slowly being replaced by one that Clara held.

Arthur scratched absently at his cheek and stared into the fire. Clara mumbled beside him as she tossed away the cloth and rolled down her trouser leg before stretching the infirmed leg out in front of her.

The problem was this: Arthur trusted her. He trusted her even though her secret seemed intent on dragging him into disastrous situations. And, despite what he’d told her earlier, he woulddefend her. His fury seethed at the memory of the men who’d come for her, who were hell-bent on stealing her away.

He wouldn’t say it aloud—he knew he could never quite form the words to say it properly—but Arthur would burn the world to its core before he let anyone harm her.

The thought both exhilarated and terrified him.

Arthur turned toward her. There was still one matter that needed tending to, one thing more he needed before he could sleep.

“The men from town,” he said, forming the words carefully, “they said it were a man named Bennett what wants you.”

Clara’s face was resolutely blank. Arthur kept his eyes on her as the firelight danced across her face.

Finally, she closed her eyes and let out a long, tense sigh. She tucked a strand of hair behind her ear and turned her head toward him though she kept her eyes firmly on the fire.

“Bennett is only part of the problem,” she murmured. “He works for the man who calls all the shots.”

Arthur said nothing. He’d already committed the name Bennett to his memory; he had a feeling he’d have one more to add to it in a moment.

His rage stirred when he saw the fear etched in the tightness of her jaw. Arthur almost didn’t hear her when she finally uttered a second name. It came out as a strangled whisper, one that hinted at the secret she still kept in her heart.

Clara said, “His name is Wyatt Byers.”

Arthur imagined the name as a person. He gave it life, breathed his hatred into it, and etched the sound of it into his memory. He wouldn’t rest until the man to whom the name belonged was driven from the world, if only for Clara’s sake.

He didn’t know it then, but Arthur Morgan didn’t like to see her so torn apart by apprehension. He didn’t like seeing the fire in her eyes dampened by a man hundreds of miles away.

She turned fully to face him. “Please,” she murmured, “don’t tell Dutch.”

Arthur narrowed his eyes. “Why?”

Clara shook her head and her jaw tightened. “He wouldn’t understand.”

He shook his head and tossed his hands in the air. “Hell, I don’t even understand. All I know is that whatever you’re running from is catching up to you, Mae. When it does, it ain’t just you it’s gonna affect.”

Clara sighed and covered her face with her hands. Arthur regretted his words immediately; he was never much for comfort.

When she lowered her hands, a cold, stiff resolve lingered in her expression. “He won’t stop until I go back to him—either by choice or by force.”

Arthur’s pulse sped up a bit. “Do you want to go back?”

He didn’t know what he would do if she said yes.

Clara sighed and looked away. “Maybe I should.” She shrugged, every ounce of her defiance gone and washed away. “It’s not fair to have you caught up in all this. He’s a powerful man with powerful connections, Arthur.”

A more sensible man would have agreed and sent her on her way. A man with less to lose than Arthur would have packed her belongings, set her up on her horse, and watched her ride away just to spare himself the trouble. Arthur didn’t only have himself to think about, after all; he had the rest of the gang—he had Dutch and Hosea—and this wasn’t his decision to make.

But Arthur said the only thing he could think of to say.

“No,” he muttered decisively. Clara turned sharply toward him and he said with iron-clad resolution, “We do this together, or not at all.”

Arthur was surprise he’d said it.

He was even more surprised that he’d meant every word.

Clara’s lips eventually curled into a smile. Arthur felt relieved at the sight of it.

“See, Arthur?” Clara said as she stretched out onto her bedroll. “You do appreciate my plans.”

Arthur shook his head and pinched the bridge of his nose between his fingers. “Appreciate ain’t exactly the word I’d use, Ms. Howard.”

“Sure, it is,” she said with a loud yawn. She folded her arms behind her head and let her eyes close. “And now you can keep first watch.”

Arthur rolled his eyes but stayed up anyway.

He would never admit it, but at one point during his watch, his eyes slid away from the dark forest and to the sleeping form beside the fire.

Months ago, Arthur wouldn’t have thought her worth all this trouble. But now, as he watched the steady rise and fall of her chest, he thought differently.

Now, he thought maybe—just maybe—she was worth far more than he could fathom.

Chapter Text

It was not often that Deputy Errol Hawkins gravitated toward anger.

He prided himself on keeping a level head; it was, in his opinion, what set the lawmen apart from the rest of the rabble that threatened to upend the balance of justice in these still as yet untamed lands. Errol had grown up in the decidedly small town of Virtue on the edge of the borders that separated New Yorkshire from West Elizabeth. His mother, god rest her, had lived just long enough to birth Errol and his four other siblings, all of whom had succumbed to the greed and unfairness that ran rife through these lands. He’d been the only one who’d worked hard and long enough to achieve his position as a deputy in Kingston, the only place where he could find some semblance of balance and order. He’d cut his teeth on grit and filled his soul with the patience of a saint; one had to, in this world, and Errol held onto the idea of it as tightly as he did the idea of fair and clean justice.

At least, that what he’d believed before this whole business with Byers and the woman.

The deputy stalked into the office and staunchly ignored the sight of his boss, heels kicked up on the desk and nose buried in a letter. It had taken him only a fraction of a moment to notice the looping, precise handwriting on the opened envelope—Byers.

Errol’s lips curdled into a deep-set frown.

He turned his attention to the bounty posters. He’d just hung another earlier that morning—a man wanted for grand larceny in two different states, most recently seen in New Yorkshire—and it seemed the offer had already been accepted.

It seemed the woman and her rather boorish companion seemed intent on cleaning up as much trouble as they caused.

The deputy glanced at Parker over his shoulder and nodded toward the missing poster. “They come and collect this one already?”

Parker nodded, sighed sharply, and tossed the letter onto the table. He wasn’t an old man, in Errol’s opinion, but the care and consideration he placed into the job had taken its toll; one had only to look at the lines of worry that creased the corners of his eyes and mouth to know that being sheriff of Kingston was more than posting bounties and wearing a battered tin star.

“She came in with that man again,” Parker mused as he folded his hands behind his head and let his gaze wander out the window. “They’ve turned into quite the bounty-loving pair.”

Errol said nothing. His hands worked at the brim of his hat as he fought for control of his mounting anger. He seemed to be doing that quite a bit, as of late; something had changed in Kingston since those two had arrived—since she had arrived—and he didn’t like it.

More to the point, he didn’t like what it was doing to the one man to whom he could look up.

Parker tapped the letter and looked over at Errol. “He’s sending us the bounty poster. Guess his patience has finally worn thin.”

So had Errol’s. “Why are you letting him play games, sheriff? It don’t make no sense.”

Just as it had every other time Errol had brought the matter up for discussion, Parker’s expression turned darkly sour. “It ain’t your call. Don’t know how many times I must remind you of that, son.”

He clenched his teeth. “I know,” Errol answered tightly, “but all this business of letting them run around this town unchecked don’t sit right with me.” Errol shook his head solemnly and went to the window. “It just don’t, boss.”

Months ago, Parker would have had the balls to tell Byers to find someone else willing to play his games. This was what happened when men with money and power thought they could rule the world: everyone else sat beneath their thumbs, waiting to breathe, to live, at the sound of their command.

Errol had looked up to Parker because of his steadfastness, his unwillingness to bend to the ones with the influence and power. If Kingston and New Yorkshire were going to be saved from the clutches of gangs and vigilantes, then they would do it with grit and determination. Now, Errol watched as Parker became the sort of man he’d sworn never to become.

He hated it. He hated being in this office and knowing that Parker listened to every goddamn word Byers said, went along with every ill-intentioned plan, and let that woman and her constituents take as many bounties as they wanted around this town. Errol knew in his heart that there was a gang hiding somewhere in the mountains of New Yorkshire, but without the sheriff’s blessing and the proper resources (of which their particular office had very few) there was no chance of rooting them out alone.

Parker’s chair groaned as he shifted his weight. Some of his old fire returned as a leveled a pointed gaze as the young deputy.

“You’re a young man,” Parker said as he stroked absently at his graying beard. “You ain’t seen too much of this world just yet; all the fear, the terror—”

Errol rolled his eyes. “Sir, please—”

Parker’s hand shot up and effectively silenced him. Errol pressed his lips together, returned his gaze to the window, and let the sheriff carry on.

“I thought justice was as clear cut as the day is long,” the man explained. “I spent my life seeing what happens when those what hold the power do and what those what don’t have any power ain’t willing to do.” Parker paused, took a breath, and sat up a bit straighter.

He said, “I prided myself on being the balance between the two. That’s what we’re supposed to be, anyhow. But times are changing, Hawkins. The ideals what founded this country are skewed; people have grown complacent and money talks louder even than them politicians in Washington. It’s up to us to decide what’s necessary in order to get the job done.”

Errol listened; he sounded so very much like the sheriff who’d hired him, who’d molded him into someone who could uphold the precarious balance of the law in the parts of the country that still sat beneath the boots of the lingering gangs of the west.

Parker rose and came to the window beside his deputy. He placed a heavy hand on the young man’s shoulder and gripped it tight, trying to distill his words into a fervor he hoped Errol would adopt.

Errol doubted very much that it would take.

“Sometimes,” Parker said wistfully, “sacrifices have to be made so that justice can be done. If it means letting Byers call the shots a while longer, then so be it.”

The sheriff said nothing else as he took his hat from the hook near the door and slipped through the door. Errol didn’t need to watch from the window to know where he’d been going. The saloon had become more of a friend to Parker than the deputy in the long days since Byers’ intervention in their matters of state. A quick flick of the eyes proved the deputy correct in his assumption.

His eyes also happened upon a trio of familiar faces just outside the general store.

The woman stood near a wagon, hands furiously on her hips as her nearly constant companion loaded supplies into the back. Errol straightened and watched what he could only assume to be an argument pass between the two. After a moment, the big man tossed a bag of grain into the wagon, stalked to where she lingered, and stood toe-to-toe with the woman while she continued her verbal assault.

A young boy with a rather nice tweed jacket and bright orange bandana sat astride the wagon and glanced impatiently at the arguing pair.

Anyone else would have seen the big one coming and run the other way. He had that surly look about him, the sort that made Hawkins immediately wary. Everything about the man was carved from violence and it was no small suspicion in Errol’s heart that he was mostly certainly looped in with one of the gangs roaming the hills.

And yet, the woman held her ground, unimpeded by the man’s presence. In fact, if Errol didn’t know any better, he could swear he caught the slight, barely perceptible manner in which they seemed to lean in closely toward one another in a way that was decidedly not antagonistic.

She was the problem, Errol thought as he watched them finish loading and mount the wagon. If she had never showed up in New Yorkshire, Byers would have never inserted himself in their business. Hawkins and Parker could have continued to mount their assault against any who threatened the law in the good and honest way they’d intended.

Errol’s hand clenched into a fist, his patience momentarily drowned by fury. He wouldn’t let this happen. He wouldn’t stand idly by while Parker wasted away into a man compliant with swift errors in judgment.

The deputy slipped away from the window as an idea struck him. He sifted through the papers on the sheriff’s desk, searching for the manifest that had arrived only a few days prior. He spotted it, tucked beneath an empty glass of whiskey, and peered at the list for something, anything, that would help him prove to Parker that not all was lost.

He grinned when opportunity gave a single, loud knock.

*

Contrary to popular belief, John Marston did not wake up itching to pick a fight with Abigail Roberts.

It just sort of happened, by natural design and her insistence that he split himself into two different people. The woman didn’t seem to understand that Dutch needed him, especially now, things being as tenuous as they were. Even after spending afternoons lying, being shot at, and fleeing the law, she still expected him to make time for the boy—to do what, John couldn’t exactly figure out, but Abigail demanded it all the same, and grew all the angrier when he refused.

This was precisely the argument they’d had earlier that morning. Abigail had shoved him and proclaimed his pathetic uselessness to the entire camp loudly enough to make John’s blood boil with fury. If it had been someone else—anyone else—he wouldn’t have hesitated to hit back.

But it was Abigail. He would never, no matter how angry she made him or how much she twisted and soiled what little self-worth he’d managed to accumulate since the day she told him she loved him.

So, John did the only thing he could do in the face of such strangled, choking emotions: He decided to rob a train.

Charles sat across the table from him. He slid his knife across the tip of the half-formed wooden spike as John cradled his head between his hands and stared at the map before him.

The main highways and train tracks that spider-webbed across New Yorkshire spread out before him. The map was a bit frayed at the edges and the well-worn creases marred some of the penned landscape; a few of the margins contained Dutch’s controlled, chaotic handwriting and Hosea’s more exact, lilting letters, highlighting the routes to avoid, those most often patrolled by law, and the ones that would provide the most convenient routes of escape, should the need arise.

Charles paused his whittling and glanced up at John. “Well?”

John sighed and jabbed a finger at the times written near the interstate train track that sliced New Yorkshire in half. He’d written them as carefully and quickly as he could after getting the information from the Kingston post office earlier that week.

“The eastbound to Blackwater should be leaving Kingston around six tonight,” John said as he tracked his finger along the track to its next stop. “According to that feller at the post office, the train should be stopping at Wallace Station.”

Charles took in the information with a slow, considerate nod. “How far is it from Kingston to the state line?”

John shrugged. He hadn’t considered that. “Two hours, maybe?”

Charles sheathed his knife, placed his spike on the table, and peered at the map. “We should ditch before or just after the border. That don’t give us a lot of time, though.”

Feeling more irritated than he had a moment ago, John looked away from the map and tried to sort through his thoughts. He needed this robbery; he needed to prove to Dutch and everyone else that he still had what it took to be in this gang. He had to prove to himself that he hadn’t lost his footing in the world, despite the fact that he felt more and more as though he had.

He shook his head and shrugged. “Then we find some help.”

Charles nodded and turned the map towards him. He gave it a moment’s inspection before he asked, “Who you thinking?”

John opened his mouth to answer (he hadn’t actually thought of a response yet, but that generally didn’t stop him) when a trill of laughter cut through the sobriety of the moment.

He knew that sound. Abigail used to sound like that around him, when she’d first joined up with the gang. Once, John Marston used to be able to make Abigail Roberts laugh.

Now, all he did was make her cry and scream and hate him.

A quick assessment of the source of her mirth brought Clara Howard into view. The women were huddled near the camp’s wash bin, the water stuffed full of laundry and soap. Clara wasn’t exactly doing much; her usefulness in the gang lay elsewhere rather than in the firm clutches of Miss Grimshaw. Clara handed Abigail laundry and took the sopping ones from the bin after she’d wrung them out.

John’s heart clenched in his chest. It wasn’t fair that Clara was making Abigail laugh like that. It wasn’t fair that John had to sit here and plan robberies to feel like he meant something to this world. Lots of things weren’t fair, but facts of life felt less fair when they brought him farther and farther apart from Abigail.

Finally, he glanced at Charles and nodded toward the women. “I got just the person.”

He got up from the table, his mind focused on his single, narrow purpose, and sauntered up to the wash bin.

“Clara,” John announced loudly, cutting through their conversation.

The women turned to him. Clara raised an eyebrow and Abigail frowned before turning her attention back to the laundry.

John bristled. He forced his attention to Clara and said, “Charles and I are looking for someone to join us on a job. You in?”

Abigail’s fists clenched around a particularly holey union suit that could only belong to Uncle. She glanced sharply up at Clara and hissed, “You said you’d help with the laundry.”

John stepped forward. “We’re robbing a train.”

Clara gaped at him. “A train? Between the two of you?”

He held out a hand to indicate her even as he looked sidelong at Abigail. “Three, if you’re in. Money’s good.”

Abigail’s hands flew to her hips. She staunchly ignored her husband (he so rarely felt like one, but he supposed he was one nonetheless, what with the boy and all) as she protested, “Well, I’m sure it ain’t worth it.”

John couldn’t help it. He said tersely, “It is worth it.”

“Sure,” she muttered as she idly pushed and shoved the laundry around the bin. “Must be more worth it than spending time with your son.”

Clara sighed and hung her head.

John, on the other hand, felt his blood sing in his veins. She couldn’t even let him have this, could she? Everything had to be an argument, everything had to be another reminder of his shortcomings. John was being perpetually punished for his sins, and they were becoming far too numerous to count.

“Mind your own business,” he snarled at Abigail. “I ain’t talking to you, anyhow.”

Clara’s head lifted and she took a cautious step forward. “Watch it, John.”

But Abigail whirled on him. She leveled a finger at his face, her expression tight with that inner fire he’d once loved so ardently. “If you spared half as much attention to your escapades as you do your son—”

“Jesus Christ, woman,” John growled. “Everything I do is to make sure you and the boy have money! What else do you want from me?”

Abigail’s mouth twisted with fury. “Money don’t buy a father’s love, John.”

He saw Clara step forward, her hand raised slightly. “Maybe you two should—”

But John couldn’t stop, not now that she’d set him off again. “And you?” he shouted with a gesture toward the half-done laundry. “All you do is sit here with the women, tending to the sewingand the washing. Maybe you should look to your own improvement before you start worrying about me.”

Abigail shoved him. “You’re a horrible man, John Marston!”

John thought of a thousand scalding things he could say to her, each one worse than the last. He held onto each one, letting them ignite his anger, until his vision tainted red. Everyone wondered why he’d left for that year; Arthur still blamed him, for Christ’s sake, but no one understood what it was like to love someone and hate them at the same time. No one understood what it was like to look at the boy who was supposed to be your son and wonder if he was ever yours to begin with.

Before he could open his mouth and make matters infinitely worse, Clara grabbed him by the arm and wrenched him away. He was surprised by her power, her insistence, and let it dampen the violence that sat so horridly in his heart.

Clara sat him forcefully back at the table. Charles eyed them with a slightly raised eyebrow as she sat between them, shooting daggers at John all the while.

“Honestly,” she muttered as she eyed the map on the table. “You need to learn when to keep your damn mouth shut, John.”

He took a few breaths before he deigned to answer. John still needed a measure of control before he spoke—whatever was left of it, anyway. “You don’t understand.”

“Oh, I understand just fine,” she said with a twisted, feral sneer. She pointed at him and said, “If I ever hear you talk to her like that again, I will gut you from stem to stern, I don’t care how much money you have to offer me. Are we clear?”

Charles looked at her with a measure of surprise.

John, for his part, glowered at her, and wondered not for the first time how Arthur ever managed to go a day without feeling like he was being flayed alive.

But John nodded all the same, if only just to stop his heart from feeling like it was being torn in two.

*

Clara tapped the map on the table. “So, what’s all this about a robbery?”

John folded his arms on the table. “Train coming in from Sacramento is supposed to be carrying cash and valuables on the way to the bank in Valentine.”

Charles shifted slightly where he sat. “We’re hoping maybe you’d be willing to help us out with the planning.”

John frowned. “It’s already planned, we don’t need no—”

Charles cut him off with a stern, unyielding looking.

He sighed and shook his head. “Could always use another set of eyes, I guess,” he muttered in futile resignation.

Clara turned the map toward her. She was still a bit put off by the entire exchange between Abigail and John, but at least the robbery would keep them apart for a few much-needed hours. Besides, she had never robbed a train before.

It sounded like marvelous fun.

She settled into the puzzle set before her. If the plan was to board at Kingston, rob the train, and get off safely before they crossed into West Elizabeth, then that left them with limited options.

It took her only a few moments to come up with a solution.

“Alright,” she said as she slapped an excited hand on the table. “We board at Kingston,” Clara began with a stab at the station on the map. “We’ll store our guns in suitcases, so no one thinks twice.” She glanced up as a thought crossed her mind. “Where are the valuables being kept?”

John folded his arms on the table. “There’s supposed to be a safe on board.”

Clara nodded, taking in the new information and weaving it into her already laid out plan. “We store dynamite in the suitcases, too.” She looked to Charles and asked, “Can you get us some?”

He agreed without hesitation. “Should be simple enough.”

She grinned. “Good. Then, we wait until we’re an hour outside of town. We rob the cars, blow the safe, and get the valuables.” Clara ran her finger along the train line to where the Bradford River, one of the runoffs from Devil’s Ridge, cut quickly along the border that separated New Yorkshire and West Elizabeth.

“We slow the train just before we hit Hiram Bridge,” Clara explained. “That’ll give us enough time to lose any tails on the way back to camp.”

She was mildly pleased with herself. It was one thing to plan robberies in town or track a few bounties through the wilderness. It was another matter entirely to plot a train robbery. A burst of excitement flitted through her as she looked up, waiting to hear what John and Charles had to say about the plan.

Both of the men stared at her as though they couldn’t quite determine her point of origin.

Clara frowned and said, “What? Are you that surprised by the fact that I can plan a train robbery without ever having done it before?”

Charles shook his head and crossed his arms. “No,” he said with a careful, considerate glance at her. “Impressed, actually.”

John’s frown soured a bit but the same sense of impression in Charles’ eyes lingered in his.

“And a bit scared,” he muttered. “Ain’t natural for a woman to be so…”

Clara bristled. She clenched her hand into a fist and dared John to finish the thought. Charles, on the other hand, gave John a slow, barely perceptible shake of the head in warning.

John, sensing his error, cleared his throat and shifted uncomfortably where he sat. “So, we doing this?”

Clara was enraptured by the idea. The planning had solidified her hold on the plan; she would prove herself worthy to Charles and John and, more to the point, to the rest of the van der Linde gang. Perhaps most importantly, though, Clara would prove that there was still a way one could outrun their past. Or, at the very least, outwit it long enough to rob a few folks on a train before giving up the ghost. But, before she could acquiesce, another voice cut in.

“Doing what?”

Clara’s hands clenched into fists as hot, slow anger slipped into her veins. She turned slowly over her shoulder and leveled a hard, unyielding glare at Arthur Morgan.

He sauntered to the table with both hands heavy on his belt. Arthur stepped one foot up onto the bench beside Clara and folded his arms across his knee. He peered at the map, looking for all the world as though the map had personally offended him.

Arthur waved a hand toward their plan and said with a frown, “What’s all this about?”

“None of your business,” Clara said between tightly clenched teeth. “That’s what.”

He looked at her and the frown lifted into the ghost of a smirk. “If you’re involved, Ms. Howard, it ain’t nothing, that’s for sure.”

Clara silently seethed. The excitement she’d felt in preparing for the train heist was now hardly more than a memory, scorned and trod upon by Arthur’s unwanted presence.

John snatched the map off the table and rolled it up. “We’re fixing to rob a train,” he said, his tone belying the small measure of pride he felt in having established the idea in the first place.

Arthur blinked at him. He gestured to each of them in turn. “Just you three?”

Clara’s frowned deepened. Charles, sensing her mounting anger, nodded to Arthur. “Clara’s the one who planned it.”

She flashed Charles a thankful smile before turning back to her Arthur. Some of her anger abated with the look of surprise on his face. It served him right; he always did find a sick satisfaction in insisting her plans weren’t good enough

Then Arthur Morgan chuckled.

“Best watch your back with this one,” he said to John and Charles. “She’s as liable to set the train on fire as she is to rob it.”

Clara’s temper drowned all her better senses. She leapt up from the table and took a step toward him, her hands balled at her sides. She lifted her chin and glared at him.

“No one asked for your opinion, Arthur,” she growled.

He turned toward her, his summer eyes dancing with undisguised mirth. “I’ve seen your plans, Mae,” he said as his lips curled into a smirk. “They’re about as solid as rotted wood.”

Clara’s smile mirrored the edge of her sharpened knives. She crossed her arms and took half a step more toward him. Arthur lowered his propped leg and faced her fully, his hands back on his belt and his demeanor drenched in his infuriating, ridiculous cowboy swagger.

For a moment, her biting retort was eclipsed with his closeness. She could smell the scent of cigarettes and musk as it drifted off his sun-kissed skin. His broad, muscled chest was close enough that it would take little effort to reach up a hand and splay her palm against it.

Not that she would. In that particular moment, she’d much rather strangle him than touch him.

She cleared her thoughts and said, “So is your brain, Mr. Morgan. And, like I said, no one asked your opinion.”

Arthur met the intensity of her glare with one of his own. “It ain’t an opinion—it’s a fact.”

Charles rose from the table and tapped Clara on the shoulder. “Maybe we should—”

She shouldered him away and pointed at Arthur. “How many times have my plans gone wrong? And I mean really wrong?”

He gave her a flat, unimpressed look. “More than I can count.”

Clara snorted and tried to ignore the way her heart seemed intent on skipping a beat every now and again. “And yet, you still came out all the richer at the end, didn’t you?”

Out of the corner of her eye, she saw Charles sigh and join John on the other side of the table, where they watched them with expressions torn between morbid amusement and discomfort.

“Sure,” Arthur drawled as his eyes held hers with their firmness. “Came out a bit worse for wear, too, if memory serves.”

John sighed bitterly and shouted, “Clara, you coming or not?”

She held up a hand to stave off John’s question. Clara felt unbalanced and full of fury; her nerves rattled, and her heart thundered in her chest. Despite the precariousness of her emotions, her eyes darted to where Arthur’s worn blue shirt tightened along his broad, strong shoulders.

He could at least buy some shirts that fit him, for Christ’s sake.

Clara took a breath filled with his scent and said sharply, “I have a train to rob and no time for you.” She turned on her heel and slipped toward John and Charles. Clara placed a hand on John’s shoulder and made a point to look at Arthur as she did.

It wasn’t that she was choosing John over Arthur—not really, anyway. In many ways, Clara wasn’t sure why she’d done it. But a small, knowing part of her conscience wanted Arthur to feel as tightly wound and out of sorts as she did.

Arthur’s eyes went immediately to the hand that clasped John Marston’s shoulder. His eyes narrowed ever so slightly at the corners and his lips, which had only moments before slung effortless quips at her, flattened into a thin line of intense displeasure.

“You ain’t going without me,” he growled as he stalked around the table toward them. Clara dropped her hand as he arrived and gaped at Arthur. “Especially seeing as how Charles and Marston ain’t been acclimated to your unique brand of planning.”

Clara stomach clenched. “No.”

He leaned toward her, his eyes blazing with fury. “I ain’t asking you—I’m telling you.”

Her lungs ached for air that didn’t smell like him. “It’s my plan,” Clara responded stiffly, “and I don’t want you there.”

“Like I said,” Arthur replied, the words echoing in his deep, thrumming tone. “I ain’t asking.”

The man was impossible. He was always inserting himself into situations that did not demand his attention. Clara fought the urge to slap him, run, do anything that would dispel the writhing, choking feeling of her nerves as they wrapped around her better senses. He was always making her feel like she wasn’t in control, and she hated it.

So, Clara did the only thing she knew how to do when faced with such extenuating circumstances.

She shoved Arthur Morgan hard in the chest and argued the bitter taste of her ire faded from her mouth.

*

John Marston crossed his arms and watched as Clara Howard continued her verbal spat with Arthur Morgan.

Her shove did nothing more than instigate Arthur. The man was built like an ox and more liable to fall over from an act of God than the insistence of a furious woman. John knew from personal experience; Arthur had always been bigger than him (and most people), a fact which he’d proved time and time again during the many fights they’d had as children—most of which John started.

Now, he wasn’t quite sure what to make of the scene before him. It wasn’t entirely abnormal; Clara and Arthur spent most of their days fiercely arguing with one another. John hadn’t known Clara long enough to divine the source of her perpetual frustration with the man, but he hadknown Arthur long enough to tell when he was acting strangely. After all, he’d seen how Arthur was with Mary during their little tiffs all those years ago.

Charles leaned over to John as the two continued to egg each other on.

“I don’t know who’s worse,” he muttered. “You and Abigail, or them.”

At first, John wasn’t sure if he should be offended. He gave Charles a sharp look of consternation before shrugging. He glowered at Clara and Arthur, who had shifted their argument from the table toward the hitching posts. Arthur stalked ahead of her, shouting something about trying his patience over his shoulder while cutting a hand dismissively in the air. Clara, on the other hand, was hot on his heels and unrelenting in her counterassault.

“So,” Charles mused as they watched for a moment longer. “I guess he’s coming, then.”

John frowned. “Guess so.”

Charles tapped John on the shoulder and nodded in the direction the other two had gone. “Those two either need to kill each other or kiss each other. I’m still not sure which one.”

Oh, but John knew. He would never admit it aloud, but one of the decidedly limited perks of knowing Arthur as long as he had was understanding when the usually stoic and closed off outlaw was trying desperately to bury emotion with hot, scalding fury.

Even after they’d all mounted up to gather supplies and the argument finally settled, John Marston watched Arthur Morgan carefully. He could just make out the way he kept close to Clara, despite having spent the better part of the afternoon arguing with her. He kept a watchful eye on both the road and the woman, as though afraid that the world would rise up and try to swallow her.

Despite the fact that John’s own matters of love were tenuous at best, it did not stop him from believing that there could only be one conclusion for the manner in which Arthur conducted himself.

He was head over heels for Clara Howard.

*

Deputy Errol Hawkins settled into the comfortable seat on the eastbound train. He removed his hat and placed it on the seat next to him as the train slowly loaded up with passengers bound for Wallace Station and, eventually, the distant city of Saint Denis.

He settled his watchful gaze out the window and carefully scanned the faces of the people that filled the platform. Hawkins patted his pocket for the battered tin star he’d tucked safely away before arriving at the station earlier that evening.

Opportunity had brought him this far; he knew it wouldn’t let him down now. The world had shown him the path to true justice, and he intended to walk it if only to prove to the sheriff that things could still go right for them, if only they had a care to make it so.

So, it was with wild enthusiasm that Hawkins spotted the second of opportunity’s small miracles—a very familiar pair of faces accompanied by two others—just as the train marked its final call for boarding with a loud, pervasive blast of the horn.

The deputy leaned back in the seat with a smile on his face and bided his time.

Chapter Text

Arthur Morgan reached up to adjust his hat before he realized he’d left it behind.

He grunted a sigh and leaned back against the wooden slats of the train station office. Folks milled about the platform, their eyes wandering up and down the tracks for the oncoming train. They were well-dressed—proper, even—and he could tell with a storied eyed that all of the people waiting for the incoming train had a purpose. Life had given them a path, a story to tell, and it was clear by even their smallest movements that they knew it.

It made Arthur wildly uncomfortable.

He scratched absently at the freshly starched collar of his shirt. The women had mended the only vest he owned that didn’t have questionable stains and his boots had been freshly polished. Arthur ran a hand over his newly trimmed swept back hair and frowned.

Being this gussied up brought back some rather unpleasant memories. Hosea was the one whose fanciful ideas for schemes often involved Arthur donning some sort of ridiculous outfit (or worse, adopting an equally absurd persona crafted by the master scam artist himself), which had only soured Arthur’s attitude toward the entire idea of playing dress up. It didn’t help that the last time he’d put this much thought and care into his appearance was the last time he’d gone to Mary’s family home.

That day had ended with Arthur very nearly strangling her father, a subsequent bitter argument with Mary, and, in the days that followed, the end of their engagement.

Arthur lifted his eyes to the people on the platform. He’d stopped looking for Mary in the faces among crowds; it served no purpose to wander longingly after a ghost. After Eliza and Isaac, there just didn’t seem much of a point to looking about the world at all. Why bother, when all he’d find were empty places and reminders of what he’d lost?

Charles Smith sat down on the bench beside Arthur. He chanced a quick glance and murmured, “Okay, Arthur?”

He nodded sharply and crossed his arms. “Just waiting to get this over with, I guess.”

John lingered in front of them, his hands constantly tugging at the hem of his jacket. The sleeves were a bit short and the pants had definitely seen better days. Arthur chuckled inwardly at the sight; Marston looked not at all unlike the nearly feral child Dutch had saved all those years ago.

It seemed society didn’t fit so comfortably with John Marston, either.

The man in question turned, as if sensing Arthur’s scrutiny. He frowned and fussed once more with the hem of his jacket. “What?”

Arthur shook his head and kept his voice low. “You look ridiculous.”

John rolled his eyes. “I could say the same about you.”

Arthur straightened a bit as a smirk crept onto his lips. “Difference is I know when I look ridiculous. You look ridiculous all the time.”

Charles, who’d endured enough bickering to last him at least two lifetimes, leaned his head back against the wall and sighed.

“No one asked you to come,” John countered with a hiss. He glanced around at the crowd to ensure no one was listening. “You’re only here because you can’t go one day without arguing with Clara.”

Arthur chortled. “You’re one to talk about arguing.”

John shook his head and turned away, leaving Arthur to ponder his accusation, despite his best intentions.

It was true that Arthur hadn’t been asked to join the robbery, but that hadn’t stopped him before. There’d been plenty of times he’d gone along because the money was good or, in cases like this, when he was sure John’s lack of imagination and Clara’s wild impulsiveness would be sure to get them all killed.

He frowned and settled back against the wall again. His eyes wandered the crowd in search of the woman whose plan had resulted in him being dressed like a goddamn fool. He’d meant what he’d said about her being likely to set the train on fire—in a manner of speaking. Clara was as hot-headed as a rattlesnake, but she wasn’t a fool. Arthur had come along to ensure the job went according to plan. After all, it’s what Dutch and Hosea expected of him, whether or not they voiced it aloud.

Arthur’s eyes cut to John for a moment before darting away. If he was being honest, he hadn’t liked the way Clara had touched John’s shoulder back at camp. It was possessive, taunting, and it made his heart tighten every time he thought about it.

Not that he had been thinking about it much. It’s just that, when he did, it unsettled him in a way he couldn’t quite articulate.

A figure at the edge of his vision caught his attention. Arthur looked up to find a woman sauntering confidently through the crowd. She was dressed all in blue, from her coat to her blouse and down to the full skirt that swayed in time with her steps. Even her hair, which was fastened into a tight braid, was crowned with a modest but fashionable hat adorned with blue and white flowers.

For a moment, all Arthur could do was stare. The woman’s pull was magnetic; she stood out from the rest of the wanton, unremarkable folk just as the stars cut through the oppressive blackness of the night.

He was surprised when the woman nodded furtively at John and Charles as she sidled up to Arthur.

He was speechless when he realized the woman was Clara.

She placed her hands on her hips and gave him an appraising look. “You don’t look half bad, Mr. Morgan,” she whispered conspiratorially.

Manners of casual conversation dictated that this was the proper time for Arthur to speak. The problem was he was having a bit of trouble finding appropriate words to form into coherent sentences. The jacket buttoned over her blouse accentuated her well-endowed chest. Her skirt, which billowed out in a manner suited to young women, hugged her hips in a way that was far too suggestive for Arthur’s liking.

Clara raised an eyebrow at him. She held out her arms to indicate her outfit. “Well?”

She had no business looking like that. They were here to rob a goddamn train, not to look like…like…

Arthur’s jaw tightened. He replied gruffly, “Where’d you get that getup?”

She shrugged and the jacket tightened a fraction. Arthur’s stomach clenched into a single, heavy knot. “I borrowed it,” Clara said, though her tone wavered slightly.

Arthur snorted and pushed away from the wall. He felt suddenly agitated and his eyes wouldn’t stop wandering to her. He waved irritably toward the track.

“Let’s just get this over with,” he muttered hoarsely.

Clara stared after him as he took a few steps away. He needed room to breathe, to feel less like he was swaying in a torrential, lavender and mint scented breeze.

She took a moment to straighten her hat and tug at the skirt. Arthur grunted and whirled away as the knot in his stomach held sway. For the space of a single heartbeat, he regretted coming along on the job. He hadn’t realized that Clara’s insistence on looking respectable meant that she would arrive dressed like that.

So much for not drawing any attention, he thought wryly.

Luckily for Arthur, the train chose that moment to arrive. Its approached was heralded by the blast of the locomotive’s horn and the tinkling bells of warning as it slid up to the platform. The passengers gathered their belongings and made for the doors as they opened.

Charles rose from the bench and joined them as the throng milled toward the train. Arthur noticed with mild jealousy that he seemed entirely comfortable in his well-kept striped shirt, fresh suspenders, and clean boots.

“We ready to do this?” he muttered casually.

Arthur nodded along with the rest of them, though he tried—and failed—not to look in Clara’s direction.

John took stock of the luggage each of the outlaws carried with them. Clara’s was demure and unsuspecting; it was a purse to match her outfit and, as Arthur noted, just large enough to contain her gun and one of her knives. The rest of them had bags and suitcases borrowed from Hosea and Dutch, who had relinquished the items with the expectation that they come back in one piece.

Arthur nodded toward the train. “Wait until we’re well outside of town before you start robbing,” he ordered. “Marston, you slow the train. Charles, you and I will blow the safe and get the money.”

Clara cleared her throat and glared at him. “That’s funny,” she said through tightly pursed lips. “This sounds an awful like the like the plan I came up with.”

Arthur rolled his eyes. “Ms. Howard, you rob who you can and try not to blow us all to hell in the meantime.”

John glanced over his shoulder. The platform was emptying quickly. “Let’s go,” he urged as he slipped away from the group and made for the train.

Arthur followed and spared one more glance in Clara’s direction. She found him watching and bumped her shoulder against his just before she boarded.

“Try not to get yourself killed, cowboy,” she whispered in his ear.

Arthur had robbed trains before. He’d gotten away with plenty of money and mostly intact the majority of the attempts. But he couldn’t help but feel like this time was vastly different than all the others. Even as Arthur boarded the train and settled into the calm, cool-headed precision that came with being on a job, a small part of him stayed wondering whether or not Clara would be alright on her own.

She could take care of herself; he knew that. But there were a thousand different ways a robbery could go wrong, and he didn’t fancy thinking about all the variations in which Clara got hurt or worse. It was troublesome and dangerous to think that way, but he didn’t think he could help it. And, more to the point, Arthur wasn’t entirely sure he wanted to help it.

And that was more frightening than any threat the law could throw his way.

*

Clara leaned back against the stiff, uncomfortable seat and waited to rob the train.

A quick glance out the window told her that they were nearly two hours outside of Kingston. Night had already draped New Yorkshire in long, thick shadows but, if she squinted, she could just make out the plains beyond the sloping hills of the countryside. A few miles up the track, the Bradford River wound its way through the hills and formed a portion of the border that separated New Yorkshire from West Elizabeth and the bridge that spanned the distance between them.

She sighed and looked at the passengers; Clara had taken a seat at the back to avoid notice. A young, pompous looking man glanced furiously out the window before checking his pocket watch and sighing bitterly. A young couple held hands and eagerly whispered to one another. A pair of men murmured about the business they intended to do in Strawberry and, eventually, Blackwater. Every single of them had a purpose; they knew precisely where they’d come from and where they were going.

Her uncle had taught her how to speak like them, how to dress like them and act like them. Byers had groomed her to mimic them, so they’d never see her—or the blade of her knife—coming. She’d always been a ghost among the living; she’d always worn a mask so the world would never see her true face.

It wasn’t that she enjoyed robbing—not exactly, anyway. One of the few luxuries Clara had had growing up was her uncle’s insistence on studying literature. She’d loved filling her mind up with stories, imagining all the worlds and places she’d never thought she’d see. The stories had ignited within Clara an insatiable sense of adventure, a desire to break out of the monotony the world demanded and relinquish herself to the unknown.

Life’s unpredictability and her uncle’s shortcomings had tied her to Byers. He’d given her everything she’d thought she’d wanted but had smothered what Clara so thoroughly craved. Now, in the vast expanse of the west, she’d gotten what she wanted: adventure—the unknown, the untamable, and the thrill of finding out who she could be if only given half a chance.

Robbing was an adventure for Clara Howard and, unfortunately for the people on the eastbound line train from Kingston, she hadn’t yet had her fill.

Her eyes flicked to the window. Her heart pounded with adrenaline when she saw the rapid glint of moonlight on the Bradford.

Clara grabbed her purse and placed it carefully in her lap. Then she closed her eyes and waited. For a moment, the car was filled with the standard sounds of the passengers. Nothing was amiss; all was peaceful and remarkably dull.

Then the shouting began.

Clara’s eyes flew open as an all too familiar baritone cut through the sharp cries. “Everybody stay calm and no one gets shot!”

Her lips curled into a feral smile.

The passengers in her car perked up at the sound of the shouts. A woman began weeping as she begged her husband to hide their valuables before the thieves caught up to them. The businessmen clamped their mouths shut and patted their pockets protectively. Fear ran rampant in the air as Arthur, John, and Charles worked their way through the car toward her.

All the while, Clara dug her hand beneath her blouse and pulled up the bandana she’d hidden there. She ducked behind the seat, tugged it up to cover her face, and fetched her knife and revolver from her purse. She slid the knife into the thin leather belt for safekeeping. For her final act of preparation, Clara plucked the hat from her head and tossed it onto the floor, glad to be rid of the hideously pompous thing.

She rose and cleared her throat. The businessmen were the first to whirl at the sound. Despite their best intentions, fear etched itself into their tightly knit expressions. Clara gave them all a moment to gape at her—first the bandana, then the weapons, as the realization that the woman at the back of the train was not quite was she seemed settled upon them.

She tilted her head at the passengers and held the gun aloft. She slid the hammer into place. The young woman, who’d only a moment before had been happily whispering to her husband, cried out and grabbed her man’s arm.

“Well?” Clara said. “You heard them, ladies and gentlemen. Play it cool, and no one gets hurt.”

The passengers clutched their belongings and cowered in their seats. In the next car, Clara heard the sound of a scream followed swiftly by the thud of a body as it hit the ground. Another ragged, blistering shout on Arthur’s part followed by John’s more insistent, sharp cries drew closer.

Clara held out her purse, took a step forward, said, “I’ll take your valuables, ladies and gentlemen.”

No one moved. Clara’s blood ran hot in her veins as she stared at the fearful faces before her. She didn’t want to hurt anyone; that was never the goal when it came to robbing, but it wouldn’t stop her if it came down to it.

She took another step forward and raised her gun.

The man with the pocket watch nearly leapt out of his seat. Clara whirled and aimed her gun at chest. His hands shook slightly as he gripped the seats in front and behind him for stability. He wasn’t quite old, but Clara could just make out the years that clung to the corners of his eyes.

“You,” he snarled, “should be ashamed of yourself.” He flung a hand toward the door, where the sound of her companion’s approach grew louder. “A young woman, throwing her lot in with—with a bunch of goddamn outlaws—”

Clara shifted her stance, set her muscles, and sent the butt of the gun crashing into the offending man’s skull.

He fell backward and landed in a heap across the seats. The women in the car let out a chorus of ragged gasps as Clara wrenched the pocket watch from where it was latched onto his shirt pocket. A quick inspection of the bauble revealed it to be platinum.

She grinned triumphantly and tucked it into her purse before training the gun on the businessmen. “Anyone else care to comment on the matter?”

To their credit, no one did.

The door crashed open behind her. John and Charles barreled through, their faces covered, and their guns raised at the passengers. They ducked beneath their seats as the men hurried up the walkway to the car beyond.

Arthur was the last to come through. Cries of despair and fear followed in his wake and his eyes blazed with cold fury. He turned his attention to Clara and the crisp, cool winter in his eyes melted a fraction.

“You alright?”

Clara rolled her eyes and showed him the weighty purse.

Arthur nodded toward the door where Charles and John had already passed through. They yanked a few more valuables from the feeble hands of their unwilling victims, shouting at them to stay down. Charles let a fist fly into the face of a man who thought it sensible to try and wrestle the bear of a man to the ground.

“Safe is up there,” Arthur grunted. “I’ll cover you.”

Clara looped her purse over her arm and kept her gun pointed at the ceiling. Arthur would make sure the passengers behaved.

They passed through the next car and made their way carefully over a rickety flatbed containing large crates and boxes. Clara slipped through them, sparing a few glances at Arthur as she followed John and Charles. He grunted as he shifted one of the larger crates in front of the passage in an effort to impede any would-be seekers of justice.

The next car was the drink car. It was blessedly empty and allowed the outlaws to pause for a moment and catch their breath.

John gestured toward the far door. “Safe’s that way.”

Charles had moved toward the nearby window. He peered out and, after a moment, looked to them and said, “We’re getting close. Let’s get the money and ditch before we hit the border.”

Arthur nodded. He pointed to John and said, “Marston, you slow the train. Charles, Mae, and I will get the safe.”

John’s brow furrowed a bit at Arthur’s casual use of her nickname.

Clara shook her head. “I’ll stay here and check behind the bar. There’s bound to be some money tucked away here.”

Arthur turned to her, his head angled in just such a way that indicated he was about to protest her suggestion.

She thrust her purse at him before he could open his mouth. “Take this. My jacket has pockets.”

John slipped back through the door; he’d likely make his way to the train’s rooftops on his path to the engine. Charles looked anxiously out the window. “Arthur, we should go now.

But Arthur hesitated. Clara bristled and shoved his arm half-heartedly. “Go on. I’ll catch up with you in a minute.”

He took half a step toward her, his shoulders bunched tightly. “Try not to throw a wrench in the plan while you’re at it, Ms. Howard.”

“It’s my plan and I’ll do what I damn well please with it,” she called out with an imperious lift of her chin as they trailed toward the far door. “Just worry about getting the money.”

She watched as Arthur paused, his repeater clutched in one hand and the other braced against the doorway. The wind that buffeted through the door sent his bandana flickering from side to side.

“I like you better without the hat,” he shouted to her. Clara didn’t miss the smirk that cut through the words.

Then Arthur was gone, leaving Clara behind to take what she could from the bar.

*

Since the bar was very full of booze and a bit short on cash, Clara decided to help herself to a pull of whiskey before moving on.

She hadn’t expected there to be much in the way of money here, but a few bucks was a few bucks, no matter where it came from. She hissed as the whiskey’s fire coated her throat and warmed her stomach.

A quick look at the bottle revealed it to be the good stuff, imported from Ireland. Clara spared a moment’s debate on whether or not she should take one back for Sean.

Clara decided her pockets were too small for a bottle, took another swig in lamentation of poor Sean’s loss, and slid out from behind the bar.

A victorious thrill swept through her. There’d been a moment before they boarded the train where Clara wasn’t entirely sure if the plan would work. But, despite the minor detail of Arthur inadvertently assuming ownership of the plan, her success would be sure to ingratiate her position even further with Dutch van der Linde.

And, she thought with a smile as wide as the approaching Bradford River, it had been a marvelous, unexpected adventure.

She looked down and checked her pockets once more for the cash she’d stowed there. Confident that she’d gotten what she could, Clara began to make her way toward the rear car door.

Clara hadn’t gone more than a handful of steps when the air shifted unpleasantly around her. Her nerves sang with warning and her instincts flared in response to the barely perceptible but fiercely distinct change.

Her hand darted to her gun, which she’d tucked in her belt along with her knife. Clara sucked in a breath, let it out, and whipped around toward the source of the disturbance.

It took a moment or two to recognize the figure that loomed near the bar. But, despite the lack of a star pinned to his vest, she knew she was staring into the unlikely face of Deputy Sheriff Errol Hawkins.

He leaned an elbow on the bar and watched her, his face frighteningly passive. Hawkins tipped his hat to her.

“Fancy seeing you here, Ms. Galloway.”

Her blood turned to ice in her veins. She’d introduced herself to the deputy and his sheriff as Mae Galloway, her grandmother’s name, upon taking her first bounty in Kingston. It’d seemed safer to adopt the moniker rather than risk her true name making its way into dangerous hands.

The deputy shouldn’t be here. Clara’s eyes shifted past him for a moment and, when she saw no other lawmen in his wake, turned her full attention back to Hawkins.

He only watched her, unafraid of the barrel of the gun leveled right at his chest. Hawkins was calm as his gaze swept slowly over her borrowed outfit (pilfered, more like, but that didn’t quite matter just then). He indicated it with a slight lift of the hand.

“I see you’ve dressed for the occasion,” Hawkins muttered.

Clara narrowed her eyes and held tightly to the gun. “If you’re here to arrest me, you might as well get it over with.”

Hawkins sighed and spared a glance out the window. Clara’s mind whirled; nothing about this was right. His demeanor was too calm, his presence entirely outside the sudden, woeful limitations of her plan. All of it served to keep her guard firmly up.

When the deputy looked back at her, something dark and terrible lingered in the depths of his eyes. He pushed away from the bar and stood before her, his hands clenched tightly into fists at his sides.

The deputy said low and threateningly, “I’m not here to arrest you, Ms. Galloway. I’m here to send you back to the shithole you came from and get you out of my town for good.”

It took a moment for her thoughts to catch up with his meaning.

Winter cold slipped into her veins, numbing her body instantly. Her heart leapt and stuttered as her fingers tightened around the gun. Clara had to get out of the car; she had to find the rest of the men and get off the damn train before this got any worse.

Hawkins saw her distress and continued his assault. “I ain’t about to let some uptight pissant of a man in New Jersey run this town ragged for the sake of a woman who don’t know her place.”

Clara lifted the gun higher and fed her desperate lungs brief, staggered gasps of air. “You don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“You come into Kingston with that man and your friends and you think you can run it the way you want?”

This wasn’t happening. This wasn’t happening. This wasn’t happening.

Clara shoved the gun in front of her as far as her arm would allow.

“I’m not going back to him, do you understand?” she shouted it, let the raw words climb out of her throat and burst into the air as effectively as a gunshot. She held onto the resolution, let it ground her back into the purpose at hand. The train was fast approaching West Elizabeth, and it was only a matter of time before John slowed the train.

Hawkins’ face shifted and twisted with hatred. He drew the gun holstered on his hip and aimed it at her.

“Then I’ll kill you and send you back to him piece by piece.”

A few things happened all at once.

The dull percussion of an explosion sounded behind her; Arthur and Charles had gotten to the safe. The carpeted floorboards rumbled slightly beneath her shoes, making her feel momentarily off balance.

Then the train ground to a sudden, jerking halt.

Loose furniture tipped and clattered to the floor. Bottles and glasses from the bar shattered and the bitter, acrid scent of alcohol cut through the air. Clara and Hawkins lost their footing and tumbled to the ground. Her gun slipped from her hand and slid over the rug to the seats just beyond the bar, useless and entirely out of reach.

She scrambled to her knees and grabbed the knife in her belt. There was only one chance to make this right.

Clara grunted as she propped herself up on one foot, keeping her knee anchored to the ground. She flipped the knife in her hand until her fingers found the familiar slip of the blade. Her eyes darted to where Hawkins, still addled from the fall, worked to pull himself up to his feet.

She peeled her arm back and threw the knife.

Her aim had been perfect and the blade freshly sharpened. But Hawkins darted out of the way in the few seconds it had taken the blade to sing through the air. Instead of hitting him in the chest, the blade nipped his arm before burying itself into the wooden exterior of the bar.

Clara didn’t wait. Instinct screamed at her to run, to get to Arthur and Charles and the firepower they still had with them.

She got to her feet and sped for the door, urging her feet to carry her faster and farther than they’d ever done before. Clara pumped her arms and watched with agonizing slowness as the distance between her and the door grew narrower by the torturous second.

But then her arms flattened at her sides, suddenly and terribly immobile. The lack of propulsion cut off her momentum; her feet slipped out from beneath her as her back collided heavily with the floor.

The breath flew out of her lungs. Pain exploded at the back of her skull and split through her thoughts like a crack of thunder. For a moment, the pain and numbness that followed disoriented her.

Then, Clara realized what had stopped her so suddenly in her tracks.

Deputy Hawkins gave the lasso a few hard, strong pulls and dragged her toward him. Clara’s heart raced as she scrambled for something, anything to get her out of the rope’s grip. But it held fast, despite her thrashing and writhing.

A moment of swift, exacting despair drowned out the world. Clara railed against it as Hawkins dragged her closer and closer to the fate she’d fought and killed to be rid of. Byers had wound the sheriff around his will. That was the only explanation for the deputy’s fury and her imminent damnation.

Despair fled in favor of almighty fury.

Clara would deal with the sheriff later. Right now, she had to deal with this piece of shit deputy.

Hawkins’s chest heaved as he pulled her to rest at his feet. Clara watched him as he stepped over her and looped the rest of the lasso around his hands—he was going to hogtie her.

Like hell he was.

She sucked in a breath, swept her legs beneath his tented ones, and delivered a swift, decisive kick to his middle.

Hawkins fell backward and Clara strained against the rope. Her heart thundered in her chest as the lasso loosened bit by agonizing bit, until she could just barely slip her arm through the loop.       

But she was out of time.

The deputy got to his feet and yanked on the rope until it tightened painfully around Clara’s arms. She cried out and gritted her teeth as she thrashed her legs, trying to kick him off balance.

“Goddamn hellcat,” he muttered as he lifted his arm and sent his palm crashing into her cheek.

Stars exploded in her vision. Clara’s head was swept to the side by the blow as her fury mounted into an uncontrollable torrent of hellish rage.

Hawkins tugged on the rope and lifted her bodily from the ground. His face loomed in front of her, his lips curled into a satisfactory, sickening smile.

Her options were limited, so Clara spat in his face.

The deputy didn’t flinch. Instead he chuckled darkly and wiped the saliva from his cheek. The smile returned and his eyes took on a sinister, devilish look. Her rage faltered just a bit at the sight of it. Hawkins lifted her up until her face was inches from his. Clara tried to twist away and groaned as the rope cut through her jacket and into her flesh.

Her captor’s tone was as black as his eyes when he said, “Let’s see how much you’re worth to your friends, shall we?”

*

It wasn’t often that John Marston did anything of much value.

Arthur had spent the better part of the last decade cleaning up after the myriad messes left behind in his impulsive, brainless outlaw brother’s wake. But even Arthur, who was loathed to acknowledge any redeeming qualities that might accidentally make Marston seem like a normal person, had to admit on the very rare occasion when John did something right.

This was one of those times and it didn’t sit very well with him in the least.

Arthur lowered the sack of money and jewels to Charles’ waiting arms. His companion tossed it to the ground with the rest.

“Guess that lead of John’s worked out after all,” he said as Arthur went to fetch the last of the loot.

The acrid stench of explosives still lingered in the car. It clung to the back of Arthur’s throat as he sifted carefully through what remained of the safe’s thick door for the last of the money. Some of the bags had been singed in the blast along with the few stacks of bills that had been tucked into the corners, but all of it was still viable.

He brought the last of the cash to Charles, his mouth soured into a frown. “Yeah, well, don’t get used to it.” Arthur brushed his sooty hands on his trousers. “Ain’t too often that Marston uses what little bits of brain he has to our advantage.”

Charles chuckled softly. He gestured toward the large, encouraging pile of newly acquired funds. “Help me load these.”

Arthur braced a hand on the door and prepared to jump down. All said and done, the robbery had gone according to plan. It was rare that Arthur could leave a job with the satisfaction that all had worked out precisely as they’d expected. He took a small measure of pride in the fact; he’d be sure to tell Dutch and Hosea when they returned.

Arthur paused as a sudden, crushing thought dawned on him.

Clara hadn't shown up.

He glanced sharply over his shoulder and then back at Charles. “You see Ms. Howard at all?”

Charles paused and shook his head. “She said she’d catch up.”

Something dark and vicious unfurled in Arthur’s gut. His fingers clenched around the door as he fought for control over his suddenly wild thoughts. He looked back toward the bar car. His heart pressed up against his ribs as the unsettling feeling twisted into something vastly recognizable: suspicion.

Charles glanced up and down the track to ensure their safety. “She can take care of herself,” he said firmly. “Ain’t seen too many women outside the camp like her. She’s something else.”

Arthur knew Charles was being sensible. He was one of the few in camp besides Dutch and Hosea that he could trust to talk straight and do what needed to be done. But Arthur also knew that his instincts, however honed to darkness they may be, were far more often right than they were wrong.

He sighed and tried to quell the rising torrent of anxiety. “She’s certainly something,” Arthur muttered. “Ain’t too sure what.”

Charles, who was far too astute for his own good, narrowed his eyes a fraction at Arthur. “Yes, you do.”

He should listen to Charles—Clara was more than capable of taking care of herself, and Arthur knew that if she discovered he believed her to be any less able than she’d already proven, he’d never hear the end of it. This was her plan; Clara knew what to do and when to do it. That would have to do for now.

But even as Arthur tried once more to lower himself to the ground, his instincts roared at him to go after her. Try as he might, Arthur couldn’t leave the car without knowing she was okay.

Charles placed his hands on the edge of the door. “Want me to go check?”

Arthur shook his head. He instinctively reached for his sidearm; he trusted Charles, but if anyone was going to look for Clara, it was going to be him. “Can you load up without me?”

His companion nodded without hesitation. “Go find her,” Charles called as he went back to their loot. “I’ll take care of this.”

This wasn’t the first and nor would it be the last time Arthur found himself unquestionably grateful for the steadfastness of Charles Smith.

He crossed back to the bar car, carefully eyeing the windows to ensure their coup had not yet been discovered. With the train now stopped, Arthur trusted that John had enough sense to make his way back toward their position. Once he fetched Clara, they’d make their getaway and start the long trek back to camp. If they were lucky and rode through the night, they could make it back to Deepwater Pass by dawn.

Arthur just needed to find Clara. He needed to find her so that this discomfiting feeling that the world had suddenly and irrevocably gone to shit would go away.

It took all of his self-control not to barrel through the door of the bar car when he reached it. Arthur let the familiar weight of the gun wrangle his raging thoughts enough to return to the single, exacting purpose set before him.

Find Clara. Get off the train. Get back to camp.

He repeated the three things until they slid perfectly into place beside the serpentine suspicion in his gut. There was only the next job to do, and nothing more—Arthur would find her. He had to; he didn’t think he’d know what to do if he didn’t.

Arthur shouldered open the door and held his gun at the ready. He took a breath, cocked the revolver, and stepped into the car as he emptied his lungs.

There was nothing but silence.

The silence pressed upon him as his careful eyes took stock of the scene. The explosion and the sudden stop of the train’s progression had sent most of the furniture tumbling about the car. Arthur caught the scent of spilled alcohol as it seeped out from beneath the bar.

He took half a step further into the car. “Mae?”

Arthur never knew how much he needed to hear that blistering, sarcastic tone until he didn’t.

He searched the car as his worst suspicion was confirmed. There was nothing—no one—in the car besides the fallen décor and the ruined alcohol.

Arthur tried to stay calm and failed.

Clara wouldn’t have gone back to the other cars; that wasn’t part of the plan and, though she had a spectacular talent for upending every halfway decent plan in favor of improvisation, the logic wasn’t sound enough for Arthur to give it any merit. The other options were starkly limited and none of them sat very well with Arthur in the least.

It was then that something tucked beneath a fallen table caught his attention.

He crossed to the corner where the object shined in the dim light of the chandeliers that hung from the ceiling. Arthur reached beneath the table and tensed when his fingers wrapped around the barrel of a gun.

It was a revolver with a custom silver grip.

Arthur’s heart thundered in his chest as he turned the gun over. His lips curled into a feral snarl when he saw the engraving etched into the flat bottom of the grip.

C.H.

For a moment, the world stilled as the force of Arthur’s fury washed over him. He whirled, his hand still holding tightly to Clara’s gun.

There hadn’t been any law on the train; they’d made sure of it on the platform before boarding. Even if a passenger had gotten it into their head to arrest Clara on behalf of the law, Arthur knew she would have fought them off without a second’s hesitation.

Where the hell was she?

His eyes roved over the car, desperate for any sign of her presence or a clue as to where she’d gone. Arthur tamped down his anxiety with cool-headed reasoning; perhaps she’d slipped away to help John. It would explain why they hadn’t seen her in the safe car.

Arthur knew that wasn’t the case, but he had to believe it. If he didn’t, he would have no choice but to tear the train apart piece by piece until he found her. And if that meant killing everyone on board, then so be it. Someone on this godforsaken piece of hollowed out metal knew where Clara was, and he intended to find out who it was.

He tucked her gun in his satchel and made to head back to the safe car to enlist Charles’ help. But just before Arthur slipped away, his attention snagged on the bar.

He didn’t know how he’d missed it before. It was in plain view but the sight of it was so incongruent, so entirely out of character, that Arthur had likely dismissed it as a figment of his torturous concern. But now his gaze focused on the object as it protruded from the wooden façade of the bar, its presence unmistakable proof of his suspicions.

Arthur left Clara’s knife behind and sprinted back to the safe car.

They hadn’t been as careful as they’d thought.

*

There wasn’t much room left in the shattered remnants of Arthur Morgan’s heart for hope.

He’d buried hope with his mother while his father beat as much out of him as he could; Mary had rekindled it before wrenching it away. Arthur thought he’d found it again in his son, but two men and a matter of ten dollars had killed hope along with Isaac and his mother.

And yet, despite all of this, Arthur felt the first stirrings of it as he crashed through the safe car and into the night. He wasn’t sure what it was, at first; it had been so long since Arthur knew the brightness, the purity of hope, and he almost mistook it for weakness.

Maybe it was; maybe holding onto hope had been the cause of his turmoil all along. He knew it was foolish to fuel this budding feeling, but Arthur Morgan was nothing if not a fool, so he fueled it anyway.

He hoped Clara would be waiting for him outside the train, safe and sound, however unarmed she might be. Perhaps a bit more than that, Arthur hoped he could fill his lungs with the sweet, calming scent of lavender and mint if only to calm the raging and pounding of his heart.

Charles whirled at the sound of Arthur’s boisterous approach. The horses whickered behind him, their hooves stamping into the ground with their eagerness to leave.

Arthur quickly looked around for any sign of Clara. When he found her absent, the stirrings of hope wavered.

“She’s gone,” he ground out. “Something ain’t right.”

Charles’ brow furrowed and his body tightened with tension. “The law?”

Arthur shook his head and tried to quell the panic that nipped at the edges of his withering composure. “Don’t know. John?”

“Not back yet,” Charles muttered darkly as he turned to Taima and slipped his repeater out of the saddle holster. He strode forward as he prepped the weapon and peered into the safe car door.

Arthur wasn’t going to be able to tame his fury much longer. All he could see was the abandoned knife and gun marked with her initials. There weren’t many folk in New Yorkshire that could stand toe-to-toe with Claramae Howard and come out unscathed; in fact, Arthur questioned on a nearly daily basis whether or not he could be counted among the number that had survived an encounter with her and lived to tell the tale.

Whoever had taken her—for Arthur was sure that that was what had happened—had to have known where she’d be. Whoever had taken her had likely been aware of the train heist, which didn’t bode well for any of them.

Whoever had taken Clara did not know that Arthur Morgan was coming for them with all the fury and damnation that hell could muster.

Charles hurried back to Arthur’s side. “You should take the money,” he said with a nod toward the horses. “Let John and I look for Clara.”

Arthur squared his shoulders and clenched his fist at his side. “I ain’t leaving her,” he growled.

Charles nodded gravely. “Had a feeling you’d say that.” He pointed back down the tracks toward the front of the train. “Let’s follow the track back up this way. We can probably catch up with John in the meantime, and—”

Charles didn’t get to finish. A ragged, furious yell cut through the night and straight to Arthur’s heart.

Clara.

He ran. There was nothing else he could have done except follow the echo of that sound wherever it might lead him. If it led him straight to the bowels of hell, then so bet it; Arthur would battle the devil himself if it meant Clara would be safe.

Charles followed close behind as they slipped through the shadows, their eyes swiveling between the train cars and the plains peppered with small copses of trees. But the shadows kept their secrets as firmly as Arthur held his gun in his hand.

He paused, his lungs aching for breath. Arthur turned to his companion, his blood overflowing with unbridled ire. “Anything?”

Charles shook his head as his eyes tracked over the train cars. Many of the passengers were milling about in panicked strides while others remained huddled in their seats, clutching whatever was left of their worldly possessions.

“Keep going,” he muttered tightly. “She has to be close.”

Arthur fought against the sudden, violent urge to tear the world apart.

They kept close to the car as they followed it to its end. Arthur slowed his advance as the car gave way to a flatbed loaded with cargo, one of the ones they had traversed earlier in the heist.

Two figures stood among the crates and boxes. Arthur paid little attention to the taller of the two; his eyes instead went straight to the other, whose arms were bound with rope and mouth gagged with a familiar blue bandana.

Arthur’s relief lasted only the space of a heartbeat. Then he trained his gun on the man holding Clara tightly, the barrel ready to deliver a single bullet straight to his heart.

“I thought you might come for her,” her captor said. He cut a glance to Clara, who tried to wriggle free of his grasp.

Charles sidled up beside Arthur and took aim. “Don’t shoot,” he whispered. “Look where she’s standing.”

Arthur tore his eyes from the man and glanced at the crate behind Clara. The shadows made it difficult to make out most of the letters, but Arthur only needed a few to understand the gravity of their already precarious situation.

The crate was filled with explosives.

He gritted his teeth and focused his attention back to the man. The longer Arthur looked at him, the more the shapes and angles of his face seemed familiar. He narrowed his eyes as the man’s identity crashed through him with unlikely surety.

This was the sheriff’s deputy—Hawkins, if memory served.

Cold seeped into Arthur’s veins. If Hawkins was here, then that meant—

The deputy shook his head, as if he sensed the tremor in Arthur’s thoughts. “I’m alone.” His fingers tightened on Clara’s arm as he added, “I came for her.”

For Clara?

Arthur’s mind whirled as he tried to piece together the deputy’s meaning. It was clear that they hadn’t noticed Hawkins because they hadn’t been looking for a lone, rogue lawman. But if the deputy’s admission that his presence was tied to Clara was true, then there was something far more sinister at play.

But it didn’t matter what the reason was. Arthur’s gun had a bullet with the deputy’s name on it; he wouldn’t last long enough to see the sun rise.

“Let her go,” Arthur said tightly, each word laced with every ounce of venom in his veins.

Hawkins didn’t move. “No.”

Arthur’s chest tightened. His eyes flicked to Clara where she stood, bound and gagged, his heart pounding with the desperate need to make sure she was alright. He wouldn’t have faltered her for showing fear; anyone else would have in the face of such daunting circumstances. But it was not terror that lingered in the cool green depths of her eyes.

Clara Howard was undeniably furious.

She seethed where she stood, her body tensed and taut with the force of her anger. Arthur was sure if were set free, she’d tear the deputy apart limb from limb.

Arthur took a breath and let his cool, steady-handed calm return. He slowly lowered his gun and raised his other hand in a show of peace. Charles kept his repeater raised but took half a step back.

This much was clear: Whatever promise Hawkins had made to see justice done in the world had been destroyed the moment the young deputy had taken Clara Howard hostage. Arthur’s well-trained eyes could see the tremulous sense of righteous that loomed darkly in the deputy’s eyes. This was a battleground with which Arthur was familiar; here, the rules did not apply. Here, it was only his will pitted against the deputy’s in an almighty struggle for victory, pure and simple.

Arthur’s life had been carved out of this very same struggle, and he’d fought and bled to win. This was his arena and he would not lose.

He holstered his weapon—he didn’t need it drawn to shoot and kill the deputy at a moment’s notice.

“Why don’t you take me instead,” Arthur offered in an even, deliberate drawl. He gestured toward Clara and said, “She ain’t but a woman.”

Something shifted in Hawkins’ expression. It became sharper, as though the shadows had carved away more of his humanity than they’d intended. His jaw worked as though he fought to hold back a torrent of slithering curses held fast in his throat.

“Just a woman?” Hawkins hissed with barely contained fury. “Do you have any idea what she’s done?”

Arthur said nothing. There were times for talk and times for silence, and this was certainly one of the latter.

Hawkins jerked Clara forward, and she stumbled as she fought for footing among the crates. Arthur instinctively jolted toward her just as the deputy raised and cocked his gun.

He leveled the weapon toward Arthur’s head. “You take another step and I’ll kill her.”

Every muscle in Arthur’s body froze. A man with a gun was dangerous enough; a man with a gun and nothing to lose was liable to upend the entire balance of worldly order.

Hawkins swiveled the gun so it pointed loosely toward Clara. Arthur forced his feet to remain planted despite every bone in his body screaming at him to leap to her aid.

“You have no idea what this woman has done,” Hawkins spat. “She’s ruined everything!”

A shadow flickered at the edge of Arthur’s vision, but he dared not take his eyes away from the deputy. Charles’ head lifted a barely noticeable fraction and his grip tightened on the repeater.

“The roof, on the right,” he whispered so that only the shadows and Arthur could hear.

This time, Arthur chanced a glance up to the roof. A shape crouched low on top of the train car, watching the scene below. John Marston looked down at Arthur. He twirled his finger in the air as he crept toward the opposite side of the roof and out of sight.

The signal was clear: Keep him talking. All they had to do was buy John time.

Arthur tried to instill what calmness he could in his tone. “Just let her go and we can settle this like men. She ain’t worth all this trouble.”

Clara’s head turned slightly over her shoulder, as though she could hear something from behind the flatbed.

Hawkins shook his head as his expression shifted into a look of aching despair. He looked away for a moment and Arthur allowed his muscles a moment’s reprieve as the deputy lowered the gun.

“I thought I understood what justice was,” Hawkins muttered. “There was only good and evil, nothing more and nothing less. That, at least, I knew how to deal with.”

The slow, slinking form of John Marston crept up onto the flatbed behind Clara. He crouched behind a crate and waited.

Arthur forced his lungs to breathe evenly as Hawkins trained his eyes on the outlaw. “But now I see that justice only goes as far as what the highest bidder is willing to pay.” He twisted Clara forward and she grunted as the deputy’s hand clenched around her arm.

Hawkins tilted his head, his eyes dark and unyielding. “Do you know much she’s worth to him?”

It took Arthur a moment to realize what the deputy meant. When he did, he couldn’t stop the torrent of cold, hard ire that drowned out all of his careful, calculated actions.

Shit.

“You know exactly who I’m talking about,” Hawkins blurted, mistaking Arthur’s silence for feigned ignorance. “You and those criminals you run with think you can take advantage of the people of New Yorkshire, just like she thinks she can fool everyone into believing she’s innocent.”

John shifted forward, keeping his eyes on the deputy. The moonlight flashed along the edge of his knife as he unsheathed it.

“Taking her won’t solve anything,” Arthur said tersely. “He’ll come after you whether you give her up or not.”

Hawkins sighed and nodded his head absently. “You’re right. There’s always going to be people like him that think they can buy justice.” He leveled the gun at Clara’s head and she stiffened, her chest stuttering with staggered breaths.

Her eyes landed straight on Arthur.

“If I kill her, then there’s nothing for him to collect,” Hawkins said.

Arthur’s revolver was drawn and aimed in the time it took the deputy to finish the sentence. Unfortunately for him, Arthur was fresh out of patience.

“You harm a single hair on her head,” Arthur said through gritted teeth, “and I will blow you straight to hell.”

The deputy chuckled but the gun remained leveled at Clara’s temple. He looked at her, a slithering sneer on his lips, as he said, “See? I knew you meant more to him than to Byers.”

The next moments happened quickly.

John’s knife sliced through the bonds holding Clara’s wrists. Arthur watched as he slapped the knife into her waiting palm and leapt out from the shadows toward the deputy.

Hawkins, who had not anticipated such a coup, only had time to look shocked before John’s hand wrapped around the deputy’s wrist and wrenched the gun from his grasp.

Clara shrugged off the ropes, whirled on the defenseless deputy, and tightened her fist around his throat. She buried the knife expertly between his ribs until the tip shattered his weak heart.

*

Clara wondered if she should feel something as she watched Deputy Errol Hawkins’ lifeless body fall to the ground at her feet.

But her heart only thundered in her chest, demanding to be noticed, as a cold, insipid numbness spread slowly across her skin and into her bones.

She was dimly aware of John’s presence at her side, his voice urging her to move. But he sounded far away, as though she’d suddenly gone through a tunnel and left him behind.

For the moment, there was only the blank, unseeing eyes of the deputy as the moonlight cascaded over his paling, wan skin. What was left of his blood seeped from the fatal wound she’d given him in payment for what he’d done to her. Her unfeeling fingers loosened on the unfamiliar knife in her hand, its edge dripping with dark, cold blood.

“Clara,” John insisted as he slid into her line of sight. “We gotta go.”

She wasn’t sure if she nodded; maybe she did, maybe she didn’t. Regardless, she realized she did feel something there in the presence of the erstwhile deputy.

It was hate.

Clara took a gasping, shuddering breath as the feeling overwhelmed her numbness and filled her veins with hellfire. She hated this man for what he did and what he would have done, had John not been there to stop it. She hated Byers for being the ghost that would not stop haunting every step she took and every thought she created.

But, perhaps most of all, Clara hated herself for continuously fooling herself into believing that she would ever be rid of him.

The hate fled as fast as it had come, replaced with the terrifying hollowness of despair. She could feel the edges of it wrapping around her, ready to drown her in its nothingness.

“Mae.”

Clara started and blinked. The world slid slowly back into place: the train, the flatbed on which she stood, the body at her feet, and the knife in her hand shuddered back into focus.

She turned, her legs shaking a bit, and found Arthur looking up at her.

Her chest felt tight. She tried to breathe but her throat swelled and closed around every short, unfulfilling gulp of air. Clara dropped the knife and staggered away from the body as she fought for control of her body, her thoughts, her life.

Arthur stretched out an arm toward. “Mae, come on.”

Clara did the only thing she could do—she focused on the sound of Arthur’s voice and let it carry her slowly to the edge of the flatbed. Her steps were halting as her muscles refused to relinquish their tension, but she forced herself to take each one all the same. When she reached the edge of the flatbed, Arthur beckoned and held out his hand for her to take.

Clara thought about sliding her palm into his and letting him help her off the flatbed. It would be nice, she thought distantly, to let go of her pride, just this once.

But the body behind her and the ghost in front of her served as reminders that pride was all she had; if she opened her heart again, then all would be lost—she would be lost.

So Clara only forced her aching, shrunken lungs to pull in a breath, braced her hands on the edge of the flatbed, and slipped back down to earth on her own.

Surprisingly, Clara landed solidly on her feet. She willed her body to straighten and let go of what she’d done on the flatbed, but a wave of crashing cold swept through her and her knees buckled. Clara’s hand darted out for the flatbed as she felt the world tilt up toward her.

But a pair of solid, strong hands caught her at the elbows. They pulled her up even though she wanted nothing more than to let the ground swallow her whole.

Arthur held her tightly and refused to let go.

Clara forced her numb and shaking fingers to gently brush against his arms. She nodded, swallowed thickly, and muttered, “It’s okay. I’m okay.”

One of his hands moved from her elbow down to her wrist. She watched as he turned over her trembling hand to see the deputy’s blood that coated her skin.

His summer eyes blazed like the hottest fire. Arthur’s lips pulled back from his teeth in a tight, furious grimace. He looked sharply at her, a single question burning in the center of her blue-green gaze.

Clara shook her head. “His,” she whispered. “Not mine.” She swallowed again as her body shook with chills. Her hands tightened instinctively on him, desperate for his warmth.

“Arthur,” she stammered, “he knew. The deputy knew about—”

“I know,” Arthur growled. “I know, Mae.”

Charles and John took a few tentative steps toward them. “We need to go,” Charles called out.

Clara felt the despair climb through her again. Everything, every part of her, was as cold as ice. She looked up at Arthur, her chest tight with a fear only her ghost could manifest.

She murmured, her voice hardly more than a trembling whisper, “I don’t know what to do.”

John trotted up to Arthur and gripped his shoulder. “We gotta get out of here, Arthur.”

Clara didn’t expect Arthur to answer her. He didn’t owe her anything; the deputy had been right, after all. Her presence here had done nothing but upend the carefully wrought balance that had once carved out New Yorkshire’s existence. Now the gang—Arthur included—would pay for her sins.

She shuddered when she felt his warm, rough palm cover her bloodied, shaking hand. Clara stared at his hand as the ice in her veins slowly but surely began to melt.

When she looked up at him, she was surprised to find the fire in his eyes had abated. Instead, their summer blue met her verdant ones with firm, resolute conviction.

“Whatever you do,” he said just loud enough so that only she could hear, “I got your back.”

Clara shouldn’t have wanted it. She shouldn’t have felt the sudden, crippling relief that flooded her body and banished the cold as Arthur’s promise hit home. This was how things went wrong, how the fragile essence of peace she’d managed to carve out for herself fell apart.

But she was far more selfish than she had any right to be, so Clara held onto the promise anyway.

Arthur dropped his hands as a grim hardness slid like a mask onto his face. He nodded toward John and Charles and said, “Let’s get the hell out of here.”

Clara followed. This time, her legs kept her upright.

“You know,” Arthur said as they reached the horses. “I am starting to realize that you are more trouble than you’re worth, Ms. Howard.”

She rolled her eyes and let out a sharp sigh. Marion eagerly pressed her nose into her mistress’s neck and huffed warily at the scent of blood. Clara swiped her hand on her skirt and used her clean hand to pat the horse’s neck.

She knew why he’d said it. Clara felt her rapid-fire heartbeat slow until her ears no longer echoed with the thunderous beat of her pulse. Despite what had happened, the brief return to normalcy was just enough for Clara to feel something like herself again.

“I hate you, Arthur,” she retorted as she climbed into the saddle. This time, she left all her frustration and conviction out of her tone.

Arthur’s smirk was unmistakable. “I know it, Mae.”

The outlaws wheeled their mounts away from the train and slipped off into the night, the moon the only witness to their crimes. Clara rode until the feeling came back into her body, until she felt something like her old self again. But the more distance they put between themselves and train and the closer they got back to camp, the more Clara’s fragmented mind pieced itself together in a single, encompassing thought.

With the deputy gone, that left only the sheriff under Byers’ thumb. One man stood between her and what freedom she could still obtain. Clara would deal with him, one way or another. Maybe then her ghost could be put to rest.

Maybe then Clara could well and truly be free.

Chapter Text

Clara placed the kerosene lamp on the ground, being careful to nestle it between the roots of the tree that jutted proudly from the ground. Deepwater Pass was nestled in the natural seclusion at the base of the mountains, but it was, at least, home to a handful of skinny, weather-beaten trees and a clear lake, filled by the upper mountain runoff.

Night had long since settled on the camp of the Van der Linde gang. The moon climbed steadily to its zenith, draping all of New Yorkshire in its stark, pale light. It was the herald of dreams, of blessed sleep brought on by a hard day’s work. And yet, it remained elusive to Clara, and after an hour of restless tossing and turning, she’d thrown off her thin blanket, snatched up her book and lamp, and stalked out in the night.

Sleep, as it turned out, was not always the promised escape from one’s troubles as most believed.

The camp was calmest at this time of night. The women were all asleep (save for her, of course) as Ms. Grimshaw conducted her last, late night rounds, inspecting the camp and assessing its worthiness against her strict, unyielding standards. Uncle, true to form, was deeply unconscious near the camp’s still burning fire, an empty bottle still clutched in one hand. The low light of a lamp burned steadily from Dutch’s tent and would likely continue to do so until the hours just before dawn.

She’d passed John and Javier at one of the camp’s tables on her late-night excursion. John glanced up at her, his eyes glassy and movements daunted by the half empty bottle of liquor Javier held.

“And where you going, miss?” John drawled, his words strung together in the lazy way drunk folk had.

Javier, on the other hand, waved her over. He was equally inebriated but held himself together with some lingering sense of pride. “Join us for a drink, Ms. Howard.”

“Bit late for that, I’m afraid. Besides,” she explained as she turned to display her book, “I’m more inclined toward less liquid entertainment.”

John scoffed and waved at the bottle in Javier’s hand. He managed to pour himself another glass, spilling only a slight bit as he righted the bottle.

“You sound just like that woman,” he commented darkly, shaking his head as he downed the freshly poured drink. “Always thinking she’s better than me.”   

Clara raised an eyebrow. Javier dismissed John’s comment with a wave. “Don’t listen to him, señorita. My friend here is trying to drown the sorrows of his heart and doing a terrible job of it.”

They watched as John poured and emptied another glass, shaking his head and muttering under his breath about incessantly nagging women.

She took that as her cue to exit, opting to leave the men to their own devices. She suspected John would pay for his transgressions in the morning, either by way of a hangover or Abigail—or both, Clara surmised. Instead she settled by the tree and opened her book, content to read until sleep finally deigned to find her.

Clara wandered into the pages of The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, aided by the light of her lantern and the moon hanging glumly above her head. A soft, cool breeze drifted through the valley, rustling the prickly, stunted grass and shrubs. She paused in her reading and looked up at the nearby lake, her eyes following the gentle crest and fall of the water’s surface against the breeze. Its surface was a mirror to the stars and Clara watched as the lights in the heavens danced against the rippling water.

Here, just below the mountains, the air was crisp and clean. She pulled in a long, slow breath, filling her lungs with the natural scent of the land. There, at the back of the breath, was the ever-tantalizing prospect of peace—true peace, the sort for which she’d fought, killed, and made her way halfway across the country. The serenity born of the steadfast mountains made her believe, even if for a moment in the night, that she could outrun the path that still nipped at her heels.

Clara filled her lungs again. This time, the air had changed, twisted into something bitter and strange. She realized after a moment that it was the sharp odor of cigarettes.

A shadow cut through the night beyond the halo of her lamp. Clara glanced toward it, her muscles tensing and mind whirling in defense. But the shape grew all too familiar, especially when she caught sight of the still-burning match as it lingered at the end of a cigarette.

Arthur Morgan flicked his wrist and doused the match before tossing it carelessly away. The end of the cigarette smoldered like a dying star in the night as he blew out a soft, billowing plume of smoke.

As if sensing he wasn’t alone, he turned in her direction. He was met with her unerring, deep set frown.

“Oh, great,” he muttered in mocking disappointment.

At the same time, Clara hissed, “Jesus Christ.”

The matter of their cordiality had not seemed to garner any sort of stability, despite the frequent and often tremulous adventures they’d shared since her arrival. Clara found him to be a stubborn, mule-headed man, an opinion little changed since the matter of their meeting back in Heritage. They were perpetually on edge around one another, as if they were both waiting for the other to draw their weapon first.

Luckily for them (and the rest of the gang), their weapon of choice was biting, venomous words.

Not that Clara minded, really; after the first few days they’d settled into their general animosity towards one another like an old pair of boots. It simply became a part of who they were, though the fighting bordered on violent, at times. The rest of the gang had taken to their relationship—if one could call it such—with an abundantly tolerant mixture of amusement and irritation. But, like most other unchangeable matters, they learned to simply accept that whenever Clara Howard and Arthur Morgan were around one another, words would fly like knives until one or both of them grew tired of fighting and conceded the battle.

Most of the time it was Arthur.

Clara slapped her book closed and sighed. “So much for peace and quiet.”

Arthur removed the cigarette from his mouth. “I ain’t even said anything.”

“You don’t have to,” she replied, tossing Huck Finn aside and leaning against the tree. “Your presence alone is enough to upset me.”

He tilted his head and narrowed his eyes at her. Arthur shoved the cigarette back between his lips and shook his head in disbelief.

“Far be it from me to disturb you by simply existing,” he muttered around the cigarette. A bit of ash fell from the end and drifted away in another short burst of wind. “I’ll go find somewhere to be that ain’t quite so hostile.”

Clara threw her hand up in the air. “You might as well stay. You’ve already ruined the moment.”

He released another bit of smoke into the night air. The cigarette was almost gone; he was a fast smoker when irritated, as she’d quickly come to find out.

“I ain’t exactly interested in sharing company with someone who constantly sets my blood to boiling,” Arthur replied tersely. “If I wanted that, I’d go find some O’Driscolls.” He tossed away the cigarette and added dryly, “Or Micah.”

Clara eyed him sidelong and rolled her eyes. “Just shut up and sit down.”

Arthur looked about to protest. Finally, he shook his head, shrugged in resignation, and sauntered over to where she sat by the tree. He paused before he sat down.

“You don’t got your knives on you, do you?” he asked with a bit of concern.

She stretched out her legs and let her head fall back against the tree trunk. “No, but I’m considering going to get them.”

Arthur lowered himself to the ground and leaned up against the tree with a sigh. He kept one leg folded and braced his elbow on top of his knee. “I’ll drown you in that lake before you get the chance.”

Much to their surprise, Clara let out a short bark of laughter. “You wish, Mr. Morgan.”

“Oh, I do,” he replied, nodding solemnly despite the playful smirk that flickered on his lips. “Every damn day.”

They settled into a sort of strange, comfortable silence. It was remarkable, really, how they could share so many bitter moments alongside these tamer, more vulnerable ones. Clara found the matter confounding; the same person who made her heart stammer wildly in her chest and her veins fill with anger was the same one who could draw some measure of comfort when she needed it most—or, in some cases, when she least expected it.

But that, Clara decided, was a mystery to be solved another day.

“So,” Arthur said after a long moment of silence, “what you doing out here, anyway?”

Clara’s eyes slid to her forgotten book. “I couldn’t sleep,” she confessed. “I thought maybe reading would help but so far, it hasn’t.”

Arthur nodded slowly and dipped his head low. “And then I showed up and made matters worse,” he admitted with a small smile.

She nodded as her own mouth twisted up in a grin, and replied, “As you do, Mr. Morgan.”

He peered around her at her book. Arthur squinted his eyes in an effort to make out the gold lettering stamped into the cover. He gestured toward the novel with his chin and asked, “What you reading, anyway?”

Clara picked up the book and held it aloft so he could see it. “I don’t much care for Twain,” she admitted, her mouth sliding into an undecided half-frown. “But I guess this isn’t all that bad.”

Arthur rubbed at the stubble on his jaw. “I ain’t read much of him. Really ain’t got much of a chance to read in general, these days.”

Clara turned her head to look at him. Strange, how stars and moonlight made him seem softer around the edges. He seemed almost handsome, she thought, with his square jaw and shining blue-green eyes.

She didn’t care for the way her stomach plummeted wildly at the thought.

“And how does a gunslinger end up being such an avid reader?” Clara inquired.

Arthur reached into the pocket of his jacket and drew forth his pack of cigarettes. He pulled a fresh one out along with a handful of slightly bent matches. Clara watched as he lifted his boot just enough to bring the match to quick, flaring life. He puffed on the cigarette until the end was a glaring, fierce red before holding it out to her. Clara shook her head; she hated cigarettes. Arthur placed the rolled tobacco between his lips and leaned his head back against the tree.

“Hosea and Dutch taught me how to read,” he provided in answer to her question. “Mostly Hosea, I guess. Taught me to write, too.”

Clara settled back against the tree. “My uncle taught me,” she said. The words brought with them a distinct hail of memory that, for a moment, made her feel unsteady. She shook her head and added, “I’ve always loved reading. It’s one of the few things I’ve always made time for.”

He nodded and blew out a cloud of smoke. Clara noticed that Arthur deliberately turned his head in the other direction so as not to bother her.

“Like me and my journal, I guess.” He gave her a lopsided grin punctuated by his cigarette and said, “I suppose even outlaws can indulge in worldly pleasures every now and then.”

She smiled. Clara discovered the more they spoke idly that her body began to relax, shedding the restlessness that had kept her on edge all night. Her back molded comfortably against the rough surface of the tree until even the tension coiled within her jaw loosened.

Arthur took another pull on the cigarette. His eyes slid toward her as he shifted uncomfortably where he sat.

“You ain’t said much about where you was from,” he began haltingly, as though the words stuck fast in his throat. “About New Jersey. About Byers.”

Clara’s mind went blank. The small breeze that had kicked up again chilled her skin until the cold seemed through every layer to land heavily in the core of her bones.

Arthur noticed the blankness in her gaze, the way her relaxed muscles suddenly tensed up at his question. He eyes softened as he tossed away the cigarette. “I didn’t mean to upset you.”

She became suddenly enthralled with the hem of her shirt. Her fingers brushed against the worn fabric while her thoughts clashed against one another. She begged the mountains for a bit of the peace they’d promised but, as was always the case with her ghosts, they were not content to let her sit idly by.

Instinct screamed at her to keep silent. Uttering secrets was a good as nailing shut the lid of her coffin. But, despite the lump in her throat and the ache in her soul, Clara framed a few, halting words while everything else—the past, the hurt, the ghosts—tried desperately to drown her. She shifted against the tree and dropped her hand back into her lap.

“I guess you could say I was with another gang back home,” Clara finally admitted, her voice quiet despite the loud clash of thoughts in her head. “It was his gang.” She paused, turned over what to say, and found each word more wanting than the last.

How was she to put years of twisted nightmares and dismantled hopes into words? How did Arthur expect her to find the voice that Byers had made it a point to suffocate with the clench of his hand?

But Arthur demanded nothing of her. He sat at her side and watched her carefully; if she chose to speak, he’d listen. If she remained silent, he’d not question it.

Eventually, Clara let out a strong, breathy sigh. “It turns out being rich can buy you many things, including loyalty. And I was, for a long time. I thought it was what I wanted.” I thought he was what I wanted. She picked absently at the short, stunted tufts of grass at her side. “And then I knew it wasn’t.”

She looked away. It was a pitiful, woeful generalization of all she’d endured on the east coast. All the old pain and fury swept up into her heart, clenching her in its fist. For a moment, there was little to do but ride out the feeling and fight for breath. Then it was gone.

Arthur watched her from the corner of his eyes. He kept his expression neutral but, if she looked hard enough, Clara thought she could see concern lingering at the center of his eyes.

Clara heard him sigh as he looked off into the distance. After a moment, he murmured, “I was nearly married once.”

Instinctively, she barked out a crisp, cool laugh. But when she glanced over at him, the brief whisper of long-hardened pain and regret shadowed his expression.

Clara cleared her throat. “I didn’t mean it like that,” she explained quickly. “I just…couldn’t believe it.”

Arthur’s grin was only half-hearted. He stared into his lap as the veil of memory slid over his features, making him seem both a thousand miles away and right beside her at the same time.

“It’s true,” he said. He let loose another sigh, this one filled with old sorrow and hurt burning at the edges. “Didn’t work out, though.”

She was quite familiar with the hidden language between words. It was silent, lingering in the space between lips reluctant to divulge what was held in their hearts. Clara heard it in the few words Arthur said and knew that the roots of that particular hurt were twined deeply through his heart.

It was the same in her case, she supposed.

It didn’t stop her from asking a single question. “What happened, if I may ask?”

Arthur gazed wistfully out onto the lake. He shrugged and rubbed absently at the back of his neck. “Her family weren’t too keen on her marrying an outlaw.”

Clara nodded solemnly. “The prim and proper type. I’ve heard of those.”

Arthur glanced wistfully out toward the lake. “Just weren’t meant to be, I guess.”

Then she said something she never would have imagined, had this been any other moment in any other day.

Clara leaned forward a little, met Arthur’s eyes, and declared, “That’s her loss, then.”

Arthur’s grin was wry and disbelieving as he turned it on her. “I know quite a few folks as would disagree with you, Ms. Howard.”

Clara lifted her chin and firmly held his gaze. “They can disagree all they want. She doesn’t deserve you, Arthur.”

Much to her surprise, she meant every word.

He didn’t say anything; even his expression remained resolutely blank. Arthur hung his head and gave her only a quick, half-hearted nod. Though her declaration was true, it was abundantly clear that he didn’t believe it.

Arthur Morgan, nearly married! How strange, Clara thought as she glanced at him from the corner of her eyes. She wondered who the woman had been that had captured his heart and pondered the circumstances that led to their separation.

A moment’s consideration left her with a hot, tight feeling in her chest and the realization that she didn’t much care about the woman—whoever the hell she was—and her decidedly poor taste in judgment.

Clara pressed her back against the tree again and let her gaze fall on the lake. The breeze had settled and the mirror to the stars was breathlessly still. Clara thought that maybe the lake wasn’t just a way to see the stars from a different perspective. Maybe, she thought with a quick glance in Arthur’s direction, it was a reminder that not all things were as they seemed.

Her next question burst suddenly from her lips. “Have you ever been to the ocean, Mr. Morgan?”

Clara heard him shift a bit beside her. “No, can’t say that I have.”

“I loved going to the ocean,” she admitted as the pleasant memory washed over her.

Something in her voice was enough to garner Arthur’s attention. He settled so that he was better able to face her in the dark. “Well, go on, then. Tell me about it,” Arthur prompted with a quick flick of his hand.

And she did. Clara recounted the handful of times her uncle had taken to her to the coast of Monmouth County, where the bright blue of the Atlantic Ocean danced against the powdery shoreline. She spared him the details in between those moments—how those trips occurred only when she did precisely what her uncle ordered her to do.

Those things were often violent and involved the sharp end of a knife.

Clara concluded her tale and felt her eyelids begin to droop. She leaned heavily against the tree, grateful for its solid presence and the fact that it kept her from the uncomfortable, slightly rocky ground. Arthur’s legs were stretched out in front of him, his head tilted up toward the stars.

“That don’t sound too bad at all,” he said with a shy smile when he was sure she was done.

She tugged her jacket tightly around her shoulders and settled in against the tree. Clara pulled her legs back up toward her chest and settled her arms firmly around her middle. “Tell me something about where you’re from.”

“Nah,” Arthur declined with a shake of his head. “Ain’t nothing there but bad memories.”

Clara glared at him. “I wasn’t asking you, Mr. Morgan.”

He grinned against the moonlight. Somehow, she thought, it seemed brighter and more prominent than even the stars.

“I should have known that weren’t no innocent request,” he answered. Arthur leaned against the tree, looked up at the stars, and took a breath.

Then he told her about where he was from.

Much like Clara had, Arthur left out the in between details, the ones that had no place there at the base of the mountain beneath the canopy of brightly lit stars. He told her of the plains that stretched farther than the horizon; he regaled her with tales of the great, proud trees he used to climb as a child. Arthur’s voice lost its roughness; instead, his deep baritone became soft as he reminisced, bringing the safe memories back to life.

Clara listened until her eyes closed, and her breathing slowed. And, in a twist of fate neither one of them could foresee, it was Arthur Morgan’s voice that ultimately lulled her to sleep.

*

It wasn’t long before Arthur realized Clara wasn’t listening.

He paused in his retelling of the mountains that loomed in the distance of his childhood home. They had been majestic and full of promise, the sort that a young boy from a shattered home could hold onto with the purity of innocence. He’d avoided any details that might lead toward his mother; there simply wasn’t enough left of her in his memory to create much of a tale. His father, on the other hand, firmly belonged in the bowels of hell, and not even Clara’s insistence could bring Arthur to speak of him in such a setting as this.

Arthur finished speaking and waited for…well, he wasn’t quite sure. With Claramae Howard, one was liable to get a compliment as they were a verbal lashing and, in his case, it was more often the latter than the former. It turned out that silence was far more concerning that either of his previous determinations, and Arthur leaned away from the tree to peer at her.

Clara was fast asleep.

He laughed softly and shook his head in disbelief. “Figures,” he whispered quietly to himself. He settled back against the tree, but his eyes remained on her.

Arthur thought Clara looked peaceful as she slept. Her head was tilted toward him, nestled against the bark of the tree at their backs. She wore only a thin jacket against the pervasive night chill, her arms wound tightly across her chest to stay warm.

It’d felt right to tell her about Mary. Arthur still wasn’t quite sure how the moment slid so perfectly into place, or how the reluctance he felt in discussing his former love fled at the sight of Clara’s eyes in the starlight.

The pale moonlight spilled across her cheek, highlighting the light smattering of freckles that lined the tops of her cheeks. Her long, tightly wound braid hung over her shoulder, its length held firmly against her chest by her arms. This was Clara with her inner fire dampened, where all the biting retorts and comments dripping with sarcasm were mercifully, briefly, laid to rest.

He didn’t realize how long he’d been staring until he started out of his wandering thoughts and stumbled headlong back into the night. The chill of the mountains had settled into the pass and the shadows had lengthened with the path of the moon. Arthur blinked, feeling suddenly tired, and began to ponder how best to remove a sleeping Clara from the tree and back to her tent.

He reasoned it would likely be like trying to move a black bear during its hibernation.

In the end, he decided on a rather unconventional idea. He rose silently, careful not to jostle her as he moved. His tent wasn’t far from the edge of camp, which made it all the easier to fetch two blankets from his belongings. When he arrived back at the tree, he bent carefully over Clara’s prone form and draped one of the blankets (the one that was decidedly less smelly and moth-eaten) around her. Arthur tried his best to tuck the edges of the blanket firmly into place so that the worst of the night’s chill wouldn’t disturb her.

Arthur took up residence beside her once more and settled back into a comfortable position among the tree’s roots. He laid out the blanket, buttoned up his jacket, and removed his hat. In reality, the tree wasn’t such a bad place to lay out the rest of the night; he’d slept in far worse places and, really, the roots formed a surprisingly appealing nest for his rather large form.

He sighed as his eyes grew heavy. Arthur took one last glance at Clara, who remained firmly in the boundaries of sleep, and tilted his head back against the trunk. Arthur closed his eyes, pulled a breath of fresh mountain air into his lungs, and beckoned sleep to find him.

That was when he felt by a soft, warm pressure on his arm.

Arthur’s eyes flew open and he turned to look at Clara. She’d moved a bit in her sleep, but that hadn’t been the source of the disturbance he’d felt. Arthur’s eyes slid down to where one of her hands clutched at the blanket, holding it firmly over her body. The other hand had crept toward him and landed in the crook of his elbow.

Arthur’s breath hitched in his lungs when he felt the barest brush of her head against his shoulder.

He froze, his heart hammering in his chest. What was he supposed to do? Arthur’s eyes darted back and forth between the places where she touched him, feeling at once panicked and confused.

After a moment, he relaxed slightly. It was cold out—Clara had unconsciously reached toward the nearest source of warmth, which just happened to be him. Arthur had done that thousands of times; it was a natural part of this lifestyle, after all. Arthur had a bit of trouble thinking of examples at the moment, but the flimsy rationale was enough to calm his nerves.

His eyes lingered on her as he relaxed the tension out of his muscles. Clara didn’t seem at all disturbed by the sudden close proximity of their bodies. Arthur swallowed thickly as his mind raced; she probably wouldn’t remember what had happened in the morning. And Arthur, for his part, would be just as content to bury the memory.

Sleep eventually overtook him. At some point during their slumber, the hand at Arthur’s elbow wound tighter around his arm, pulling him closer. Arthur, who had in waking moments decided that it was best to ignore what had happened, unconsciously tipped his head onto hers as he slept.

*

That was how they found themselves when they woke in the hours just before dawn.

The sky was slowing opening back up to the sun. The moon shuddered as it dipped below the horizon and the bright, fiery orb of day peeked at the world with fresh, clear eyes. The mountains beyond Deepwater Pass would be the first to feel the warmth of the sun; for now, the moon’s chill pervaded the valley in which the gang made their camp, waiting for the day to creep slowly back into the embrace of the sun’s warmth.

Clara slipped slowly out of sleep. She sighed as wakefulness flooded her limbs, bringing them back to life. It was difficult to remember the last time she’d slept so peacefully and deeply.

It was then that she realized she wasn’t on her cot.

She cracked open her eyes and blinked at the blanket wrapped around her shoulders. It wasn’t hers; she hadn’t brought a blanket when she came out to read and Arthur interrupted her endeavor. In fact, her nose detected the distinctly masculine smell that lingered in the fibers of the fabric.

Something moved beneath her cheek. Clara froze and flex her hands before coming to a heart-stopping realization. Somehow during the night, she’d moved away from the tree…and onto Arthur.

Her hand was still wrapped around his arm just above his elbow, the tips of her fingers pressed firmly into the soft, worn leather of his jacket. It was that same supple feeling of leather that cradled her cheek.

Clara’s heart thundered once, twice, in her chest. She sucked in a breath and looked up.

Straight into Arthur Morgan’s summer eyes.

Their foreheads brushed against one another. Every breath she took was matched with one of his own. Every inch of her skin hummed with this unexpected closeness.

He was looking at her as though he’d stumbled out of a pleasant dream only to find her beside him. It wasn’t that he was upset, not precisely; Clara could see the same mixture of confusion and mild embarrassment she felt mirrored in his gaze.

“What are you doing?” she whispered. Somehow, the vitality and conviction had slipped out of her voice.

Arthur’s eyes narrowed slightly in an effort to appear angry and displeased. But, just as the conviction had gone from Clara’s voice, any anger Arthur might have otherwise fell away with the passing night.

“What are you doing?” he countered. Clara noticed that the tops of his cheeks were painted a soft pink.

Neither one of them moved. Clara, desperate to breathe in the clean mountain air, found that each breath she pulled into her lungs was wound with Arthur’s scent. Her instincts screamed at her to move, to break away from the bits of contact she and Arthur shared.

Another part of her—one that she could not name—begged her to stay and drink in the feel of his closeness, of the comfort that had kept her so deeply entrenched in sleep.

Just when she thought the tension would tear her apart, Clara pushed up to her feet, letting the Arthur-scented blanket fall to the ground. Her nerves were on edge; she couldn’t quite determine whether she wanted to run away or stay rooted to the spot. Clara couldn’t tell if she wanted to scream at him, or…

“I’m going to pretend this never happened,” Clara blurted as she yanked the blanket off the ground and wound it into a tight, messy ball. “That way, I don’t feel the urge to stab you.”

Arthur jolted from the ground and slapped his trousers to rid them of the dust and bits of old leaves. “Oh, calm down, woman. It ain’t even dawn yet and you’re already griping about nonsense.”

Clara threw the blanket at him. Arthur caught it, his brow etched with a deep frown. She couldn’t seem to stand still; her thoughts felt frantic and every movement felt wild and unnatural. Briefly she wondered if she’d left some vital part of herself still asleep beneath the tree.

She shook her head and tried to clear the cobwebs from her thoughts. “What did you think you were doing?” she asked, gesturing toward the place where they’d slept beneath the tree. Together.

Arthur retrieved his hat from the ground, his movements etched with irritation. He slapped it on his head and turned a withering glare at her.

“You mean when I was trying to keep you from freezing to death?” he countered, holding out the blanket as evidence. Arthur shook his head and let out a wry bark of laughter. “Guess I should’ve just let the cold take you and spare myself the headache.”

Clara grabbed her book and the spent lantern. “Oh, shut up,” she muttered angrily. “It’s too early for this.”

Arthur gaped at her. “You’re the one causing a damn ruckus. And before dawn, might I add.”

She looked at him—really looked at him, for the first time since they woke. He was watching her as intently as she did him and, despite her desire to be angry and irritated at him, Clara found that he looked different in the soft halo of light that pervaded the waking world.

It seemed they’d both left something behind night.

Arthurr mirrored her attempt to look displeased. But the memories they’d shared with one another the night before in one of their rare moments of decency hung between them like thin, persistent threads.

Stars and shadows ain’t good to see by. The line from her book clattered loudly through her thoughts, momentarily subduing all the chaos. Even the mountains above and the approaching dawn seemed to hold their breath while Clara and Arthur watched each other.

Maybe, she thought with her heart stammering in her chest, matters could be made clearer if only she were willing to let in a bit of light.

*

In the end, Arthur was content to push the night firmly out of his memory.

Every time his thoughts wandered back to Clara’s hand on his arm and the feel of her head on his shoulder, a swirling, sour feeling filled his stomach. His heart pumped wildly in his chest when he recalled the first moments of waking, when Clara stirred beside him and the soft, silken strands of her hair brushed against his cheek like a gentle caress.

He hadn’t meant for that to happen; the fact that it happened at all was enough to upset him, and not for the reasons he would have imagined.

Arthur didn’t find the contact unpleasant. Even after all their arguments, angry looks, and threats on his life, Arthur was not at all repelled by Clara’s presence.

He decided with grim determination that that was a problem best solved another day.

They didn’t speak as they entered the camp. Most of the gang, save for Pearson, were still abed, not yet willing to face the world before light had fully broken. Clara hugged her book to her chest and let the lantern dangle from her fingers. She seemed deep in thought as they wandered quietly to their tents.

Either that, Arthur reasoned, or she was plotting his murder. Either option was entirely feasible.

They reached his tent first. Arthur drifted toward the opening, casting one last look at Clara.

Surprisingly, she paused, glanced at him over her shoulder, and said quietly, “Thank you. For not letting me freeze to death, I mean.”

He was mildly shocked. Unsure of what to do, Arthur shrugged uselessly and nodded. “Sure.”

And that was that.

Or so Arthur convinced himself. But what the stubborn, often hard-headed outlaw refused to acknowledge was that buried beneath the reluctance to consider the night too closely was another truth, one so incongruent and at odds with what he’d already established as reality that he buried it before it ever had a chance at life.

The truth was this: Arthur had felt more at ease last night with Clara than he had in as long as he could remember. The world felt less complicated, less complicit in its vendetta to wipe his kind from the face of the earth. Breathing felt easier, his steps didn’t pound so thoroughly against the ground, and his heart, which had once felt as heavy as stone, seemed to slowly, slowly, rise from the depths of his blackened, frayed soul. All of this was too vast, too terrifying and dangerous to admit, so buried it stayed, because he knew no better than to squash that which did not serve him.

Because, if Arthur Morgan had spared half a moment to being honest, he would have discovered that there was still enough of his heart left to feel something other than hate.

Chapter Text

There was one strict rule by which Hosea Matthews abided: When camp was quiet, one ought to take advantage of said quietude and indulge in a bit of self-care.

He sidled up to his tent with his cup of steaming coffee in hand. Dutch’s gramophone blared some sort of ridiculous tune that carried across the wind of Deepwater Pass, a sound that served as the gang’s dawn herald. But Hosea, who’d spent these long years indulging nearly every one of Dutch’s fanciful whims, endured the sound and lowered his creaking, elderly body into his well-worn chair.

Hosea sipped his coffee and enjoyed the liquid’s pleasant burn as it warmed him through. He’d elected to make the brew this morning in place of Pearson, who always mucked up the damn drink. It wasn’t hard, the old man always told him; even a monkey could do it, though they’d be hard-pressed to find one in such remote climes.

He reached for his book, which he’d already laid out on the nearby table. Hosea’s eyes lingered for a moment on the photo he kept on the table. A smile played on his lips.

Bessie had always teased him about his preference to read in quiet times. Even as young Arthur and John ran amok, his younger self would always find a brief moment of calm in which to indulge in a book. It was, in the end, how he’d persuaded Arthur and eventually John to sit still long enough to teach them how to read.

The moments in which Hosea allowed himself to thoroughly miss his wife were raw and undiluted with pain. But in the end, he took a deep breath, settled back against the chair, and opened his book.

There was still work to be done with the gang, but he’d see her soon enough.

Hosea managed to read through an entire chapter (a feat nigh unheard of in such times) before the sound of hooves trampled closer to camp. He turned over his shoulder as the shout of the lookout (it sounded like John, who had likely taken up the job in a blatant attempt to escape the demands of his woman and boy) and saw two horses approach.

Arthur Morgan and Clara Howard sidled up to the hitching post. At first, everything appeared normal. Then Hosea heard the shouting.

He closed his book and turned fully in his chair to watch. Arthur nearly threw himself from the horse and tossed an angry, accusatory hand toward Clara.

“Anything else you planning on ruining today, Ms. Howard?”

The woman in question patted her horse’s neck and dismounted in a single, unperturbed motion. When she landed on her feet, she glanced curtly in Arthur’s direction.

She said, “And yet, despite your insistence to the contrary, my plan worked just fine.”

Hosea watched in bemusement as Clara stalked away, leaving a vastly hot-tempered Arthur to follow in her wake.

“It ain’t about your plan—or lack thereof, if you mean to be precise,” he replied tersely. “It’s about doing what you’re goddamn told.”

The old man knew exactly what was going to come next.

Clara whirled and tossed her hands onto her hips. She glared at Arthur, who pulled up short and faced her head on.

“You,” she snarled with a jab to his chest, “have a severe lack of imagination.”

Arthur squared his shoulders. He pointed at her and deliberately kept his skin from coming into contact with her body. “And you,” he countered, “do not yet seem to grasp the concept of following orders.”

“Do I look like the sort to follow orders, Arthur?”

He snickered. “You don’t seem like the sort to do much of anything other than whatever the hell you damn well please,” he replied with dripping sarcasm.

Clara stiffened and narrowed her eyes at him. “Are you done now?”

Arthur shrugged and held up his hands. “That depends. Are you through with trying my patience?”

They continued to argue, even as Hosea watched from the safety his tent. Kids, he thought wryly. Always making such a mess of things. He opened his book and resolved to finish the chapter before the world demanded his full, uninhibited attention.

Hosea had hardly gotten through a page when Miss Grimshaw sped toward him, her quickened steps filled with divine purpose. She cut a hard glance toward Arthur and Clara and turned angrily back to Hosea.

She pointed at them and ordered, “You need to do something about those two.”

Hosea closed his book with a resigned sigh and placed it on the table. “I’m not quite sure what you expect me to do, Susan.” He braced his hands on his knees.

“It’s been going on for too long, Hosea. They’re disturbing the entire camp with that boisterous nonsense,” Miss Grimshaw explained through gritted teeth. “I won’t have it anymore.”

He looked around at the camp as if to verify Miss Grimshaw’s accusations. Most of the camp ignored the bickering, but the girls had certainly taken notice. They whispered to each other from where they all sat, huddled and doing the work assigned to them. Charles Smith glanced once or twice over his shoulder when Arthur or Clara’s voice got particularly loud. Javier walked by and muttered something in Spanish and, while Hosea couldn’t understand it, his tone was far more than enough to convey what he thought.

Susan Grimshaw raised an eyebrow at Hosea. “Well?”

He sighed and scratched at his chin. “I suppose I can speak with Arthur.”

She waited a beat and nodded in satisfaction. Susan glanced once more at the quarreling pair, who had thankfully taken their argument toward the opposite end of camp, and sighed.

“I thought we had it bad enough with Abigail and that boy,” Miss Grimshaw muttered with a jab toward John’s scouting position. “But these two—”

“I know,” Hosea nodded solemnly. “But you know Arthur.”

Miss Grimshaw crossed her arms and frowned. Her eyes softened just a bit at the corners. “That I do.”

“And you remember how he was with Mary,” Hosea said as he sat back in the chair.

The hardness returned to her gaze. “I never liked that girl,” she said with a distinct lift of her chin. “And she weren’t any good for Arthur, anyhow.”

Hosea didn’t entirely agree. He knew how much Arthur had loved her and how painfully difficult their separation had been for him to bear. But, in the end, Hosea hadn’t felt one way or another about Mary; he only knew Arthur’s feelings and that, once upon a time, they’d been true and deep, and that the pain that followed was equally as crucial to his character as the love that preceded it.

It hadn’t been all that different with Bessie, after all. Love was a fickle thing, which wrought as much euphoria as it did sorrow.

Clara’s voice cut through his silent reverie. “Idiot!”

A shout in Arthur’s distinct baritone followed swiftly after. “Witch!”

The old man glanced up at Susan Grimshaw and said, this time with more conviction, “I’ll talk to Arthur.”

*

There was one other hard and fast rule by which Hosea Matthews abided: Never attempt reasonable conversation with Arthur Morgan when he was angry.

Now, Hosea knew that Arthur preferred to hide behind the angry, dumb façade. It was a mask so familiar and comforting that Hosea had long since ceased any and all attempts at bringing the true Arthur to the surface.

That was where the journal had come in. That, too, had become so much a part of who Arthur was that those who’d thought the habit strange and unlike a man of his particular, unruly demeanor had simply come to accept it and move on. The journal, at least, allowed Arthur an outlet for the truth he buried beneath the mask he turned out to the rest of the world—even Hosea, at times, though the old man could usually see right through it.

The fight with Clara had ignited an anger so swift and exacting that Hosea sensed the danger right away. He remained precisely where he was as Arthur stalked off around the camp, seeking any and every outlet for his boiling ire. Once or twice someone tried to pester him and the last of them, Bill Williamson, received a verbal lashing so bitter and unrepentant that the rest of the gang stayed away from Arthur for the rest of the afternoon.

Except, of course, for Hosea, who waited until Arthur wandered to the rocky shore of the mountain pool before making his move.

Arthur turned and glared over his shoulder at the sound of approaching footsteps. The edges of his hardened expression softened a bit when he caught sight of Hosea.

“Mind if I join you?” the old man asked as he approached the log upon which Arthur sat. He didn’t wait for an answer and instead simply sat himself down with a soft sigh.

The perks of becoming old were few, but one of them was this: Advanced age allowed one to come and go as they pleased and, more precisely, without the permission of upstart adoptive sons.

Arthur turned his attention back to the hunting knife in one hand. He held a whetstone in a death grip in the opposite hand and drew the blade along it in a practiced, slightly aggravated motion.

Hosea watched for a moment and then muttered, “You ain’t planning on stabbing an old man, now, are you?”

Arthur heaved a long, heavy sigh. “No.”

He waited a beat. The only sound was the soft, billowing breeze and the metallic singing of the blade on the whetstone.

Then, Hosea said carefully, “Quite a ruckus that was, when you came back.”

The knife paused in his track. Arthur grunted and resumed the sharpening with renewed force.

“Care to tell me what that was all about?”

The question was met with another terse sigh. Arthur’s grip on the knife handle tightened just a bit. Hosea waited; Arthur wasn’t the sort to be explicit and detailed with his feelings. It oftentimes took quite a bit of coaxing to get Arthur to mutter even the barest of words in explanation.

Hosea leaned forward and waited.

After a few moments, Arthur lifted the knife from the whetstone. He sheathed the blade and tucked the stone into the satchel he always kept looped around his shoulders. He shook his head, tossed his hands in the air, and finally spoke.

“She don’t listen,” he explained with undisguised aggravation.

Hosea nodded thoughtfully. “And I’m assuming that fact is the cause of your argument?”

Arthur scratched at the back of his head. “I guess.”

“You guess?”

“What you interrogating me for, anyhow?” he asked irritably.

The old man held his composure. “I’m just asking, that’s all.”

Silence resumed. Arthur adjusted the hat on his head and let his arm drop futilely at his side.

He said, “That woman is impossible. She don’t listen, Hosea—she just do what she wants, consequences be damned.”

Hosea smirked. “Sounds a lot like someone I know.”

Arthur frowned and narrowed his gaze. “At least I know where my loyalties lie,” he muttered. He tossed a hand over his shoulder and added, “That woman don’t care about nobody but herself.”

The old man shook his head. “Oh, I don’t think that’s true at all.”

“It is. Every time I ride with her, she ropes us both into some sort of ridiculous predicament that nigh on gets us killed.” Arthur paused and glanced out at the lake. His lips were pressed into a firm line, but Hosea could just about see the turbulent flow of thoughts through the depths of his summer eyes.

“She’s got one foot in the real world and the other—I don’t even know where, but it ain’t here.” Arthur hung his head and added, “I just don’t know what to do about her.”

Incidentally, this wasn’t the first time Hosea had heard a variation of this admission. When Arthur had fallen fast and hard for Mary Gillis, he’d admitted the same—though in a slightly different choice of phrase. And, if memory served him correctly, the young outlaw had been equally as reluctant to acknowledge the truth that lay hidden beneath the hardened layers of his heart.

Hosea had been worried that Arthur would never open his heart again, not just after Mary but particularly after Eliza and Isaac. He peered closely at the set in Arthur’s jaw and had a feeling that the very thing Hosea had feared lost and broken was slowly but surely being knit back together.

He’d have to tread carefully with this one.

“You know,” he said as he looked out at the lake, “men aren’t privy to the frivolities of women.”        

Arthur shoulders shook slightly as he huffed. “Ain’t that the truth.”

Hosea waited a beat. “They’re cleverer than we give them credit for. Half the time, they don’t even realize they’re stringing us helplessly along.”

At this, Arthur’s eyes narrowed a fraction. “I guess so,” he replied.

The moment filled with the heaviness that came from difficult conversations. Hosea shifted a bit on the log and Arthur mirrored the movement. He glanced over at Hosea quickly before deliberately turning his attention back to the lake.

“Arthur,” Hosea said as he laid a hand on his shoulder, “you’re going to have to admit it yourself sooner or later. Preferably sooner, so Miss Grimshaw won’t have to toss you both out of camp.”

Arthur looked up, his brow knit with confusion, or consternation, or perhaps a bit of both. Arthur shook his head and replied tersely, “I don’t got a clue what you’re talking about, old man.”        

Hosea sighed. “You ain’t as dumb as all that, son. All I’m saying is, it’s okay to feel this way, especially after all you’ve been through.” He gave Arthur’s shoulder a squeeze.

“What exactly are you implying?”

The elder outlaw sighed. He opened his mouth to say the words and was summarily interrupted by a shout from within the camp.

Both men turned toward the source of the sound. It didn’t take long to discover that Clara, having apparently been accosted by Miss Grimshaw, delivered a loud, succinct rebuttal to whatever the camp matriarch had said.

Hosea watched Arthur, who watched Clara with an unmistakable fierceness. The old man knew that look all too well; it was not simply the look one gave to an object or area of interest. It was the sort of gaze that memorized every detail of a person until every facet became as familiar as the observer’s reflection.

Arthur eyes still sought her, even after Clara stalked away from Miss Grimshaw, her fists clenched at her sides.  

There would be no better—or easier—time to say it.

The old man looked at the man he considered a son, who had been through more pain that he cared to think, and said, “Just admit it, Arthur. You’re in love with her.”

Arthur’s head snapped to him. For a moment, he said nothing. Hosea locked eyes with him and watched as one-by-one the words and their implication settled and began to take root.

“You,” Arthur finally said, “are out of your goddamn mind.”

Normally, Hosea wouldn’t have withstood such a blatantly disrespectful statement from his upstart jackass of a son. But the truth was never an easy thing to hear and it was an even more arduous thing to bear. He knew the weight of it all too well, but he’d carried it gladly with Bessie and would do it all over again, regardless of the pain that came with it.

He also knew that with truth often came denial, and that it would be far more beneficial for all involved if Hosea kept silent while Arthur rode it out.

Arthur looked away and shifted angrily where he sat. His head whipped back toward Hosea, his lips twisted in an incredulous grimace.

“In love with her?” Arthur gestured sharply toward the camp. “Have you met her? I’d be better off marrying a rattlesnake than getting into it with her.”

Hosea blinked but held his tongue.

There was a bit of mumbling and cursing as Arthur dug angrily into his satchel. He pulled out a cigarette and a match and took a long, healthy drag before blowing out an equally irritated cloud of smoke.

“That woman ain’t capable of love,” he grunted. “And even if she was, ain’t no way that would involve me.”

The old man scratched at his chin. Arthur seethed beside him as he furiously smoked the cigarette. Every now and then Hosea saw his eyes lift toward the camp before darting away again and narrowing to pointed, angry slits.

There was only way to rein Arthur back in.

“You know,” Hosea finally said, “Bessie wasn’t the only woman I ever loved.”

Arthur did and said nothing. He blew out an impertinent puff of smoke and hung his head.

He said, “Her name was Gertrude, though just about everyone who knew her called her Trudy. She was a spitfire, that one.” Hosea paused and smiled wistfully at the memories that came flooding back. Some of them—many more than he would have liked—were blurred at the edges.

“Anyway, I met her just before I fell in with Dutch. There was a local farmer who had the run of the town, made all his money on the backs of his tenants. He was a bastard, to be sure, and I thought it wickedly smart to run a scam on him to teach him a lesson. A few days in, he sent his only daughter and successor to meet with me.”

Arthur turned his head a fraction toward Hosea. “Trudy.”

The old man nodded and settled back into the story. “The very same. She was whip smart and beautiful to boot. I’m fairly certain I fell in love with her within two minutes. Unfortunately for me, she saw right through my act. Guess I weren’t quite as clever as I’d convinced myself to be.

I knew the jig was up. After the meeting, I packed up what little I had and made for the train station, but Trudy was waiting. She promised not to tell her father I was a con artist if I stuck around and helped her put to rights the sins of her father. Do you believe it? There I was, hoping to scam her father out of the money that belonged to the tenants, and she was fixing to do the same.”

Hosea halted again. Trudy’s face had long since faded into the annals of his memory, but every now and again he could just make out the familiar features that he’d once adored. He glanced at Arthur through the corner of his eyes and saw the outlaw’s head lift a bit more as he listened intently to the story.

Perhaps he wasn’t such a lost cause, after all.

“What happened?” Arthur asked, his voice hardly louder than a whisper.

Hosea sighed as the old wounds resurfaced. They’d long since healed over but the damage had been done and the memory of it still lingered in the depths of his heart.

He explained, “Weren’t meant to be, is all. I helped her because I was a fool in love. And when it was all said and done, I asked her to run away with me. She didn’t seem to care much about her father, anyhow. Trudy agreed to meet me at the very same train station she’d found me at weeks before. The train showed up—she never did.”

Silence lingered in the pass. The breeze lifted the branches of the trees and drifted across the mirror-clear surface of the lake. Hosea and Arthur watched the ripples as they marred the water and slid lazily to the stony shore.

Hosea coughed and the sound rattled through his lungs. Arthur sighed and tossed away the butt of his cigarette and stomped the ashes into the ground.

Stories sometimes took a while to settle where they were supposed to settle. There was a reason why Hosea had chosen the tale of Trudy Griggs; though he rarely spoke of his brief and erstwhile love, he knew that much of the tale paralleled what Arthur had experienced with Mary. It was why Hosea never judged Mary Gillis too harshly; he’d lived through the very same pain Arthur had, though to be fair, Hosea had long since come to realize the love he had for Trudy was not really love. At least, not the lasting sort, and certainly not the type he’d had with Bessie.

He waited a beat longer and then said, “You know the rest, of course. I wasn’t looking for Bessie, that’s for sure, but she found me nonetheless. That was her way, after all,” he added with a smirk.

Arthur nodded solemnly. “That it was.”

The log was beginning to send spikes of pain through Hosea’s brittle bones. He shifted a bit and turned to face his adoptive son.

“The whole point of this, Arthur, is that our hearts have a way of knowing things that our brains are reluctant to admit. But, more than that, it’s perfectly reasonable for you to find happiness again—and to want to find that happiness.”

Something shifted in Arthur’s gaze. For a moment, it looked as though he’d allowed the story and Hosea’s wisdom to sink in. But the change went away as quickly as it’d come. The all too familiar stubbornness and reluctance to believe he was worth any sort of tenderness returned and blotted out everything else.

“I ain’t in love with her,” he spat out as he rose from the log. Arthur glanced at Hosea, his frown set deeply onto his face. “I know what you’re trying to do, old man. But the truth is plainer than all them stories you tell: I ain’t meant for that sort of life, and even if I was, it wouldn’t be with her.”

Hosea watched Arthur stalk back toward camp. He remained where he was; the day was pleasant enough and the mountain air was crisp and clear in his withering lungs. He felt strangely tired, as though reliving those moments with Trudy and trying to convince Arthur of his reluctant truth had drained him of more than just his energy.

Arthur didn’t need to know he’d embellished some of the details about Trudy. The point of the matter was that he’d heard precisely what he needed to hear, and that would sink in sooner rather than later.

He just hoped it happened before Miss Grimshaw strung the both of them by their ankles.

Chapter Text

Arthur Morgan was many things: an outlaw, killer, con artist, and sometimes—rarely—a halfway passable human being.

But one thing he was not was in love with Claramae Howard.

This was the prevailing thought that floated endlessly through his tortured mind as he stared at the roof of his tent. He forced his tired, aching eyes open and stared until his vision blurred at the edges and his eyes cried out for relief.

Arthur blinked, dragged his lids open, and continued his silent, seething ritual.

He wasn’t in love with her. Hosea could spin as many stories as he wanted, turning the plain, rough yarn into golden threads dripping with the promise of happiness. But stories were just that, in the end—just tales woven with the silver-tongued man’s wit and wisdom.

The canvas spun and swam. Arthur blinked again.

He wasn’t in love with her. Arthur had spent the vast majority of the twilight hours examining all the reasons that this was true, including but not limited to her spectacular propensity for getting into undue trouble. This was swiftly followed by his eternal frustration with her impulsiveness, her venomous, biting sarcasm, and that damnable, imperious manner in which she lifted her chin at the merest sign of defiance against her wishes.

Arthur forced a blink. He shifted on the cot and listened to the protesting creak of the rope and the wooden legs that just barely managed to hold his weight.

He wasn’t in love with her. Love wasn’t a thing to possess, a thing to hold in hands twisted and bent with blood and savagery. Arthur had tried and each time, his hands weren’t strong and careful enough to hold love in the way it deserved. Instead, he was left only with the tattered fragments of his heart, unable to do anything but let them fall to dust at his feet.

He blinked again. The mountain breeze flitted errantly through the camp, rustling the canvas canopy above his head. Somewhere among the crags and rocks that made up the furtive arms that kept Deepwater Pass out of sight, a wolf howled its lament at the silent, ignorant moon.

Arthur Morgan was many things, most of them bad. But one thing he was not was in love with a woman who made him feel…

He paused. He reached up a hand and pressed the heel of his palm into one eye until his thoughts settled into more sensible, comprehensible phrases.

Clara made him feel frustrated. Yes, he acknowledged silently as he lowered his arm back to his side. She was frustrating, and unladylike, and…

Arthur frowned at the tent ceiling as though it had been the offending hand that reached into his head and plucked out his thoughts. Each time he pondered the way Clara made him feel, he only got so far before the path of his words suddenly dropped off, leaving him on the edge of something unknowable and, quite frankly, disturbing.

He swallowed, set his jaw, and tried again. Arthur had a point to make, after all; Hosea was remarkably intuitive, more so than Arthur, who relied more on steel and fists than his gut.

Slowly, Arthur pulled the pieces of his thoughts back together. Clara was frustrating—no, he’d already said. She was frustrating, unladylike (he’d already said that, too, but he plowed forward anyway), and selfish. Yes, that was a good one. He couldn’t be in love with Clara because she was frustrating, unladylike, selfish, and pretty.

Arthur lurched to a seated position and swung his legs over the side of the cot. His heart slammed against his ribs, his pulse blaring in his ears. He wrapped his fingers around the edge of the cot until his knuckles whitened and his strength threatened to crush the metal frame.

Clara wasn’t pretty. Hell, he’d seen pretty women before, and not a single one of them were like her. Clara was so very different from all of them, with the rivulets of crimson in her earthen hair that Arthur could always make out when the sun hit at just the right angle, or the fullness of her figure, which was so opposite from the stunted, scrawny ladies he—

Arthur cupped his head in his hands and pressed his fingertips into his temples. He took one breath, then another, until the worst of the insistent thoughts finally abated and allowed him a moment’s peace. His heart still thudded angrily in his chest, so he decided to focus instead on pulling air into his lungs bit by bit.

Breathe in. Breathe out.

Dutch had taught him the mantra when he was still a ragged youth hellbent on tearing the world apart piece by piece. When the worst of his ire threatened to overwhelm him, Dutch would grab him by the shoulders, sit him down, and whisper the words in Arthur’s ear until cool, calm control slid back into place.

Breathe in. Breathe out.

He was not in love with her.

Breathe in. Breathe out.

He was not in love with her.

Breathe in—Arthur Morgan—breathe out—was not—breathe in—in love—breathe out—with Claramae—breathe in—Howard—breathe out.

Carefully, Arthur lowered his hands. Slowly, he felt his pulse return to its normal rhythm. Finally, Arthur felt the words sink down, take root, and forge anew the armor around his heart.

When he was sure he was in control once again, Arthur laid back down on the cot. Exhaustion clawed at his consciousness, begging him to relinquish himself into oblivion for the few hours that remained until dawn. Arthur shifted until his body conformed to the well-worn spaces that had spent so many years cradling his body. He relaxed his shoulders, deepened his breathing, and allowed his head to nestle against the thin pillow.

Hosea was wrong. He wasn’t always, but in this matter, there was no denying that the old man had missed the mark. Whatever lay between Clara and Arthur was not love; it couldn’t be. It didn’t matter what Hosea thought he saw and understood; it didn’t matter what he thought about Arthur’s worthiness for happiness (or lack thereof).

It didn’t matter that when Arthur closed his eyes, the first thing he saw was Clara’s face.

He was up like a shot. Arthur wrenched his boots from beneath the cot and furiously pulled them on. When his foot stuck in one of them, he let out a growl ferocious and loud enough to rival the wolf in the mountains. He spared half a thought to grab his satchel and jacket from the nearby chair as he threw himself into the night.

Boadicea whickered and stamped at the sight of her distressed master. Arthur instinctively brushed his fingers along the ridge between her nose in an attempt to calm her, but she only tossed her head and butted his shoulder.

He could never hide anything from her. The horse always seemed to know his thoughts better than he did, Arthur admitted silently as he tightened the saddle straps and checked his weapons. Arthur patted her neck again, this time with a bit more calmness instilled in the gesture, and hoisted himself up into the saddle.

The moon lit his way out of the camp and down the treacherous, rocky mountain paths to the hills below. Billings Forest blanketed the foothills of Devil’s Ridge just to the south; this was where Arthur set his sights.

There was only one thing to do when Arthur Morgan felt like the world was spinning this far and fast out of his control, and that was to kill.

*

Arthur thrust his skinned and bled quarry toward Simon Pearson.

“Here,” he grunted. There were two prairie birds, a rabbit, and a squirrel for good measure. “Got a doe, too.”

Pearson glanced up from where he’d been standing chopping vegetables alongside Abigail. His hand still lingered on the cleaver as he smiled with satisfaction at the fresh meat. Pearson opened his mouth to say something but closed it firmly when his gaze lifted to Arthur.

His hand dropped from the clever. Abigail’s brow furrowed at Arthur and she shook her head before turning her attention back to chopping carrots.

Arthur waited, his eyes following Pearson as the man wiped his hands on his filthy apron. It smelled like rotten potatoes and blood.

“Oh,” he said dubiously as he peered at the animals. “Thanks, Mr. Morgan.” Pearson’s eyes flitted away for a moment before darting back to Arthur. He gestured with his chin toward him.

“You, uh…you alright there, Arthur?”

Arthur had spent the hours that preceded dawn hunting in the forest. He shot, skinned, and bled each carcass until the clawing, aching feeling in his chest subsided and he felt a bit more like his old self again. When the first bits of sun peaked through the thick canopies above, he’d decided to chance an hour or two’s rest before heading back up to Deepwater Pass.

He’d been so exhausted that there he’d seen nothing but the blackness of oblivion the moment he closed his eyes.

What Arthur did not realize was that hunting in the dark and lack of sleep had marred his appearance. Flecks of dirt and blood were lodged beneath his fingernails; he’d swiped a bit of the same across his cheeks in the moments when his head had nodded in sleep, causing him to almost miss his targets. His fitful sleep on the ground left his hair in a state of mad disarray and his bloodshot eyes stared back at Pearson from hollowed out, deeply shadowed crevices.

But he only grunted and held out the animals a bit farther. “I’m fine,” he mumbled, the words slurred together. It was too much effort to separate them into proper-sounding words.

Pearson peered past the carcasses and frowned at Arthur’s torso. “You look like a backstreet butcher.”

As it turned out, the iron stench that pervaded Arthur’s nose wasn’t emanating from Pearson (thought that wasn’t to say that the man wasn't capable of emitting such furious scents that the appetites of the entire camp would turn sour) but from his own person.

His jacket was soaked in blood, likely from doe still lashed to Boadicea’s back.

His patience, already paper thin, threatened to snap entirely. Arthur slammed the carcasses on the butcher table with a loud, sounding slap of flesh.

“Shut up,” Arthur growled, “and take the goddamn meat.”

Pearson did as he was told, though not without a bit of grumbling and a quick, glancing look of distaste in Arthur’s direction. The offending party managed to stay upright long enough to careen toward his tent.

Lenny Summers saw Arthur and waved at him from where he sat playing an early morning round of cards with Tilly. “Hey, Arthur!”

“Not now,” Arthur bit out through clenched teeth. He slipped through the flaps of his tent, maintained just enough consciousness to tear free his jacket and muddied, bloodied boots, and fall heavily onto his cot into a deep, dreamless sleep.

For the second time, he did not dream of Clara, but his sleep was all the more fitful for the lack of her appearance.

He woke sometime later, when the camp was already in full swing and the sun blared hot and heavy in a rare show of dominance over the earth. Arthur dragged his tired, aching body up from the cot and braced his hands on the edge.

Arthur blinked away the remnants of sleep, took a breath, and clenched his jaw.

He was not in love with Claramae Howard.

He waited for the roar of his pulse to crash through his ears and his heart to stumble and his thoughts to crash to a screeching halt. But the longer Arthur sat there, the more the admission settled and, eventually, took root.

Arthur rose with a limp sense of triumph. It wasn’t often that he could manage to prove Hosea wrong, but he’d done it.

He changed into fresh clothes (if he didn’t, he’d have to suffer Miss Grimshaw’s wrath, and he was not at all in the mood to be thrust into the wash barrel like a babe newly baptized) and relinquished himself to the camp.

Arthur had not gone more than a few steps when he came upon a rather unexpected sight.

He adjusted the strap of his satchel to sit more comfortably around his shoulders as his feet carried him toward the campfire. He was desperate for a cup of coffee—maybe two—and for the comfortable, solid warmth of the fire. Arthur, who was still dragging his sluggish mind out of the dregs of half-achieved sleep, almost didn’t notice the two figures who already occupied space at the campfire.

A shock of red hair and a boisterous, cascading laugh cut through the morning. Arthur slowed to a stop as he watched Sean MacGuire loop his arm around Clara’s shoulders as she cradled her still-steaming coffee. He leaned conspiratorially toward her, his lips hovering just beside her ear as he whispered something to her. Arthur watched as Sean’s mouth curved into a wicked smirk.

Clara laughed and covered her mouth with the back of her hand, as though their secret was far too precious to spill into the world.

Arthur wondered what Sean had whispered to her to make her laugh.

Arthur pondered why Sean felt it appropriate to put his arm around her like that.

Arthur considered what it would be like to tear off that little Irish bastard’s arm and toss it into the fire.

It was then that Sean glanced up and spotted him looming by the fire. He raised a hand in greeting and the smirk on his lips widened considerably.

“There he is, the big man himself!” Sean called out. “Come over here, you bastard.”

Clara’s eyes darted to Arthur as the last bits of her laughter faded. She lifted her coffee to her lips and took a long, steady sip.

He wasn’t in love with Claramae Howard.

But all Arthur could think of was the way Sean’s arm had held her close, as though she were his and not her own person. All Arthur could hear was the way her laugh had sounded as it slipped into the morning, bright and pleasant enough to rival the sun that nipped at the back of his neck.

Arthur frowned, grunted, and turned on his heel.

He was not in love with Claramae Howard.

But the twisted, unknowable torrent of thoughts began to break down the walls he’d built. Arthur slipped through the camp until he reached the mountain pool, where the air felt clearer and the familiar sounds of the camp faded in favor of the quick brush of the breeze across Devil’s Ridge.

He could feel it coming—the great, crushing hand of anxiety hovered just out of sight, its fingers reaching toward him with desperate, sinister need. Arthur fought to control his breathing, to hold onto what remained of his calm, cool-headed reason.

When he finally reached the pool, Arthur dug into his satchel and withdrew his journal. His hands tightened around his pencil as he flipped to a fresh, blank page. He needed to get it out; he needed to expel the crushing weight in his heart and bring order back to his tumbling thoughts before he lost himself in the storm.

When Hosea had given him his first journal, Arthur had stared at the blank tome with a mixture of dubiousness and consternation. What in the hell was he supposed to do with that? He could barely read let alone write, and forming his own thoughts was tantamount to letting a cage, enraged animal loose upon the world. What good could come from bringing to life the thoughts that rotted and tore at his soul?

Now, Arthur wasn’t sure how he’d ever managed without it.

His pencil flitted across the paper as Arthur gave it free reign to expel the roaring in his head. He hardly paid attention to what appeared on the paper; all that mattered was that the pencil was moving, his thoughts were settling, and he could finally, finally, breathe properly again.

When he was sure he was himself once more, Arthur unclenched his fingers from the pencil. Arthur shook out his hand and took in what he had created.

Clara’s likeness stared back at him.

It wasn’t a singular moment; it was one of the many in which Arthur had spotted her in the early mornings or evenings, when she snuck away from camp with a book tucked beneath her arm. His pencil had carved out the startlingly precise image of Clara with a book nestled in her lap and her chin cupped in her hand. Her eyes were wide with excitement and the barest hint of a smile was on her lips.

She always looked like that when she was reading.

His chest tightened. Arthur slammed the journal closed and shoved it back in his satchel, feeling betrayed and angry and—

Arthur rubbed his face with his hand and shook his head.

He wasn’t in love with Claramae Howard.

This time it felt less corporeal; this time, Arthur could feel the words slipping out of his grasp.

Charles Smith found him a few moments later, face etched with a deep-set frown and gaze faraway and elusive.

“Arthur,” Charles greeted, though his name sounded wary.

Arthur turned slowly and tried to smooth the frown away. “Charles,” he muttered uselessly.

Charles said nothing for a moment; he only watched him in that studious, knowing manner he had that always felt like he knew more about the world than Arthur could ever hope to learn.

His companion jutted his chin toward him. “You alright? You seem angry.” Charles shrugged a bit and added, “More than usual, I mean.”

Arthur huffed in a bitter, languid attempt at a laugh. He looked down at the ground as though it held the answers he sought and said, “Nah, I ain’t angry. At least, I don’t think I’m angry.”

He definitely wasn’t angry. But there wasn’t really much of a definition he could put to the orbiting sensation of being chewed up and swallowed whole by something he couldn’t fight, so Arthur merely connected it to the one emotion he could still understand.

Charles nodded solemnly. That knowing look was still on his face and, despite his best intentions, Arthur found himself bristling beneath its weight.

“Javier and I are heading into town,” Charles said with a nod toward the camp. “You interested?”

Arthur scratched absently at his chin. A bit of work might be just the thing to set matters to rights. But when he looked up at his companion in order to ask what, in fact, the work required, there was a clever smirk hidden carefully in the corner of Charles’ mouth.

This piqued Arthur’s attention. “Will there be alcohol involved?”

Charles nodded and the smirk widened.

Arthur was a firm believer in this simple fact: there was no problem too great that couldn’t be solved either with the barrel of a gun or with a glass (or several) of whiskey.

He rose from his seat and clapped Charles eagerly on the shoulder. Arthur swept his hand out before them and said, “Lead the way.”

*

By the time Arthur finished the first glass of whiskey, the liquor numbed his thoughts into complacency.

By the time Arthur finished his second glass of whiskey, his smile was undaunted and his laugh uninhibited by insensibilities.

By the time Arthur finished his third glass, the pleasantries slowed to an eventual halt.

He loomed at the end of the bar, his half-finished glass on the bar top in front of him. The raucousness of Heritage’s saloon filled the air around him, but Arthur remained strangely and unexpectedly unfeeling in the midst of all the crashing noise.

Arthur blinked at the whiskey and tried the phrase again, though his heart pattered wildly at the thought.

He was not in love with Claramae Howard.

The remnants of whiskey that flooded his veins made the words pool into swirls of feeling like ink dropped into water. Arthur took a breath, held his glass up to his lips with a somewhat wobbling hand, and downed the rest of the liquid in a hearty, eager gulp.

There. That was it, then. He’d finally put the matter to rest, once and for all. It didn’t matter that the room tilted every time he turned his head; it didn’t matter that it was becoming a bit more difficult to balance his considerable bulk on his two unsteady legs.

Arthur called for another refill. He wasn’t in love, and that was that.

A quick search over his shoulder revealed that Charles and Javier had not left the pair of women they’d been wooing for the last few hours. They exchanged smiles dripping with drink and desire, and the women’s laughter trilled high and mightily through the air.

Arthur frowned in their general direction. The echo of their laughter sounded crass and dissonant compared to Clara’s.

The thought whipped through him with a slyness that cut swiftly through the haze of drink. Arthur whipped around to the bar, gulped his drink, and called for another.

They’d tried to get Arthur to join in on the fun. Javier insisted that Arthur was in dire need of an itch that could only scratched by a woman’s hand. (This had elicited a roar of laughter from both Javier and the women in question, but Arthur did not find it funny in the least.) Charles, on the other hand, encouraged Arthur for only a moment before leaving him to his own devices. Now they were touching and laughing and drinking and Arthur knew exactly how the night would end. He’d be drunk, and Charles and Javier would wake up in a bed warmed by a woman.

Arthur reached up and rubbed the back of his neck. His mind inevitably wandered back to the conversation he’d had with Hosea. He wasn’t in love with her; he couldn’t be, and the whiskey finally made Arthur brave enough to rattle off all the ways in which to disprove the old man’s theory.

Arthur sipped his whiskey. Clara was a member of the gang, however short her tenure might be; given this fact, he had never considered her as anything beyond that particular classification. Besides, they couldn’t go more than an hour without squabbling over one inane thing or another. While Arthur couldn’t exactly pretend he hadn’t fed into their arguments on one or two occasions, the fact remained that they were part of the same gang, and not at all liable to cross that line.

Anyway, she was goddamn aggravating. It wasn’t as though he’d ever given consideration to the distinct flare of her hips, or the way her pants always seemed to tightly hug her backside.

Arthur’s heart stammered. His fingers tightened on the glass of whiskey and he took a sip.

He frowned as he shifted unsteadily a bit on his feet. Women weren’t even supposed to wear pants, let alone shirts that hugged their bosoms in just the sort of way that was guaranteed to garner a man’s attention. Not that his attention ever wandered in that particular direction, mind you; Arthur only thought of it so that he could prove his point, and nothing more.

Arthur’s attention drunkenly wandered back to where Charles and Javier still lingered with the women. One of them had dark hair, nearly black in the light of the saloon; the tresses were woven into a braid that hung down her back and brushed against the full, voluminous skirt at her hips.

His brow furrowed in consternation. Clara always braided her hair like that. And the woman’s figure was full, though not quite as full as Clara’s.

His stomach tightened and he drowned the feeling with more whiskey. Fine—perhaps he could be willing to admit that he’d had some fleeting (very fleeting, almost too quick to acknowledge) thoughts of Clara’s assets. But he was a man, most of the time, and he was permitted an errant thought or two now and again. There was nothing more to it than that.

Besides, Arthur reasoned silently as he glowered alone at the bar, it wasn’t like he’d ever thought of Clara in the Biblical sense. Even pondering the hypothetical image of it was enough make him feel strange and off balance. Anyway, you were supposed to be attracted to the person with whom you were in love. Weren’t you supposed to bend the world to their smile, or tug the moon out of the sky in exchange for the sound of their laugh? Weren’t you supposed to fill your dreams with them and despair in their absence? Weren’t you supposed to think of them in the depths of the night, when the most impure and sensual thoughts ran rampant in the dark?

Arthur Morgan had absolutely, unequivocally never thought of that woman in those moments. He wasn’t prude by any means, and he was certainly still a man with needs, however dampened they might be by the sins of his past. But just because he’d thought of Clara while doing that didn’t meant that he loved her. Anyhow, it was only once, and it had been quite some time since he’d allowed himself to feel pleasure in that way.

He stared at the whiskey and grunted sharply. Twice, then—it had been twice, but no more than that. And it wasn’t like she’d been the only woman he’d ever thought of while doing that. He took some minor comfort that the fact still served to prove that he wasn’t in love with her.

It didn’t merit consideration that the few times he’d pleasured himself while thinking of Clara had been far more intimate than the others. It wasn’t at all important that he could carve out the precise image of her, of the way her body moved when she sauntered across the camp, or the way her breasts bounced as she rode her horse—

“Shit,” Arthur bit out. He grappled for his drink and downed it, spilling a bit of the whiskey on his shirt in the process.

A man slipped up to the bar beside him. Arthur turned his best and most ferocious cautionary glare at him before glumly turning his attention back to his woefully empty glass.

The man watched him for a moment, nearly long enough for Arthur’s sharp anger to rise to the surface. He waved the bartender over and gestured at both Arthur’s empty glass and the empty space in front of him.

“Get a round for me and my friend here,” the man said with a decided glance in Arthur’s direction. He leaned forward and added under his breath, “You certainly need it.”

Arthur continued to glare at him. “I ain’t looking for company.”

The stranger held up a plaintive hand. “I ain’t planning on sticking around, partner. Just thought I’d buy you a drink.” He paused and tossed a few coins toward the bartender as their drinks arrived.

Arthur sighed in resignation as he took the proffered whiskey. His newly acquired neighbor raised his glass to him. Arthur did not follow suit.

The man gave him a considerably pitiful look as he said, “You got it bad, my friend.”

Arthur paused with the glass halfway to his lips. He narrowed his eyes and growled, “What?”

His companion tipped his head back and swallowed his whiskey in a single gulp. He slapped the glass on the table and wagged his finger in front of Arthur’s face.

“I seen this before,” the man said as the whiskey burned his throat. “Hell, I’ve lived it before.” He pointed a decisive finger at Arthur and added solemnly, “You got it bad, partner. You’re in deep, ain’t no way out now.”

Arthur fervently wished he knew what in the fresh hell the fool was talking about. He held up his hands and said as much.

The man gripped Arthur’s shoulder as the bartender freshened their glasses. Arthur glanced at the hand and then turned a pointed glare at the man.

“Listen,” he said as he leaned forward a little. His breath reeked of alcohol. “I been married three times. Three times,” he emphasized with an indication of as many fingers.

Mercifully, he let go of Arthur’s shoulder and shook his head. “I fell hard and fast each time. Couldn’t help it, I suppose. Women do have a way of capturing a man’s attention, when the mood suits them.”

Arthur blinked at the man and wondered if the alcohol had finally caused him to hallucinate. “I don’t have a clue what you’re talking about.”

The refill was gone in a moment; Arthur’s remained untouched. His companion hiccupped and brushed the back of his hand across his lips. Then, he looked straight at Arthur.

Without missing a beat, he announced, “You’re in love, friend. Only one reason a man looks and drinks the way you do, and that is undoubtedly because of a woman.”

Arthur said nothing.

He only stared at the man and calculated the chances of getting caught if he dragged him out back and shot him.

He was not in love with Claramae Howard.

He was not in love with her.

He was…

Arthur pushed away from the bar and made his stumbling way toward the exit. Everything, everyone, faded away as a singular purpose flooded his veins.

He was going to put an end to this, once and for all.

The man at the bar watched him make his hasty retreat. He cupped his hands around his mouth and shouted, “Best of luck to you!”

Arthur studiously ignored him as he managed to mount Boadicea and begin the swift trek back to Deepwater Pass.

*

Clara shut the book and peered curiously at the blank, slightly worn cover.

Mary-Beth leaned forward slightly, her eyes alight with expectation. She clasped her hands in her lap with white-knuckled anticipation.

“Well? What’d you think?”

Clara ran her hand along the cover of the book as she silently pondered the question. It was best to tread lightly in such matters, particular when a young girl’s livelihood hung in the balance.

Finally, she sighed, and the sound of it dismantled some of Mary-Beth’s enthusiasm. She watched as the young girl’s face fell as the excitement dwindled. She unfurled her hands from her lap as her shoulders fell slightly.  

“That bad?” she asked. The question was laced with budding disappointment, the sort of stark, discouraging negativity that came when hopes were far too high and inevitably came crashing down at one’s feet.

Clara shrugged and ran her hand along the length of her braid.

“I wouldn’t say that,” she refuted, albeit lamely.

Mary-Beth covered her face with her hands and let out a frustrated groan. Then she gripped Clara’s arm and shook it slightly, as though the gesture would somehow relinquish the words she so clearly wanted to hear.

Mary-Beth urged, “Come on, Clara! I want to know what you think.”

Clara knew it was crucial to choose her next words carefully. She raised an eyebrow and asked, “You want me to be honest?”

Mary-Beth nodded emphatically. “Yes.”

“Are you sure?”

“My goodness, Clara,” Mary-Beth cried out as she tossed her hands in the air. “Just say it, already!”

Clara let out a long, dramatic sigh. She made a show of rifling through the pages of the book as Mary-Beth squirmed across from her. Finally, she broke her silence.

“Alright,” Clara admitted. After a slight pause, she added, “It’s wonderful.”

Mary-Beth Gaskill, who had clearly been awaiting bad news, blinked at her. “What?”

Clara allowed a smile to creep onto her lips. “It’s wonderful, Mary-Beth.” She held up the book and glanced at it with wide-eyed admiration. “You have a marvelous talent for writing.”

The young outlaw and amateur author let out an excited, pleased trill of laughter. She slapped Clara’s arm playfully and said, “You’re terrible, making me sweat like that! You really did like it?”

“Yes,” Clara reassured as she handed the book back to its owner. “I hope one day you’ll let me read the finished copy.”

Mary-Beth tucked the tome safely with the rest of her belongings.

“Oh, I doubt I’ll ever be published.” She glanced wistfully up at the stars. “But wouldn’t that be something?”

Clara laid a hand on the girl’s shoulder. “You’ll get there, Mary-Beth. Any publisher would be stupid not to hire someone with your talent.”

It really had been a fine piece of work, though it remained as yet unfinished. Clara had read her fair share of novels, both classics and otherwise, and considered herself a fair judge when it came to recognizing true talent. She’d found a kindred spirit in reading with Mary-Beth, but Clara had been surprised to discover the outlaw’s formidable way with words. It had taken some coaxing in order for Mary-Beth to show her writing to someone else, but Clara had promised to be honest and in the end that had been enough.

Mary-Beth could spin a story so heartfelt and profound that Clara found her heart crying out for more. She wasn’t one to mince words; when she’d told Mary-Beth that she believed she’d be published, she’d meant every syllable. While the girl’s trend toward romance wasn’t exactly the typical literature Clara preferred, Mary-Beth had found a way to channel the truth of romance—it’s euphoria and heartbreak, its joy and tragedy—into her stories. There was simply no denying that the outlaw had a penchant for proving that Clara’s world could be made of more than blood and bullets.

They sat talking a while longer. Mary-Beth spoke eagerly of her plans to finish the work Clara had already critiqued and took the opportunity to share a few more ideas. Clara listened all the while, absorbing each word and letting the rest of the world fall away.

Eventually the rest of the camp, who had spent many hours lingering by the fireside, drifted off in favor of their respective tents or other means of entertainment. Lenny and Sean began a game of poker, while John, Bill, and Tilly played their chances at dominoes. Abigail hurried Jack off to bed, though the boy protested every step of the way, and Hosea and Dutch plotted the future in the confines of the camp patriarch’s tent.

All of this served to quell the budding feeling of disquiet that had pervaded much of Clara’s day. Despite her best intentions, her mind had often wandered back to the morning, where Sean had found her by the fire. All she’d wanted was a bit of peace and quiet; Sean MacGuire was entirely the opposite of that and, while she’d enjoyed the company, had not expected the arm that had draped unceremoniously around her shoulder.

She really hadn’t expected Arthur to walk by at that exact moment.

There was no reason why the thought of Arthur seeing her with Sean’s arm around her shoulder should bother her; she was her own person and therefore allowed every right to speak to and touch whomever she wanted. Besides, Clara had reasoned throughout the day, she was friendly with nearly every male member of the gang (save for Micah Bell; she’d much rather gouge her eyes out with a spoon than spend even a fraction of a moment alone with him).

But it was the way Arthur had avoided her that set her blood to boiling. What right did he have to treat her as though she’d done something wrong? Clara had allowed the matter to bother her for only a moment before she resolved that he wasn’t worth the trouble and set about her day. She hadn’t even spoken to him; how could he be upset with her?

It was only when she discovered that he’d escaped to town with Charles and Javier that her mood had effectively soured. Mary-Beth, as it turned out, had been just the remedy she’d needed to turn the otherwise shitty day around. Eventually, Clara settled on this: if Arthur was intent on punishing her for something she hadn’t even done, then so be it. He was a grown man (most of the time) and she had far better things to worry about than his fractured state of mind.

Clara fell into the ideas that Mary-Beth provided, letting them carry her away on the breath of promise. It was welcome distraction from the turmoil that so often surrounded them and, though she wouldn’t admit it aloud, the conversation kept Clara’s thoughts from straying too far toward a certain surly, ill-tempered outlaw.

As such, they didn’t hear Arthur approach until he was only a few feet away.

He stopped when he got to where Clara and Mary-Beth sat comfortably on the blanket outside the trio of tents the girls shared. Clara narrowed her eyes as he swayed slightly on his feet and leveled an accusatory finger in their general direction.

“You,” Arthur snarled.

She frowned at him. Clara turned and shared a curious glance with Mary-Beth, unsure which of them was the source of Arthur’s fury.

Clara finally pointed to herself. “Me?”

“Yes, you,” he shouted. The words were strung together, and Clara could just make out the telltale stench of whiskey as it drifted through the air toward her.

His mouth was curdled into anger as he spat, “I’ve had just about enough of your bullshit.”

Well, that was unexpected.

Mary-Beth gathered her skirts and stood. She patted Clara consolingly on the shoulder and murmured, “I’ll leave this one to you.”

Arthur chuckled darkly and lowered his hands to his gun belt. Clara raised an eyebrow when he missed the first time and finally settled his grip on the second.

“Suddenly you ain’t got nothing to say,” he said with a sneer. “Ain’t heard you this quiet since—ever.”

Clara sighed and steeled her nerves. She rose from the crate she’d been using as a seat.

“Okay,” she said calmly and with both hands raised. “Just calm down.”

Arthur leaned forward and nearly toppled over. “Don’t tell me to calm down,” he slurred angrily. “Always telling me what to do you, like you’re some type of…some type of nursemaid.”

Clara’s mood plummeted. She glanced around the camp, searching for anyone that might be able to alleviate the sudden and inexplicable burden of an intoxicated Arthur Morgan. She pressed her hand to her head, looked at the outlaw tottering on his feet, and sighed.

“Why don’t I walk you back to your tent?” she offered, hoping she’d instilled enough calm into her tone to alleviate the potent anger that radiated off Arthur.

But he only gaped at her as though she’d suddenly grown an extra head.

“Didn’t you hear what I said? I am done with your bullshit.” The vehemence with which he uttered the words made his already precarious grip on the earth shudder a bit.

Clara instinctively reached out in an attempt to hold him upright. She nodded and said quickly, “Yes, yes, I heard you. Now, come on, let’s get you to bed.” She waved at him to come closer and added under her breath, “Before you fall and break your damn neck.”

Arthur’s feeble attempt at movement sent him careening forward. Somehow, Clara was able to hold onto his arm and keep him from heading straight to the ground. He stilled at the contact and lifted his glassy, red-rimmed eyes to hers. Clara watched as the drunken haze that clouded his summer eyes sharpened into…

She didn’t know how to describe it. It was as though he’d suddenly become aware of the world for the first time, as though he had been wandering in a fog and had only just now broken through it. Clara watched the shift and felt her chest tighten with an equally inexplicable feeling, as though the air around her dissipated, leaving her gasping for something more.

Clara sucked in a breath and shook away the strangeness of her thoughts. She tightened her hold on the unsteady outlaw’s arm. Arthur’s frown deepened as his gaze dipped to where she held him.

“Come on,” she muttered, “let’s get you to bed.”

The anger still lingered in Arthur’s eyes, but it lost the verity of its conviction. He stumbled along and Clara was grateful that the drink hadn’t entirely stolen his ability to walk. If it had, she would have likely been crushed beneath his weight.

“That’s just like you,” he slurred as they made their slow, deliberate way through camp. “Always so goddamn self-righteous and…”

Clara raised an eyebrow as he faltered.

Arthur frowned deeply and shook his head. “Reasonable,” he finished lamely.

She held onto his arm and chuckled. This wasn’t going to end well. “I would have thought you’d appreciate me being reasonable for once, Mr. Morgan.”

Arthur stumbled a bit but quickly righted himself. “Stop patronizing me, woman.”

Clara rolled her eyes and decided it best to remain silent.

She let go of him when they reached his tent. Clara let her hands linger on his arm until she was sure he could walk without tottering over and pulling his tent down with him. Arthur stumbled toward the tent opening, his hands darting out and gripping the tent flaps for stability. Clara watched with wry amusement, her arms crossed over her chest.

“Careful there,” she said with a poorly disguised smirk. “Wouldn’t want to bring your tent down on you, would we?”

He chanced a dismissive wave, which nearly sent him entirely off balance. Arthur let out a string of muddled curses as he managed to get his footing before tearing down the thick layers of canvas tent.

Clara sighed sharply, looked up to the sky as if for divine intervention, and once more took him by the arm.

“Let’s get you to bed,” she said witheringly.

Arthur tried to wrench his arm from her grip. “I ain’t a boy what needs your help.”

Clara’s gaze sharpened. “Then stop acting like one.”

He looked about to protest, but he swallowed whatever biting retort. Instead Arthur let her lead him to the cot, where she watched with scrutiny as he gingerly lowered himself down. He took the hat from his head and, with an angry flourish, tossed it across the tent, where it landed upside-down near the chair. Clara shot him a hard look before making a show of picking up the hat and putting it right-side up on the chair. She crossed back to the entrance as Arthur tugged furiously at his boots.

“Try not to knock yourself unconscious there, Mr. Morgan,” she said as she lingered in the entrance.

She waited for a slithering, scathing remark.

But all Arthur did was pause in his rather arduous attempt at removing his boots. He looked up at her and for a moment, the anger and frustration that had marred his expression since the moment he arrived back to camp faded. Clara watched as his grimace softened and the cool, crisp blue and gold of his eyes warmed. She frowned the longer he looked at her and couldn’t quite manage to explain why her heart stammered in her chest.

Then Arthur shook his head and flopped onto the cot.

“The old man was wrong,” he muttered as he threw one arm behind his head and let the other dangle over the edge of the cot. His eyes were already heavy.

Clara’s brow furrowed. What old man? “About what?”

Arthur’s eyes flicked to her before he forced them closed. “It don’t matter.”

But something was tugging at her, something wild and desperate, and Clara turned until she fully faced him.

“You know I have no idea what you’re talking about, right?” A part of her knew that arguing with a drunk man was about as useful as fighting off a mountain lion with her bare hands. But something had shifted there in the tent, and she knew she wouldn’t be able to rest until she discovered what it was.

Arthur turned his head away. It was then that she recognized the look that had replaced the anger on his face.

It was resignation.

“Hosea was wrong,” he mumbled as sleep began to drag him beneath its swift current. “You ain’t never gonna love me.”

*

You ain’t never gonna love me.

Love me.

Love.

Together, the words made sense. She could pick them apart one by one, identify their meaning, and piece them back together into a sentence that was easily understood.

But the minute Clara assigned those words to Arthur, her stomach lurched, and her head spun. She gripped the flaps of his tent and waited until the world slid back into place, until things finally started to make sense again.

Clara pulled in one breath, then another. Her nerves were flayed, her heart a mess of stampeding beats and irrational rhythms. She swallowed as his words slid back and forth through her brain, their echoes creating a din so exacting and overwhelming that she thought she might stumble beneath their weight.

She looked over her shoulder.

Arthur was asleep. His chest rose and fell with the steadiness of slumber and his lips were ever so slightly parted.

Hosea was wrong. You ain’t never gonna love me.

Clara darted away from the tent in an effort to leave the words behind. What Hosea had to do with all of this, she didn’t know, but Clara wasn’t interested in finding out. She wasn’t interested in knowing why Arthur had said what he said, she wasn’t interested in whatever drunken antics had led to this moment.

She just wanted to run and keep running until she felt grounded once more in reality.

Her feet carried her toward the campfire. Clara tried to push the words away, tried to force them out of her mind, but they lingered all the same. Her hand drifted absently to her head and her fingers brushed against her brow, as though she could somehow tug them free and let them fall to ash at her feet.

Why would he say that?

Why would he say that?

And what’s more, what did Hosea have to do with any of this—whatever the hell it was?

Clara slowed as she reached the campfire. Uncle, in his usual fashion, was slumped up against one of the logs of the fire, already unconscious. John Marston and Bill Williamson, their game of cards having long since concluded, sat warming their bones before they began their night’s watch.

It was John who looked up at the sound of Clara’s approach. His eyes narrowed the longer her looked at her.

“You alright?”

It took Clara a moment to realize that he was talking to her. The noise in her head was too loud, too focused, for her to pay much attention to the rest of the world.

Clara swallowed and nodded quickly. “Yeah, sure.”

John turned slightly toward her. The firelight played on his face, casting most of it in shadow. “You don’t look so good.”

But she was fine—wasn’t she?

She shook her head and took in a slightly shaky breath. Arthur was drunk; that was all the explanation she needed. It didn’t matter that he’d said…what he said. He wouldn’t remember in the morning, anyway.

You ain’t never gonna love me.

The fire was too hot; the wind was too cold. Clara’s hands gripped the hem of her shirt as she fought against the insipid feeling of being torn apart.

“Clara,” John said again, this time his voice a little louder and more insistent. “What’s wrong with you?”

With her?

Nothing.

Nothing was wrong.

She looked back toward Arthur’s tent. Everything was fine. He didn’t mean what he said. Everything was fine. Everything was…

“I’m fine,” she blurted. She turned on her heel and called out a hasty goodnight as she went.

That bastard. That foolish, drunken bastard.

Clara stalked back toward his tent, her soul wrapped in the grip of fire and fury. She was the spark that would set the fire that would burn down whatever goddamn nonsense this man thought he could spew at her without consequence. What in the hell was he thinking, throwing around that word like it was base and useless and nothing at all?

She intended to find out. If she had to wrench Arthur Morgan out of sleep by the throat, she’d do it.

Clara threw back the tent flaps, her chest heaving with the force of her ire. Her eyes went right to Arthur’s prone form, where it still lay in precisely the same position in which she’d left it. She stomped to the cot. Her hands flew to her hips and she screwed her face into a tight grimace, just so he could understand the gravity of his error the moment he woke.

“Arthur,” she snarled into the night.

He didn’t move.

Clara ground her teeth. “Arthur Morgan.”

He slept on, heedless of her call and her presence.

Frustration sifted into raw, numbing despair. Her fingers dug into her hips as her chest tightened. Why wouldn’t he wake up? Why did he say that word?

Why did he say it to her like it didn’t mean anything at all?

Clara pressed the heels of her palms into her eyes and fought for control. She was losing it and fast; she could feel the sense of order in the world slipping away, leaving her to wage war with whatever this persistent, terrifying feeling was that enveloped her in a vice grip and refused to let her go.

When she lowered her hands, she trained her eyes back on Arthur. She filled her lungs, steeled her raging nerves, and reached out a hand to shake him awake. Unfortunately, her hand did not obey her command.

Instead, Clara watched helplessly as her slightly trembling fingers brushed against his cheek. His stubble nipped at her skin, but it did nothing to impede his warmth, which was strong enough to banish the cold from her body. Her fingers dipped a bit lower, until they kissed the pink scars that remained vibrant and untouched by the stubble.

Arthur let out a soft whisper of a sigh.

Clara wrenched her hand away and clutched it to her chest. She nearly stumbled away from the cot, her heart hammering against her ribs until she thought sure it would break her apart.

She wanted it to break her apart.

She didn’t want to feel like this anymore, like she was never going to find sure footing ever again. She didn’t want to feel like the world—her life—had quite suddenly gone down a path she wasn’t willing to travel.

“Shit,” Clara breathed into the silence of the tent. The word was strangled and raw.

Somehow, she made it back to her tent without falling to pieces. Somehow, she managed to undress, though her limbs were stiff and unfeeling. Somehow, she crawled onto her cot and tugged up the worn blanket until her head was drenched in darkness.

She begged sleep to come. She railed against the night, kicking and screaming for sleep to bring her into its comforting, ignorant embrace. Clara needed to put this night behind her; she needed to forget it, to wipe it out of mind, because if she didn’t…

If she didn’t, then she’d have to face it.

If she faced it, then things wouldn’t be the same anymore.

If things weren’t the same anymore, then…

Clara’s breaths came in shuddering, stunted gasps. Her throat felt tight and thick and her stomach roiled, despite the arms she kept wrapped tightly around it. As long as she didn’t feel it, then she’d be safe. As long as she could hold onto some measure of control, even an ounce of it, then she could set things back into place.

Because now, in the dark, she understood what Arthur had meant.

Hosea Matthews had somehow convinced Arthur that he loved her.

And, somewhere in the dregs of whiskey that filled his veins, Arthur had allowed himself to believe it.

Arthur believed it, and it was going to ruin everything.

Chapter Text

Victoria Everly-Byers died before her twenty-ninth birthday.

The doctors had said that her death was a result of complications from delivering Wyatt’s sister a few weeks earlier. The child, which had been stillborn, had been promptly removed from the arms of her ailing mother and deposited in the family plot on the Byers estate grounds. There was no tombstone to mark the grave; only a small heap where a child lay buried, nameless and summarily forgotten.

Victoria was left to recover at home and the vibrant, ever-present mother that had captured Wyatt’s heart faded before his eyes. She could often be found at the window, staring blankly toward the graveyard with her arms wrapped tightly around her stomach, as though the ghost of her child still remained safely tucked in her womb. Wyatt and his father, Anderson, watched helplessly as the shadows beneath her eyes grew longer and darker with each passing day. On the few occasions when she would be well enough to visit with her only living son, her touch felt cold and her gaze entirely absent; no amount of screaming and hitting and throwing on Wyatt’s part could bring her back from the despair that had swallowed her whole.

Anderson Byers had been the one to discover the body of his wife. She’d been found in the study, tucked into the corner of the window seat with her head on the glass. Her eyes were closed, but it wasn’t difficult to see that her last moments had been spent watching over the daughter that had never been given a chance to live.

His father broke the news to Wyatt in much the same way as he conducted his business. Anderson called Wyatt into his office—the very one Wyatt now used to conduct his own affairs—and sat him down in one of the stiff-backed chairs that loomed before the mahogany desks.

Anderson had folded his hands on the desk, stared with resolute firmness at his son, and revealed to him the fate of his beloved mother.

“Your mother is dead,” the elder Byers had said without preamble or forewarning. “I’m sorry for your loss, son.”

Wyatt had only stared at his father, unsure of precisely how he was expected to interpret this news. His mother, with her gentle hands and loving eyes, was dead. No more would he fall asleep to the soothing sound of her lilting voice as she sang to him. No more would she run her fingers through his hair, as she so often did as a silent sign of her affection.

Victoria Everly-Byers was dead, and there was nothing Wyatt could do to bring her back.

Wyatt hated the unborn child. He hated it and was glad that it was buried beneath the ground, where it would rot and be eaten away until it was nothing left but bones and dust. It had killed his mother, stolen her soul away before it consumed the rest of her body—a life for a life.

Anderson prepared a funeral and a plot for his wife (beside their stillborn child, despite Wyatt’s furious protests) and simply went on with his life. But every now and again, when he was certain Wyatt wasn’t watching, he would take out his handkerchief and quickly stab at the corners of his red-rimmed eyes. Every time Wyatt caught his father in these moments, he would be at the window, his gaze trained on the graveyard.

The night of the funeral, the only living Byers child delivered his tears to the night. He’d stained his pillow with the salt of his despair and hatred until there was nothing left but a carved, raw space where his heart used to be. When the morning came and Wyatt was forced to face a world without his mother, he delivered a single, steadfast promise to the wan morning light.

He would never again lose anything—or anyone—he loved. The world could take what it wanted from everyone else, but it would take nothing from Wyatt Byers that he was not willing to give.

Wyatt Byers adjusted the framed photograph of Victoria Everly-Byers so that the sunlight streaming from the window brought her more clearly to life. It was a portrait taken just before her marriage to Anderson Byers—before Wyatt, before the stillborn daughter that had wrenched her from the world. If one knew where to look, one could just make out the smile hidden in the corner of Victoria’s mouth. Her gaze was steady and unflinching, her hands clasped loosely in her lap. Victoria’s expression was soft and demure, but Wyatt could always make out the gentle but deliberate way she held her head high and with purpose.

Perhaps that was part of the reason Wyatt loved Clara; in many ways, she reminded him of his mother. She was far more impulsive and riotous than Victoria, to be sure, but their fiery spirits were most certainly cut from the same cloth.

Everything seemed so much drabber without her.

But, he reasoned, he wouldn’t be forced to endure her absence much longer. She might try to run, to outwit him, but she would come home eventually. The world had nothing to offer her than he could not give himself. They belonged together; they had always belonged together, but she was just too goddamn stubborn to notice.

He took a sip of the Scotch whiskey he’d poured himself earlier and trained his eyes on the portrait above the fireplace, where Clara eyed him from behind the prison of glass.

Wyatt sipped and stared, imagining the moment in which she was finally sitting before him again. And when she was safely back with him, he’d make sure she never left him again.

A knock sounded on the door. Wyatt said nothing; after a beat of silence the door opened, revealing Eden Bennett, well-dressed as always and with a newspaper folded and tucked beneath his arm.

Wyatt gestured toward the sideboard. “Pour yourself a glass.”

Eden shook his head and took a seat in front of the desk. He took the newspaper from beneath his arm and laid it in his lap.

Wyatt placed his half-empty glass back on the desk. He leaned back in his chair and nodded toward the newspaper. “Well?”

Eden unfolded the paper and tossed it carefully in front of Byers. The morning edition’s headline sprawled across the page in a riot of ink: DEADLY HEIST! BANDITS ROB TRAIN TO W. ELIZABETH, KILL TWO.

“Word has it,” Eden began as he crossed one leg over the other, “that one of the deceased is a deputy from Kingston.”

Wyatt lifted an eyebrow.

Taking this as his invitation to continue, Eden gestured toward the paper. “One of the boys says he was killed by a knife wound.” Here he paused and his lips curled into a smirk. “Right between the ribs and straight to the heart.”

A thrill ran through Wyatt’s veins. It was her—it had to be.

He lifted his glass once more to lips, feeling far more chipper than he had a moment ago. “How tragic,” he replied flatly.

“Rumor has it that the deputy went rogue,” Eden explained as he scratched idly at the stubble lining his chin. “Tried to bring Clara in on his own.”

Byers’s eyes lifted from the newspaper to the portrait on the mantle. Dead deputies and errant sheriffs weren’t nearly enough to detract from his purpose. There was a time and a place for everything; life had a way of carrying on with its own whims, but Byers always held the upper hand. He’d planned for every eventuality, every scenario—there was nothing that could happen that he wouldn’t be ready for.

He sighed and smoothed a hand down the front of his jacket. The sunlight painted his mother’s smile in its golden, warm light.

“A few years before my grandfather died, his town was plagued with a varmint problem. Neighbors complained of their gardens—for many of them, their source of food and income—being torn apart by rabbits and all manner of little vicious bastards. Naturally, they went to my grandfather for help.”

Eden nodded solemnly. He’d long been privy to the storied adventures of John Everly, the famed hunter of Warren County.

Byers turned his glass on the table and watched the amber liquid slosh against the sides. “Many of them expected my grandfather to lure them in with scraps or trap them when they came in search of food. But he had a far more effective way of rooting out the pests.”

His fingers closed on the glass and the whiskey immediately settled beneath the strength of his grip.

Byers asked idly, “Do you know the best way to hunt varmint, Eden?”

Eden Bennett swallowed and shook his head.

“You stop up their burrows. You take away every means of escape until they’re forced out in the open.” Byers drained his glass and set it with a soft clink on the table. “Then you go in for the kill.”

Eden nodded, his jaw set. “You want me to give the order, then?”

Byers kept his eyes trained on the portrait on the mantle. “He has two days.”

Eden Bennett rose from the chair and made for the door. He paused with his hand on the knob and turned to face Byers.

“And if she escapes?” he asked tentatively, as though the very mention of such a thing was akin to waking a sleeping giant.

For a moment, Wyatt said nothing. He only looked to his mother’s smile, dappled with sunlight before his eyes inevitably slid back to Clara’s, where she watched him with her hooded, defiant gaze.

He answered with cool finality, “Where could she possibly go where I won’t find her?”

There was nothing he wouldn’t do to have her again. There was no one he would not destroy, no town he would not ravage; she was his, and no one—not even the man she’d been seen with in town—would stand in his way. All he had to do was bide his time. Just as his grandfather had rooted out the varmints, so would Byers draw Clara back into his arms.

Every path she took inevitably led back to him. She just didn’t know it yet.

Chapter Text

The sun were reluctant to pull itself up over the horizon and drench Deepwater Pass in its warmth.

The crest of the mountains, high and distant over the van der Linde camp, pushed a bitterly cold wind stained with fresh snow into the pass. It whistled through the camp, sifting through the canvas tents until the rustling fabric became nearly loud enough to drive the denizens of the pass up from their cold, hard beds.

Clara Howard sat huddled on her cot, her blanket wrapped tightly around her shoulders, and her bleary, aching eyes staring blankly out through the small crevice of her tent flap.

She wasn’t entirely sure if she’d slept. Her body ached and her eyes begged for reprieve, but she only blinked and tightened the blanket on her shoulders. The wind rippled through the canvas as the first sounds of the camp’s wakefulness petered through the otherwise silent morning.

Clara hadn’t dreamed at all; at least, she didn’t think so. All of her thoughts were tangled up and knotted around one moment, a single sentence that still made her body tremble with a heady mixture of rage and…

That was the rub. She couldn’t identify the other feeling.

It was the namelessness, the absence of understanding, that had kept her up most of the night. Arthur’s admission (if one could call it that) had already been enough to upset the foundation of everything she’d worked so hard to build. But it was this feeling, whatever it was, that made her sure matters were far more grievous than she could have imagined.

Clara bit out a sigh and tried to quell her rising disquiet. It was merely dawn, and her body was already so worn thin by the night that had drowned her not in blessed ignorance, but in the very throes of her own turmoil.

Arthur was a fool.

If he’d just kept his mouth shut, then she wouldn’t be tucked like a child on her cot, wrapped in a blanket that smelled faintly of mold and horse, and staring at her tent as though it somehow held all the answers.

If he hadn’t opened his mouth, then she would have at least gotten some goddamn sleep.

You ain’t never gonna love me.

Clara held her head in her hands as the echo of his words crashed through her for the thousandth time. When the reverberation faded, she slowly lowered her hands. The morning breeze kicked up again and the cool mountain air slipped through the opening in the tent and kissed her cheeks.

Arthur didn’t know anything about love.

Love wasn’t the marvelous adventure the likes of which Mary-Beth penned. It wasn’t a triumphant savior to carry her out of the dark. No; the only love she’d ever known had left her bruised and broken in more ways than she cared to remember. The only love she’d ever known had swallowed her whole, until all that was left was his will, his overwhelming presence, and nothing at all left of her.

Love wasn’t kind, or patient; it was demanding and ruthless, and Clara wanted nothing to do with it.

Clara huffed and tossed off the blanket. She slid off the cot, her heart twisting wildly in her chest. Numbed, sleep-deprived fingers grappled for her clothes and she tugged them on, cursing when her foot snagged in the leg of her pants.

If Arthur expected her to play whatever manipulative game he’d concocted, he had another thing coming. Clara quickly unwound her braid and tore her fingers through the knots and snags in her hair. She wove a new one and rode out the fierceness of her anger, stoking it until she could let it loose where it belonged.

Arthur Morgan wouldn’t know love if it shot him in the back, and she was going to make sure he understood that fact before the day was out.

*

Arthur Morgan woke with a pounding headache and a brittle promise to never drink again.

It wasn’t that he’d had trouble sleeping; in fact, he’d welcomed the blissful, eradicating slumber that so often came with overindulging in alcohol. If he’d spared half a moment to be honest with himself, Arthur might have been thankful for the whiskey’s ability to drown memories of the previous day’s excursions in the dark recesses of his memory.

Really, all he wanted was to die.

His head throbbed fiercely as she sauntered on whiskey-addled legs toward the campfire, where Pearson had already set out the morning brew. He bent, cursing swiftly as the pain rolled and pounding across his brain. Arthur straightened, sniffed the coarse-ground coffee, and winced. His stomach roiled and he fought back the urge to empty what little contents was left directly onto the offending pot of so-called coffee. But he swallowed (and dutifully ignored the sharp taste of bile at the back of his throat) and made his slow, coursing way to one of the logs near the fire.

The last time he’d gotten that drunk, Mary had left him.

He’d left camp after their last encounter, when she’d informed Arthur that, rather than marry him, she would honor her family’s wishes and wed Barry Linton. If memory served (and it often did, though he couldn’t quite swear by the memories fractured by drink), Arthur hadn’t made it back to camp; instead, he’d stopped off at the first saloon he’d come across, ordered a drink, and summarily drowned in his misery. Somewhere between the first drink and the next morning, Arthur had managed to instigate a bar fight (he’d come out victorious, as someone later noted), broken one of the barstools in a momentary fit of uncontrollable rage, and passed out in a pile of piss and horseshit out back of the saloon. Apparently, that’s where John and Javier found him after Hosea and Dutch had sent them in search of their wayward son.

Arthur grunted as he lowered himself onto the log. He took another sip of the bracing coffee and tried not to retch. Arthur let out a soft groan of general disappointment as he balanced his elbows on his knees and let his shoulders fall forward.

The only upside, he supposed, was that his latest escapade had resulted in one vastly important fact: Hosea had been wrong. He was not in love with Clara, and that was most decidedly that. Sure, it’d taken quite a bit more whiskey to prove said point that Arthur had expected, but that was the end of the matter, and he was content to suffer as long as it remained true.

He frowned, stared at his cup, and considered tossing the rest onto the ground. He wasn’t entirely sure why, but his stomach felt tight and unsettled even beyond the expected sting of nausea that came with drinking too much. Arthur had a feeling that somehow, despite his best intentions, things had gone awry.

Then, just before he reluctantly lifted the cup to his lips, the reason for his overall discomfort landed with sudden clarity in his mind.

He’d dreamed of her last night.

During any other circumstance and with any other person, this fact would have been totally innocuous. But the longer Arthur stared into the fire, the more the enormity of his predicament settled and took root. He couldn’t be sure—in actuality, he wasn’t entirely sure that he wanted to be sure—but Arthur thought he might have dreamt that Clara had touched him.

Absentmindedly, Arthur reached up a hand and brushed his fingers across his cheek. The touch had been featherlight, barely a whisper of her skin against his.

Arthur quickly lowered his hand. His fingers tightened on the cup as his brain beat at his skull in an effort to free itself from its confines. His heart gave a single, terrible lurch as he forced cool, morning air into his lungs. He didn’t want her in his head, whether or not he was awake. It didn’t matter how soft her hand had felt against his rough, coarse skin. It didn’t matter that his senses had been inundated with the scent of lavender and mint, so much so that when he woke, he could swear her ghost had been in the tent with him.

But she’d walked him back last night; it made sense that her scent would still linger. Right?

Arthur grunted and firmly decided to chalk all of this nonsense up to a night poorly spent at the bottom of a glass (or several), and nothing more than that. He took another sip of the coffee, which was marginally better now that he’d acclimated to its taste, and forced all of his musings out of mind. He winced as another burst of pain shot through his skull, vibrated in his teeth, and shot into his stiff neck. He pressed a hand to his forehead in an effort to quell the worst of the pounding ache, but it refused to abate and only grew louder and more insistent.

A shadow moved in the corner of his eye. He turned, his mouth already etched into a sour frown, as a figure approached the campfire and headed straight for Arthur.

Arthur wasn’t at all prepared when Clara Howard stomped up to him, pulled her hand back, and slapped the cup of coffee out of his hands and directly onto his person.

The burn of the liquid was immediate and ferocious. Arthur let out a strangled growl as he leapt from the log and pawed uselessly as his now stained and soaked shirt and pants. He wheeled on Clara, the misery of his hangover momentarily forgotten.

“Are you out of your goddamn mind?” he roared, holding out his sopping arms to his sides.

“You,” she snarled at him, “are a drunken, dimwitted idiot.”

Arthur lowered his arms, wincing as the burning liquid pinched his skin. “I ain’t even said a word to you,” Arthur growled, taking a step forward.

She said nothing; Clara only set her jaw, pulled her arms back, and delivered a hard, deliberate shove to his shoulders.

Arthur bore the brunt of her assault with hardly more than a half step backwards and gaped at her. Her eyes were lit with rage. If Arthur looked closely enough, he could just make out the shadows that lingered beneath the blazing, bright green of her eyes. Her face was drawn and pinched, both with punctuated irritation and, Arthur realized, a distinct lack of sleep.

He spared a moment to wonder what it was that had kept her up. And, because he was still whiskey-addled and a marvelous fool, Arthur felt sorry that she’d suffered through a sleepless night. He banished the thought as quickly as it’d come, tearing it pieces and burying it in the darkness with all the other thoughts and considerations that did nothing but make the world far more difficult to navigate.

Arthur drew in a breath, curled his lips into a frown, and muttered darkly, “You’ll forgive me, Ms. Howard,” he sneered with as much venom as he could muster, “but I ain’t quite had enough coffee yet to deal with whatever it is you insist on throwing my way at this moment.”

He made to turn away and pick up what was left of his shattered morning. Clara’s hand flew out and latched on his arm, her fingers digging persistently into him, despite his newly acquired layer of coffee. Arthur turned, a bitter sigh escaping his lips, and prepared to face her again.

When he looked at her, her lips were already curled into a snarl. “I’m not done with you yet,” she hissed as she took another half step toward him, closing the distance with a defiant lift of her chin and the fire still burning hotly in her eyes.

“If you think for one minute that I’m going to play whatever sick game you’ve got floating around in that blockhead of yours, Arthur Morgan, then you are sorely mistaken.”

Arthur stared blankly at her. Clara had developed a particular propensity for inserting Arthur into any and all situations that could garner her antagonism; despite the fact that the evening following his excursion at the saloon was still hazy, he was fairly certain he hadn’t done anything to deserve being the recipient of her current wave of anger.

But the more Arthur pondered the fact, the more he felt like the world was tilting dangerously beneath his feet, so he only scowled as best he could and squared his shoulders.

“I don’t have a clue what you’re talking about,” he grunted as he easily peeled her hand off his arm. “Find someone else to bother. I ain’t in the mood for you just yet.”

Clara’s brow furrowed. Her hands flew to her hips as she stared at him. “You don’t remember, do you?”

Incidentally, there were very few things that Arthur forgot. He could cement names into his memory after only hearing them once or twice; his journal was filled with the likenesses of people, places, and buildings, each with enough detail to rival a photograph. But in this particular instance, Arthur Morgan had absolutely no idea what the thing was he’d supposedly forgotten.

Considering this absence of information only made the dull persistence of Arthur’s headache return with a vengeance. He shook his head and tried his best to mull over the situation.

“Like I said, go find someone else to bother.” He once again brushed at the coffee stains on his shirt. “I’m going to go change before you decide to skin me, or burn me alive, or whatever it is witch women like you do for sport.”

Possibly he should have used a bit more tact when speaking to a decidedly angry woman. Perhaps Arthur should have just kept his mouth shut, but unfortunately, he had never quite developed the ability to differentiate between spewing his opinion and understanding when it was entirely unwanted.

Clara blinked at him. He saw without meaning to the distinct curl of her fingers on her hips and the angry lines that creased her forehead. Then she sucked in a breath, clenched one hand into a fist, and sent it squarely into Arthur’s gut.

As far as punches went, Arthur had hit and been hit far harder than this, and the blow hadn’t exactly been painful. It was, however, still enough to expel the air from Arthur’s lungs and drive home the fact that he’d somehow, without even meaning to, invoked the almighty wrath of Clara Howard.

His hands darted out and latched onto her arms. He pulled her forward, holding her carefully in case she took it upon herself to assault him again. Arthur glared at her as he filled his lungs with air and made a concerted effort to slow his raging, racing pulse.

It didn’t help at all that he could feel her warmth beneath his hands, and that the air around her was filled with the now distinct scent of her perfume.

Arthur cleared his head enough to growl, “I ain’t too sure what’s gotten into that head of yours, Ms. Howard, but I’d think twice before you do anything like that again.”

Clara stared at him. She was as fearless and undaunted by him as she’d been the moment they met. But even now, as he stood there holding her arms, Arthur could make out the infallible demeanor she wore like a suit of carefully crafted armor. And there, just beneath the cut-glass sharpness of her eyes, Arthur saw something else—something he couldn’t understand—swimming just beneath the surface. It nipped at him and dug its claws in whenever he tried to wash away the feeling. A rush of warmth swept through his chest as the feeling grew far more difficult to ignore, and far more unsettling for his liking.

Clara’s muscles tightened beneath his hold. Her nostrils flared as she pressed her lips into a tight, thin line.

“Do you even remember what you said to me?”

Arthur froze.

He remembered coming back to camp with a hellish fury, one that demanded he inform Clara just how much trouble she’d caused him since her unexpected arrival. If he tried hard enough, Arthur could recall the visceral need to tell her, if only to prove to himself that he was still in control of what little of his life he could still truly call his. But the rest remained stoic and blank, as though the reel of film had suddenly torn and given way to nothingness.

What in the hell could he have possibly said to her to make her this upset?

Arthur could remember speaking to Clara upon his arrival back at camp; he was fairly certain that she’d walked him back to camp after that, though the topic of conversation eluded his fractured memory. The following memories were drenched in shadow, the edges far too blurred to be able to make out with any sense of clarity. But, the more he tried, the more Arthur thought that maybe…maybe he had said something to her…

That’s right—he’d told her that Hosea had been wrong, that he was absolutely, unequivocally, unmistakably not in love with her. But the thought twisted and writhed in his gut. Arthur knew that this wasn’t the truth, however much he wanted to hold onto it. He replayed the moment over and over, until the edges finally started to come clear and the distant, discordant echo of his voice finally sharpened into something clear and audible.

You ain’t never gonna love me.

He forgot how to breathe. The rest of the world fell away as Arthur Morgan stood there like the unimaginable fool he was, the truth of what he’d said now inescapably laid bare before him. He felt the weight of the words he should never have uttered settle like a yoke around his neck, threatening to drag him to the ground and suffocate him with their finality.

Arthur didn’t realize he was still holding onto Clara—that all he could smell was her sweet, earthy scent—until he shuddered back into reality.

Arthur shook his head and fought for words. “Mae, I—I didn’t mean…” He stopped, pressed his lips together, and let out a sigh. He damned his intolerably horrific way with words and tried again. “I don’t—”

Clara wrenched her arms from his grip. She set her jaw and looked away, and in that moment, Arthur felt her slipping further and further from him.

“I don’t know what’s worse,” she said tersely, her eyes flicking to Arthur for only a moment before darting away again. “What you said, or the fact that you don’t remember.”

Arthur knew this was the moment he should say something. If there was ever a moment for him to dig up sensible words, to string them together in a manner that could effectively convey the turbulent, mangled mess of emotion in his heart, it was now. He searched for them, begged them to come forward, but he was only met with stark silence.

And because he didn’t know what to say, or how to properly say it, he remained encased in silence, forever staring in Clara’s eyes and knowing he had only himself to blame.

He opened his mouth in the vain hope that words—real ones, not the ones that would evaporate from his tongue like ghostly wisps—would come forth. But there was nothing, and the realization that Arthur would never be anything more than a ghost, eternally choking on all the half-formed words that he could never find the strength to utter.

Hosea swept up toward them and the moment, as tenuous and filled with import as it had been, fell away like dead and broken leaves to their feet. The old man delivered one of his famously stern looks to each of them in turn.  

“Children,” he greeted, his voice dripping with sarcasm. “I see you’ve gone and upset the delicate balance of nature again.”

Clara’s frown was fierce. “I’m not the one who—”

Hosea held up a hand to stop her. His firm gaze darted to Arthur, flaying him open as it had done so often when he was a child. Clara and Arthur both clamped their mouths firmly shut under the weight of his watchful eye, though their silence did not stop Clara from sending a damning, furious glare in his general direction.

“Now, look,” Hosea began. He indicated the both of them with a pointed finger. “I’ve had just about enough of the both of you. Rather than continue to argue like senseless idiots and force the rest of the camp to endure it, I suggest you go out and make yourselves useful.”

Arthur said nothing; Clara, for her part, angrily crossed her arms, so wrought with ire that Arthur could almost feel the heat simmering off her skin.

“I’ll go,” she said slowly, “as long as he doesn’t come with me.”

Hosea narrowed his eyes. “Oh, he’s going with you, whether you like it or not.” He jabbed a finger at the both of them. “Seems to me that the two of you have some things that need sorting out.”

Once again, Arthur said nothing; Clara only shifted on her feet, clearly irritated and only half-listening to Hosea.

The old man plowed on. “John’s already in town trying to drum up some work. Why don’t you go and see what he’s found and do something other than antagonize each other like a pair of cornered animals?”

Arthur stiffened; the last thing he wanted was to babysit Marston on top of ensuring Clara didn’t try to stab him when he wasn’t looking.

Hosea began to turn away, clearly satisfied with his edict, but stopped and wheeled back to them.

“And if I catch you two anywhere near here before I’m sure you’ve dealt with your business, then I will whip you both and be done with it. Understood?”

Arthur glanced at Clara; she glanced at him. He didn’t like the look he saw on her face.

She wasn’t just upset; she was a storm of rage and discontent. Clara had looked upon him with disdain before, so much so that Arthur had grown used to it. But this—this he didn’t want. This felt far too much like she was drifting away from him, and Arthur didn’t want that.

At least, he didn’t think he did.

*

Clara stared at the decidedly small handful of bills on the counter. She raised an eyebrow at the hotel clerk. “That’s it?”

He sighed as though every moment he spent in her presence was far more arduous than he cared to admit. He slid the bills to her. “Take it or leave it, miss,” he said, each word taut with irritation.

Clara frowned at him. “You do realize,” she said carefully, “that I just spared your employee from a man quite clearly intent on beating him to within an inch of his life?”

It wasn’t exactly the sort of work she’d gone to Kingston to do, but it had been better than nothing. The hotel clerk had been loudly complaining to anyone who would listen about his wayward employee, Terrence, who’d wandered off sometime in the night and had not returned to work at his appointed time. While the rest of the town duly ignored the clerk, Clara had offered to fetch Terrence and bring him back—for a price, of course.

As it turned out, Terrence had quite the unfortunate addiction to gambling. He’d spent what little money he’d had and, when that had quickly gotten him nowhere, decided in his desperation to steal from the hotel’s funds in order to supplement his misguided interests. When Clara had found him near the edge of the town, a rather large and surly individual had him by the neck. As it turned out, even the biggest men could be coaxed into submission with the sharp edge of a knife.

The clerk narrowed his eyes at Clara. “As I said,” he muttered through gritted teeth, “take it or leave it.”

For a moment, Clara considered whether his opinion on the matter would change very much if she were to engage in a bit more aggressive negotiation. But she quickly decided that the clerk was not at all worth the effort, made a show of disdainfully taking her money, and stalked from the hotel.

If she ever came across Terrence again, she’d help him steal the rest of the hotel’s money, just to be sure the clerk understood what happened when you shorted the reward for heroism.

Clara shoved the money in her satchel as she crossed the street. She’d left Marion hitched outside the saloon; a quick glance revealed that Arthur and John had not yet returned from their horse wrangling job.

She patted her horse’s neck before climbing the stairs to the saloon. The town was bustling, despite the still early hour, and the sun had grown far too hot for Clara’s liking. She lowered herself onto a bench with a long, heavy sigh and stared out at the sprawling town.

The ride into town had been tenuous, at best. In truth, Clara hadn’t exactly meant to let her anger get the better of her that morning. She’d only intended to have a very strongly worded conversation with Arthur before continuing on with the day. It had all changed, though, the moment she’d laid eyes on him.

Despite the fact that her fury had resulted in their temporary banishment, Clara had kept it stoked on the ride into Kingston. Arthur had tried speaking to her and she’d dutifully ignored him, though a torrent of knife-edged words lay clasped behind her tightly clenched teeth.

He didn’t remember what he’d said to her.

Clara’s eyes went unfocused as she stared out into the crowds that lingered in the streets. If she spared a thought to be honest, she would have admitted that she couldn’t stop thinking about what he’d said. She couldn’t stop thinking of the way her fingers had brushed across his stubbled cheek of their own volition, as though they had grown cold and lifeless and ached for his warmth. She couldn’t stop thinking of the way he’d leaned into the touch, as though he needed and wanted it just as much as she did. And, more than that, Clara detested that her mind had even spared a thought for any of those things at all. There was no room for it in her heart; there was no imagination strong enough to conjure such as scene in which any of that could be possible.

And besides—Arthur didn’t remember any of it anyway.

She tilted her head back and rode out the tremor that sped like wildfire through her body. Her nerves felt flayed, her veins shriveled and burned; her heart clenched painfully in her chest and her lungs ached for the cool, clear mountain air.

This was precisely why Clara should have kept the walls firmly around her heart. She’d allowed them to fall just enough for her loyalties to take root, to the gang and to…well, that didn’t matter. All that mattered was that she’d gone and done precisely what she hadn’t meant to do, and now she was going to have to pay the price, one way or another.

And it was all Arthur Morgan’s fault.

Clara looked up at the sound of approaching hoofbeats. She spotted John as he drifted along through the crowd on horseback, followed closely by Arthur and Boadicea. She stood up and strode to the railing, where she braced her hands and watched as they pulled up.

Arthur’s eyes flicked to hers only once before he set his jaw and resolutely turned away.

She wrapped her fingers around the mottled wooden railing and sent a piercing glare in his general direction. “I thought I told you,” she said to John, “not to bring him back, if at all possible.”

John wasn’t given an opportunity to answer; instead, Arthur slid off Boadicea, tossed her reins around the post, and glanced darkly up at her.

“And I see your mood ain’t exactly improved in the time we’ve been gone,” he muttered.

John rolled his eyes as he dismounted and hitched his horse. He gestured between the two of them and asked, “You two about done with this yet?”

Arthur waved away the question. “Ask her.”

She narrowed her eyes, her temper seething just beneath her skin.

John ignored him and came up the steps. Arthur followed, his gait slow and a bit reluctant. Clara stiffened as he approached; her skin felt taut over her bones the closer he got.

“You find anything while we was gone?” John asked as he joined her near the railing. Arthur went directly to the bench Clara had just vacated, sat down with a bitter grunt, and pulled out a pack of cigarettes from his satchel.

She ran a hand down the length of her braid and shrugged. Clara did her best to keep her eyes from wandering to where Arthur sat, silently and in a hazy, gray cloud of smoke.

“One of the hotel employees has been stealing money so he could gamble,” Clara explained with a quick nod of the head toward the offending building. “Turns out he got into it with the wrong man and I stepped in before it went badly.” She crossed her arms and frowned. “Not that it was very much to my benefit.”

John raised an eyebrow. “You stopped him by yourself?”

Arthur leaned back on the bench, his cigarette clutched between two fingers. Clara didn’t need to look to feel the weight of his gaze on her.

She turned a pointed, warning glance at John. “Are you trying to imply that I’m not capable of handling such a situation on my own, John Marston?”

Arthur scoffed and flicked a bit of ash away from the cigarette. “He don’t even know what imply means.”

Clara’s anger flared. She turned to him and said tersely, “No one’s talking to you.”

Arthur pressed his lips together and said nothing.

John leaned on the railing. “Well, I wasn’t trying to imply nothing,” he said with a pointed look in Arthur’s direction. “So, you kill the bastard?”

Clara sighed. “Not everything in the world has to be about killing, John. And no, I didn’t.” She smirked and added, “But I’m sure he’ll think twice before assuming women are harmless, unsuspecting creatures.”

Arthur tossed away the spent cigarette. “That man was a fool if he thought you was harmless.”

Possibly he meant it as a compliment. Possibly Arthur was trying to make amends for his transgressions, in his own rather limited and reserved manner. But Clara was still not ready to acknowledge the fire raging in her heart; she was still not prepared to break down what was left of her walls and let inside whatever this feeling was that made her heart feel shriveled and wanting.

Instead, she whirled on Arthur, her fists clenched at her sides. Clara said loudly and through clenched teeth, “I am not speaking to you!”

Arthur’s summer eyes flickered for a moment in the shade beneath the roof. He leaned forward until Clara could see that they’d hardened over like winter ice.

“And yet,” he said with a deliberate sneer, “you keep on talking.”

John sighed and made his way to the saloon doors. “I’m getting a drink,” he muttered as he slipped away, leaving Clara and Arthur to their argument.

Clara inhaled sharply. “You are inescapably dense. You know that, right?”

Arthur sat back, his hands landing heavily on his knees. His lips were curled into the ghost of a smirk, but his eyes remained crisp and clear and as frost. “So you keep reminding me, Ms. Howard.”

She took in a long, trembling breath. An electric, prickly feeling scalded nearly every inch of her skin. Her heart stammered, unsure of how to regain its proper rhythm; the longer she looked at him, the more Clara felt like she was going to burst at the seams.

Clara shook her head and stalked toward the saloon doors. “I don’t know why I bother with you,” she muttered.

Arthur rose from the bench and slipped directly into her path. Clara quickly stepped back to avoid colliding with his bulky, hulking frame, and clenched her hands once more. If she didn’t, she was afraid she might hit him again.

Arthur’s hands dipped to his belt and he squared his shoulders. His eyes hadn’t yet lost their winter chill and his lips were pressed into an equally displeased line.

“You got a problem with me, Ms. Howard,” he said slowly and in his low, rumbling baritone, “then go ahead and say it.”

Clara’s nostrils flared as she fought for breath. “Get out of my way, Mr. Morgan.”

He remained precisely where he was. He leveled an accusatory finger at her and said, “You been acting like a goddamn maniac all day. I ain’t too sure what’s gotten into your head, but I’ve had just about enough of this.”

Clara couldn’t look at him anymore. If she did, she might hit him, or…

She pushed the thought out of her mind and tried to step around Arthur. He took half a step to his right and blocked her, his hands still lingering on his belt with an air of undaunted swagger.

Clara couldn’t help it this time. Her heart was about to beat out of her chest, and she was absolutely certain that this feeling was going to tear her apart. She craned her head up to look at Arthur, curled her lips into a scowl, and shoved him as hard as she could in the chest.

Arthur hardly moved; he was as solid as rock and nearly as strong, too. Clara dropped her arms down to her sides as Arthur took a step toward her, his shoulders angled in such a way that, if she were anyone else, would have very likely sent them running in the opposite direction.

“What the hell is your problem?” he ground out, his anger dripping like poison from every word.

“You are my problem,” she bit back, her voice on the edge of a yell. “You are always the problem.”

Arthur’s eyes widened a fraction. He jabbed at his chest with his finger. “I’m the problem?”

Every second was a battle in which Clara fought desperately to hold onto reason, to keep the threads of her soul from unraveling. But she couldn’t stop the torrent of words as they spilled from her lips.

“You’re selfish, Arthur Morgan,” she hissed. Clara curled her fingers into fists as adrenaline flickered like fire through her veins. “You think you can say whatever you want, do whatever you want, and there won’t be any consequences. You think you can act the way you do, and I won’t have anything to say about it.”

He opened his mouth to protest but she held up a firm, unyielding hand. The storm was impossible to stop. Clara felt it tear through her as her tongue blistered with all the words she couldn’t quite bring herself to say.

Instead, she took a steadying breath and uttered, “Did you honestly think I would forget what you said?”

Arthur didn’t move, nor did he utter a single word to dismiss the accusations she’d so caustically thrown at him. The words sat between them like storm clouds, masking what they both were desperate to keep hidden and clouding the judgment they both knew would only serve to drive them further apart.

Clara knew this: No matter what he said next, nothing would be the same. Every moment, every word, every thought was another turn in the path that would eventually lead to their ruin. All of this served as nothing more than a reminder that Clara could never truly be rid of the ghostly tethers that kept her anchored to the past.

Eventually, the frost in Arthur’s eyes melted just enough for her to see their edges soften. His face, which had only a moment before been tightly knit with anger, loosened enough for Clara to know what was coming.

And for her to be sure that it wouldn’t be enough to make things go back to the way they were.

Arthur swallowed and looked away. He took a breath and let it out before turning back to her. “Mae, I already told you,” his voice low and devoid of all ire. “I didn’t mean what I said.”

She should just leave it at all. Clara knew that, and still the question rose up in her throat and spilled from her lips. “Then why did you say it?”

Arthur blinked as though stymied by the query. His lips parted and closed and parted again, as though he’d suddenly forgotten how to speak.

Clara wasn’t sure why, but the bitter sting of disappointment swept through her, making it suddenly hard to breathe.

Finally, he squared his shoulders, swallowed again, and looked at her. “I—”

Whatever he’d meant to say was left unfinished. He turned suddenly toward the street, his gaze sharpening into one of suspicion.

Clara followed his line of sight and instantly found the source of his disturbance. A handful of men—four to be exact—clattered loudly down the steps of the sheriff’s office. Judging by their outfits and their rather particular demeanor, they were not residents or regular visitors of Kingston. Thick, bullet-studded bandoliers stretched across their chests; their clothes were finely cut, their only blemish a fine coating of dust from riding. Their hats were pulled low, shadowing many of their faces even in the daylight, as they sauntered with purpose toward their hitched horses.

All of them bore a star on their left breast.

Arthur’s frown deepened as they mounted up. A few of them cast wary, pitying glances around the town, as though it had failed to meet their expectations. Clara leaned against the post that held up the saloon’s roof. Something about them seemed off, something besides their appearances. “Bounty hunters?”

Arthur watched them with both hands braced on the railing as the riders picked their way through the thronging streets of Kingston. Some of the folk dutifully skipped out of the way of their mounts; others watched them with the same suspicion etched on Arthur’s face. Clara ignored the twisting in her gut and the sensation of wrongness that prickled at the back of her neck.

“They’re deputized men,” he rumbled in response. “Bounty hunters ain’t typically in direct association with the law.”

One of the riders glanced up as they drifted past the saloon. Clara bristled when his eyes slid over Arthur and landed directly on her.

Arthur straightened and instinctively stood a bit closer to her. The rider’s attention slid away and returned to the road ahead and, just as quickly as they’d appeared, they slipped out of sight.

Clara shifted away from Arthur as her heart trembled slightly in her chest. “Not bounty hunters, then,” she mused.

Arthur’s hands went to his belt. His eyes were still on the road, where only a cloud of hazy dust hung in the air in the wake of the riders. “Don’t much matter who they was,” he muttered darkly, “long as they stay the hell out of this town.”

Clara sighed and crossed her arms. She tried to slip back into the familiar banter that had dictated her relationship with Arthur, but the moment felt forced, like a key trying to a fit a lock for which it was not made.

“You don’t own this town, Arthur,” she said tiredly.

He turned to look at her. The suspicion on his face was muted in the absence of the riders, but she could tell his guard was still up. “Neither do you, Ms. Howard,” he said with a smirk.

She lifted her chin. Her heart stammered a bit more, now that the summer warmth had returned to Arthur’s eyes. “Damn right,” Clara said. “If I did, I’d have strung you up months ago.”

Arthur rolled his eyes but the smirk on his lips widened just a bit.

Sheriff James Parker stepped out onto the narrow porch of the sheriff’s office. He loomed at the top step, a cigarette propped between his lips as he gazed out at the town. After a moment, his eyes ceased their wandering and stopped directly on Clara.

She stared at him and he at her; beside Clara, Arthur stiffened as his hands tightened on his belt.

Parker tipped his hat to her and jabbed a thumb back toward the office. “Got something you might be interested in, Ms. Galloway,” he called out across the street, referring to her by the name she’d given him upon their first meeting. He didn’t wait for her to answer; Parker only turned and slipped back into the office.

Clara’s arms tightened across her chest. This wasn’t right.

Arthur, sensing her distress and the inherent otherness of the moment, straightened and glanced at her. “What’s he talking about?”

She shook her head. Clara moved away from the railing and said, “I don’t know, but I’ll go find out.”

Arthur gave her a withering look. “Mae, don’t—”

Clara descended the stairs. “I’ll meet you back here,” she said firmly. “Go and check on John.”

Clara saw the protest on Arthur’s lips. She could see that, if she were anyone else, he would have insisted she stayed. But Arthur knew her and, despite their now questionable rapport, reasoned it was far better to allow Clara to walk her own path than to insist otherwise.

It was just more difficult than she’d thought to leave him behind.

*

The air reeked of alcohol and day-old sweat.

Clara pulled a rancid breath into her lungs as she stepped into the shadowed interior of the sheriff’s office. The gray light from outside barely managed to infiltrate the haze of smoke and stark depression that seemed to pervade the space; it was as though the life had been sucked of it, if there had ever been any sign of life at all.

Parker had already made himself comfortable in his usual seat. He pulled a battered pack of cigarettes from his jacket pocket as Clara hovered in the doorway. Her eyes went immediately to the battered tin star at the corner of his desk. If she squinted, she could just make out the flecks of blood that clung to the metal.

A rush of memory pervaded her thoughts: the deputy’s cold hands on her; the cool metal of his gun pressed to her head; the look on Arthur’s face when it became clear that her life was perched on a precarious balance.

Parker struck a match on his desk and held it up to the cigarette. He followed the train of her eyesight and nodded with his chin toward the star.

“Figured I’d keep it,” he muttered around the stick of tobacco. “Seeing as how he ain’t got any other family.”

Clara tried to find remorse within her heart. She tried to empathize with Hawkins, who had, according to the sheriff, no other family to speak of. But all she could think of was his iron-clad will, the adamant decision to fetch her and bring her back to the one person to whom she could not return. Unfortunately, remorse escaped her.

Clara placed a hand on her hip. “Seems you had a few visitors this afternoon, sheriff.”

Parker waved away the comment. “Just a few deputies from Heritage. They’re helping me out with a rather delicate case, as it were.”

Clara pondered this for a moment. It was entirely possible that Parker was lying, though the rationale behind the action eluded her reasoning. If what he said was true, then, she wondered what sort of case required assistance from neighboring towns, and whether or this matter of delicacy had anything to do with her, or the rest of the gang.

There was no better way to find out, Clara reasoned, than to plunge in headfirst. She held out her hands and asked, “So, what is it you have for me?”

Parker raised his eyebrows and nodded, as though the question had jogged his memory. He leaned back in the chair and the wood creaked beneath his weight. The sheriff plucked the cigarette from his mouth and dispensed the ashes into a nearby ashtray.

“On the wall there,” he said with a flick of his wrist. “Just came in the other day.”

Clara turned. When she considered the matter later, a part of her knew precisely at that moment what she could find when she turned her back on the sheriff. It was the same part that Clara had spent months burying beneath festering hope and carving her freedom with the sharp edge of her knife. But Clara hadn’t gotten this far by shying away from the things that lingered at the edge of memory; so, despite her loud misgivings, she turned. 

Her eyes landed on a poster. On any other day in any other moment, it would have been entirely remarkable. The ink proclaiming the name, last known location, and the amount to be given in exchange for procuring a body—alive or dead—were all so familiar to Clara’s eyes that she nearly whirled on the sheriff and demanded to know what he had up his sleeve. But then the letters of the name finally broke through Clara’s consciousness. She read them over and over, stuck in a moment that was inescapably eternal. Clara felt her lungs shrivel and her mind go blank, save for the swift, damning echo of the name emblazoned in thick, ink-dark letters.

WANTED: CLARAMAE HOWARD.

She didn’t move; she didn’t blink. Clara only stared at her name on the bounty poster while the rest of the world burned away.

After an eternity caught in the undertow of her mistakes, of every year spent beneath the thumb of a man who’d tried to make her into someone she could never be, Clara pulled in a sharp breath and steeled her nerves. She reached out, wrapped her fingers around the edges of the thick paper, and tugged it free from the wall in one swift pull.

Clara turned slowly back to face Parker, who sat watching her intently as the cigarette burned steadily. The paper felt strangely fragile in her hands; if she held it too tightly, it would rip and shred her to pieces. She carefully folded the poster, forcing her stiff fingers to obey her silent commands. Clara made a show of tucking the poster into her satchel before her hand dipped to her holster.

Parker didn’t flinch as she leveled her revolver straight at his heart.

The sheriff crossed one leg over the other. “Seems you got a fair price on your head, Ms. Galloway—excuse me,” Parker mockingly apologized, “Ms. Howard.”

Clara focused on the cool, firm handle of her revolver. Clara’s eyes focused on the deputy, trained on his every movement. She took a breath and said, “You want the bounty? So did your deputy.”

Parker sighed and tossed the cigarette into the ashtray. He braced both arms on the chair and looked at her, his face tried and drawn. He seemed for all the world like a father who’d reached the edge of patience with his unruly child.

He said with some resignation, “Figured it was you that killed him.” Parker’s fingers wound around the arms of his chair. His eyes grew darker and his expression tightened. “He didn’t have to die.”

Clara set her stance and kept her gun level with his chest, despite the shaking and burning in her muscles. “Yes, he did.”

Parker slammed a fist on the arm of the chair. Clara froze, the barrel of the gun hovering persistently in alignment with the sheriff’s heart. Her eyes begged to slide toward the door, where she might catch a glimpse of Arthur and John.

Arthur didn’t know about the poster that had her name emblazoned across it inescapably permanent letters. He didn’t know that the time had finally come to face her past.

“Hawkins didn’t have to die,” the sheriff insisted, his lips curled around each of the words. He lifted a finger and pointed it at her, his own flesh version of a gun. “You brought this chaos upon us, Ms. Howard. It were you that should have paid the price.”

Possibly he was right; there were plenty of times when Clara should have met her end at the barrel of a gun, but here she stood, pointing her weapon at the man who would resign her to her fate. She took one breath and another before she allowed the burning and aching muscles in her arm to relax.

Clara lowered and kept her finger carefully balanced on the trigger. “I paid more than you can imagine,” she whispered as the memories of her past rose unbidden in her mind. She took another breath, focused her intention, and asked, “You haven’t met him, have you?”

Parker lowered the accusatory finger and said nothing.

When she was sure that she was safe from Parker’s wrath, at least for now, she holstered her weapon. Clara placed her hands on her hips and kept her cool, green eyes firmly on the sheriff.

“Let me guess,” she began. “He told you that I was a fugitive from New Jersey, accused of a variety of rather unsavory crimes.” She raised an eyebrow and nodded toward him. “Am I right so far?”

For a moment, the sheriff remained silent. Then he nodded at her to continue.

Clara took a step toward the desk and placed her hand on the edge. She felt her body beg to tremble, to bow beneath the weight of her predicament, but she forced it to remain upright. She refused to cower before a man so hellbent on seeing an innocent woman suffer at the hands of a man equally at odds with the world.

“He painted a lovely picture of me, I’m sure: a murderer, a thief, among other things. But that’s not what caught your attention.” She tilted her head and watched him carefully; if there was one thing she’d learned from the exacting, vengeful hand that had wrought her, it was the ability to tell when the truth hit its mark.

“What caught your attention,” she said with surety, “was the money he promised you if you returned me to him.”

Parker’s lips curled into a smile. He folded his hands over his stomach and replied, “You are every inch the intelligent woman I thought you was.”

She didn’t bother to match his smile. “You of all people should know that it doesn’t take intelligence to know when you’re being strangled by a snake. All it takes is a spine.”

The sheriff’s smile faded. “You must realize, Ms. Howard, that my hands are tied.”

Clara lifted her chin. “And you, Sheriff Parker, must surely have realized by now that you will never get a cent of what he’s promised you.”

He shrugged, entirely unfazed. “Seems pretty promising to me.” Parker reached over to the desk and brushed his fingers against the fallen deputy’s symbol. “Besides, I ain’t too sure he wasn’t right about all them things he said about you.”

This, at least, was a game she knew how to play. “Oh, he was right, sheriff. He was right about nearly everything he told you, except for one.” For this, she leaned in close, her veins filled with all the venom she could muster. “What he didn’t tell you,” she said softly, “was that I do not belong to him.”

Parker eyed her curiously as he took this in. His fingers drummed on the desk and finally he said, “The deal’s already done, Ms. Howard. Ain’t nothing I can do to stop the wheels from turning as they already have.”

Clara peered at him. Dimly, she was aware of the fact that Arthur would have likely met up with John at this point. She trembled beneath the weight of everything that remained unsaid between them, of all the things she was sure were better left to the void. Her hand wandered toward the hilt of her knife. She breathed in and out as her fingers wrapped around the hilt, taking comfort in the familiar grip that molded perfectly to her hand. Clara pulled a long breath into her lungs and pulled the knife free of its sheath.

She buried it into the wood of the desk, a fraction of an inch away from where the sheriff’s hand sat still idly tapping out a slow, steady rhythm on the desk.

He froze, his head whipping toward the knife with no small measure of surprise.

“Bullshit,” she hissed as she leaned forward. She slowly, carefully, removed her fingers from the knife. Clara instilled every inch of control and strength she could muster into her bones as she leveled a hard, unyielding gaze at the sheriff.

“Here’s what’s going to happen,” she said as she straightened and crossed her arms over her chest. “You’re going to let me walk out of here with this poster.” She gestured toward her satchel. “Then, you’re going to write to Wyatt Byers and tell him that I’ve left town and you don’t know where I’m heading.”

Parker raised an eyebrow. “You think you’re in a position to bargain, miss?”

Clara shrugged. “Men like you—the sort that think they’re working in favor of the law—are always willing to strike a bargain.”

His face darkened at that. Clara watched his eyes harden at the edges as he pondered her edict, mulling over the words and looking for a way to escape the burden they placed upon his weak, unwilling shoulders.

“And you really think,” Parker countered, “that he’ll believe a word I have to say?”

Clara swallowed but maintained her composure. For a moment, her eyes slid toward the window, where she could just barely catch a glimpse of the saloon’s porch. She swallowed and turned back to the sheriff. “I’ll go willingly—you don’t have to worry about that.”

She didn’t want to go; the very thought of leaving, of abandoning the gang, was nearly enough to wrench her heart in two. But the worst of it—the part that she kept buried at the back of her mind, where it was safely hidden—was that she couldn’t imagine leaving Arthur.

Clara knew there would be a time she’d have to come to terms with whatever that meant, but it wasn’t this moment. Now, she was faced with for more egregious matters than the ones that resided in her tremulous, wary heart.

Parker sighed and adjusted the hat on his head. He turned his attention briefly out the window, as though the conversation had suddenly become too straining to withstand. When he turned back to her again, his expression had smoothed into an evenness that gave away nothing of his intentions.

“Say I do this,” he began with a wave of his hand. “Say I do exactly as you say. What guarantee do I have that this town will be safe?” Parker leaned forward until his elbows were balanced on his knees. “What assurances can you provide that Kingston—hell, that this entire state—won’t feel his wrath the moment you’re gone?”

Clara answered without missing a beat. “He doesn’t care about you, or this town—he never did, despite whatever story he might have told you.” She swallowed as his face rose unbidden in her mind, his twisting, wry smile as haunting in her memories as it had been in life. There was only one outcome Byers had ever craved, had ever killed and manipulated for.

“He wants me,” Clara said as a chill crept up her spine. “Once he does, he’ll leave you all to rot.”

Parker said nothing; he only watched her, assessing every small and brittle crack in the veneer she fought hard to hold together. Every moment that passed was another in which Clara felt the world shift beneath her feet, molding and reforming the path she’d been walking to one she thought she’d left far behind.

The sheriff took a deep breath. He smoothed his mustache with deliberate fingers, his eyes lingering on her all the while.

“If I agree to this,” he said slowly, “I don’t want to see your face—or your man’s—around here again.”

Clara’s chest tightened at his assumption. She searched the words for a loophole, for anything that might reek of subterfuge and deceit. But the sheriff wasn’t a fool; he knew her well enough by now to understand that even the barest hint of a double-cross would be more than enough for Clara to bring the fires of hell down on him.

Clara held firm and said, “If you tell me what I need to know, you won’t have to see me again.”

Parker glanced once more at the star. Then, with a sigh of resignation, he turned back to Clara and said, “His men are holed up in the old Wild Rock Mill, just outside of Heritage. You know it?”

The name pricked at her memory. Clara was fairly certain she’d gone hunting near there before with Arthur. She swallowed the lump in her throat and nodded.

“If you kill them,” the sheriff said with bitter conviction, “if you get Byers off my back, then I’ll consider us even.”

There wasn’t much of a choice. There never really was a choice, not when it came to Byers, who wrenched what he wanted from the world and twisted it until it molded to suit his needs, however fleeting they were. Every choice she’d ever made, every person she’d ever killed, everything she’d ever stolen…all it had done was lead her right back to him.

Fine, then—she’d do this. Whatever Clara had to pay to be rid of Byers, she’d pay it. Besides, they all had to pay a price in the end. After all, deals with the devil were always bound to go wrong; you just had to make sure you were on the upside when it all went to shit.

*

Arthur Morgan tilted his hat until the brim sat low on his face and sat back against the bench with a terse sigh.

John sat perched on the railing outside the general store. He threw a glance over toward the sheriff’s office for what Arthur could only assume to be the thousandth time since Clara had gone in.

When she didn’t appear, John huffed irritably and pressed his back against the post.

“The hell’s taking so long?” he muttered as he pulled a pack of cigarettes from his jacket pocket.

Arthur didn’t answer. His head was too full of all the words he’d said and, more specifically, the ones he hadn’t said. His thoughts were wound tightly around the look Clara had had on her face when she’d angrily emptied his cup of coffee onto his clothes. He could still feel the singed skin, if he moved a certain way, and, while Arthur had been loathed to admit it, he didn’t think he was entirely undeserving of it.

Arthur pressed his shoulders into the bench and sought for any measure of comfort. His eyes, carefully hooded from the passersby, darted once more toward the sheriff’s office. He’d had every opportunity to dismantle any suspicions she had about the verity of his drunken words; instead he’d pushed her buttons and instigated an argument, true to his piss-poor nature.

All it had done was foul his mood, and hers. And now, Arthur sat watching and waiting for her return, hating the feeling that something still lingered between them that he couldn’t quite name.

Arthur grunted and crossed his arms tightly across his chest. Hosea’s banishment had done little but make things worse between them. Things being as they were, Arthur was fairly sure Hosea wouldn’t permit them to return to camp, if they could hardly speak to each other without biting remarks and swift, violent blows to the chest.

And that was assuming the old man would consider Arthur and Clara’s business settled—whatever that meant. He was always talking in riddles, Hosea, and Arthur had spent the majority of his formative years feeling as though he were downwind of a particularly intellectual joke. Hosea was always too quick for him—quick to see what he could not, quick to understand where Arthur preferred to sling venomous, biting words until understanding became the least of his problems.

All of this, Arthur thought with some measure of discomfort, seemed to center on Clara Howard, which only served to make matters worse.

His eyes went to the sheriff’s office again. He would have gone with her; in that, at least, he’d been telling the truth, along with the fact that the matter surrounding the sheriff’s offer felt off. Arthur had been in enough situations that had gone south to sense one coming before he fully succumbed to the pull of its current. Clara had had a foul impression of the sheriff from the get-go, though they couldn’t very well let bad first impressions inhibit their work; if they did, the gang would have foundered long ago. But after the train robbery and the sight of Clara with a gun pressed to her head…

Arthur’s ire roared to life. His fingers pressed into the flesh of his arms and he rode it out, breathing in deeply until the desire for blood subsided.

John blew out a cloud of smoke, his eyes focused on Arthur. “What was all that business between you two about, anyhow?”

Arthur rolled his eyes. “You always gotta open your mouth, Marston?”

His outlaw brother frowned but persisted. “She looked real pissed.”

“She always looks like that,” Arthur countered. He waved his hand and added. “You know how she is.”

John flicked away the ash into the street and tilted his head back against the post. “You say something to her?”

Arthur looked up fully this time and pushed his hat out of his face. “Don’t ask too many questions, Marston,” he muttered darkly. “Wouldn’t want you to go and hurt yourself, now.”

“Why do you have to be such an asshole?” John shot back. He made a sound of frustration and shook his head. “No wonder Clara’s always in a bad mood around you.”

Arthur was not in the mood for John Marston’s perpetually sour (and frankly goddamn irritating) attitude. He rarely was, but the day had already gone to shit and his insistence on irritating him was only making matters worse.

“Do us all a favor,” Arthur said tersely, “and shut up.”

For a few blessed moments, John actually listened. Arthur barely had time to feel surprised, given that Marston hadn’t ever really shut up for more than five minutes since Dutch brought him into the fold all those years ago. But then, much to Arthur’s chagrin, John tossed his cigarette into the street and turned his full, unbridled attention on him.

“You know,” he said with a bit of caution, “if you two would just get on with it already, then maybe you wouldn’t be so goddamn annoyed all the time.”

Arthur’s blood riled in his veins. He stared at John as the words sank in and their meaning took root. “What in the hell are you talking about?”

John shrugged but the deliberate look in his eye told Arthur that his comment stemmed beyond nonchalance. “All I’m saying is, it’s pretty obvious that you two—”

At that moment, Clara bounded down the steps of the sheriff’s office, effectively cutting of whatever nonsense Marston was about to spew. Arthur rose from the bench and stood at the top of the steps outside the saloon, watching her intently as she crossed the street to where their horses were hitched.

It didn’t take long for Arthur to realize that she was furious—no, it wasn’t fury, not exactly; it was something more insidious, something that dampened the vibrant green of her eyes and cast a suspicious shadow across her expression. Arthur stiffed and sucked in a breath. She was worried yet stubbornly determined, a combination that could only be a response to some as yet unknown trouble.

John swung his legs over the railing and sauntered down the steps. “’Bout damn time,” he muttered with a dark look at Arthur. He nodded toward Clara as she joined them and said, “You done with whatever it is you was doing over there?”

Clara only gave John a withering look before heading straight for Marion. “You boys head on out,” she called as she inspected her saddle. Arthur realized with mounting concern that she was checking her weapons and supplies. “I have some business to attend to, after all.”

John opened his mouth to ask exactly what sort of business in which Clara had suddenly become involved, but a terse look from Arthur silenced him. Arthur went to Clara’s side, his heart tightening in his chest.

“What’d Parker want?” he asked, his hands dipping low to his belt out of habit.

Clara’s jaw tightened. Her hands, which had been furiously checking and tugging on straps, stilled for a moment as her eyes focused intently on the crisp, cut leather of her saddle.

“Nothing important,” she muttered after a moment. She turned her head a bit towards him but didn’t meet his eyes. “I just have something I need to take care of.”

Arthur stared at her. This was entirely unlike her.

Clara drew Marion’s reins from the hitching post. Arthur reached out and took them from her hands. Clara grappled for them and, when she turned a raw, tight glare toward him, he held his ground.

“Mae,” he said low, his eyes sliding quickly to John. He’d already mounted his horse and was astutely watching the road in the opposite direction. Arthur turned back to her and said, “What’s all this about, now?”

He watched her swallow and her hand tighten on the reins.

Clara turned to look at him. She’d smoothed her face into a mask of emptiness, belying none of her intentions. But Arthur, who’d spent his life lying to survive, knew when the truth was being deliberately kept away from him.

“I have to make things right, Arthur,” she said tersely.

Arthur bristled. A thousand different refusals crossed his mind, all of them spilling together until they tangled around his tongue and choked them back into silence.

“What’s he got you doing?” he growled.

She closed her eyes for a moment, and he could tell she was trying to hold herself in check. “Something I have to do.” Clara turned away from him and drew the reins up over Marion’s head.

Arthur tugged the strap out of her hand and gripped her shoulder.

Clara whirled, anger hardening the edges of her eyes. Her mask was cracking and the apprehension she was fighting hard to keep in check shown through with violent clarity.

He forced his eyes to hers and said, “I told you—we do this together, or we don’t do it at all.”

Arthur instilled each word with a promise, one that he didn’t think he could ever find the words to utter. He wanted her to understand that the argument hadn’t been intentional, that perhaps it had been a mask of his own. He wasn’t sure for what—he didn’t think he wanted to know—but Arthur wanted her to know just the same.

Clara’s expression softened and, for a moment, the mask fell away. But just as quickly as she’d let it slip, Clara put it back into place, and Arthur knew that his promise would go unrequited. She took the reins from his hand and stepped out of his touch.

“Not this time,” Clara murmured, her voice cracking a bit at the edges.

Arthur stepped out of the way as Clara mounted up and wheeled Marion out into the street. He stood aside as she kicked her mount into a quick step and headed out and away from him.

He knew without really being able to say how that this had everything to do with Byers. Arthur knew beyond a shadow of a doubt that Parker, whom Clara had already suspected of being in league with the man from her past, had set upon her a task that was pulling her down a path that she would not let Arthur follow.

And yet, despite all of this, Arthur Morgan wanted nothing more than follow her. He’d meant what he’d said to her—he would have gone with her to whatever end.

But, because he was a fool, he watched Clara until the road out of Kingston swallowed her from sight.

*

Marion plodded dutifully along the road toward Heritage.

The dirt path swept lazily through the countryside of New Yorkshire; Clara’s eyes wandered idly over the verdant, sunbathed landscape, at the wild beauty that remained resolutely untamed. She’d cross paths with a few riders in the nearly half hour since she’d left Kingston behind. Normally she’d be glad for a quiet, as yet uneventful sojourn toward her destination.

Clara was adrift in a sea of torment.

It raged within her, tearing and wrenching her heart until it succumbed to the inevitable chaos that she’d spent years keeping carefully locked away. Once or twice she lost herself entirely as memories choked and throttled her, but always she returned back to the path on which she walked.

She tightened her grip on the reins while one hand drifted toward the sheath on her belt. Clara forced her thoughts to focus and the world eventually slid back into place. There was a job to be done; whether the path would lead to heaven or hell, she couldn’t be sure, but Clara knew it didn’t matter. What mattered was that this ended, one way or another.

Every now and then, her thoughts wandered to Arthur.

And yet, despite her willful insistence that any and all thoughts of Arthur Morgan be banished, his last words to her in Kingston persisted through her mind, followed swiftly by the foolish ones he’d uttered to her in the dark of his tent the previous night.

He was mess, Clara decided with grim determination. He was a foul-tempered, foolish mess, and there was nothing more to it than that. It didn’t matter that she felt vulnerable and lonely without his solid, constant presence at her side; it didn’t matter that she’d spent the night mulling over what he’d said and convincing herself that it was in everyone’s best interests to bury it beneath anger. Clara was good at that, anyway.

And besides, she reasoned as she glanced up the track as it twisted to the right, there was no room for that—not when all paths led back to her past.

Clara fell into her musings, a blessed reprieve from the storm that had nearly suffocated her only a few moments before. It was only when Marion came to a halt that she finally deigned to shift her attention back to the task at hand.

The road twisted away to the right. Clara hadn’t noticed but the plains had given way to the crags and dense forests that were the very furthest fringes of Devil’s Ridge. The path slid around rocky, tree-studded hills, where the sunlight barely managed to dapple through the thickly woven canopies. Beneath her, her faithful mare whickered and stamped with obvious anxiety.

Clara reached out and patted the horse’s neck, muttering a few quick words she hoped sounded calm enough to reduce the mare’s apprehension. Her eyes quickly landed on the source of Marion’s disquiet.

There, where the road bent away, was the wreck of a stagecoach.

Her hand went instinctively to her weapon. Clara turned and glanced back the way she’d come and, finding no one, tamped down her rising apprehension long enough dismount. She managed to coax Marion off the road before taking a breath, drawing her revolver, and traversing the short distance to the wreck on foot.

Nothing about this felt right.

Clara tightened her hand on her revolver and kept the other on the handle of her knife. She wasn’t a gunslinger like Arthur, but she could throw and use a knife far better than he could (though he would have certainly and loudly proclaimed otherwise). As she drew closer to the wreck, the worst of the damage came into full, unadulterated view.

All four of the wheels had been broken off their axels. The doors, which were still open like gaping wounds, hung loosely by their hinges. Clara took in the sight of the broken, shattered frame of the coach, of the bowed roof and the rider’s bench that looked as though it had been bent nearly in half.

The stench of gunpowder still hung in the air.

Clara glanced around again, this time at the trees. The back of her neck prickled in warning, but after a few moments of silent watching and listening, she reasoned that whomever had accosted the stage had long since abandoned it.

She took a breath, let it out, and went in for a closer inspection. Though she hated to do it, Clara sheathed the knife for the moment as she peered into the erstwhile carriage. She wrinkled her nose at the iron-scented air; the upholstery, which had once been meticulous and clean, was now drenched in still-wet blood.

“Shit,” Clara whispered as she moved away from the carriage. She slid the hammer into place on her gun and tried to remember how many bullets she had left in the barrel.

This wasn’t an accident.

She could feel the truth of it just as surely as she could feel the weight of the cold, unforgiving steel in her hand. A quick glance back up the road proved that Clara had been right to sense the wrongness of the supposed accident; this was the only road to Heritage and, by design, to Wild Rock Mill. The accident would force her to take the lesser trod paths through the woods, where she was even less likely to come across any other travelers.

A path which a sheriff, under the guise of parlay, might have orchestrated in order to place her more directly into Byers’ hands.

Quickly, Clara moved to the front of the stage. She couldn’t linger for long, but there might be something among the wreckage that might be useful, something that might be proof positive that the sheriff had only ever been willing to do what Byers asked. Clara crept over shattered wood until she made it to the front. The bench was cracked and bent, one horse dead and the others likely stolen or spooked. Clara lamented the loss of the beautiful stallion before another, equally grim sight caught her eye.

Slumped on the broken bench was a body. A fresh bullet hole marred the center of his forehead. But it wasn’t the unfortunate sight of the man that made Clara’s heart shudder to a stop.

Nailed to the corpse was her bounty poster. Her name was nearly soaked through with the man’s blood.

An eternity passed in which Clara stared at the ruined poster, the corpse, and the wrecked stage, knowing all the while that she’d walked directly into a trap designed for her.

And Arthur didn’t know where she was.

This was the last thought that careened through her head before pain exploded at the back of her skull.

Clara fell heavily to the ground, her body limb and unresponsive. Sharp, blazing agony filled her head as she fought for the breath that had sped from her lungs. Her bones ached; every movement was like the blade of her knife against her brain.

Dimly, she heard the sound of footsteps. Clara tried to roll and yelped when the pain crashed through her, nearly smothering her into unconsciousness. She fought against it, digging her nails into the hardpacked earth, and somehow managed to roll onto her back. A trickle of warmth seeped through her braid and down her neck.

Clara tried to wrench her eyes open. Her skull was splitting, nearly cracking beneath the weight of the pain. Every beat of her heart faltered in favor of the terrible agony. She closed her eyes as the fingers of oblivion brushed against her consciousness, lulling her into its unknowable depths. The footsteps stopped as they crowed around her. Clara rolled and a low, formless groan fell from her lips. She blinked her eyes open once more as her aching lungs begged for breath that wasn’t tainted by blood and dust and death.

Men stood around her—that much she could tell. It took her a moment, a lifetime, to count them. Four shadows loomed above her, four specters of death waiting for her to fall heavily into their arms. Each of them wore a star on their chests.

One of the bounty hunters pointed to the girl lying prone on the ground. “This the one, sheriff?”

Sheriff James Parker—upholder of the law, seeker of justice, and willing puppet of Wyatt Byers—stood over Claramae Howard’s battered but still very much alive body.

He gave his man a nod. “That’s her.” He gave another vague wave toward the trees. “Load her up, and let’s get the hell out of here.”

Clara heard all of this and remained helpless. She was foundering, hovering on the edge of her sense of self. Her eyes grew heavier, the pain an overarching presence that roared through her brain, her veins, and her bones. She had to get back to camp; she had to get back Arthur, because they were supposed to do this together, or not at all.

She closed her eyes and fell into the darkness.

Chapter Text

There were three things of which Arthur Morgan was absolutely certain.

The first was that he was angry. Since this was a relatively frequent state of being, Arthur accepted this as nothing more than standard and went about the rest of his afternoon.

The second was that he was no longer going to be a willing participant in whatever nonsense John Marston considered a job. His horse wrangling enterprise was a success, in large part due to the exorbitant amount of work Arthur had put into it. Marston could hardly tell the ass end of a horse from its head, a fact which made him a poor wrangler and, in Arthur’s very limited opinion, a stone-cold idiot. But, seeing as how he’d grown up with the knowledge that his younger outlaw brother was, in fact, an idiot, Arthur also accepted this and moved on.

The third thing of which he was certain was that his foul temperament had nothing really to do with John Marston and everything to do with Claramae Howard.

Arthur’s pencil slid across the open page of his journal, leaving behind gentle brushstrokes of charcoal. The afternoon slant of sunlight tentatively dappled across the page as it descended toward the distant horizon. The perpetual mountain breeze wisped through the air, playfully ruffling the pages of Arthur’s battered and worn journal, but his pencil moved along, undeterred. He couldn’t remember the moments leading up to his trek toward the mountain pool, or when he’d decided to nestle himself in the crook of the tree’s roots where he’d once spent the night with Clara. Here, with the pencil carefully clutched in his hand, everything else fell away.

The ride back to camp had been arduous, if only for the thoughts that clamored through Arthur’s head and rattled his otherwise calm, cool-headed demeanor. He’d been frustrated with Clara’s insistence on dissolving their partnership, though he couldn’t exactly blame her after the morning they’d had. But even as Boadicea carried him dutifully back along the steep slopes toward Deepwater Pass, Arthur’s frustration refused to abate. Instead, it writhed and formed into anger—both at her and mostly at himself—and left him feeling useless and flayed.

He paused in his drawing and blew the dark flecks of charcoal off the page. Arthur tilted the journal a bit, assessed his progress, and resumed his work. For Arthur Morgan, drawing was cathartic; every moment he spent carving out details on a page was one in which the pencil bled him dry of all the things he couldn’t say, all the things he couldn’t bring himself to feel. Even now he felt them hanging over his head like an errant cloud, threatening to rain on him everything he could not say aloud.

If he was being honest with himself, Arthur would have admitted that he’d gone straight to drawing in order to avoid acknowledging one very important fact: He’d let her go off on her own.

Arthur’s heart rattled in his chest. The pencil’s smooth movements hitched for a moment before he regained control. He forced the pencil along and let his mind wander again, dutifully breaking apart the thoughts that tried to take root and send him off balance.

He’d recognized the look on her face outside the saloon. Clara had attempted to carefully hide it behind a veil of watered-down conviction, but Arthur was a man who knew all too well the visceral, primal urge to settle a long-owed score. He knew the way it rotted away better judgment and reason, the way it burned through the days and made the nights achingly, sickeningly long.

Whatever the sheriff had offered to her, Clara hadn’t wanted to involve Arthur. A part of him understood and accepted it, just as he would have if it were anyone else in the gang. But another part of him, the one that had been dormant and recently begun to stir back to life, knew it for something else, something far more dangerous and daunting.

Arthur lifted his pencil and looked closely at his drawing. There were plenty of times when Arthur recorded the natural world with intention in the pages of his journal. Other times, like this one, he was overcome with the need to create, to do something other than carve destruction and breed hatred into the world. In these moments, there was no intention—there was only him, his pencil, and the wide-open page before him.

Knowing this, he was still taken aback when the likeness of Clara Howard looked back at him.

It was a sight Arthur had seen a hundred times before: Clara, seated where he was currently perched, with a book tucked in her lap. Her chin was cupped carefully in one hand while the other carefully held the book open at the base. It wasn’t perfect—Arthur’s work never was—but his pencil had very nearly captured the verity of the hidden, barely perceptible smile that always creeped onto Clara’s lips as she read.

Arthur stared. His eyes took in all the lines, all the curves and edges that made up the likeness. But always, no matter where they wandered, Arthur’s eyes inevitably found their way back to her smile.

His grip on the pencil tightened.

His chest tightened and his shell of a heart ached, fiercely and completely.

We do this together, or not at all. And yet, despite that, Arthur had let her go on her own.

“Drawing again?”

Arthur’s head snapped up as his heart unleashed the fullness of its rhythm. Mary-Beth Gaskill stood before him, her hands clasped around a still steaming cup of coffee. Her eyes flicked from his face down to the still open journal in his lap.

He blinked at her as the world settled back into place. It was always difficult, coming back to his senses after having let them drift away so thoroughly in the pages of his journal. Arthur tucked the pencil between the pages and quickly shut the tome before slipping it back into his satchel. A swift, heated burst of embarrassment slid up his spine.

Arthur reached up and scratched at his chin. “Just something to do to pass the time, I guess,” he muttered uselessly.

Mary-Beth only looked at him. Finally, she nodded toward a spot beside him. “Mind if I join you?”

Arthur shifted and patted the ground next to him.

When she was settled, Mary-Beth sipped her coffee and gazed wistfully out toward the mountain pool. “Ain’t it amazing,” she began with a sly glance in his direction, “how art and writing can bring out all sorts of things we thought we’d never feel?”

He wasn’t entirely sure he liked the trajectory of this particular conversation. Arthur stared at his boots (he’d have to replace them soon; the soles were so thin he could nearly see his feet) and tried to quell the urge to fidget and change the topic of discussion.

All he managed was something that sounded like a grunt in response.

Mary-Beth tucked her legs beneath her and braced one hand against the ground. The sweet, nearly perfect curls of her hair danced in the breeze. “When I’m writing, it feels like…” Here she paused, searching for words. “Well, I guess it feels like I have control over things.” A smile curled on her lips as she added, “It feels like I can really be myself—like I can bring to life all the things I would otherwise keep hidden.”

Arthur pondered this. The girl was certainly a wordsmith; she’d shared her musings with him before, particularly when Karen shoved aside her propensity for romance and gallantry. Mary-Beth could steal and lie as well as the rest of them (better, in some cases, in Arthur’s personal opinion), but there was still the bright, inescapable sense of goodness in her, enough to allow her to see whatever few pleasantries still lingered in the harsh, unforgiving world.

He would never tell her, but Arthur envied her this gift. Whatever goodness he’d had—if he’d had any at all—had long since rotten away and left him barren.

Arthur idly rubbed his wrist as silence fell between them again. It ached a bit from the horse wrangling and the drawing. He hung his head as the lingering sunlight carved golden pools among the lengthening shadows. When he finally deigned to look at her, Arthur found Mary-Beth already watching him, her eyes intent with some hidden purpose.

“Arthur,” she said softly, “I think you should talk to her.”

It took him a moment to realize what she’d said.

Arthur frowned and gave a noncommittal shrug. “Talk about what?”

Mary-Beth rolled her eyes. “I was there that night, you know.”

He bristled. Arthur pressed his lips together and turned his gaze firmly to the mountain pool. The calmness he’d fostered while drawing was almost entirely gone now, swiftly replaced with mounting dread. He was never any good at talking, let alone talking about this sort of subject. It made him feel wildly uncomfortable and unbalanced, which only made him feel angry and irritable, which only made him resort to violence and acts of ill-repute.

Besides, he was already having quite a bit of trouble putting Clara’s smile out of mind; he didn’t need to add this on top of it.

“She ain’t exactly the reasonable sort,” he muttered darkly and with what he hoped was enough conviction to banish the matter. “Besides, I ain’t got nothing to say to her.”

Mary-Beth sighed and took another sip of her coffee. Arthur noticed that her eyes never did quite lose that knowing, presumptuous glint.

“If you say so,” she replied with some dubiousness. “But, if you ask me, there’s a bit more to it than that.” Mary-Beth placed her cup on the ground and made to stand. Arthur held up a hand to stall her and rose before offering that same hand for assistance.

When she was on her feet, Mary-Beth placed a hand on Arthur’s still outstretched arm. “I know you don’t like to talk about it much, but we all saw what happened with Mary.”

Arthur’s stomach tightened. He was less surprised at the girl’s candor (Mary-Beth was always a straight shooter) and more surprised at the sudden realization that he couldn’t remember the last time he’d thought of Mary Linton.

His head—and his journal—had been too full of someone else.

Mary-Beth took advantage of his stunned silence. Her fingers tightened a bit on his arm. “Love ain’t always like that. I know you might not think so, but you deserve to be happy. We all do.”

Arthur said nothing. He only watched Mary-Beth clutch her warm cup to her chest as she slipped away back to camp.

Her words lingered in the air around him, mixed up with the scent of fresh snow and crisp, clean pine. The shadows of night crept closer around him, blotting out more and more of the sunlight with each minute that passed. All the while he stood beside the tree, the very same one where he’d woke to find Clara Howard nestled against him.

Arthur thought of what he’d said to her the night he returned from the saloon with Charles and Javier. Arthur considered the way she’d pushed and shoved and yelled at him for it, and the hurt that had still lingered in her eyes even after he’d tried to explain to her. But, above all this, Arthur thought of the way she smiled while she read, as though all the world and its possibilities lay bound and nestled in her lap.

Arthur listened to the echo of Mary-Beth’s words.

He pondered them, turned them over and over, until there was nothing left of the world except the meaning she’d kept carefully tucked between the well-crafted syllables.

There was only one thing he could do.

Arthur would talk to Clara—that was sure and certain. He would tell her that he hadn’t meant what he’d said, that he’d been drunk and foolish and, like countless other times in his sad, sorry life, the words hadn’t come out the way he’d meant them to. He would endure whatever punishment she saw fit to deliver unto him, and then they would bury the matter entirely.

If he spared a moment to consider this course of action, Arthur might have been surprised to discover that it wasn’t exactly what he wanted. He might have been willing to believe that Mary-Beth had been right, that there might still be a path for him that might lead to something like happiness and contentment.

But Arthur Morgan had tried that road before. He’d tried and failed to hold happiness in his calloused, bloodied hands, and it had ended with a pair of graves and a heart torn to shreds.

There was no happiness to be had by a man like him. That was just the way things were.

*

Once, when Clara was a girl, she’d fallen from a high branch of a tree.

The memory came in fits and starts; there were bits that Clara was sure had happened, that reeked of a verity borne only from having experienced something so thoroughly and ardently as to be unmistakably true. But there were other bits of it—specifically the beginning and the end—that had been lost to the wiles of time and Clara’s imagination.

She could never remember why she’d climbed the tree in the first place. Clara had never been a great lover of heights, despite the undeniable loftiness of her ideals and expectations of the world. All she could remember of the moments before the fall was the way the sun gleamed high in the heavens, the way it danced upon her fair skin with the idle threat of turning it golden. Then there was a distinct sensation of weightlessness, the sort that upends the world and makes it seem out of balance. Clara couldn’t remember the pain she’d felt when she’d connected with the ground; however, she did remember the persistent, sharp ache that invaded every bone and muscle in the days following her accident. In those days, Clara had been sure she wouldn’t ever be able to feel anything more than that pain, the sort that became nothing if not a stark reminder that humans were far more fragile than they wanted to believe.

This moment sort of felt like that.

Clara let out a tight, sharp groan as she shifted on the cold, unyielding wooden floor. Her shoulders slid across the wall at her back, though she was careful not to let the back of her head rest too firmly on the wood. She blinked until the heaviness in her eyes abated enough for her to be sure they would stay open of their own volition. Even the smallest movement was enough to send a tumbling crash of pain through her bones. She rode out the wave, her jaw tightly clenched and her teeth aching from the pressure. Her neck, which had borne the brunt of the attack that had delved her so swiftly into unconsciousness, screamed with every fraction of a movement.

For what seemed like the hundredth time, Clara wiggled her fingers. Finding them sound, she did the same to her toes. A sprinkle of restlessness climbed into her muscles, undaunted by the heaviness that made them feel leaden and immobile. Her wrists, she’d discovered almost immediately after waking, were bound at her front with a bit of fraying rope that bit wantonly into her skin each time she tested the knot’s strength. Each time, the knot got the better of her.

All told, it wasn’t exactly the best of circumstances. But Clara wasn’t dead, as her pain so consistently reminded her, and that was a vast improvement on what could have almost certainly been the alternative.

Her tired, somewhat hazy gaze slid to the kerosene lamp in the corner of the room. It was meager, to be sure, but at least her captors hadn’t deigned to leave her entirely enveloped in darkness. A quick glance at the door revealed nothing; its hinges were rusted, that much she remembered from the fractured memories that flitted through her battered skull. She could recall a figure looming above her, forcing a canteen to her lips as cool, stilted water slid down her throat and eased its dry rawness. Clara was wanted alive, after all; they wouldn’t kill her on purpose.

Wyatt Byers didn’t much care for his things to be broken and ill-used before he obtained them.

Clara fought the urge to shift again, to do anything but remain pliant and immobile on the ground. But with her movements restricted as they were, her options were grievously limited. She stilled her movements and listened, straining her ears for any sign of where they might have taken her.

But there was nothing.

She sighed, her lungs aching for breath untainted by dust and mold. Clara winced as she tried to stretch the sore, tight muscles in her back. If she had to warrant a guess, her captors had taken her somewhere remote, away from any of the main roads that crossed through New Yorkshire. Clara was sure that she could find the location where she’d been taken if given a map, but the blow to her head had buried any and all hints she might have garnered along the way. She pulled in another slow, deliberate breath and tasted the bitter, mineral tinge of coal at the back of her tongue.

Coal?

Clara breathed in slowly, deliberately. The smell grew stronger, though it remained largely faint, as though it were hardly more than a memory. She wracked her brain, tracing the maps she’d seen in the camp for evidence of a mine anywhere in New Yorkshire. But there was nothing in memory that provided a location for where her captors might have taken her; she couldn’t even be entirely sure she’d been able to pinpoint where they’d taken her from on a map.

She sighed and swallowed, wincing a bit from the dryness in her throat. The gang might look for her, but Clara was reasonable enough to know that it was just as likely that they wouldn’t look for her.  

And Arthur…

A hot, heavy tightness swept across her chest and choked the breath from her lungs. She’d been horrible to him. She’d left him behind, even after they’d promised to face whatever tribulations Byers threw at her together.

Clara licked her lips and set her jaw. She wouldn’t blame him if he hated her. She would understand if he were reluctant to trust her after this—hell, she wasn’t even entirely sure he’d trusted her before today. But a part of her liked to think she’d given him reason to trust her.

She certainly trusted him.

But the truth of the matter was that Arthur didn’t know where she was. Clara carefully laid her bound wrists in her lap, wincing as the rope nipped at her already red and raw skin. Even if he tried to find her, he wouldn’t know the first place to start looking. She’d left him there in Kingston without a care for the partnership he’d offered to her.

Clara took a long, trembling breath and closed her eyes. She might never see him again. The thought wrenched through her, squeezing what little breath she had left from her lungs. She might never get a chance to tell him that she was sorry for the way she’d treated him. Clara might never get a chance to explain why she’d acted the way she had, or to say the things she’d kept so astutely guarded and close to her heart. Fear was a powerful thing; it drove away reason and instilled the overwhelming need for survival.

She’d only had it in her mind to survive—not to live. And now she might never get to tell Arthur…

Clara steeled her nerves and set her jaw.

She would see Arthur again; she would escape, though the means by which this would occur were still a bit outside the bounds of her understanding. But Clara had always been resourceful; she’d been forced toward that end since childhood, after her mother had perished to yellow fever and her father found solace and comfort at the bottom of a bottle. And if she could survive Wyatt Byers, then she could certainly find her way out of this.

Her eyes roved around the room. The wood paneling on the walls were old and worn, some of them driven to separation by time and the wiles of nature. Clara breathed deeply and winced as the earthen scent of mold and mildew climbed into her lungs, backed by the scent of bitterness and smoke. Clara swept her gaze along, searching the crevices and well-hidden places for anything that might aid in her escape. But there was only the old table with its forlorn lamp, accompanied by a single stool that sat on uneven, stunted wooden legs.

She moved her attention away from the stool before a thought crossed her mind. Her eyes darted back to the seat. If she could manage to get to her feet, she might be able to--

The heavy plodding of bootsteps echoed from beyond the door. Clara’s head snapped toward the sound, her muscles painfully tightening. Her bound hands itched for weapons that were no longer there and, for what seemed like the thousandth time, Clara cursed her own stupidity.

The steps paused when they reached the door. Clara breathed in and out and forced calm into her aching limbs. She watched from her place on the floor as the door opened. Night fell across the widening threshold; it’d been several hours since she’d been taken. A dark silhouette broke away from the gloom outside the door and stepped into the wanton, brittle light of the lamp.

Clara wasn’t entirely sure who she’d expected. The devil perhaps, or the sheriff that had so ardently played the part of the betrayer. She sat back against the wall and peered up at the familiar face, wondering all the while what she had done to be so thoroughly wrenched back into a past better left forgotten. Golden light swept across familiar features as Clara took a breath and lifted her chin with as much haughty defiance as she could muster.

She took a breath and rasped, “Hello, Eden.”

Eden Bennett’s slim form cut through the twilight gloom and into stark relief. He smoothed a hand down the front of his impeccably tailored vest. An equally well-crafted shirt matched the pair of pants into which he tucked his hands. His eyes roamed the room and, taking in the grim state of Clara’s affairs, a frown only barely marred the otherwise pleasant mask he wore.

“Nice to see you again, Clara,” Eden said by way of greeting. Clara had once thought him handsome, but now she could see the way the shadows clung to his visage, carving out the hollows of his eyes and slicing along the sharp edges of his cheeks. His thin lips curled up into a slow, viperous smile. “It’s been a while, hasn’t it?”

Clara said nothing. The last time she saw Eden, she’d sent the butt of her knife into the side of his head. She’d had every intention of keeping it that way, but it seemed her intentions hadn’t exactly amounted to very much in recent days.

When she didn’t answer, Eden sighed, his shoulders slumping as if burdened with a great, impossible weight. He reached for the stool and placed it in the center of the room. He eyed it dubiously before gingerly lowering his weight onto the rickety seat.

Clara instinctively tightened her hands into fists.

Eden ran a hand along the pomaded strands of his straw-colored hair. He wasn’t much older than Clara, but time spent in the servitude of Wyatt Byers had a way of aging those who didn’t care enough to hold tight to their morals. Clara knew precisely what it felt like to feel the years flit away like leaves in the autumn wind, always out of reach and forever unobtainable. Eden still had something left to give Wyatt, by choice or by force; Clara had given all she’d been willing to give, before the world had forced her to come to terms with the person she’d become in the face of the person she could still be.

“You know,” Eden began slowly as he leaned forward and pressed his hands together, “this isn’t how I would have preferred for you to come back.”

Clara bit back the scathing slew of damnable words that rose up like bile in her throat. Instead, she held his gaze and said, “I don’t remember agreeing to go back.”

Eden sighed again. His mask of false pleasantry shifted into that of a father reprimanding his errant child. “Please don’t insult your intelligence by implying that you have any other options.”

He was one to talk about intelligence. Clara was sure that Eden hadn’t had an original thought in years; his brain was pliable, molded by desperation and a willingness to sell his soul for what little control he could maintain over his life. What the man didn’t know was that Clara had discovered the secret he kept closely guarded in what was left of his heart. Eden Bennett had had a wife in the years before he’d chosen to cower before Byers. That wife had borne him a son, but the joys and fruitfulness of marriage weren’t nearly enough to quell Eden’s insipid problem with gambling.

He’d borrowed quite a bit of money from the wrong sort of men and, when the time came to pay up, Eden had been desperate to hide the truth of his black soul from his wife and their child. Secrets had their cost—in Eden’s case, the cost amounted to the price he’d managed to fetch for his wife’s heirloom bracelet, made from exquisitely cut sapphires. She didn’t know this, of course, but Eden’s desperation had driven him to a fence unwilling to pay top dollar. This did not appease the men who’d held Eden’s balls in their rather vicious hands, so they beat him and eventually let him go. When Eden had returned home that night, he’d discovered the body of his wife in their bed. There’d been a note tucked into the torn fabric of her dress, instructing him to retrieve the rest of the money if he ever hoped to see his son again.

Byers had given him the money in exchange for his services. As for Eden’s son, Clara knew the boy was living a reasonable life in Chicago with Eden’s sister. He sent the boy money every now and then, though Clara knew it was only out of habit and not out of obligation.

That was one thing they had in common, she supposed—both of them had been drawn to the wrong sort of men, though only one of them had been brave—or foolish—enough to break free.

Perhaps if things were different, Clara might have decided to dredge up the past just to see how much damage she could inflict. But, as it was, her hands were quite literally tied. Instead, she settled into a slightly more comfortable position, gingerly rested her head against the wall, and opted for a slightly tamer line of questioning.

“Where exactly am I?” Her eyes slipped around the room again, feigning a bit of nervousness. It wasn’t difficult; contrary to her intentions, she was a bit nervous.

Eden didn’t break his gaze. “The old Reliance Mine. It’s a little ways outside of Kingston, but not too far from Heritage.” His lips quirked with morbid amusement.

That explained the scent of coal she’d detected on the breeze, however stagnant and steeped in memory it might have been. Clara’s fingers itched to wrap around his throat. He might be a glorified errand boy, but Bennett had at least enough sense to avoid giving her specific information. She took it as a compliment, useless it might be; at least he thought her a worthy enough opponent.

That was more than could be said about Byers.

Eden shifted a bit on the stool. “I’m not surprised you haven’t heard of it. It was abandoned back in 1878, after a mining accident killed ten workers. Two survived, you know.” He paused and gaze wistfully toward one of the darkened corners, as if plunging into the bowels of memory. “One of them was a man from Kingston and the other was the foreman’s son. His father kept the mine open, even after the accident. A few weeks after they buried the dead miners, they found the foreman’s son dangling from one of the cart tracks.”

Clara listened to the story, but her gaze wandered to the legs of the stool. One of them bowed a bit under Eden’s weight.

“How unfortunate,” she muttered. Her throat was still tight with thirst and she lamented the loss of her biting, hardened conviction. She lifted her eyes to his. “Why am I here?”

The smile on Eden’s face grew wider. The shadows pooled in the corners and the glow of the lamp cast a glow like embers in his eyes.

“You haven’t even heard the best part of the story yet.”

Clara quelled the first stirrings of fear that rose in her gut. She pressed her lips together and remained in stoic silence.

Eden straightened a bit but froze when the broken leg of the stool precariously wobbled beneath him. “No one wanted to bother with Reliance after the unfavorable death of the foreman’s son. The place was the unfortunate recipient of ill omens and mighty superstitions. It sat abandoned for years—until it was recently purchased, that is.”

This time fear climbed unbidden into Clara’s veins, sweeping through her blood and turning it to ice. The cold stone of fear sat heavy in her stomach, weighing her down with the knowledge masked by Eden’s clever story.

It explained everything—how those men had found her after she’d first met Arthur, how they’d come for her again in the foothills below Devil’s Ridge. Ghosts of the past couldn’t be drowned in blood or intimidated by the barrel of a gun; they lived in the shadows of forgotten places, waiting and watching until you’d thoroughly fooled yourself into believing you were free.

Clara looked away. The enormity of her failure hung like a tangible thing in the air; she breathed it in, let it consume her, until she finally swallowed and found the courage to ask, “How long?”

Eden knew precisely what she meant. She saw his eyes linger on her as he swiftly answered, “It took us a while to find out where you’d gone.” He leaned an elbow on one knee and placed a hand heavily on the other. “After a couple of weeks, we found out you’d gone west. About a month after that, we got word someone fitting your description was seen here, in New Yorkshire. He bought the mine soon after that.”

Clara ached to do something, anything, with her hands. She was desperate to scream, to cry, to tear at the world until every inch of it broke and fell away at her fingertips. Every mile she’d run in search of the life that had been deprived to her had only ever driven her straight back to Byers.

There was nowhere she could go where he would not find her.

“What we weren’t expecting,” Eden began, “was to discover your—association—with that gang.”

Her eyes flicked toward him. The taut rope slivered into her skin as she flexed her fingers, once more wishing beyond all hope that she’d had her weapons. Clara realized too late that she should have smoothed her expression over, kept her emotions in check.

Eden tilted his head and looked at her. “Where are they staying?”

Clara’s brow furrowed. Her pulse rattled as she managed to say, “I don’t know.”

He sighed and pinched the bridge of his nose. “Clara, I don’t mean to be rude, but I’d really rather not endure this conversation longer than absolutely necessary.”

She straightened, her mind whirling around a thousand different possibilities, none of them at all pleasing. “They don’t matter. They only took me in because I was useful.”

Eden glowered at her. “You forget—I know you, Clara. You wouldn’t have stayed with Dutch van der Linde unless there was a reason to stay.” His lips cracked in a dangerous, knowing smile when he saw her stiffen. “Or, perhaps I should say you wouldn’t have stayed with Arthur Morgan.”

Clara stared at him.

She stared until she’d thoroughly imagined all the ways in which she could kill him. The need burned through her, turning her senses to ash. Clara clenched her bound hands until her fingers became numb, filled with nothing else but the desire to wrap firmly around Eden Bennett’s throat.

“He has nothing to do with this,” she hissed, the words spewing like venom from her lips.

Eden reached into the small pocket sewn into his vest. Clara watched as he pulled out a small piece of paper and carefully unfolded it.

“Arthur Morgan,” he intoned as he eyes scanned the paper. “Son of Beatrice and Lyle Morgan, a lifelong criminal,” here he paused and raised an eyebrow. “Like father, like son,” he mused.

Clara imagined the flesh of his neck beneath her clawing fingers. She pictured what Eden’s face would look like as she crushed the air from his throat, to squeeze and squeeze until he would never utter Arthur’s name again.

Eden pressed on, heedless of Clara’s blood-soaked machinations. “He’s made quite a name for himself, hasn’t he? Confirmed wanted in at least two states and responsible for killing, robbing, and scamming countless of innocent people.” He held up the paper and eyed Clara with mock incredulity. “This is the person you’ve been spending your time with, Clara. A common cutthroat, hardly better than the dirt beneath your boots.”

She leaned forward, every inch of her carved with the conviction that she’d feared lost to her. “You know nothing about Arthur Morgan,” she snarled. “I’d rather spend a lifetime with him than spend a single day in the company of Wyatt Byers.”

She’d meant to make a point to Eden Bennett. She’d meant to draw a line of finality, one that she dared him to cross at his own peril. But there was something else buried in the words that spilled with such clarity and purpose from her lips. Clara could taste their truth as much as she could hear it; it was undeniable, unequivocal, and now that she’d uttered them there was no more sense in denying it.

Clara thought of the last time she’d seen Arthur and wished she’d done things differently.

The shadows slid in Eden’s eyes, coalescing into two dark pools that reflected his barely contained ire. He slipped the paper back into his pocket with predatory grace, keeping his eyes on her all the while.

“This is how you repay him,” he muttered darkly, “after everything he’s done for you.”

Clara’s body screamed with pain; the back of her head roared, and her wrists cried out against the knife-like pain of the rope. But she held her chin aloft and met Eden’s anger with her own, righteous brand.

He had no right to be angry.

He had no right to judge her for the people with whom she associated.

He’d been there all along, watching from the shadows as Byers tightened his yoke and reeled her further and further toward an edge that would erase every inch of her soul. He’d listened to every scream Byers tore from her throat, had glazed over every bruise he’d painted on her skin. Eden Bennett had never once stood up for her; his own desperations and sordid past had formed his own chains he dragged behind him, and their weight was far too heavy to remember what it felt like to have a sense of morality.

Clara’s lips curled into a dangerous, viperous sneer. “All Wyatt Byers did was prove that he isn’t half the man he thinks he is.” She sat back against the wall, settling with all the righteous courage that fueled the fire pumping through her veins. “Arthur Morgan is worth ten of him.”

She felt her chest constrict as Arthur’s face filled her thoughts. Everything she’d said about him was true—she knew that now, as surely as she knew that somehow, someway, she’d escape whatever trap Eden Bennett had snared for her.

Eden rose from the stool, his gaze flat and even. He made for the door and cast a single somber look over his shoulder in her direction. “I’ll give you until morning to rest and recover. Then, you can tell all of this to him yourself.”

Clara knew exactly what would happen.

Wyatt Byers would welcome her back with open arms. He would pepper her with brief, caustic touches and scalding kisses, all with a promise to make things different. This time, he’d say, things would change. This time, everything would be different. And then, when she’d been carefully lulled into dangerous complacency, Byers would remind her that she’d only ever belonged to him. He’d pummel it into her, weaving it into her soul until everything she’d fought for became nothing more than sordid, half-formed memories.

He would make sure she forgot the name Arthur Morgan. But, as Clara sat among the shadows and light, she was certain of three things.

The first: she would escape the Reliance Mine.

The second: once she did, she would see Arthur again.

The third: Claramae Howard would make sure that Wyatt Byers understood that he was nothing more than a terrible, ill-favored memory.

She let out a sharp breath and tried to instill a bit of calm into her throbbing, adrenaline-laced muscles. Clara focused her eyes on Eden’s and let her cool, crisp confidence slip back into her voice.

“One more thing before you go,” she said as he paused near the door. Clara tilted her head and watched him, her gaze roving over the stiff, reluctant set of his shoulders. “How’s Alexander?”

Eden Bennett froze. He’d already half turned toward the door, intent on leaving her among the darkness to await her fate. But Clara watched as he slowly shifted until the twin pools of his eyes settled on her once again, their depths swirling with undisguised hatred, animosity in its purest, most ardent form.

She might not have her knives, but Clara still knew how to hit her mark.

“I’ve always wondered—does he know you’re his father?”

Rage played across Eden’s features. “Don’t,” he hissed, the single world flung across their space like a dagger.

Clara eyed the stool again then lifted her gaze back to Eden. “Does he know that you pay his way with blood money?”

Eden took half a step toward her. Every inch of him was seething, writhing, with hatred. Clara bore the brunt of it; he was a pupil of Wyatt Byers, after all, and thus was well schooled in the art of sowing the seeds of hate wherever he went.

He lifted a single finger at her. “Shut your mouth.”

This was the truth about Eden Bennett: he could scald with words and shoot a decent shot, but he would never hit a woman. In that, at least, he hadn’t taken after his master.

Clara took a breath and braced her aching arms at her sides. “It does make me wonder why you ever chose Wyatt over your son. Did you ever love him? Or did you just—”

She didn’t have time to finish.

Eden Bennett leapt forward with a guttural, feral growl. Hands curled like claws wrenched the stool from the floor and hefted it high over his head. In one swift movement, Eden shifted his stance and hurled the rickety seat at the nearest wall.

Clara firmly closed her eyes and turned her body away.

The sound of shattering wood exploded in the room. The former pieces of the stool clattered loudly to the floor and scraped across the wood with grim, broken finality. Clara felt the pinching brush of splinters across her turned cheek and the snag of broken wood in her tousled, messy braid.

Silence fell like night in the room. Clara waited, her shoulders tightly bunched, and her face buried in her right shoulder, until she was sure that Eden’s fit had passed. She fought against the smile that played on her lips as she slowly lifted her head to look at him.

Eden’s chest heaved as he smoothed the front of his vest. He swiped a hand along his well-groomed hair as his breathing regulated and the haze of uncontrollable rage slowly ebbed out of his eyes. Though the light from the kerosene lamp flickered through the shadow, Clara could still make out the traces of dark, furious crimson that marred the tops of his cheeks. The fury left him, but the damage was already done.

He smoothed his expression in one that poorly mimicked his true face. “Get some rest. You’ll be home soon.” With that, Eden Bennett swept out of the room, leaving an abundance of shadows and wan light in his wake.

Clara listened as the sound of his steps faded away.

She waited, listening to the cacophonous blare of her pulse echo in her ears.

When she was sure he wouldn’t come back—or that anyone else would take his place—Clara began the arduous process of getting to her knees. She fumbled more than once, cursing her bound hands as she managed to get her legs folded beneath her. Her stiffened muscles protested the quick, jerking movements, but Clara pushed through it. Carefully, she shifted her weight to her knees, grunting slightly as the uneven floor pressed painfully into her shins. When she was sure she’d gotten her center of balance appropriately planted, Clara held out her hands and cautiously began to lower to the floor.

When both her knees and her trapped hands were both firmly planted on the floor (and she was sure she wouldn’t go crashing to the ground in useless heap), Clara took a few steadying breaths. Already her shoulders and back ached, the pain whipping like wildfire through the narrow passageways of her bones. She let out a quick burst of laughter—Clara could only imagine what Arthur would say if he could see her now.

But the thought of him made her lungs ache and her heart tighten far too much for comfort, so she pushed it aside and set her focus to the shattered wood strewn about the floor.

It took her much longer than she would have liked. She’d been forced to stop every now and again as the distant sounds of voices and bootsteps filtered in through the infinitesimal cracks in the walls. Clara fought for every inch, bearing the scrapes on her already damaged palms and the forming bruises on her knees. She fetched her prize, wrapping her burning, swollen fingers around the thick shard of wood.

Getting back to the wall was a bit easier, even with the shard. Clara grunted as she shifted her weight back onto her backside and stretched her weary, trembling legs in front of her. Her throat raged with thirst and her stomach tumbled a bit out of desperation for food, but she could feel little else but the sweet, triumphant sense of victory. She carefully gripped the shard of wood—the very same one that had been part of the broken stool leg that Eden had destroyed—and slipped the slim, sharp tip between the strands of rope at her wrists. It would take some time and meticulous maneuvering, but there was no other choice.

The only way Wyatt Byers would ever have her back would be in a pine box, safely out of his reach for good.

Clara gritted her teeth, bolstered her intention, and got to work.

*

It was difficult for Arthur Morgan to tell the precise moment in which things had gone horrible awry.

He stared at the cards splayed in his hand. The edges were weathered, and a couple had their corners torn clean off, but they were still good enough to play with. Well, they would have been good enough to play with, Arthur thought sourly, if he’d gotten a decent goddamn hand.

He had the high card again—for the third round in a row.

Bill Williamson, who considered it his brilliant idea to play poker in the first place, sprinkled a few more coins in the already considerable pot in the center of the table. He sat a bit straighter and his eyes twinkled with poorly disguised mischief as he held his hand close to his wide chest.

Arthur had played poker enough times with the fool to know that his excessive display of confidence was likely a bluff—or, more specifically, an obvious tell that he was planning to cheat.

Javier leaned on one elbow, his cards loosely fanned in his hand. He kept his face passively blank, his eyes never lingering on any one card or place for longer than necessary. John, on the other hand, glowered at his cards as though they owed him a great sum of money. His cards had been particularly lackluster since their game started, but the difference between them was that Arthur was better at hiding his stark disappointment at the fact that he was going to lose more money than he cared to admit.

“Everything okay, Arthur?” Javier asked as he slid one card in between two others. “You look a little worried there, compadre.”

Arthur Morgan rarely worried.

Worrying was the sort of emotion liable to get a man killed; it didn’t sharpen focus the way raw, well-mined fury did, nor did it ground a man to reality the way bullets and cold, hard steel did. Worrying was about as useless as hoping and in this world, there was no such thing as superfluity. It either was, or it wasn’t; you either had it, or you didn’t. Besides, as Dutch had once told Arthur, it was best to leave the worrying to the women. Their fussing was one of the few things on which the men could count, and it damn well kept them alive when they would have otherwise been buried six feet under.

Arthur glanced toward the hitching posts for what seemed the hundredth time that day. Still, despite the shadows that had long since encroached on the camp and douse them with the coming night, Clara still had not returned.

He turned back to Javier and shrugged. “I ain’t worried.”

Javier watched him for a moment before turning his attention back to the game.

In truth, there was a slithering, sweeping turmoil tightening like a knot in the pit of Arthur’s stomach. It’d been mounting an assault against him since he’d begun to feel her absence like a hole in his heart. At first, Arthur had chalked it up to another bout of fairly regular indigestion, seeing as how Simon Pearson’s cooking so often sought to slay the gang with his sorry excuse for food. But the feeling had persisted, growing more powerful with each hour she did not return.

Arthur Morgan rarely worried, but when he did, it was nearly enough to tear him apart.

Bill cut a hard glance toward Arthur. Sensing his preoccupation, he tossed yet another coin onto the pile (his opponents spared a moment to wonder just what he’d done to have so much money sitting idly in his pocket) and said, “Alright, boys. Let’s see them cards.”

Arthur tossed his cards onto the table and sat back, laying his hands heavily on his thighs. “I fold,” he muttered darkly.

John glanced a bit dubiously at Javier and Bill before straightening and sweeping his hand across the table: three Sevens and a Two. Javier paused, sighed, and placed his cards on the table with a sense of reverence—a straight flush. Arthur leaned over and let out a low whistle of appreciation.

Bill made a show of glancing between the sets laid before him. Arthur rolled his eyes as John threw up a hand and shouted, “Get on with it, Bill!”

The man laid them out one by one.

Arthur narrowed his eyes.

Javier shook his head, glanced sharply at Bill, and resolutely declared, “Esto es una mierda.”

John slapped a hand on the table and nodded toward Javier. “Yeah, what he said.” He jabbed a finger at Bill and shouted, “Ain’t no way you got a royal flush without cheating, you bastard!”

Bill greedily cupped his winnings, heedless of the angry men around him. “Ain’t my fault you two don’t know how to play a decent hand of poker.”

Arthur couldn’t bring himself to be angry. Bill had always been a cheat when it came to cards, however much he proclaimed himself an honest man—at least when it came to poker. He was a sore loser, as Arthur had experienced firsthand, and had been cheating for so long that folks had just accepted it for it what it was.

John’s hand shot out and clapped onto Bill’s wrist. He leaned forward and growled, “You ain’t getting a goddamn cent of my money.”

Bill flung away his hand and cast a dark glare at the both of them. “What’s fair is fair.”

Javier crossed his arms, though Arthur could see the way his fingers twitched as if itching for his gun. “You wouldn’t know fair if it slapped you square in the face, Mr. Williamson.”

They continued to argue, though it was clear that Bill would likely strike out at the both of them rather than give up the money. Arthur, who was unusually not in the mood for arguing with Bill Williamson, instead found his attention shifting back toward the hitching posts.

Still, she hadn’t returned.

The insipid sensation in his gut rose exponentially, drowning out the argument and the rest of the world altogether. Arthur’s pulse quickened as he fought the urge to leap from his seat, mount Boadicea, and set off to find her. He clenched one hand into a fist and reminded himself for the thousandth time that she didn’t want him. Clara knew what she was doing and whatever it was, she’d known from the moment she’d made her decision that Arthur wasn’t to be a part of it.

The thought stung more than he wanted to admit. Its venom swept through him, heightening his sense of worry, until he was sure that he would burst from harboring the feeling for too long.

When Arthur finally forced his attention away from his wandering musings, John and Javier seemed to have settled their rather vicious dispute with Bill (Arthur hadn’t been paying attention, but he assumed Bill had coerced them into playing another round rather than risk getting ganged up on) and a new player had joined in.

Arthur stared at Micah Bell as every muscle in his body grew taut and his hands itched to tear that ridiculous, unseemly mustache right off his putrid, aggravating face.

Micah held Arthur’s attention, his lips curling into a slight, veiled smirk. He took the cards from Bill, shuffled them quickly, and dealt them out to each of the players in turn. Javier fetched his from the table and kept them close to his chest; the easy, carefree manner in which he’d played the previous round was gone, replaced with stiffness and a quiet reluctance. Bill, true to his nature, seemed entirely unbothered by Micah’s presence, while John cast several long, distasteful glances at the man from the curtain of his cards.

Arthur left his cards on the table.

“Ah, come on, now, cowpoke,” Micah sneered in his sniveling, oil tone. “Don’t tell me you’re afraid to play some poker.”

Arthur’s hand crept up to snatch the cards. “Oh, I ain’t afraid of poker,” he shot back, his voice low and dangerous. “As long as you ain’t afraid to put your money where your damn mouth is.”

The rest of the men at the table settled into their cards, each one keeping a wary eye on the other. Micah’s presence felt wrong, somehow; Arthur had never quite acclimated to the unease he felt around the outlaw. There was a distinct sense of camaraderie that bonded all the outlaws together, born from the one forged between Hosea, Dutch, and Arthur all those years ago. It was the standard to which all newcomers were held; it was a feeling that resonated within all their hearts, one that called to the freedom the world would deny them, a sensation that drove them to brink of civilization so that they might live free of the shackles the world insisted on placing around their souls.

Micah was not like the others. Arthur had sensed it the moment Dutch had invited him back to camp and it had only grown more present, more necrotic, the longer he stayed with them. And after the way he’d treated Clara…

Arthur’s hand gripped his cards so tightly that they bent and creased along their centers.

They played. Arthur focused on the cards in a way he hadn’t in the earlier hands; his mind was a storm of queens and hearts, with kings to back it and aces to win it. The pot grew larger and Arthur’s focus narrowed to his sweep of suits before him. He could defeat Micah; he knew he could, because that rat bastard was good at nothing besides causing mischief and unsettling the delicate balance of what they’d fought and killed and lied to establish.

Micah sat back and eyed his audience with ill intent. “Gentlemen,” he said with mock sternness, “Let’s see them hands.”

Arthur’s lips curled into an unbidden smile. He was so very eager to see the look on Micah’s face when he took all his money and reminded him who was in charge. But before Arthur could show his hand, the sound of pounding hoofbeats snagged his attention.

He turned and watched a horse approach through the lantern-lit gloom of the camp. His heart leapt in chest; in that moment, everything—Micah, poker, even the rest of the gang—fell away as Arthur stared intently through the dark, waiting for Clara and Marion to sift their way through the darkness.

But it wasn’t Clara and Marion. It was Charles and Taima who sped up to the hitching posts with an undue sense of urgency. The disappointment that swept through Arthur was a raw, painful ache, and he remained fixated on the sight, hoping against all hope that she’d ride up behind him.

Arthur’s hope was only half answered.

Charles slipped off Taima’s back and tossed her reins onto the hitching post. It was only when Arthur squinted that he could spot a second set of reins held in Charles’s hand and another mount tiredly step out from behind Taima. He dutifully placed the reins alongside Taima’s and gave the mare a strong, affectionate pat on the neck.

Arthur’s breath hitched in his lungs.

It was Marion, saddled but without her rider. The dull, throbbing ache of Clara’s absence magnified, nearly swallowing Arthur whole. He tossed his cards down on the table and rose, heedless of the murmurs behind him at the poker table.

He watched as Charles hurried to where he stood. His face was grave, etched with tight worry.

“Charles,” Arthur uttered as his companion came to stand beside him. He gripped him by the shoulder, his fingers tight and numb with concern.

Charles did the same; he gripped Arthur’s shoulder and gave him a curt nod. “Arthur,” he said tightly. “It’s Clara.”

He knew it—had known it.

Arthur floundered in guilt. It filled his lungs, seeped into his veins, and tore through his already weak and blistered heart. His jaw tightened and he focused on Charles, on the feeling of his hand on his shoulder, and let the familiar cool, sharp-edged thrum of a task that needed doing fall upon him.

“What is it?” he asked. Dimly Arthur was aware of the eyes of the men on him, listening intently to their conversation though the slip and flip of cards still echoed behind him.

Charles let go of Arthur’s shoulder and placed his hands on his hips. He nodded toward Marion with his head. “I was running a job in Kingston and overheard a few fellers talking in the saloon. They were wearing deputy’s badges, but they weren’t exactly the law-abiding type.” He punctuated the information with a knowing look.

Arthur could still see the brass stars on their chests shining in the sun. He could still hear the pounding throb of their boots as they descended the stairs of the sheriff’s office. He could still remember the way they’d turned and looked at Clara in a way that nearly made Arthur mad with fury.

He should have known. Arthur Morgan was nothing but a goddamn fool, and now Clara might pay the price for his foolishness.

Charles continued, instilling his voice with calm as he took in the sight of Arthur’s bristling, barely checked ire. “They were bragging about a job they’d just done. Something about kidnapping a woman for the sheriff; they said she was wanted out of New Jersey.” He paused and jabbed a finger toward Clara’s horse. “Found her on the way back to camp. I rode as fast as I could, figured you needed to know.”

Arthur nodded. His anger smoldered hotly in his veins; his hands itched to hold the unforgiving steel of his guns, to settle the score with a torrent of gunpowder and righteousness.

“Where?” Arthur growled.

Charles squared his shoulders, sensing the approaching mission descend upon them. “The men mentioned Reliance Mine. It’s not on our maps; it’s been abandoned for years.”

Something sinister sifted through Arthur’s thoughts. If the mine truly was abandoned, then that would have made it the perfect place for someone to hole up in secret…

“Arthur.” He whirled at the sound of John’s voice. He was up out of his seat, his hands braced on the table and his cards momentarily forgotten. He looked between Arthur and Charles and asked, “Is it Clara?”

Arthur gave John a tight nod. “Something’s happened.”

John’s usually terse expression turned all the more solemn. He straightened, his hand dipping to the revolver holstered at his hip. “You need another man?”

Javier looked between them all, tossed his cards on the table, and rose up to join them. Bill remained motionless and seemed a bit put off, staring at the gathering men as though their presence had well and truly ruined his night. Micah, on the other hand, rose slowly from the table, eyed Arthur and Charles with an ill-disguised sneer, and carelessly tossed his cards onto the table.

“Poor Ms. Howard,” he drawled, his eyes landing squarely on Arthur. He moved slowly around the table, his arms held out at his sides. “Never took her for the damsel in distress type.”

Arthur didn’t think. He turned to face Micah head on, his hand dipping to where his gun eagerly waited for his touch.

Micah tilted his head as he peered at Arthur. The shadows of night seemed to hug him tightly in embrace, as though he were born from the darkness and made to enact its vengeance. “But if she needs saving,” he said with venomous purpose, “you can be sure I’ll help.”

Arthur’s lip curled. “I don’t remember asking for your help, cowpoke.”

Micah licked his lips and glanced between John and Javier. “My mistake,” he mused, as though whatever wicked idea had only just crossed his mind. “I forgot Morgan’s already laid claim to little lost Clara.”

Charles took half a step forward, but Arthur hardly noticed. There was only Micah’s bare neck and the burning, desperate desire pulsing within Arthur to wrap his hands around his throat. He could imagine the way Micah’s pulse would throb beneath his grip, the way his face would become strangled for the breath Arthur denied him.

Words spilled from his lips unbidden, marked with all the vengeance—the very same brand that Dutch always warned against—that he would deliver unto Micah Bell if given half a chance. “Watch yourself.”

John and Javier stepped closer to Micah, their backs straight with rigidity. “Just shut your damn mouth for once,” Marston muttered.

Micah looked at John, his expression as dark as his intentions. “I ain’t saying nothing that ain’t true.” His eyes slid back to Arthur. His lips curled ever so slightly into a sneer as he said, “Just because Morgan wants to fuck her doesn’t mean the rest of us can’t step in to help an innocent girl.”

The world stilled to a single moment, a single word.

Arthur didn’t move.

He didn’t breathe.

Then every ounce of hatred he’d ever felt burst like a dam, unleashing a fury so exacting and vicious that Arthur Morgan could have torn the world apart with his bare hands, if given half a chance. Instead, Arthur set his sights on a single target; he leapt forward, his hands reaching out toward Micah’s throat, his vision painted a killing shade of red.

He collided firmly with Charles, who pushed against his raw anger to hold him in check. But Arthur railed against it, straining every muscle in his body for a single sliver of a chance to wrench the soiled, filthy tongue from Micah’s mouth. Charles muttered to him, tried to assuage his anger, but Arthur couldn’t hear him.

All he could hear was that word that Micah had uttered.

All he could hear was her name, fallen from his lips like a curse.

Arthur renewed his effort even as Javier and John closed in around Micah in an effort to keep the sorry bastard in line. Charles shoved Arthur back and held up his hands to calm him, as though he were an unbridled, untamed horse gone wild with distress.

“Not now, Arthur,” Charles growled low in Arthur’s face. “Clara needs us—she needs you.”

The frenzy in Arthur’s blood slowed. The raging stampede of his heart dimmed to a dull throb as the world slowly came back into focus. Arthur looked at Charles as the name he’d uttered grounded him back to the present, anchoring him to what mattered most.

Finally, Arthur took a shuddering breath and gave Charles a single nod. Charles moved away slowly, watching him with a wary eye to be sure the depths of his ire wouldn’t overcome him again. Arthur glanced quickly over Charles’s shoulder and saw Micah heading off in the opposite direction, his steps quickened with anger. Javier followed slowly in his wake, his hand still lingering near his gun.

Arthur watched for only a moment more. He could still feel the terrible, earth-shattering power hum in his veins, but this time he held it in check. There’d be time to make Micah pay for what he’d said. And when that time came, Arthur would relish every second of that punishment.

For now, there was something—someone—more important. She’d always been more important, Arthur realized with a start; he’d just been too stupid to realize it.

He looked over at Charles. “You’ll ride with me?”

Charles straightened and nodded emphatically. “Always.”

His steps carried him swiftly to the hitching posts. Boadicea tossed her head at his approach, sensing her master’s distress. Arthur drew her reins and spared only a fraction of a moment to pat her neck and mutter a half-hearted murmur of consolation.

The anger hadn’t left him—not entirely. Arthur held onto it, stoked it carefully and precisely, for he knew he’d need it in the hours to come. The men who’d taken Clara—and that goddamn sheriff—would breathe their last before the sun rose, if it was the last thing Arthur did.

Charles wheeled Taima into position as he spent a few precious moments checking his weapons. “The people who want Clara, the ones in New Jersey,” he began, eyeing Arthur critically. “You knew about them?”

Arthur paused, his hand momentarily stilling on the strap that held his repeater to the saddle. It was no use lying to Charles; besides, the rest of the gang was bound to found out sooner or later.

He nodded and sighed. “It’s just one man who wants her,” he ground out. “But yes. Didn’t think it was worth telling no one, since…”

Since what?

Arthur tugged firmly on the strap, hard enough to earn a grunt of displeasure from his mount. He hadn’t told anyone because Clara had asked him not to, but that wasn’t the only reason.

He hadn’t told anyone because he’d believed—foolishly, hopelessly—that he would be the one to protect her. And now…

Arthur looked away, his jaw tight with stark disappointment. His muscles clenched painfully as he reminded himself how careless, how heartless, he’d been to let her go on her own. She might never forgive him; he wouldn’t, if the roles were reversed.

“Doesn’t matter now,” Charles said, his tone calm in its acceptance. He nodded to Arthur with solemnity and added, “We’ll get her back.”

Arthur forced breath into his tightened lungs. He nodded to Charles and pulled himself up into the saddle. “Thank you, Charles.”

“Don’t thank me yet,” Charles said with a raised eyebrow. “Still have to live through the night first.”

Arthur kicked Boadicea into a gallop. They would live—that much was certain. The life of an outlaw was far from a guarantee; any moment could be their last. But as Arthur followed Charles’s lead out of camp, he let a single, solitary resolution settle and take root in his heart.

They would find Clara. They had to, because Arthur could not—would not—accept a possibility in which they were not successful.

Because the longer Arthur Morgan went without her, the more he discovered that there was no path worth walking that did not have Clara Howard in it.

Chapter Text

They rode hard and fast.

Charles rode point as Arthur followed, urging Boadicea to follow closely behind Taima. New Yorkshire splayed out before them as the hills and crests of Devil’s Ridge faded into the night. Arthur looked back only once. The mountains that kept them hidden seemed bleaker, more desolate, than he remembered.

The moon followed in their wake, rising high and fast in the blue-black heavens. They took the rode to Kingston, slipping off the track when they could manage the slopes and tricky terrain in the dark. Arthur gripped the reins and kept low in the saddle, allowing his faithful mare to take him where he needed to go.

He allowed himself only a moment to consider all that might go awry in the next few hours.

They would get to the mine—Arthur had no doubt of that. Charles was an expert tracker—the best in camp, in Arthur’s opinion. But it was what they might find after they arrived that set Arthur’s teeth on edge and made him clench the reins all the more tightly. Clara might not be there by the time they got to Reliance; they might have already moved her, taken her further east, further away from where he could find her.

Or, she’d be still be there—just not alive.

It was this thought, this terrible, singular possibility, that tore through Arthur’s resolve for the space of one, eternally damnable heartbeat. It made him sway slightly in the saddle, made him forget the hard-edged conviction that usually cleared the way for his own sense of cool, unforgiving judgment. The thought of Clara dead, of her vibrant, fiery, inescapably infuriating life snuffed out like a forgotten dream, was so abhorrent that Arthur could think of little else the world could throw at him that would equal its measure.

He let it consume him for only a moment before he buried it with the fire of his purpose. Clara knew how to survive; she’d proven her worth a thousand times over. She just had to last long enough for Arthur to fetch her.

Arthur ducked beneath a low hanging branch as Boadicea skirted a tangled thicket. Charles had slipped off the main road again, opting for the more direct, slightly less favorable road. The road closest to Kingston were littered with copses of tall, wide trees, but they were just as traversable as the main road, if you knew where to ride.

After a few more moments of silently terse travel, the wooded track dumped them back out onto the main road. Charles pulled up on the reins and circled about as Arthur slowed Boadicea to a stop. The horse huffed with exertion and he patted her strong neck.

Charles gestured to the area. “I found Marion here.” He pointed a short way back up to the track. “Looked like there had been a stage accident further up.”

Arthur gave him a hard look. “An accident?”

Charles nodded sternly. “The law was investigating by the time I rode up. Found Marion a ways back. She was agitated and nervous.”

Arthur rubbed his chin. “Likely from when they took her.”

“That’s my guess,” Charles muttered as he glanced back up the road. “The fellers in the saloon mentioned something about a stage accident.” He looked back at Arthur, his dark eyes glittering with purpose in the night. “I didn’t think anything of it, but now…”

Arthur stiffened as the same thought came into his mind. “It might not have been an accident at all.”

This much was true—they were up against men who knew the wiles and wills of outlaws. They knew how to deceive, how to use the natural world as a veil for their ill-favored purposes. If these men had set up a stage accident to block the road, then Clara would have had no choice but to try to skirt it. But that didn’t seem right, either. Arthur pondered, imagining how Clara’s far superior and more astute brain would have interpreted the matter.

That was when he knew.

He’d ridden with her enough times to know that she would have gone to investigate the accident, rather than take the more cautious approach and avoid it altogether.

Arthur clenched his hand into a fist. “Shit,” he hissed.

Charles dismounted Taima and led her off the road. “Let’s hitch up here. We’ll search the site of the accident and see if we can figure out which track to take to get to Reliance.”

He followed suit, happy to at least give Boadicea a few moment’s reprieve. The hour was late and the road far less traveled than it might have been during the daylight hours. Arthur and Charles let their mounts rest while they inspected the road where the stage accident had been.

Arthur followed Charles’s lead. They bent toward the road, their careful eyes roving over the divots and ridges formed by generations of travel. The dirt was hardpacked and the night heavy and persistent around them. Moonlight spilled across the road but the shadows of the hills that rose up around them insisted on keeping some of it for themselves.

It didn’t take long for Arthur to get frustrated.

He squatted on the ground, his muscles burning and his heart lurching with the need to keep moving. Arthur tossed his hands up in frustration and angrily muttered, “I don’t see nothing."

Charles gingerly brushed his fingers along the road. He pointed and said, “This is where the accident was.”

Arthur got up and stepped carefully to where Charles remained low to the ground, his eagle eyes still assessing the land. “How can you tell?”

He watched as Charles gestured to a few rugged tracks in the road. Arthur squinted, searching for what Charles saw in the gloom, but only managed to spot a few places where vibrant green grass managed to peer through the ground. He was just about to protest and insist they move on when he something caught his eye.

Charles nodded sagely when he saw realization dawn on Arthur’s face. “Now you’ve got it.”

Arthur squatted and leaned forward. Now that he’d seen the marks, he could tell them for what they were—evidence of a fire, one that had burned steadily and left behind traces of ash and detritus.

“And over there,” Charles added, his voice mounting with anticipation despite their ordeal. He paused a few feet away, his hand hovering over the earth. “Something big lay here. If it was a stage, probably—”

“The horses,” Arthur finished, straightening up from his crouch and brushing the dust from his pants. His anger roared as he considered the sort of folk that would slaughter innocent beasts for the sake of a set up. “Goddamn bastards,” he growled.

Charles’s attention drifted toward the opposite side of the road. Arthur froze, sensing the tension that lined his fellow outlaw’s shoulders. For a moment, there was nothing but the ambient sounds of the night that crept between the hills and the sky.

“Tracks,” Charles muttered as he rose and hurried along an unseen path. “Going up this way.”

Arthur’s heart leapt. He followed, his careful eyes searching the road in Charles’s wake. The longer he looked, the more his eyes acclimated to the dark and to the unique features of the road, the more he could see the tracks that cut through the hardpacked dirt and up into the wooded slopes beyond.

Charles paused at the edge of the road and peered into the trees. He turned back to Arthur, his face grave, and nodded. “They took her this way.”

Arthur forced his lungs to breathe evenly and his mind to focus on the task at hand. “You think the mine is that way, then?”

For a moment, Charles looked unsure. He gave a half-hearted shrug and then steeled his face into one of mild certainty. “That’s the best we’ve got. They could have taken her on a more indirect route but that ain’t likely.”

Arthur considered this. “They was assuming no one would follow, because no one knew where she’d gone.” Because you let her go off alone, you goddamn pathetic fool, he added bitterly and in silence to himself.

A surge of violent hope coursed through him. Arthur hoped she forgave him. He was never one for hope and had long since been too much a sinner to warrant forgiveness, but he felt it, nonetheless.

Charles agreed. “The tracks will be harder to follow in the woods, but we’ll see the mine as long as we head in the right direction.”

Arthur nodded. The need to press on rose within him, urging his body forward to where he was needed most. “Let’s go, then.”

*

Clara didn’t know for sure how long it had been since she’d began sawing through the rope binding her wrists.

For all she knew, it’d been an eternity of bloody rigor, an endless war between captivity and freedom. Eventually her focus narrowed only to the tip of the wood in her hands, which had long since began to dull from her efforts, and the already frayed, worn rope that refused to give up the ghost.

All the while she was painfully conscious of the seconds and minutes that flitted away from her, each one falling away like a forgotten memory.

She gritted her teeth and pressed the tip of the wood into the rope. There were only a few strands left holding it together. Clara forced some feeling into her numb, clawed fingers and willed her screaming muscles to quiet long enough to finish the job. Her tired lungs ached for a single, full breath instead of the short, stunted gasps that kept time to endless rhythm of her desperate attempt at escape.

Clara wondered if she would ever be free of this—this moment that lasted in perpetual, dismal purgatory, where the world crept on while she toiled away in a single, breathless, moment of turmoil.

She focused on the pain, letting it draw her back to the present. Clara forced her fingers to tighten on the wood and brought the still sharp edge down against the rope with a renewed force.

Another strand snapped.

The raw, ragged cuffs on her wrists cried out in agony. Clara felt tears prick the back of her eyes as she set her jaw and continued on. There was only one more strand to go—one more, and she would be free.

Her sweat-soaked shirt clung to her curves. Droplets fled from her brow down the length of her face and dripped onto her fingers, making them slick and clumsy. Clara cursed, her frenzy at its height, and let out a sharp grunt as she thrust the wood into the unforgiving rope.

The last strand snapped.

Clara stared at the broken rope in mild disbelief. She sucked in a few breaths of tepid air and let the wooden shard drop from her painfully stiff fingers. She winced as she flexed each digit and felt her bones grind against her worn, angry muscles.

Her wrists had borne the brunt of her exercise. Clara set her jaw and used one clawed hand to grasp the free end of the rope. She bit her lip as the rope slowly and reluctantly peeled away from the crusted, sticky blood that held it in place. Her hands shook and a fresh torrent of sweat crept down her neck and along the ridge of her spine.

Finally, she pulled in a breath and pulled the rope free in one fell swoop.

Clara swallowed the cry of pain that rose up in her throat. Her wrists throbbed something fierce and she clutched them to her chest, being careful all the while not to let them touch one another.

Every heartbeat that thundered in her ears was another throb of agony in her wrists. The air cooled the worst of the angry welts that marred her skin, but the distant throb was still there. Clara turned her hands over carefully, inspecting the red and pink-mottled wounds. It was difficult to see in the gloom of the lantern light, but she was fairly certain that they weren’t nearly as bad as they felt.

A good thing, then, she mused silently to herself. She’d have to put the rope back on eventually.

For now, she kept one ear trained on the door and picked up the rope from where it had fallen between her thighs. Clara inspected her work—it wasn’t exactly the cleanest cut; the ends were frayed, but she’d be able to hide it well enough. She laid the rope on the top of her thigh and turned her attention to the shard of wood that had become her savior. It was thin, a fact which had served to cause her trouble during her escape attempt, but it was strong. Clara was willing to wager that it would continue to hold up, should she have to use it for other means.

Specifically, she thought with a dark look toward the door, if she was forced to send the sharp end into an unsuspecting man’s throat.

A shout rang out from beyond the door. Clara’s heart leapt in her chest and a spike of red-hot adrenaline coursed through her veins. She buried her pain and tucked the wood into the top of her boot and crossed her legs at the ankle. Bootsteps rang loud and clear as they approached the door. Clara fumbled with the rope, dropping it twice as the steps paused just outside.

She slipped her wrists through the former binding, heedless of the sting of protest from her wounds. Clara’s head snapped up at the sound of the doorknob turning as she looped the frayed eyes of the rope around her pinky fingers. Just as the door opened, Clara placed her wrists in the well of her legs and steeled her expression into one of practiced sameness.

She expected Eden.

Instead, she was forced to share space with the man who had ultimately betrayed her.

Sheriff James Parker ducked into the room. He quickly closed the door behind him as he his eyes wandered indiscreetly to Clara. They watched her for only half a moment before slipping away again, obviously more comfortable focusing on the dark rather than the woman he’d so ardently gave to the wolves.

Clara seethed. Her teeth ground against one another as she watched the damnable sheriff glanced around the room, his eyes landing on the former stool that Eden had broken in his fit of anger.

She’d been the cause of it, but it had all been a means to an end. Clara settled back against the wall, waited until the sheriff’s eyes met hers, and let a bit of that same spark embolden her verdant gaze.

He wasn’t beyond her reach. Men had spent the better part of her life believing that she was nothing more than a wallflower, destined for an ornate vase and left to rot without nourishment. But Claramae Howard was, quite simply, much more than that.

She was the viper hiding in the garden. She was the breath of icy wind down your back. She was the second thought you had when you were sure of yourself only a moment before. It didn’t matter that she’d been kidnapped, bound, and left to stew in her own filth in this godforsaken room. Clara was stronger than they’d given her credit for, and she had every intention of showing them once she got the chance.

Sheriff Parker looked at her, understood this, and rightfully kept his distance.

He reached beneath his arm and Clara stiffened, expecting the worse. But the sheriff only brought forth a well-worn canteen and a bundle wrapped with cloth. He held them aloft, his wary eyes daring to dance toward her once more.

“Brought you some food and water,” he muttered. “Thought you might need it.”

Clara very seriously considered telling him where he could put the canteen and the bundle, but she was, unfortunately, rather hungry and thirsty. She kept her lips pressed closed and watched him.

When it was clear that she either didn’t care or refused to speak or both, Parker laid both of the items on the table with the lantern. His hand lingered on the bundle and a sense of reluctant quietude settled in the room.

Clara wrapped her pinkies tightly around the ends of the rope. She leaned her head back against the wall and watched the sheriff. She knew guilt when she saw it; it lived in the crevices of the mind, eating away at sense and reason. It poisoned the eyes first—pools of clearest blue could turn poisonous in an instant when faced with the full-fledged assault of one’s own guilt. Clara knew what it felt like, knew how it would edge away at everyone that was once comforting and familiar, until there was nothing left but despair and an emptiness that would sooner smother rather than save.

She fought against a sinister grin. Parker deserved to feel every ounce of that heavy, leaden guilt.

When he finally turned toward her, she could just make out the shadows that hung like heavy drapes beneath his eyes. He wasn’t old, not really, but the juxtaposition of the light and shadow in the room played horribly with the lines that marred his face. He watched her for a moment more before he let his eyes drift away once more. His fingers wrapped tightly into the cloth of the bundle and his shoulders became unrelentingly tight.

“For what it’s worth,” he muttered, “I’m sorry about the way things turned out.”

Clara remained silent. It wasn’t worth much and besides; he didn’t look very sorry.

But he would be.

Parker let his hand drift away from the table. The shadows concealed what he wanted them to conceal, leaving the light unable to penetrate even the smallest ounce of redemption that Clara might find. He shoved his hands in his pockets, his eyes slipping and sliding over her battered and weakened form, unable to hold her gaze for longer than was absolutely necessary.

“Didn’t think it would be him,” Parker said with a nod toward the door. It took Clara a moment to realize he was talking about Eden.

She settled back against the wall. Her gaze slid toward the food and water on the table and, despite her willfulness to the contrary, bolstered against the hunger that clawed through her stomach and the thirst that left her throat raw and scraped dry. She forced her eyes back to the sheriff and kept her expression smooth and even.

Clara drawled in her rasping, uneven voice, “Wyatt Byers is above doing what other, more expendable men could easily do.” She took a breath and added, “I thought you would have gathered that, after all your correspondence.”

Parker, ever the willing opponent, straightened and set his shoulders. Eden had been a lit fuse, liable to set off at any moment; James Parker was a clever, insidious game of chess, every word and every action calculated just enough that Clara would have to rely less on bravado and more on precision.

“I’ve been sheriff of Kingston for nearly fifteen years,” he said finally. “And in all that time, I ain’t never dealt with a pain in the ass quite like you, Ms. Howard.”

Clara raised her eyebrows and shrugged. That wasn’t the first time a man had told her as much; Arthur told her that on a nearly daily basis, but the thought of him rammed a spike of red-hot pain through her chest, so she buried the thought immediately.

Parker continued, bolstered a bit by her silence. “That gang you run with has been lying, cheating, and killing their way through New Yorkshire for months now.” He paused, set his jaw, and added, “I promised to uphold the law, Ms. Howard, and I intend to do just that.”

Clara considered this, peered at him, and replied, “And does the law allow you to take money from a man in exchange for an innocent woman?”

Parker’s face darkened as he shook his head. “You’re about as innocent as a wolf in a chicken coop.”

She lifted her chin. “I’m innocent of the lies he told you, sheriff. As for the rest…” she shrugged and looked away.

Clara had never intended to be an outlaw—not in that sense, anyway. All the stories she’d read and loved as a child had instilled within her a sense of adventure that refused to be tamed. It lived within her, stoked and ebbed by a world that refused to allow her to be anything other than a simple, docile woman. She’d always sought a way in which she could remind the world that it could not keep her from the path she’d chosen; if lying, cheating, and killing was the only way to keep her freedom, then she’d do it.

It was better than dying in service to a man who considered her to be less.

Parker leveled a tense, unyielding gaze at her. “All you had to do was leave, Ms. Howard. You and them folks you run with, all you had to do was leave.”

“I tried,” she bit out. She held up her wrists just enough for him to see the rope that, for all it was loose now, still bit into her wrists with a mighty vengeance. “You didn’t have to be a coward.”

“And you,” he shot back, “didn’t have to kill my deputy.”

Clara snarled, “And he wouldn’t have died if he hadn’t put a gun to my head.” She didn’t bother to add that the erstwhile deputy would have met his end on the train heist regardless of his presumptive capture; Clara and the sheriff both knew it, and so the words remained unspoken, though not for want of verity.

Parker laughed mirthlessly. “He were the one that told me to turn you over and be done with it.”

Clara said nothing. The chess pieces were moving, forming their own plot, and it wouldn’t do to disturb them now.

The sheriff ran a pair of fingers along the length of his mustache. He looked tired and drawn, his movements stunted and a bit stiff. Clara watched as something shifted in his eyes, revealing more of the shadows and less of the light.

He dropped his hand and kept his eyes away from her. “Hawkins was a good man—better than me.” Parker sighed heavily, as though shouldering a great and terrible weight. “He thought it were more important to turn you in than it was let to Byers call the shots.”

Clara had spent enough time with Wyatt Byers to know that it wasn’t only money that fill his coffers and sated his appetites. It wasn’t just trinkets, loyalty, and the comforting embrace of other women that fulfilled the insatiable, insipid need that rotted at this core.

Wyatt Byers loved secrets. It was to these he held tightly, filing them away in his vaults until they rotted their owners and fed him his perpetually sought subservience. It wasn’t money that bought his enforcers or his backers—it was the trading of their heart’s desire, their greatest shame, or their most ardent hope for salvation. That was what fueled Wyatt Byers; that was what kept him with one foot in hell and the other firmly planted near the golden gates of heaven.

“You’ll pardon my frankness, sheriff,” she began, “but when, exactly, are you going to admit that Wyatt Byers has your balls in the palm of his hand?”

Parker bristled. A glimmer of darkness flickered in his eyes, mirrored by the darkness in the room. His jaw tightened and Clara saw his hands wrap tightly into unforgiving fists. He looked away and pulled in a long, stiff breath. When he let it out, words came along with it, spilling from his lips in the way desperate men had when guilt became too familiar a friend.

“It weren’t just the money,” he murmured. “He has my wife.”

Clara waited to feel surprised. She anticipated the cold sting of shock up her spine, the quickened rhythm of her heart, or a chill to crawl across her skin. But there was only the sobering solemnity of calm, the knowledge that this was precisely the sort of machination born from the mind of Wyatt Byers.

Parker licked his lips and set his jaw. “Don’t know how he found her. She ain’t been well for some years now, ever since we lost—” The sheriff’s voice hitched, the words stopping up his throat. Parker shook his head and settled his hands on his hips. “Had to send her away after that. She just…weren’t the same.” Parker looked down, his shoulders bowing forward with the weight of the words he kept firmly locked away.

Clara watched the sheriff, assessing the hard lines of well-kept sorrow that marred his expression. “He knows more than you think he does,” she finally said after a moment. Every word rang true; she’d lived them, breathed them, for years, and their truth was the painfully inescapable sort.

Parker huffed a mirthless laugh. “Damn right he does.” He vigorously rubbed a hand over his face and sighed. Whatever moment of vulnerability he’d shared with her sloughed away. The sheriff looked at her and, though the shadows had crept across his face once more, Clara could just make out the small bit of light that lingered in the corners of his eyes.

“You remind me of her,” he mused before he swallowed thickly. “She had that same fire, same stubbornness, as you.”

Clara pressed her lips together. She didn’t have time for sentimentality; the shard of wood tucked into her boot pressed into her leg, a sharp reminder of the task she’d set for herself. If she had any hope of escape, she needed more information than this.

“So,” she said with a slight lift of her chin, “do you get your wife back once I’m safely delivered?”

The light fled from the sheriff’s eyes. Cold, harsh steel flashed across his features and the hands on his hips tightened a fraction. “Once you’re safely away,” he began, his voice a low, dark hum, “I’m going to find that gang you run with. I’m going to run them down until there ain’t a trace of them and left and, when I do, I’ll make sure each one of them hangs.” Here, his lips curled into an uncharacteristic smirk, one lined with venomous promise. “I’ll save your man for last.”

That’s when Clara was sure.

Sheriff James Parker wasn’t worried about his wife. He wasn’t concerned about the town that he’d sworn to protect, nor did he spare a single, solitary thought for the wrath that would befall him from the money who’d promised him everything and gave away nothing.

No—the sheriff only wanted the band of outlaws furtively nestled in his town to be eradicated. He wanted their stain of existence wiped from the face of the earth; he wanted the glory that came with such a feat. He wanted to cement his name in the annals of history as the sheriff who’d overcome the odds and silenced the violent uprising of a few outlaws who only wanted to live free.

Clara let a slow, feral smile creep onto her lips. “I’d like to see you try.”

Parker’s smirk faded back into the darkness. He looked over at the food and water he’d laid on the table and shot a hard glance back over his shoulder at Clara.

“Weren’t supposed to happen like this,” he muttered as he reached for the sustenance. He took a few slow, careful steps toward her. “But I guess we all get what’s coming for us in the end. Don’t we, Ms. Howard?”

Endless thirst and hunger shot through her as Parker lowered the bundle and canteen to the floor. He left them just beyond what he thought was the limit of her reach, hoping to prove to her once more that she was entirely at the mercy of lesser men.

Clara let her eyes linger on the food before letting them slide back up to Parker. “I guess we’ll find out, won’t we?”

Park said nothing. There was only the ghost of a smile on his lips, the barest hint of a man who felt the first stirrings of pity.

Clara’s eyes followed him as he turned and strode toward the door. She hardly moved as the sheriff who’d betrayed her opened it and stepped back out into the night, where he could easily hide among the shadows and avoid the guilt that nipped at his heels.

When the lock slid back into place behind, Clara finally allowed herself to feel the true weight of her predicament.

Her eyes slid to her hands and then to the top of her boot, where she could just make out the barest hint of the wood she’d stowed inside. She’d promised herself that she would see Arthur again; even now, the very thought of that promise crept the like first rays of sunlight over her, warming her cold and stiff muscles. But Clara was as practical as she was hopeful; life wasn’t built on promises made in the dark, born out of turmoil and held fast by desperation.

She pulled in a slow breath. There was a very real chance, realer than she’d wanted to believe, that she would not make it out of this mine alive. Fear crept in beside her promise, its long, cold tendrils reaching into her still beating heart and sending thin beads of apprehension through her veins. She could feel it threatening to overcome her; it trembled in her bones, shuddered with every breath she took. If she gave even the barest inch, she’d lose what little control she had over her predicament.

Clara closed her eyes and counted to ten.

For ten, mind-numbing seconds, all she felt was fear—fear of death; fear of freedom lost to her forever; fear of all the things she should have said buried and rotted in the dirt with her bones.

When ten seconds was up, Claramae Howard opened her eyes, lifted her chin, and decided that this was no time to die.

She would eat and drink, regain her strength, and wait for her captors to fetch her. When the door opened again, Clara would show them what she was made of; she would show them that she belonged to no one but herself.

And then they’d all be sorry.

*

Frank McClure wondered if he’d ever been a good man.

He struck a match on the side of Reliance Mine’s old central building. The flame burst to vibrant life before settling into a more muted, controlled smolder. He held it up to the end of the cigarette propped between his lips, took a healthy sip of tobacco, and let the crisp smoke flow out through his nose.

The place was a goddamn dump.

Reliance Mine had once been New Yorkshire’s livelihood but now it remained hardly more than a crumbling, derelict ghost town. The main building—perhaps the only bit of the place that refused to succumb to time and weather—nestled up against the rolling hills that dotted the places of the state. The old cart tracks snaked from the entrance on the nearby hill to the lower mining valley, where a lopsided tower (the old depository, if memory served) spiraled up from the desolate landscape like a last beacon of forgotten hope. Tents and smaller buildings dotted the former mine’s valley, a testament to the small community of folk that once had this place running like clockwork.

New Yorkshire likely would’ve made it big, maybe even as big as Saint Denis, if the foreman’s son hadn’t upped and hung himself like a fool.

It was sentiments like that, ones spiked with apathy and caustic pessimism, that drove Frank to wonder if he had always been so sour. His father certainly had been; the bastard was a drunk, like most folk back in his hometown of Tumbleweed (the desert had that sort of effect on folk), and a useless one at that. His mother had lasted in the home until Frank had finally turned old enough to get some decent work. He’d heard later on that she’d run off with some foppish stable hand and popped out a couple more kids further east, somewhere in the Heartlands, he thought.

Frank had shrugged off the news. From what he could remember of his mother, he hadn’t care much for her, anyway.

He pressed his shoulder into the wood wall beside him and propped up a leg for balance. He flicked away some of the ash from the end of the cigarette and looked out onto the gray remainder of the mine. He still wasn’t entirely sure why the sheriff had gone through the trouble of deputizing him and the other boys all in an effort to get a woman, but the pay wasn’t all that bad. According to Parker, the money was coming from a man in New Jersey—some well-to-do, high-and-mighty feller who had quite a few dollars to his name. And who, incidentally, was quite keen on having this particular woman returned to him at their earliest convenience.

In Frank’s experience, that meant fast, or else. He took another puff on the cigarette and sighed. The woman wasn’t much; he’d been the one to knock her out before loading her up and making the trek to the mine, where that vain, pompous looking asshole Bennett had been holed up. Turns out he’d had quite the operation going on among the ghosts and fragments of a lost mining community. It still didn’t change Frank’s rather unwavering belief that the woman certainly wasn’t worth it.

Women just weren’t worth much at all, if he was being honest.

Henry Smoot, partner on watch and fellow, recently deputized brother in arms, turned toward him and frowned. “Do you really have to do that?”

Frank glanced down at his feet and back up at Henry. He shrugged and asked, “What?”

Henry rolled his eyes. “Smoke, you goddamn idiot.” He pointed firmly at the floor and added pointedly, “Or ain’t you noticed that wood is flammable?”

Frank liked smoking. Perpetual clouds of smoke kept most people at bay, which was a boon, in his opinion. But when Henry continued to glare at him, he took the tip of his boot, scattered the ash, and settled back against the wall.

“Better?” he asked, raising an eyebrow.

Henry shook his head and turned his attention back toward the valley. There was only one way into Reliance, and they had the place locked down good and tight. Besides, Frank thought with some frustration, he wasn’t stupid enough to burn the place down. He wasn’t getting paid for thatsort of work. Not this time, at least. Frank waited a moment for Henry’s temper to cool before he ventured into the realm of somewhat civil conversation.

“So,” he began, wincing at the stupid, useless word, “when you think we’ll get paid for this…” Frank faltered for a minute, waving his cigarette through the air in an attempt to find the word. “This job Parker’s got us doing?”

Henry turned from his place near the railing of the balcony. The roof of the upper floor jutted above her heads and butted up against the tree-lined ridge that cradled Reliance Mine. His young, mustached face was lined with mounted frustration (likely both at their unfavorable watch positions and from having to deal with Frank) as he replied tersely, “When the woman is delivered. You know that.”

Frank shrugged again. “I know, but…when you think that’s going to be?”

“When the fucking woman is brought to Byers,” Henry spat out. “Now, will you kindly shut up and stop trying to burn us all to hell with that cigarette?”

Frank raised both eyebrows. Henry wasn’t usually so tense; he was younger than Frank and seemingly bred from the more optimistic, less downtrodden sort. He waited a beat and, being the sort bred from a distinct lack of human empathy, pressed the matter with morbid curiosity.

“Why the hell you so angry, Smoot?” Frank asked and tossed his spent cigarette over the side of the railing. Henry cast an angry glare at its descent before deigning to answer the query.

Henry replied, “Just want this over with,” he muttered as he kept his eyes firmly on the valley. “Something about this don’t seem right.”

A crisp breeze kicked up, rustling the brush and stunted trees on the ridge. Frank cast a look up at the sound but, upon finding the shadows too thick to see much of import, turned his attention back to Henry.

“I suspect you mean the fact that the sheriff’s got his balls in a vice with Bennett—or Byers, I guess I should say,” Frank amended with distasteful glance over the side of the balcony. The men who weren’t patrolling the entrance milled about in the courtyard of the building below. He knew from their position that the woman was in one of those downtrodden pieces of shit buildings out in the valley; he’d already seen Bennett and the sheriff enter.

Henry nodded at Frank’s observation. He glanced around, as though afraid his words might carry. His brow furrowed as he gingerly sat upon the railing. “Don’t seem right, is all. I don’t like the look of that Bennett.”

Frank could hear the sentiment Henry kept cleverly veiled behind his words. What the young man meant was that he didn’t trust Eden Bennett. The man was too clean, too undaunted by the fierce, lingering sense of lawlessness that still pervaded this part of the country. Folks in these parts didn’t trust outsiders as a rule of thumb, especially those who looked like they’d been born with a silver spoon tucked sweetly between smooth, rosy lips.

The trees above their heads rustled again. Frank glanced up again, this time with a bit more fervor. There hadn’t been a breeze; at least not one that he could feel. He turned to face the ridge as a distinct prickling sensation trickled down the back of his neck toward his spine. He squinted toward the trees and shrubs and shadows. He was certain that he’d heard them rustling, and that he’d seen something—

“McClure?” Henry called firmly. He rose from the railing and came to stand beside Frank. He craned his neck up and squinted at the shadows above them. “You see something?”

It was probably nothing. It was part of the reason why Frank detested night watches; the world had a way of playing tricks with one’s mind. He shook his head and sighed, feeling foolish and a bit out of sorts.

“Guess it weren’t nothing,” he muttered. He tapped Henry on the shoulder and headed toward the railing. “Guess we should get back to—”

Several things happened at once.

There was a loud, distinct thump from the roof. Frank, sure now that he’d heard it, whirled and reached for the gun holstered at his hip. He opened his mouth to shout at Henry, to tell him to get ready.

The only problem was that Henry Smoot had already crumpled to the floor, an arrow jutting out from just beneath his throat.

Frank stared at Henry. He froze as panic gripped him good and tight and send cold shivers up his spine. He was dimly aware of the fact that he should be doing something besides standing here like a goddamn fool.

Shadows shifted at the corner of his vision. Frank fumbled for his gun, drew it, and held it before him. His hands shook as he tried to find something to focus on.

Perhaps if he hadn’t been panicked, he would have seen a figure with a bow and arrow nimbly lower himself from the roof to the balcony, his steps hitting the floor with hardly more than a whisper of noise.

Perhaps if Frank McClure had been a better man—maybe even a good man—he would have been careful and astute enough to see the second figure slip up out of the shadow, wrap a thick, powerful arm around him, and slip the cold, numbing blade of a knife into the side of his neck.

*

When the dark became too much to bear, Clara found herself remembering the first time Wyatt Byers had made it clear she would never live up to his expectations.

It had only been a few months since her uncle had deposited her into his care. She’d always favored a decent pair of pants and a shirt, despite her uncle’s misgivings and insistence to the contrary. Men’s clothes had a wide of hiding the aspects of herself she would rather keep hidden away from the world, the ones that so clearly separated her from the other, more beautiful debutantes that seemed to linger on every street corner.

But on the night she was to be presented to Byers’s father, he’d arrived at the door to her marvelous, rather ostentatious suite with a freshly packaged dress and a young, meek girl who refused to meet her gaze.

He hadn’t said much. He’d only looked her up and down, his eyes swimming with a tainted mixture of desire and repulsion and ordered the girl to get her cleaned up. If memory served (and it usually did), Wyatt’s exact words were, “I don’t want her looking like shit in front of my father.”

The echo of his words filled her with their hollow, aching numbness when the door to her makeshift prison opened. Her eyes lifted to find Parker and one of his men looming in the doorway.

The sheriff said nothing to her—he’d barely even managed to glance in her direction before nodding to his man. The brute sauntered toward her, his steps filled with a vicious, overly confident sort of swagger. Clara pressed her back into the wall as he leaned down toward her, his claw-like hand hovering over her arm.

The man grinned at her. He was missing several teeth and what few remained were yellowed and half rotten. Clara frowned as a foul, sickening odor emanated from his mouth.

“Ain’t so tough now, are you, little lady?” the man drawled. Every word was laced with toxicity. Clara felt what little she’d consumed in the last few hours threaten to expel from her stomach.

It didn’t stop her from replying, “At least I still have all my teeth.”

The man’s salacious grin faded. His muddy eyes darkened with anger as his hand landed on her arm. Clara bristled at the unwanted touched, at way his fingers bit into flesh as if they’d grown far too used to it. Mason yanked her toward him, nearly wrenching her shoulder from its socket. Clara turned her head away as his reeking, rotted mouth loomed in front of her face.

“Bitch,” he sneered. Clara’s skin roiled as flecks of spit peppered her cheek. “Best learn to keep your mouth shut, or—”

“Mason!” Parker barked. “Just shut your damn mouth and get her cleaned up.”

Clara felt a small surge of victory as Mason reluctantly let go over her arm and moved away.

This hadn’t been Parker’s idea—it had been Bennett’s. Clara knew without having to ask that his orders included making sure she looked presentable before being delivered back to Byers’s doorstep. Bennett would scrub away the life she’d carved out in New Yorkshire, relinquishing her back to the version of herself she’d left behind.

Clara pulled in a breath (and immediately regretted it, given that the general air surrounding Mason was distinctly unpleasant) and calmed her racing heart. She took some solace in the insistent press of the wooden shard in her boot.

If this fool thought she was going to let him touch her, he was sorely mistaken.

“I can do it myself,” she shot back at Parker.

The sheriff said nothing; his look was tempestuous and firm. Clara’s temper flared and she itched to wrap her hand around her hidden weapon in only to wipe that look off his face.

Parker turned toward the door. “Bring her out when you’re done,” he muttered to Mason.

Clara held her breath until the door closed.

Mason turned slowly toward her, his broken and jagged teeth revealed in a stomach-curdling grin. Every breath he expelled was rotten and rancid, the stench strong enough to curdle what little Clara had in her stomach. She steeled her already fiery will, pressed her wrists together to hide the severed rope, and straightened her shoulders. She’d dealt with plenty of men like Mason. Their sinuous, sinister wills were weak, however venomous, and she refused to bend to whatever machinations the man was already conjuring in his head. She kept still as she watched him spill water from the canteen onto the rag.

Mason was none too gentle as he firmly pressed the rag to Clara’s filthy cheek. He scraped along her skin and she winced, curling her fingers together in an attempt not to strangle him.

“Sheriff says you been quite a bit of trouble.” He swiped the rag along the tip of her chin.

Clara said nothing. She watched him carefully as he dipped more water onto the rag.

Mason cut his dark, beady eyes to her before starting in on the other cheek. “Personally,” he began as Clara swallowed against the rising bile in her throat, “I ain’t never understood why he thought a woman was worth all this.”

Clara would have been astounded if she found out Mason had ever enjoyed the company of a woman. Or, more specifically, a woman he didn’t have to threaten.

“If you ask me, women like you are good for one thing and one thing only,” he said with a distinctly twisted grin. He ran the rag along the top of her cheek as his eyes slid down her body. Clara pressed her head against the wall and tried to twist away. Mason held firm, following her every movement as his eyes lingered on her.

It wasn’t the first time Clara had heard that. She wasn’t as petite and beautiful as the women Byers had preferred back in New Jersey. She couldn’t count the amount of times men had told her to stick to what she was good at; women like her—a bit thicker and with less clarity of beauty—should conduct their business with the rest of the women who looked more appealing under the guise of night.

He wet the rag once more and worked on her forehead. “What you think, miss? Maybe we should let the boys have a bit of fun with you before we let you off the hook.”

Clara clenched her jaw. Men like this were a dime a dozen. She couldn’t wait to shut him up.

Mason sat back, the rag held aloft in the air. “You ain’t got nothing to say, now, huh?” The hand slowly lowered as the shadows in the room coalesced into the dark pools of his eyes. He shifted a bit closer to her, his stench nearly overwhelming. “Maybe I can teach you a thing or two about politeness.”

Clara wondered how best to kill him. She wouldn’t want to stain her clothes with his filthy, maggot-infested blood.

Mason settled in until his face was merely inches from Clara’s. “Maybe I can show you how a real man does—”

The ground trembled beneath them. The walls shuddered as dust fell like snow from the ceiling, coating them both in a thick, choking layer. Clara’s head shot up as she glanced toward the door. Shouts were already cutting through the air outside, each one more hurried and frantic than the last.

An explosion—it had to be.

Mason whirled, his threat lost in the mounting chaos of the moment. “What in the hell?” He half turned away from her, his attention thoroughly on the door as he dropped the rag and kicked away the canteen.

Clara held her breath and waited.

She waited until Mason’s back was fully turned to her.

Even then, she waited a heartbeat longer.

Then, just as Mason reached for the door, she pulled apart her wrists. Her hand dove into the top of her boot, her fingers wrapping around her weapon. In one smooth movement, Clara wrapped an arm around his throat as she reached around and plunged the wood into his chest with all the strength she could muster.

Wood tore through muscle and sinew; it cracked through bone and drew hot, stinking blood from the last dregs that lived in Mason’s veins. He had only enough strength to writhe against her once, twice, before Clara felt him sink to the floor.

She drew back, breathing in clean air, and swiped her palms on her pants. Her pulse rattled her veins as she watched dark, sticky blood seep from the crumbled form. Clara’s stomach tightened as she considered the life she’d taken. It had been him, or her—that much had been certain. And Claramae Howard refused to die in an old, abandoned mine for the sake of a man like Wyatt Byers.

She drew a steadying breath before her eyes caught on a far more valuable prize than her wooden weapon. It seemed Mason hadn’t been entirely useless; his revolver was still tucked in the worn leather holster on his hip. Clara tugged it out; her shaking fingers slipped on the cool metal and she bit out a low curse as the barrel swung open, revealing six full chambers.

Six shots. That’s all she had to get out of the mine, get back to the main road, find a horse, and ride back to camp.

Shouts clattered through the night. They’d grown louder, more insistent, since the explosion ripped through the otherwise quiet evening. But there was something else, another sound, that sifted through the shouts.

Gunshots.

Clara didn’t have time to consider who else might have invaded the valley. Quite possibly Colm O’Driscoll had gotten word that men were holed up here, or that there might still be some profit to be had from a ghostly, derelict mine. Or, more simply, he wanted to the territory.

She slammed the barrel shut with a decisive click. Fine, then; she’d shoot her way out, one way or another.

Clara went to the door. Her legs wobbled with exhaustion and disuse, but she forced her muscles to obey. She tucked the revolver into the waistband of her pants for now, lamenting the loss of her gun belt. Clara wondered if she might have a chance to reclaim it but thought better of it—what mattered most was getting out of here alive.

And finding that sheriff again. She had a score to settle, after all.

Clara pressed her ear to the door and listened. Rapid-fire gunshots rang out as bootsteps pounded the dirt outside. Men continued to shout, their voices garbled by the door and the chaos. Clara steadied her nerves and laid her hand on the doorknob.

It was now or never, them or her.

Six shots would have to be enough.

*

Percy Young had a knack for knowing when things were about go bad.

When he was nine, he’d watched his brother climb the big oak tree outside their home near Virtue. The sinking feeling in his gut had told him it’d been a bad idea from the start. This suspicion was made all the more apparent when Percy’s brother stepped on a fragile limb and went crashing to the ground. He’d never been the same after that.

Percy had also known his younger sister’s betrothal to Thomas Mayhew had been a terrible idea. He’d heard of Tommy’s reputation for womanizing along with his penchant for a temper, but it hadn’t been quite enough of a warning to deter Claire from marrying him. They’d only been married a few months before their cousin had seen Tommy at the local saloon with another woman, and a few more months after that for Tommy to strike her hard enough to leave a lasting mark.

So, it went without saying that when Percy felt the creeping chill of suspicion climb steadily up his spine, he naturally grew worried.

He shifted uneasily on the old crate. Percy gripped his old repeater (it had been his father’s, bequeathed to him upon the old man’s untimely death six months ago) and let his eyes wander through the darkness.

Bernard Cromwell, his partner on watch, sighed and shook his head. “Will you give it a rest, kid?”

Percy gasped, startled out of his rather dark reverie and blinked at Bernard. “What?”

Asher Harris stomped his spent cigarette beneath his boot with obvious vigor. He glanced sidelong at Percy, his expression just as ornery and ill-tempered as it had been when they’d first met. “Lookin’ all nervous, cowpoke. It’s settin’ the rest of us on edge, and ain’t nothin’ for it, bein’ nervous.”

Percy’s grip tightened on the repeater. “I’m not nervous.”

Except Percy was nervous. He was almost always nervous, seeing as how things had a marvelous tendency to go wrong nearly everywhere he went. And he wasn’t sure—he couldn’t be sure—but something about the darkness that hung over the mine seemed unusually sinister.

Bernard kicked idly at the dirt. He looked at Asher and said, “Told the boss not to pick such a young’un for a job like this.”

Percy felt his cheeks redden. “I can shoot just as well as any of you.”

“Ain’t just about shootin’, kid.” Asher said as he tugged another cigarette out from his breast pocket. “Gotta be willin’ to kill.”

Admittedly, that was a bit of a sore point for Percy. He’d been raised to appreciate life, but with his father dead, his mother suffering from tuberculosis, and their money nearly gone, Percy had been forced to do what he could to help what remained of his family. He glanced toward the darkness again. His spine prickled with warning again, this one fiercer than the last. Percy’s palms began to sweat as he eyed the darkness, waiting for something to happen.

Just when he was about to turn back to Bernard and Asher, something shifted in the darkness.

Percy nearly leapt off the crate. His heart thudded in his chest as he quickly aimed the repeater at the spot where he’d see the shape.

Asher rolled his eyes and tossed his hands in the air. “What in the hell you doin’ now, Young?”

Percy’s eyes were focused so intently that they quickly began to water from strain. “Something—something moved out there.”

Bernard, who was likely the only one of the two that would have given Percy’s suspicions a second thought, peered out into the darkness for a moment before giving Percy a hard, stern look.

“Cut the shit, boy,” he growled. “If it were anything, the watch up on the old building would’ve sounded the alarm by now.”

Percy tried to accept the reason; he did, but it didn’t stick, just as it never had all the other times he’d been reeled into believing in the presence of unknown trouble. He forced his lungs to breathe steadily before lowering his weapon. He was sure—Percy was almost entirely certain he’d seen something there in the darkness, but he supposed he couldn’t prove it. But the more he considered it, the more he thought the shape had been low to the ground, as though it were a man crouched and running through the valley…But he shook his head and reluctantly turned back to the men beside him.

Perhaps if Percy Young had been a bit more confident in his innate powers of suspicion, he would have investigated the shape a bit further. Perhaps, if he’d been a bit older and wiser, he would have allowed himself to believe that no fortress was beyond capture, and that it was distinctly possible that a pair of unseen outlaws had indeed crept into the valley with sinister intentions.

But Percy Young deferred to the lesser judgment of others. And when the stacks of old, untouched crates in front of the rickety spire of the old mining depository suddenly exploded into flame, the men hit the ground hard from lack of preparedness.

Percy barely had enough time to gather his broken wits and reach for his gun. He got to his knees as his head painfully rattled atop his shoulders. A quick glance revealed that Asher and Bernard were already dead, but not from the explosion.

The explosion had been loud enough to muffle two gunshots, each one landing between the men’s eyes.

Percy numbly raised his gun toward the towering inferno. The air was already choked with smoke and fire and coal, making it hard to breathe and harder still to concentrate on anything. He should have known something was amiss; he should have trusted his gut for once in his sorry, pathetic life, but he hadn’t.

That was Percy Young’s singular regret when the bullet lodged in his skull and his body crumpled lifelessly to the ground.

*

The night air rushed past her with a chilled blast of coal and gunpowder-scented breeze.

Clara peered through the slim crack in the door and took in what little she could of her surroundings. No one stood outside the door; that was clear as she took comfort in the slim yet heavy weight of the gun at her waist. Moonlight cut through the heavy darkness outside, highlight the open and stark valley beyond. A few jagged crags of dark silhouettes jutted from the ground—more buildings, more prisons, like the one she’d been placed in.

Clara listened. The gunshots could still be heard in the distance, though she was sure danger lingered far closer than she could rightly see. She carefully pushed open the door, wincing when the rusted and worn hinges creaked in protest, but no one came to investigate.

She took one step out into the freedom. When still no one came, she took another. Emboldened by success (however tremulous it might be), Clara relinquished herself to the night and whatever came with it.

The air was stained with the scent of coal and fire. Clara pressed the back of her hand to her nose to muffle the stench as the source of the night’s disruption became immediately apparent. The flat valley—the old mining community, if she had to wager a guess—stretched out before her. There was a single jagged spire that jutted up from the ground, its pride long since deteriorated by time and forgetfulness. Clara pressed her back up against the shack and squinted through the night.

A raging inferno blazed in front of the structure. Flames licked at the darkness, eager to consume everything in its path. Clara craned her neck and saw men huddled behind the structures and crates as yet untouched by the conflagration, their guns aimed above and through the fire.

Clara lifted her eyes. There, at the very top of the structure, was a small opening. Beyond the opening, Clara could make out a darker, solid figure huddled just out of sight. Moonlight glinted off the barrel of a long barrel it shot volley after volley at the men below.

O’Driscolls or not, now was her chance.

She turned, deciding to make her way through the darkness and the now empty community toward the entrance. There had to be one, she determined as she laid a hand on her pilfered gun and crept around the back of her previous prison. She stretched her other hand out toward the wall; her muscles were still a bit stiff and weary. Clara could worry about finding her way back to the road and finding a mount once she was out of his godforsaken place. Then, once she’d made it back to camp, she could find Arthur and—

The breath fled Clara’s lungs as she ran headlong into something solid and immovable. She tore the gun free from her waistband and held it aloft as she struggled to get her footing. Her body was still weak; her arm shook with the weight of the gun and her feet struggled to find purchase on the ground.

She blinked as her clattering thoughts began to right themselves, making sense of the looming figure before her. Before she could fire off one of her precious few shots, a hand connected with her outstretched arm, effectively slapping the gun out of her grip. Clara let out an angry yelp as the gun slid nearly a foot away into the dirt.

Clara leapt onto her knees, tamping down the pain that shot up her tired bones. She had to make a grab for the gun, even if it meant putting her back to her assailant. Her hands slipped through the dirt, her skin aching to come into contact with cool metal. Her fingertips slid across the handle of the gun. A tight, wrenching groan escaped her gritted teeth as she heaved more strength into her arm, stretching it as painfully far as it could go.

But it wasn’t enough.

Her attacker grabbed a handful of her shirt. He effortlessly yanked her to her feet, her hands still grappling for a gun no longer within reach. Clara writhed, sending her elbows out as sharply as she could behind her. An arm wrapped around her throat, pulling her up against a firm, heaving chest. Her feet gave way and she fought for footing, but he held her tight, his grip firm enough to crush the air from her throat.

Clara stiffened when she felt the telltale point of a gun slam into her lower back.

“Should’ve known you was going to try something stupid,” Sheriff James Parker hissed in her ear. “Where is it, exactly, you was thinking of going?”

She gritted her teeth and scrambled to find purchase on his arm. Her fingers dug into cloth and flesh alike, raking in an effort to dismantle his hold on her. Air slowly and steadily leeched from her throat as the muscles beneath his grip grew firmer by the second.

“Guess you killed Mason,” he muttered as he turned his head just enough to glance at the gun still in the dirt. “Perhaps I should thank you. I ain’t never liked him, anyway.”

Clara made a fist and slammed it as hard as she could against Parker’s arm. But her muscles still refused to work, even under duress, and she silently cursed Parker, Bennett, and Byers for ever having been born men in the first place.

Parker pressed the gun into her back, eliciting a tight groan of pain from her pursed lips. He bent his head until his lips lingered just beside her ear. Clara tilted her head in the opposite direction, her sluggish thoughts crashing against one another even as she fought for some clarity of freedom.

“Women like you,” he said bitterly into her ear, “don’t know their place. You think you can run this world with a bit of conviction and rational sense, but don’t you see, Ms. Howard?”

Clara managed to eke out a few words. “I see just fine.”

Parker angrily jolted her. Clara managed to gulp down a single, woefully inadequate breath before the arm at her throat constricted just enough to make her dizzy. She fought once more for footing. She rallied when she felt the toe of her boot dig into the dirt.

Parker continued. “Men have already tried that. We conquered the west, brought all them savages to heel. We built this place from the ground up, brought a sense of law here, and that still ain’t done a goddamn thing to make this place the way it should be.”

Clara blinked away the dark spots lingering at the corners of her vision. He was taller than her, but just a few more seconds and she’d have enough leverage to do what needed to be done. She just had to keep him talking. Men liked to hear themselves talk.

“But you women,” Parker amended with vehemence. “You women still don’t understand what it takes to make this world what it’s meant to be.” The barrel of the gun pressed forward and Clara fought against the biting, insipid pain that flowered through her already sore muscles. “That means learning where you belong and staying there.”

Clara planted her right foot on the ground. Air was in short supply and her thoughts had long since slowed their wild pacing. Her heart thundered in her chest as she held what little breath she had, lifted her left foot, and brought it down on Parker’s instep with all the hatred and conviction she could muster.

She felt it when her bootheel cracked through bone.

Parker yelped and instinctively let go of her. Clara gasped air into her lungs before gaining her bearings and darting for her fallen gun.

She heard the sounds of Parker shuffling toward her, each step punctuated with the strangled cry of misery. Clara dove to her knees, bracing for the impact, and slid toward the gun that glinted brightly in the moonlight. This time when she threw her arm out, her fingers wrapped around the handle of the gun. She whipped around, drawing every ounce of lingering strength into her arm, and pointed the gun at Parker’s hulking, doubled-over form.

The sheriff who’d stolen her looked up at her, his face a twisted grimace of pain. Dark eyes looked at her with unimaginable hate; darkness swirled in their depths, heightened by the night.

“It weren’t supposed to be like this,” he growled as he tried to amble toward her.

Clara slid the hammer back. “Everyone gets what’s coming to them in the end, sheriff.”

She took a breath and let it out at the same time she pulled the trigger.

*

James Parker had loved Adelaide Morris since the first moment he met her.

She was fiery and firm, a heady tincture that served to instill clarity and vitality into an otherwise dull and monochromatic existence. James had spent the vast majority of his youth fulfilling every wish, every demand, that Addie had ever made of him. There was nothing else he could have done; she was the only woman who had ever understood him, who had ever spared him half an ounce of attention.

James had had to prove himself worthy when, after asking for her hand in marriage, her father had expressed his doubt. He’d become a deputy, rising swiftly through the ranks, all the while remaining unequivocally devoted to his Addie. And, true to her word, she turned away all suitors and insisted to her father that she would only ever marry her Jimmy, whether or not he approved.

They should’ve still been in New Austin, raising their daughter and perhaps a son, if Addie had deigned to give him one. He should’ve been the sheriff of Tumbleweed, bringing order to the wilds that lingered between the lower United States and the border of Mexico. James and Adelaide Parker should be living out the remainder of their years in contented solitude.

Instead, Adelaide Parker would live out the remainder of her days in an asylum, suffering under the crushing weight of the visions that tore her vibrant soul to shreds. Instead, their daughter lay rotting in the earth, torn from their grasp by typhoid two weeks after her fifth birthday.

Instead, James Parker, sheriff of Kingston in New Yorkshire, died at the hands of an outlaw in an abandoned mine, lost forever to his failures of time.

Chapter Text

Sheriff James Parker was dead.

Clara Howard stood above his body, the night stained with ash and gunpowder, and felt nothing—not the sting of regret, not an ounce of mercy.

She let out a breath as the heat of adrenaline left her cold and trembling in the night. The sound of gunshots and shouts still cut through the night but still she stood, staring at the body of the former sheriff.

He was dead. There was nothing left of him now but a memory, and even that would fade with the approaching dawn.

The cold steel of her revolver brought her back to herself. Clara glanced down at the gun, at the slightly worn surface. It seemed Mason hadn’t taken great care with his weapons, but it hadn’t stopped the thing from doing its job. Clara tightened her shaking fingers around the grip; there were five shots left.

Five shots, and miles to go before she was safely out of danger.

Clara slowly, carefully, crept to the edge of the shack and peered into the night. The flames from the conflagration had lessened somewhat but the hellish glow still glared brightly against the night.

It was a rare and welcome bit of luck. Bennett and Parker’s men would be otherwise occupied, but whoever had set upon the mine would soon make their presence known. She couldn’t risk a fight with O’Driscolls, or whatever members of the Jack Hall gang still lingered in these parts. Clara instilled a bit more of her faded strength into her fatigued muscles and took off at a low run.

The darkness was a heavy curtain draped across the valley. It was difficult to make out the hulking shapes of shacks, crates, and other detritus left behind when the mine shuttered its doors and faded into the wilds of New Yorkshire. Clara went as fast as she dared, slipping once or twice when her muscles refused to obey her commands.

She slipped around back one of one of the former mining buildings and nearly stumbled against the wall. The worn, splintered wood bit into her sweat-dampened skin as her chest heaved, her spent lungs desperate for air that wasn’t clogged with coal and smoke and death. She bent forward, bracing her hands on her shaking knees, and considered her options.

There had to be an entrance to the mine. She closed her eyes and searched through tattered memories. But just as it’d been difficult to see in the dark through her short burst of a sprint, it was equally hard to sift through the tumult that clattered through her mind. Clara pressed the heel of her hand to her head and forced the chaos to still.

There’d been a building behind the fire—a tall one, with something that’d looked like a snaking, winding path that led back into the valley. She was in a mine, so the building must have been the depository. The valley was home to tents and shacks, which could only mean that she hadn’t come across the entrance yet. Clara lowered her hand and lifted her head, wincing against the pain that sliced down her back.

She couldn’t see much in the gloom, but she was sure she could just make out the line where the shacks and tents broke, and the valley splayed wide toward the small ripples of hills that hugged the mine. She craned her neck a bit more and focused her gaze as hard as she could.

There it was—a small, barely visible break in the hills.

It was the entrance. It had to be; even if it wasn’t, Clara was swiftly running out of options.

She took one long, tepid breath of air and let it sit in her lungs before expelling it. She’d have to run again; she’d never been built for it and would much rather take her chances in a battle of wits or blades instead of punishing her body in such a brutal, unforgiving way. But she couldn’t simply saunter out of the mine with her head held high. Clara squeezed her knees and braced herself.

There’d be time to rest later. First, she had to get out of this godforsaken place.

She straightened and pushed away from the wall. Her body was stiff and begging for reprieve that she could not afford to give. Clara’s hand absently brushed against the revolver tucked her into her waistband and quietly reminded herself of the five bullets she had left. Clara braced to run, to push toward the break in the hills she’d spotted in the dark. She’d hardly taken half a step forward before she heard something behind her.

She froze, bracing her hand against the structure at her back. Clara’s breaths came in short gasps as she listened, straining her ears for the source of the sound.

Perhaps it’d been nothing; perhaps her already compromised state was playing havoc with her mind. The distant sound of conflict drowned out everything else, but Clara still couldn’t shake the feeling that she’d heard something.

If she had to warrant a guess, it was the sound of boots shuffling through the dirt.

Clara swallowed, her throat wretchedly dry and rasping. She forced her lungs to breathe evenly as she turned quietly, slowly, toward where she thought she heard the sound.

At first, bittersweet relief flooded her—there was nothing there, nothing but the darkness and shadows of the night. But then her eyes focused, the fog of fatigue momentarily clearing long enough for one of the shadows to take a distinct form.

Clara’s heart thundered in her chest. The shadow was a person—a man—and he was looking right at her.

She couldn’t shoot him—she’d never been a good shot, and she wasn’t about to waste the precious few bullets that remained in her revolver. Clara silently cursed the loss of her weapons. She hadn’t thought about searching for them after dispatching Mason; there hadn’t been time. Her hand itched for a knife—with that, she knew she wouldn’t have missed.

There was nothing for it, then. Clara looked out toward the valley, in the direction where her salvation lay in wait. She’d have to run and hope she lost her tail in the dark or came up with a better alternative.

“Shit,” she breathed as she took her hand from the wall. Clara waited a moment and, when the shadow made no move toward her, pulled in a full breath of air.

Then she set off at a run.

Her lungs burned. Clara pumped her arms as fast as she could as her boots pounded the packed dirt. Every step sent painful tremors through her bones, but she pushed on, weaving between the obstacles in her path.

It was no use. The man still followed her; she could hear the echo of his footsteps as they matched hers. Clara drew on the last reserves of her strength and ran on, putting on as much speed as she could muster.

Still, he followed; still, she was remained out of reach of salvation.

Clara chanced a glance over her shoulder at her pursuer. Her speed jostled her vision and the darkness was a shroud around his form, but she could see him cutting through the dark with ease. This wasn’t a race she could win, that much she already knew.

She faced forward again, narrowly avoiding a large divot in the ground. Clara scrambled to regain her speed, but she was spent. Her muscles burned and soon enough she’d have to stop running.

But there were only five shots left.

Clara’s eyes roved the dark, searching the skeletons of the past for anything that might be of use to her. But, as her poor penchant for luck would have it, there was nothing to do but run. Fine, then—if she couldn’t outrun him, then maybe she could outwit him.

It would cost her, to be sure; the cost might be more than she was willing to give, but her choice had already been made. Clara counted ten more steps—ten more agonizing, lung-bursting steps.

On the tenth, she forced her legs to stop. The momentum she’d picked up was fierce, despite its inability to carry her out of range of her pursuer. Rather than let it consume her, Clara used it to pivot on her heel as she drew her revolver. She took aim, slid the hammer back, and held her finger over the trigger.

The figure stuttered to a stop, his boots sliding briefly in the dirt. Clara held still and kept aim, even as her lungs gasped for air. She wouldn’t fire, not yet—not until he made the first move.

“Don’t come any closer,” she hissed.

Her eyes held the figure in check. Clara watched with grim satisfaction as he slowly raised his hands in a show of surrender. She loosened her grip ever so slightly on the trigger; she might yet be able to save the bullets for better use.

But then the silhouette of the figure began to take shape. Clara’s vision cleared from the veil of adrenaline, allowing just enough clarity to seep through. It was easier now to make out the details that had been elusive when she’d first taken notice of the figure.

Broad shoulders.

A strong, confident stance.

A hat, pulled low over an already shadowed face.

Clara’s arm trembled. These details shouldn’t feel familiar, not in his place, where their presence was impossible. But even in the dark, even with the threat of death hanging over her head, Clara recognized the shape and wondered how it’d taken her this long to notice.

It couldn’t be, and yet it was.

As if to prove that reason hadn’t entirely left her, a break in the clouds let through enough moonlight to douse most of the darkness in its pale, wan light. It crept over the figure like dawn, erasing the shadows and bringing already familiar features to startling, unmistakable clarity.

It wasn’t one of Parker and Bennett’s men come to hunt her down.

It wasn’t an O’Driscoll, or Jack Hall gang member.

It was Arthur Morgan who, against all odds, had found her.

*

Arthur Morgan had spent most of his life on the run.

He ran after his mother died, after those men wrenched the life from his bastard father’s useless body. He ran to stave off hunger, to hide from the world that no longer seemed to accept him. He ran until he fell straight into the hands of Dutch van der Linde and Hosea Matthews and, for a little while, Arthur thought that maybe he’d finally found a reason to stay put. They’d clothed and fed him, gave him a place to sleep that wasn’t a piss-stained back alley, or the hidden loft of a barn.

But they’d been running, too. And Arthur followed, because they were running towards something—Dutch never said what it was, but Arthur believed in it all the same. He’d let his feet carry him on, toward whatever distant horizon his adoptive fathers could see but that still eluded Arthur. But they never stopped running for long.

They didn’t stop after Arthur met Mary Gillis and foolishly thought he might have a life with her—a real one. They didn’t stop after Eliza and Isaac, after Arthur strayed as far as he could from the binding roots of fatherhood. And just when he’d thought they might finally find a place to settle in the mountains of New Yorkshire, Arthur Morgan found himself running again, this time after a woman had stolen money from right under this nose and she had him running after her ever since.

Hers was a chase without end, a hunt without quarry. Claramae Howard was a thief; she’d stolen money from him and more besides, and Arthur had always managed to find himself following whatever lead she left for him. So, he wasn’t entirely surprised when he found himself chasing through the dark of a forgotten mine to find her.

Maybe---maybe he’d always been running toward her. He’d just been too foolish to see it.

Unfortunately, she was probably going to end up shooting him.

Arthur held still; he’d had enough guns pointed at him to know that even the slightest movement was enough to upset the careful balance of an itchy trigger finger. His eyes followed her as Clara slowly, carefully, stepped to her left.

He didn’t move when he saw realization dawn on her face. Arthur kept still when her trembling arm slowly, slowly, began to lower the gun to her side. He kept his feet grounded even the though the urge to go to her, to make sure she was whole and hale, very nearly threatened to overwhelm him.

Mae,” he called softly into the night. “It’s me.”

Her brow furrowed with shock as she breathed, “Arthur?”

His heart clenched painfully in his chest. His name fell dull and ragged from her lips, a far cry from the often boisterous, biting tone to which he’d grown accustomed. Arthur instinctively took a step forward—there was suddenly too much space between them, every inch a terrible, unforgiving mile, but he forced himself to remain where he was.

Clara looked fragile; he felt sure that if he moved too quickly, she would shatter like fractured glass. Arthur slowly, cautiously, lowered his hands as Clara blinked at him, shock still etched on her face.

The silence between them was mountainous. Arthur felt the pressure of it like a stone weight in his chest and he silently begged for her to say something, anything, that would make him sure that she was okay, that the Clara he knew hadn’t faded away with the memory of this place.

When she said nothing, Arthur desperately blurted, “Quite a mess you’ve gotten us into, Ms. Howard.”

He expected Clara to utter a searing, biting retort. He waited for the onslaught of her unique brand of sarcasm, the sort that always set his blood to boiling and his temper flaring. But she said nothing. She only stared at him as though he were more ghost than man.

The sense of wrongness slid like a knife between his ribs. Arthur frowned as he took note of the dirt smeared across her cheeks. His pulse quickened at the sight of her haggard and drawn appearance; her bright, verdant eyes shone like beacons through the dark, but it wasn’t hard to miss the red-rimmed bruises that marred them. Clara stood firm though Arthur could see the barely perceptible trembling that tremored through her body.

Then his eyes dipped to the ragged, pink manacles around her wrists.

He stared at them.

He stared until the world slowed to a sudden, crippling halt. He stared until his vision tinted with the reddish hue of the blood that stuck like flecks of rust to her skin. The monstrous rage that Arthur kept anchored in his heart railed against its cage, fracturing the brittle walls that kept it in control. Try as he might, he couldn’t tear his eyes from the sight of the wounds on Clara’s wrists. His throat grew parched, suddenly bloodthirsty for the men who’d done this to her.

Whoever had done this—whoever had hurt her—would not see the coming of the dawn. The last thing they would see would be his face as he dragged them straight to the bowels of hell.

Clara swallowed and absently smoothed the sweat-soaked, curled strands of hair out of her face. “You came for me?”

Her voice carved a path back out of the darkness. Arthur clenched his fists and tightened the reins on the blackness in his heart. His eyes slid to her and, though the flare of anger still remained, his vision slowly came back into proper focus. He opened his mouth to respond but found that he was entirely at a loss of what to say.

Every word he might have chosen felt flimsy and ill-equipped to properly convey an answer. Of course, he’d come for; there was nothing that could have kept him away. He would have searched the town, the state, the world, for her, if that’s what it took. He wanted to beg her forgiveness for being a goddamn fool and letting her go off on her own. But there was nothing for it; Arthur felt the words swirling in his mind, but they slipped out of his grasp. Eventually they flitted back into the recesses of his mind, where a strange, unknowable feeling had begun to take root. Arthur couldn’t say how, but he knew that if brought that feeling to light, if he tried to put words to it, it would shatter the world as he knew it.

All of this amounted to a few, woefully inadequate words: “Of course I came. You was in trouble.”

Clara let out a long breath and continued to stare at him. Arthur felt a burst hot anger at his own stupidity. This was why he kept his mouth shut—his words could never convey what he wanted, so he relied on bullets instead.

He smoothed his expression and cleared his throat. “You’re part of this gang,” he said with a vague gesture in her direction. “Besides, I knew I weren’t ever going to hear the end of it if I didn’t risk my neck coming out here to—"

He never got the chance to finish. Clara ran toward him and threw her arms around his neck.

Arthur couldn’t move, couldn’t think. His heart slammed against his ribs.

She was touching him…she was embracing him.

And Arthur had no idea what to do.

He shouldn’t allow this. The instinct to push her away roared to life, drowning out the intoxicating sensation of her touch, her warmth. Arthur knew the longer she touched him, the more the dark thing in his heart would seep into her and taint her with its cold, deathly touch.

He’d tried this before.

He’d tried tenderness and affection, tried to hold them in his calloused, bloodied hands. But the thing inside him, the monster anchored in his heart, was never sated by these hopeful, gentle things. He was a killer, a liar—goodness was a foreign ideal, a dream eternally turned to ash by the nightmare he’d created for himself. Arthur’s touch was necrotic, poisonous, and if Clara didn’t move away from him, the dark thing would ensure she was torn from his grasp.

It always did. That’s why they all left him in the end.

Arthur knew this—he knew this and still found it impossible to ignore the way her body felt against his. He waited for her to discover her mistake, to pull away before his touch could poison her. But Clara clung to him; her body molded to his in ways he couldn’t have imagined. Every breath he took was filled with the scent of her. She was in everywhere, in everything, and Arthur couldn’t begin to fathom the idea of being torn away from this.

Clara made him feel…real.

But this feeling could never last.

Arthur placed his hands gently at her waist. He steeled himself to push her away, to accept the emptiness of solitude rather than the blessed solace of her warmth. But his hands slid across her back of their own accord, his fingers sliding over the smooth fabric of her shirt. Before Arthur could consider what he’d done, his arms wrapped around her, holding her close enough that every breath he took was filled with the calming perfume of lavender and mint.

Clara’s arms tightened around him. He wanted to hold her—no, he needed to hold her. The need was painfully strong and all he could do to alleviate it was to pull her closer, until he could feel every inch, every curve. Every ounce of fury he’d ever felt faded with her touch; every nightmare he’d ever lived fell away when Arthur felt her hand cup the nape of his neck.

He pressed his cheek to the top of her head as his fingers knotted in her shirt. “It’s okay, Mae. I got you.”

Arthur shivered when her fingertips brushed against the shorn strands of his swept back hair. “I know, Arthur,” she whispered against his neck.

A distant voice screamed at Arthur to let go. It warned him not to fall into the trap that would eventually ensnare him—both of them—if he didn’t end this now. But the longer he held her, the more his senses became overwhelmed with her scent, her warmth, the more Arthur was sure he didn’t want to let go.

She was safe here—she was safe with him. As long as Arthur held Clara, no one else would ever hurt her again.

But it was Clara who pulled away, her hands sliding down his arms with a lingering touch. Arthur felt the loss like a bullet to the heart, but he followed suit, resolutely dropping his arms back to his sides without a word. Clara looked up at him, her green eyes softer than he could ever remember seeing them. That thing within him stirred again, begging to be brought to the surface, but Arthur clamped down on it and shoved it deeper and out of sight.

He swallowed and took a shaking breath. Already her scent was drifting back out into the night. He watched as Clara lifted her hand toward him and Arthur froze. He wanted her to touch him again. He needed her to touch him again, to make him feel like he was human, like he was real.

Instead, Clara clenched the hand into a fist and sent it straight into his shoulder.

Arthur frowned and looked at the spot where she’d hit him. Clara placed her hands firmly on her hips, glared at him, and said, “You could’ve come a bit sooner, you know.”

This was the Clara he’d expected to find. He hadn’t been prepared for the Clara who’d embraced him, who’d touched him with a tenderness he didn’t deserve. Arthur relished the presence of her inner fire, the one that so often infuriated and frustrated him.

He raised an eyebrow at her and replied, “And you could’ve done something other than get kidnapped.”

Clara pressed her lips together and looked away. Arthur cursed himself for the hundredth time that day for being a goddamn fool whose words were better left in his addled mind.

“It was the sheriff,” she said tersely after a moment. “He set me up.”

A memory burned its way to the forefront of Arthur’s mind: the hot sun of the Kingston afternoon; the insurmountable tension that tethered him to Clara; the men with metal stars pinned to their chests; and Sheriff James Parker, his eyes hooded with mystery and deceit.

He should have known. Arthur should never have watched Clara ride off on her own; he should have followed her, rode with her to whatever end. If he had, she wouldn’t have ended up wounded and dragged into this hellish, dreadful place. If he had, she wouldn’t have had to suffer for his foolishness.

Arthur felt a hand on his arm. He looked down, startled out of his dark thoughts, and found Clara’s palm splayed across his heated, taut skin. It was a strange, really, how a gesture so simple had enough strength to supplant the fury and anger to which Arthur had long held. “He’s dead,” she said as Arthur lifted his gaze to meet hers. Her eyes followed his every movement, holding him steady and keeping him grounded. “I killed him.”

Arthur’s only regret was that he wouldn’t have the opportunity to do it himself. Clara pulled her hand away and let out a shallow breath. “There’s something else. He was working for another man, someone named Eden Bennett.”

Arthur frowned. She’d never mentioned this name before. “Not Byers?”

Clara’s lips curdled into the barest hint of a snarl. She shook her head and answered, “His shadow. But if Eden’s here, then that means Byers is—”

She looked up sharply at the sound of footsteps. Clara fumbled for her weapon, but Arthur had already drawn his and raised it toward the shadows. He instinctively moved in front of Clara, shielding her from sight with his bulk. He wasn’t at all surprised when she sidestepped him and took aim beside him.

Charles Smith slipped out of the darkness and jogged up to meet them. Clara let out a relieved sigh as she lowered her half-raised weapon. Arthur holstered his and Charles slung his repeater over his shoulder.

“Good,” he said with only the barest hint of relief. “You found her.”

Arthur raised his eyebrows. “Found her? She nearly shot me.”

Clara ignored him and clapped a hand on Charles’s shoulder. A hot flare of jealousy clattered through Arthur’s heart.

“Thank you, Charles,” Clara said, her voice heavy with sincerity. “You didn’t have to come, too.”

Arthur felt a swift crest of relief when her hand slipped off his shoulder and silently chastised himself for ever having felt it in the first place. Charles gave him a mischievous smirk and replied, “Someone has to watch Arthur’s back once in a while.” He turned to Clara and added pointedly, “And yours, too, it seems.”

Arthur glanced behind them. There were no sounds of pursuit; he had no doubt Charles could handle the men after his explosion drew them out of their hiding places. But a life on the run had hardened Arthur to being lulled into complacency; suspicion tugged at his instincts and he turned back to his companions, his face grave.

“Let’s get the hell out of here,” he murmured, laying a hand on his weapon. He looked to Clara and asked, “You said you killed the sheriff. What about this Bennett feller?”

Clara let out a frustrated breath and shook her head. “I don’t know.”

It was no matter, Arthur thought as he drew his holstered weapon. They’d find the bastard soon enough, and when they did…Arthur clenched his jaw and looked over at Charles. “How the hell do we get out of here?”

His fellow outlaw indicated a direction with his chin. “There’s a path that cuts through the hill and out of the mine off to the east.”

Arthur nodded. There was no sense questioning Charles; he could read the earth and the landscape almost as well as Hosea could read a book. “Lead the way.”

They followed without hesitation. Arthur instinctively kept close to Clara and he half expected her to lash out in protest. But she only cast him an appreciative, albeit slightly curious, glance, and allowed him to match his steps to hers. The thought of letting her out of his sight for even a moment was near enough to drive him mad.

He’d already let her go off on her own once, despite the promise he’d made to fight at her side. Arthur wasn’t going to make the same mistake twice.

*

They ran until Clara’s legs nearly gave out.

It was a conscious effort on her worn body’s part to slow her down, Clara realized once her knees buckled. One minute she was running solidly beside Arthur as they trailed Charles through the dark; the next, her muscles simply gave up, heedless of the urgency surrounding them, and sent her crumbling like a sack of Pearson’s grain to the ground.

She fell hard on her useless knees and just managed to brace the worst of the fall with her hand. An inescapable wave of exhaustion flooded every inch of her, bowing her shoulders with its impossible weight. Clara fought against it, digging her fingers into the dirt as her limbs trembled. She forced her eyes wide, until the smoke and coal-thickened air pricked at them like a thousand unseen needles.

If she closed her eyes for even a second, Clara knew she was done for.

Even her lungs had slowed their steady breathing, a silent warning for Clara not to give in to the weakness that Bennett and Parker had forced upon her. Clara clenched her hand into a fist, her nails scraping through the packed dirt. Byers and his ilk—they’d thought they could break her, whittle her away until there was nothing left of her will. Parker had already paid with his life—she still had a score to settle with Bennett. Byers, on the other hand, was another battle for another time.

Arthur knelt beside her. Clara could hardly turn her head to look at him as he laid a careful, tentative hand on her back. The touch was woefully inadequate in comparison to the feeling of his arms around her.

She hadn’t meant to embrace him.

A small part of her, perhaps the more practical, less resolutely suborn part, had been resigned to the fact that she might not see Arthur again. Clara had buried it there in the darkness of her prison and refused to acknowledge it, but the seed of fear had already been planted. It only served her right, after all; Clara had selfishly left him behind when he’d already pledged himself to her.

But when she’d embraced him, Clara knew she’d done it to prove to herself that he was real, that she hadn’t conjured his likeness out of desperation and futility. But there was something else in that embrace, something terrifying in its power, and Clara wasn’t sure she wanted to bring it to life. Instead, she’d relished the feeling of his warmth and strength as his arms wrapped protectively around her. It meant she’d been wrong to believe in doubt and the threat of finality; it meant that, despite all she’d done and said to him, Arthur had still come for her.

All of this passed through her tattered mind in the space of a single heartbeat. Arthur looked at her, his brow creased with concern. “You alright?”

Clara managed a half-hearted nodded. “Just a bit worse for wear, I’m afraid,” she replied with some difficulty.

Arthur’s hand drifted from her back and Clara immediately its absence. “Maybe you should hang back, let Charles and I handle business while you rest.”

Despite her weariness, anger spiked through her. She glared at Arthur, a scathing retort already on her lips, and found a playful yet wary smile on his face.

“Just making sure you ain’t given up just yet, Ms. Howard,” he said as he stood up and gave her room to rise.

She got to her feet, though it required far more of her limited strength than she cared to admit. Arthur’s hand hovered within her reach, a proffered lifeline should she require it. But Clara hadn’t fallen quite so far as to be unable to help herself. She ignored it and replied, “I’ve hardly given up.”

The corner of Arthur’s mouth pulled up in the barest hint of a grin. “I’d expect nothing less, Ms. Howard.”

Clara lifted her chin with more effort than she could spare. “Of course, you wouldn’t—you know better, Mr. Morgan.”

A soft whistle cut through the night. Arthur and Clara glanced toward the sound and found Charles few yards away, urgently waving them forward. They joined him where he huddled behind a dilapidated stack of crates, each one still nailed shut and stamped with bold letters that spelled RELIANCE.

Charles pointed through the gloom. Clara let her tired eyes adjust to the swath of darkness that covered the valley. There was a small break in the gentle slope of hills that formed the valley which housed the once vibrant mine. Two wooden pillars jutted up from the ground, their height only slightly bowed with time. A wooden sign hung between them, its bulk swaying slightly in the nightly wind that pushed through the landscape.

Clara felt a surge of triumph wash through her. But it wasn’t just the entrance that had snagged Charles’ attention. The distinct shadows of men loomed in the entrance like wraiths, effectively blocking off their escape.

“Shit,” she muttered.

Arthur’s expression mirrored her sentiment. Charles, on the other hand, remained stoic with grim resolve. “I count ten,” he announced.

Clara glanced sidelong at Arthur. “Guess you didn’t get everybody.”

“No, I guess not,” Arthur growled as he tightened his grip on his gun.

Charles glanced around. The hills were short here, more ripples in the otherwise flat valley. The closer they stretched on toward the entrance, the more trees and thick shrubs coated their summits.

“If we cut through the hills,” Charles whispered thoughtfully, “we can cut around the back of them, pick them off one by one.”

Bennett had to be down there somewhere. Clara couldn’t make out the faces of the men in the dark at this distance, but she could feel his presence there in the shadow, hidden among the secrets to which the mine held firm.

Charles was right—they could pick them off one by one, if they were careful and quiet. But Clara was done with care and quietude; she was tired of tiptoeing through the dark while men waited to tear her down. No; she wouldn’t go quietly into the night.

She would burn through it in a hail of gunfire and fury.

Clara held up the revolver, the barrel glinting in the slim moonlight. “You two go through the hills. I’ll meet you at the entrance.”

Arthur and Charles both turned to her, their eyes wide with incredulity.

“You’ll what?” Charles hissed in exclamation. He stabbed a finger at the men. “There’s ten of them, Clara. You can’t fight them all on your own.”

She glared at him with unmasked ire. Arthur sighed, dropped his head, and shook it in with obvious, heavy resignation. He tapped Charles on the shoulder and said, “Go on. Get the horses and meet us back here.”

Clara would never admit out loud, but she was fiercely grateful that Arthur had chosen to stay with her. Not that she needed him in order to fight, mind you—she just felt steadier, more confident, with him around, and that was enough to be confusing in of itself.

Charles narrowed his eyes. “I can fight, you know.”

“Better than most,” Clara quickly affirmed. “But we need someone to watch our backs once in a while, don’t we?”

Charles opened his mouth to protest but closed it the moment he saw Clara’s warning, terse expression. He sighed and took hold of his repeater, casting one more cautious glance in his companions’ direction. “Be careful—and be ready.”

Clara and Arthur watched as Charles crept up into the hills, every footstep as silent as breath. Only when he was finally out of sight, swallowed up by the heavy shadows, did they turn their attention back to the task at hand.

She dug deep into the reserves of her strength. It was nearly spent; the longer they crouched behind the crate, the more unwilling her body would be to move when she finally willed it.

Arthur shifted and bent an arm atop one of the crates. “I ain’t too sure I like this plan of yours, Ms. Howard.”

Clara smirked and placed a hand on the crate beside him for balance. “I don’t exactly remember inviting you to join me. And you never like my plans.”

He chuckled darkly and shook his head. “Seeing as how they usually involve me getting shot at, I ain’t too inclined to like them.”

The men shouted orders at one another. They froze for a moment and listened, each of them concerned that Charles might have been spotted. But they were only shouting at one another to hold tight in their formation; many of them had already begun to wander away from their post, sensing the futility in preparing for an escape that might never come.

Clara let out a frustrated breath. Where the hell was Bennett?

“Well,” she sighed out. “One day I may just surprise you, Mr. Morgan.”

Admittedly, it wasn’t much of a plan. There were too many variables, too many avenues in which matters could be swiftly wrenched from their very limited control. But Clara trusted Arthur—she always had, despite their tenuous beginnings and…whatever existed between them now. Besides, Bennett was out there; the men at the entrance wouldn’t have known to mobilize without his explicit instruction. But Bennett was just another pawn in a game he’d been destined to lose. Clara had played far longer than she cared to remember; it was time to topple the pawn and scorch a path of righteous vengeance to the king.

In the end, she’d be the one to hang Byers with the noose of his hollow crown.

Arthur kept his eyes squarely on their targets, ever the hunter despite being one of the hunted. “I’ll take the left,” he whispered. “You take the right.

Clara rallied against the exhaustion that plagued every muscle and sinew. There were still miles to go before she was free, and she intended to walk each and every one before the night was out. “This is my plan, you know,” she muttered in reply.

She couldn’t make it out in the darkness, but Clara knew he was smirking at her. Arthur reached for his hunting knife, his amble fingers wrapping around the handle with ease. He pulled it forth and passed it to her hilt-first.

“You ain’t never been a good shot,” he explained, his shadowed smirk widening.

Clara took the proffered weapon. The loss of her own knives was a keen one, but she buried it; there was no time for sentimentality. A quick flick of her wrist proved that the balance of the blade was serviceable, albeit a bit ungainly for her tastes. Clara didn’t bother to inspect the blade; Arthur’s care for his weapons was as unparalleled as his ability to wield them.

She looked at him and a whisper of feeling brushed against her tired, aching heart. “Together, then?”

This time, when Arthur looked at her, Clara found that the same fluttering feeling—something like hope, perhaps—lingered in his summer eyes.

“Together,” he answered.

*

It didn’t take long.

It rarely did, when Arthur gave into the beast that lingered just beneath the human guise he wore. Decades of pent up rage manifested into a creature so bloodthirsty, so willing to cut down any who dared stand in its path, that it was a wonder Arthur was able to control it at all. It’d been born of the turmoil that defined his youth; it’d been molded by Dutch’s machinations and honed by Hosea’s firm but calming hand. Possibly he was made of nothing more than this thing he carried with him, his few and very far between deeds of decency notwithstanding. Perhaps Arthur had always been a wild, untamed creature bridled only by the promise of one day being set free.

But as Arthur sprinted from their hiding place, he knew it didn’t much matter in that moment. He was already counting the men, his instincts laying out the path each bullet would take.

These weren’t men—they were targets. They’d taken Clara, conspired to harm her. Every inch of Arthur’s being understood that if he hadn’t come when he did, they would have wrenched her firmly out of his grasp.

No, they weren’t men. They were cowards. Arthur could tell the measure of a man simply by looking at him. Cowards had a way of carrying themselves, replete with demeanors that were nothing more than a mimicry of confidence that exuded a hollow sense of power. These men, the ones who had followed Bennett’s orders, did so not because he was in charge, but because they feared for their lives.

And fear they should. But it wouldn’t save them in the end—they’d be dead before they could spare a thought for their sins, and Arthur Morgan would make sure they paid for them in full.

He slid behind one of the posts that still held the mine’s sign. Arthur pressed his back against the wood as gunfire ricocheted through the night. He took a breath, let the monster within take control, and expelled the air from his lungs as he turned and aimed.

Arthur dropped two of them before they could even think to fire. One of them, perhaps a slightly less cowardly one but a fool, nonetheless, ran at Arthur in an attempt to ambush him from the side. He pivoted and, in one seamless motion, sent the butt of his gun into the man’s skull.

Bone cracked like brittle glass beneath his unforgiving steel. Arthur relished the sound of it as the man crumpled to the ground.

The remaining ones fired wildly, their erratic shots a testament to their fear. Arthur fed on it, fed the dark thing in his soul with the taste of it, as he ran at them. They didn’t bother to run for cover. The thickets and trees that coalesced on the hills were too thick here, too overgrown and wild from growing unchecked. Arthur’s gun swept through the night, sending bullet after bullet into the backs of men too afraid to face their deaths.

He didn’t miss. He knew he wouldn’t. Arthur could almost see the pounding veins in their necks, the hearts that stammered in their chests. The monster within him fed on fear as much as it did the blood of men who stood in his way.

It was over before it began.

Arthur stood among the fallen, their bodies sprawled and bleeding around him. Some were contorted, their limbs draped over branches and rocks. Others had simply fallen where they once stood; they were the ones who hadn’t even noticed the bullet lodged in their hearts.

He pulled in a long breath. The acrid stench of gunpowder filled his lungs and he held it for one second, then two. When Arthur exhaled, he buried the monster, sending it back to the black, rotted depths of his soul.

For now, at least. Eden Bennett still lingered about, yet another coward among the shadows. Arthur raised his gun, the cool steel calming some of the raw heat of power that still filled his veins.

His eyes swept back toward the entrance. They landed on Clara, who cut through the men with obvious effort but and deadly accuracy. Arthur felt a surge of pride as he watched her sidestep a particular foolish one and cut a path with his knife across his throat.

But Eden Bennett was still out there.

He was the one who would have taken Clara from him.

Arthur tightened his grip on the gun, bolstered his monstrous resolve, and slipped back into the fray. Whoever this Bennett was, he had a price on his head.

And a bullet with his name on it.

*

Clara felt the man’s blood spray across her cheek.

She stepped over his corpse as he fell to the ground. Another was just behind him, his gun raised and primed to fire. Clara didn’t think; she pulled the trigger, emptying her lungs as she did, and the bullet took care of the rest.

Her shots weren’t nearly as preternaturally accurate as Arthur’s, but they did they job. Each and every bullet she had left in the chamber was put to exacting use. Each one cut through the men who impeded her path, who had chosen to follow a man without understanding what the servitude meant. But she’d shown them. Their pockets might be heavy with coin, but their hearts were filled with lead—that was what service to Wyatt Byers got them.

When the dust settled, the entrance to the mine was strewn with bodies. Blood pooled in the dirt, feeding the dry and arid earth. Clara stood among the carnage, her blood pumping searing adrenaline through her fatigued, spent muscles. She glanced around, searching for the one face she had yet to see.

But Eden Bennett was nowhere to be found.

He was near, though. Clara knew it to be true as she bent, wincing at the pain in her back, and swiped the blade of Arthur’s knife on her pants. These men had only ever been a means to an end; now that that means was ended, Bennett had no one else to throw her way.

But he was here. Clara knew he wouldn’t—couldn’t—leave without her in tow. She slipped the knife into her boot for now and straightened, swiping the back of her palm against her damp forehead. Bennett was many things but an insensible was not one of them. To leave Clara here in New Yorkshire was tantamount to a death sentence; Byers would never accept his return without her, and she knew from experience that Eden Bennett thought her skills overhyped and decidedly lacking when tested against a man’s.

Clara’s eyes slid across the bodies at her feet. She’d love a chance to personally prove him wrong.

But he was a viper, the sort that tended to hide in the darkness rather than face the jury of the light. Clara steadied her breathing and glanced around, searching through the night for any sight of where he might be. She crept among the shadows, her revolver held tightly at the ready.

She wondered if she should search for Arthur, make sure he was alright. But the moment the thought crossed her mind, Clara dashed it away; he was more than capable of taking care of himself. Besides, she considered with a fresh wave of vengeance, she and Eden Bennett had a score to settle.

This ended here and now, one way or the other.

Something wasn’t right. The feeling slid across her skin like oil as her instincts screamed at her to be cautious. Clara fought through the onslaught and threw caution to the wind; wherever the bastard was hiding, she would find him. And when she did, she’d prove to him that she was worth more than he’d ever given her credit for. Clara Howard would prove to him that she was more than what Wyatt Byers had tried to make of her.

But the night was quiet—too quiet. The absence of sound was like a cacophonous din, and Clara nearly buckled beneath its weight. Even the gunshots had finally fallen into silence; even Arthur—

The hammer of a gun clicked solidly into place just behind her.

Clara froze, her spent limbs nearly buckling in the process.

“Drop the gun,” Eden Bennett ordered.

Clara clenched her jaw and bit back a vicious curse. She kept her hold on the gun. Her eyes darted through the dark in search of Arthur and found no sign of him.

Her heart leapt in her chest. If Bennett had snuck up on her, did that mean that Arthur…?

No. He was fine. Arthur was fine—he had to be, because if Bennett had touched even a single hair on his head, she would tear him apart with her bare hands.

The gun stabbed into her back with deadly insistence. “Drop it, now,” Eden growled.

There was nothing else she could do. Clara slowly peeled her fingers away from the revolver. She bent slowly and let the weapon fall to the ground at her feet. She felt the barrel of the gun follow each and every movement, daring her to take even a single step out of line. But in this, at least, Clara would be compliant. She straightened, her muscles screaming as she rose inch by inch, and raised her hands in a show of surrender.

Clara heard him shift behind her, but he didn’t lay a hand on her; that was against Wyatt’s rules, after all. He hissed in her ear, “I never took you for being this fucking stupid, Clara.”

She forced some steadiness into her limbs. “And I never really took you for being much of a man,” she muttered in reply, “and yet, here we are.”

Eden wheeled back and sent the butt of the gun into her back. Clara fell hard to the ground as pain radiated from her spine. Breath spilled from her lips as she braced her hands on the ground, the pain strong enough to momentarily disorient her. Her palm slid through the dirt, but she caught herself, biting back a yelp as a fresh wave of pain cascaded across her back.

The bastard would pay for that one. She likely would have told him so, if it weren’t for the cold press of the barrel against her skull.

“This is over,” Eden said, his tone reprehensibly smooth and devoid of his previous anger. “It’s time we go home and put all of this mess behind us.”

Clara gritted her teeth and pressed away from the earth. “Go to hell.”

Eden let out a long, impatient sigh. Clara bristled as the barrel pressed with deadly insistence into her head. “Clara, I really didn’t want it to come to this,” he said with mock sympathy, “but if you don’t get up, I will shoot you. I’ll take you back piece by piece, if I have to.”

Byers had spent years trying to break her. He’d torn at her bit by bit, piece by piece, until each and every inch of her belonged to him. But even in the moments when Clara was sure she was no longer the person she used to be, she still held onto a single, burning ember of hope. Eden could shoot her, tear her to piece, if he wanted, but nothing would smother that single kernel of wild, fleeting hope.

No one—not Byers, not Bennett, not anyone—would take that away from her.

“Shoot me, then,” she dared as she stared off into the night. She would face it head on, as she had all along; even the darkest night would eventually be banished by the coming dawn. “We all get what’s coming to us in the end, Eden.”

Really, it was a rather improbable bluff.

Clara knew Arthur would have a few choice words for this particular plan of hers. All the while Bennett had been talking, her hand had crept through the dirt and shadow to where the handle of Arthur’s knife still jutted from her boot. By some divine stroke of luck, Eden hadn’t noticed it when he came upon her.

That was his first mistake. The second was thinking she would ever go back to the life she’d left behind.

All she had to do was keep him talking. All she had to do was believe that he wouldn’t shoot her, that she would have enough precious moments to snatch the knife, turn, and plunge it into Bennett’s gun before he could fire off a shot.

But she was made of wild, fleeting hope, and that was more than enough to light up the dark.

“I guess you’re right about one thing,” Eden said as he held the barrel still. “We all get what’s coming to us in the end. It’s about time you got yours.”

Clara breathed a fresh rush of air into her lungs. Her fingertips brushed against the handle of the knife. She would need to be quick. If she allowed even the smallest room for error, then it was all over.

Clara paused. She emptied her lungs and pulled the knife from her boot.

Before she could move, a single gunshot rang through the night.

The world crashed to a startling, breathless halt.

And then she felt air trickle into her lungs from cold, numbed lips. Clara’s hand crept to the back of her head, her fingers pressing with barely controlled insistence through her hair and into her scalp where the phantom of Eden’s gun still sent cold, deathly shivers across her skin.

There was nothing.

She wasn’t dead, then.

Clara whirled, nearly stumbling she went. If Bennett hadn’t fired the shot—if she was still marvelously, unbelievably alive—then what in the hell had happened?

Her mouth dropped open in surprise when she saw Eden Bennett on his back. One weak, grappling hand clawed at a bleeding wound in his shoulder. A long, tight moan barely managed to escape his tightly clenched teeth. His legs kicked at the ground, the heels of his boots leaving pain-crazed scorch marks in the earth. With some effort, Clara lifted her eyes away from Bennett and found the true source of the gunshot.

Arthur Morgan stood above him, his revolver still smoking and his eyes trained firmly on Clara.

“You alright, Mae?” The question was wrung with concern and rigid with barely contained fury.

Clara swallowed, unsure of how to answer at first. She looked back at Bennett, her eyes lingering on the wound that seeped dark blood through his fingers. Arthur never missed a shot; his skill bordered on preternatural.

No, he hadn’t missed—he’d shot him there on purpose.

Clara turned her attention back to him. If she didn’t know him, she was sure she would find him as fearsome and terrifying as she knew he looked. He seemed cut from the darkness, born from the terrors that lived in the shadows. Nothing of the Arthur she knew was in his eyes; they were frosted over with a killer’s intent. Every inch of him was cut with the cold, unflinching aura of an outlaw.

She swallowed and nodded to Arthur as she slowly climbed to her feet. Clara’s knees nearly buckled, and Arthur’s hand darted out to her, his fingers just barely touching her arm.

“I’m alright,” she insisted as she straightened and stood by him.

Eden writhed on the ground at her feet. His head snapped toward her, his lips peeled back from his teeth in a primal, pain-filled snarl.

“You bitch,” he growled, the words laced with vehement hatred. “This is all your fault!”

Clara said nothing as Arthur turned his icy glare to Bennett and kicked him squarely in the gut.

Eden crumpled in on himself and let out a long, strangled groan. Clara stared at him and considered the man she knew for all those years back in New Jersey. Eden had never been exactly nice to her; perhaps he’d shown her a bit of mercy now and then, on the rare occasion where he chose to spite the man who employed him. She wondered if maybe she should repay the rare, lukewarm kindness he’d once shown her; maybe now, of all the moments in her life, was the time to reach toward a bit of redemption for her sins.

But Clara Howard had long since spent what little mercy she held in her heart for men like Eden Bennett.

She tilted her head at the pathetic, whimpering man at her feet. Something dark and crooked sifted its way through her heart. Clara bent down, ignoring the soreness that radiated like wildfire through her limbs, and stared at Bennett. Darkness danced through her soul; there was still something to wrench out of him, something of more value than the faded morals and ragged remains of his heart.

 “Where is he?” she asked, her voice calm despite the rage in her heart.

Eden lifted his head toward her. His eyes were clouded with pain, but they sharpened into focus once they landed on her. Clara watched his jaw tightened and his lips clamp shut. Ever the dedicated jester, then; even now, with the wound in his shoulder seeping his life’s essence, his first inclination was to protect Wyatt Byers.

Clara drew Arthur’s knife and held it in front of her. The blade glinted with the promise of pain. “Please don’t make me ask again.”

Eden’s eyes slid between Clara and Arthur. “Close,” he bit out through pain-clenched teeth. “He’s always been close.”

Before she knew it, she leapt at Eden, gripping his wounded shoulder with fingers eager to hurt and tear and maim. The knife in her hand flew to his throat, the tip landing precisely where his most crucial lifeline throbbed in his sweat-slicked, pale neck.

Eden let out a single, guttural howl of pain before biting it back as her knife ever so lightly nipped at his throat. His chest heaved as the tumult of fresh agony rocked him when she pressed her fingers into the taut, bloody muscle near the wound.

The dark thing within her heart leapt with unfettered pleasure. All those years spent trapped in a world not of her making, chained by a single man’s whims, roared with their desire for vengeance. Eden knew where Byers was, and she would draw out the words even if she had to cut them one by one out of his throat.

“Where is he?” she demanded, her voice tainted with the black-edged void of hysteria. “Tell me!”

Arthur said and did nothing. He only stood beside her, a careful sentinel who understood the danger in stopping the blood-tinged maelstrom that pounded in her heart.

The fog of pain receded from Eden’s eyes just long enough for sinister, twisted intent to take its place. He lifted his head and leered at her, his teeth bared like a caged animal. “He’s in every shadow, every crevice,” he whispered to her.

The knife in her hand trembled.

“He’s in every nightmare and pleasant dream. Every decision you make, every road you take…he’s always there. He’s always been there, no matter how far you thought you ran.” Eden stiffened against another burst of pain.

It wasn’t enough. It would never be enough. Even now Eden sought to keep Byers’ most crucial secrets; even now, the ghosts of her past taunted her with their persistent, inescapable presence.

“He’ll find you, Clara,” Eden whispered. “And when he does, he’ll—”

Clara plunged the knife into his side. She watched as Eden Bennett’s eyes widened, as he sputtered and gasped as the knife cut through sinew and muscle. He let out a strangle cry as he fell hard against the ground, his body shaking as fresh blood began to seep around the knife. His eyes never left hers; they blazed with unimaginable hatred, both for her and for the world that had chewed him up and spat him back out with a second thought.

Clara pressed her lips together and tightened her grip on the handle. “If he wants me,” she whispered, “then he can come get me himself.”

She pulled the knife free and watched the light fade from Eden Bennett’s eyes.

*

The sun was just beginning to rise when they set out on the road back to Deepwater Pass.

Arthur kept a loose hold on the reins; Boadicea knew the way. She was impulsive, to be sure, but Arthur and the mare had a mutual understanding that very often transcended spoken word. Besides, he thought as he carefully shifted to glance over his shoulder, she understood that they were carrying precious cargo.

Clara let out a soft sigh. Her arms were draped lazily around his waist and her head was lay solidly on his shoulder.

Arthur swallowed and faced front. His stomach was a mess of mangled knots, the sort that required more consideration than not to undo. His eyes dipped to where Clara’s arms lay just above his hips.

Every breath brought forth another cacophonous din of his heartbeat that nearly drowned out the rest of the world. Not only was it wildly difficult to concentrate with Clara so close, but he was having a hard time reconciling the fact that he’d nearly lost her.

No, Arthur silently corrected himself. He didn’t come close to losing her. The thought implied some measure of possession and that was quite assuredly as far as one could possibly get from the truth. Clara didn’t belong to anyone, much less to Arthur Morgan.

He fought the urge to look at her again. The encounter with Bennett had taken whatever was left of Clara’s strength. She’d hardly been able to stumble to the horses when Charles finally arrived with Boadicea and Taima in tow. When Arthur had offered to help, she’d only slapped away his hand and grumbled, “I thought you were an outlaw, not a nursemaid.”

Despite her insistence to the contrary, Arthur had been the one to catch her when her hand slipped off the saddle and her foot nearly got tangled in the stirrup. Charles held her upright as Arthur mounted up and helped him lift Clara into the saddle.

True to form, Clara had griped endlessly about the matter. Even as they took the road less traveled away from Reliance Mine, she insisted on ensuring Arthur and Charles understood just how put off she was by their coddling behavior. Despite her criticisms, it hadn’t taken long for her arms to snake around Arthur’s waist (for balance, of course; Boadicea was a good horse, but that didn’t make the road any less treacherous) and for her head to settle comfortably against his shoulder (she’d more than earned a bit of rest, after all).

Arthur hadn’t been sure how to feel or what to do about it. Perhaps the most frustrating part was that Arthur didn’t entirely dislike the way her arms kept her flush against his back, or the way her warmth rivaled that of the oncoming sun. It was both infuriating and intoxicating, and all it did was make him feel more like a hazy-minded fool, which made him all the more unsettled and irritable.

Her touch was calming, he realized with a flood of heat to his cheeks. Arthur wasn’t sure why or how, but her presence seemed to quell the wildness inside him, enough for him to feel less like a caged animal and more…well, like a man, he supposed.

Charles rode quietly beside him. Eventually, he craned his neck to take a close look at Clara. After a moment, he said softly, “She’ll be okay. Just needs some rest.”

Arthur nodded stiffly. He tried not to move too much; if he did, her arms would brush against him and it made his stomach churn uncomfortably. “Sure,” he muttered uselessly in reply.

They rode in silence for a time. Dawn crept up along the horizon, crowning the earth in a halo of golden light. Exhaustion nipped at Arthur, but he pushed it aside; there’d be time to sleep when they were safely back at camp.

But the longer the silence crept on and the sounds of the waking world filled in the gaps, Arthur couldn’t help but turn his thoughts back to Bennett and, consequently, to Byers. His hands clenched on the reins as the memory of Bennett’s gun against Clara’s head filled every inch of his thoughts. The shot to the shoulder hadn’t been accident; Arthur very rarely missed his targets. Despite the rage that had filled him, he knew that Clara wouldn’t have forgiven him if he’d been the one to take Bennett’s life. This wasn’t his fight, after all, though for some reason it was beginning to feel more and more like it was. He didn’t regret it—instead, he relished the thought of it, of putting an end to the people who sought to tear Clara away from him.

Arthur gritted his teeth. No, not from him. It wasn’t like that. Clara wasn’t a thing to be possessed, a treasure to keep locked away. She was…

“Arthur?”

He started and looked over at Charles. “Huh?”

Charles raised an eyebrow at him. “I asked if you were going to tell me what’s going on.”

Arthur’s heart stuttered wildly in his chest. A swift and biting denial climbed to his lips until he realized that that wasn’t what Charles meant. He scratched absently at the back of his chin and let out a sigh.

“I don’t know the whole story,” he said with a quick glance at Clara. “She got mixed up with the wrong sort back in New Jersey, some man by the name of Byers.” He shrugged, realizing just how little he actually knew of Clara’s past. “Seems he ain’t quite willing to let bygones be bygones.”

Charles said nothing. He patted Taima’s neck, murmured something that sounded vaguely like encouragement, and finally looked back up at Arthur. “Do Dutch and Hosea know?”

Arthur pressed his lips together and shook his head.

Charles looked mildly surprised. “You’ll have to tell them sooner rather than later.”

“I know.” It felt viciously wrong to keep something from the men who’d made him what he was, but  it felt just as wrong, if not worse, to betray Clara’s trust.

It didn’t make much sense to Arthur, but that was how he felt, all the same.

Charles’s eyes lingered on him with their knowing look. “And,” he began cautiously, “you might want to talk to her sooner rather than later.”

Arthur furrowed his brow and shifted uncomfortably in the saddle. It only made her touch more starkly present than before, which only made Arthur more unsettled and more frustrated—at himself, mostly. “About what?”

Charles’s gaze softened like a parent speaking to a petulant child. “Arthur, it’s about time you—”

“Will you two please shut up?”

The men turned sharply to Clara. She hadn’t moved; her head was still tucked against Arthur’s shoulder and her arms carefully wound around his middle. Every muscle in Arthur’s body tightened as she nestled her cheek more firmly into place and tightened her grip on his waist. He was acutely aware of the fact that one hand lay squarely above his hip. She added tersely, her voice a bit muffled, “I’m trying to sleep, if you don’t mind.”

Charles chuckled softly and turned his gaze forward. Whatever he’d been about to say to Arthur had been effectively dashed by Clara’s interjection. Arthur was immeasurably grateful for her impeccable timing.

Something in the back of his mind told Arthur that he’d eventually have to deal with whatever this was—he still had no name for it. But for now, they ambled along toward camp, the Reliance Mine once more forgotten and left to the bowels of time. For now, Arthur could content himself with the fact that Clara was safe, that the danger had passed. But he knew full well that it was only a matter of time before they once again crossed paths with Clara’s dark past. The past never really died; secrets and lies had a way of catching up to you, especially when you weren’t looking.

He looked once more over his shoulder at her. The barest hint of lavender and mint drifted toward him. When he faced forward again, Arthur Morgan was sure of one thing: He would protect her. When her past came calling for war, he would ride out to battle alongside her. There was nothing else he could, after all; if he died in the process, then so be it.

Arthur Morgan didn’t think his life would mean much to her, but it belonged to her, all the same.

Chapter Text

The man in Blackwater had two letters to write.

He stood at the window that overlooked Van Horn Street, a frown etched on his otherwise handsome face. His sharp eyes followed the paths of the folk on the street below as they carried on with their errands, slipping in and out of the shops along Main Street that catered to all manner of folk currently in town and the ones they’d hoped would one day come. There was some manner of hope in the eyes of the people of Blackwater—hope that they wouldn’t be forgotten in the dusty plains of West Elizabeth, that they wouldn’t be drowned by sins along the gray-blue shores that fed the flow of the Lannahechee River.

But he knew it was nothing more than a mottled mask. He could see the cracks in the cobbled streets, the hard lines on the faces of the people who paraded in the guise of better, more honest folk. The man knew they were nothing more than farmers hiding in plain sight, desperate to belong to a world that already left them to rot on the fringes of the west.

The man hated every single one of them.

But he hadn’t come here for them. He tipped the glass of whiskey he held to his lips, savoring the cool, smoky bite. It was his favorite type—an Oban from the highlands of Scotland, imported at his behest. Saloons claimed to have proper Scottish whiskey, but he knew from experience that their bottles contained hardly more than watered down piss. His other hand slipped into the pocket of his freshly pressed pants and his fingers wrapped carefully around a slim, delicate necklace.

It’d belonged to Victoria Everly, given to her on the eve of her wedding by the man that would become her husband and father of her only surviving child. He pulled it free and held it up to the sunlight that spilled in golden streams through the window. It was a single sapphire, its facets as familiar as the back of his hand. She’d worn it proudly, regally, and the item had become as much a part of her as the smile that he so often pictured in his memories. His mother and the necklace were so intertwined, so complementary, that he had difficulty picturing one without the other. The man had vowed after his mother’s death that the necklace would remain safe in his possession. No other hand would touch it, no other neck would bear its shining, crowning jewel. It was to this he’d held in the years following her death, when his anger was still a living, breathing thing that tore and scraped at the world around him.

No other woman would wear the necklace save for the woman that would become his wife.

He ran his thumb along the faceted edges of the sapphire, relished the slip of the thin silver chain against his skin. A thrill trickled up his spine as he imagined what the necklace would look like on her neck. He wasn’t one to ponder the workings of destiny or the yoke of fate; he’d carved his own path through the world, entirely discontented with the idea that a power other than his own should determine his success. But the image he held in his mind—her braided hair swept over one shoulder, her fiery, verdant eyes—was made infinitely more appealing when he pictured his hands clasping the sapphire around her neck.

To the man who’d come to Blackwater from his home in the east, that image—that single, conjured vision of the woman who belonged to him wearing the necklace that had once been his mother’s—felt far more like fate to him than any other of the machinations the world had tried to throw at him.

There was only one prize to be found for him in the west. Soon, he’d have her back.

The door to the office opened and a pair of shuffling footsteps sauntered across the room. The man tucked his mother’s necklace back into his pocket and patted it once to ensure it was well and truly safe. He turned and eyed the sheaf of papers that had been placed on his desk. An elderly man stood off to the side, hands clasped primly behind his back. He kept his gaze firmly elsewhere, an air of mild disinterest on his wrinkled face.

“The new contract, sir,” Silas Getty explained. The words rattled in his tight, raspy throat, a lingering effect of the sickness that had nearly claimed his life half a year ago. The doctors had cautioned him against the trip to West Elizabeth, but Silas hardly let anything—including illness—get in the way of his service and flatly ignored the doctor’s advice.

The man peered for a moment at the papers. He lifted his eyes to Silas and asked, “The revisions are done already?”

The old man nodded. “Mr. Dawson sent it over this morning.” He was old, to be sure, but wrinkles and a deliberately dull gaze belied the cunning that lingered just beneath the surface. It’d been necessary to survive all these years. After all, only the strong, most willing sort could withstand a tenure of service to the Byers family.

Wyatt flipped through the pages of the contract. He knew precisely where the revisions should be and found each in turn, his eyes carefully reading over the language. Jack Dawson was good at his job—he couldn’t be and still hope to be employed by Byers—but no one made a good businessman who didn’t scrutinize every facet, every possible loophole, of every deal.

He hadn’t wanted matters to come to this. After all he’d done for Clara—given her a home, as many books as she’d wanted, trinkets to apologize when she’d blamed him for one thing or another—he’d hoped she’d see the error of her ways and return of her own volition. But he understood now, after Parker and Bennett and the rest of the goddamn mess they’d left behind in New Yorkshire, that there were simply some matters better left to the binding chains of the law. Sometimes people could only be brought to heel when the full weight of their crimes was thrown like a yoke around their necks.

Byers searched for the last and final provision, the one that had needed the most change. He’d needed the words to convey not only a particular meaning but to match the full, undaunted weight of their consequences. He needed to be certain—absolutely, unequivocally certain—that she would never leave him again.

And the only way to do that was to go after the people she cared about.

Wyatt’s fingers trembled as he read the words over and over again. Bennett and Parker had told him, of course, that she’d been seen around New Yorkshire with a gang—the van der Lindes, if the erstwhile sheriff’s assumption was to be credited—but he’d never cared much about them. They were vagrants, people who played at being human while they scrimped and fought for the scraps left behind by better folk. But that man, that pissant murderer Clara had been seen with…

The page tore at the bottom, slightly marring the carefully worded text. Byers dropped it and shoved the papers back toward Silas. “Have him draw up another copy and prepare them both to be signed.”

Silas took the papers and tucked them beneath his arm. He eyed his young master carefully and said, “She might resist, sir.”

Wyatt’s eyes snapped to his. “Of course, she will,” he replied. It wouldn’t be like his Clara to buckle without a fight. And he supposed he couldn’t entirely fault her for that; her father had been a drunk and her mother had perished from scarlet fever when Clara was still but a child. The uncle that’d raised her had been an idiot parading as a proper man left Clara with little else but the burdens of men who’d failed to instill within her a bit of womanly grace and subjugation. He’d tried, of course, to ensure she understood her place in the world, but she was as stubborn as the day was long. No matter, though—soon enough she’d be back with him, and he’d make sure she understood precisely what she’d been born to do.

But that would come in time; for now, there was still the matter of the letters that needed writing.

Byers fetched two blank sheets of paper from his desk and took up his pen. Silas stood silently by as he addressed the first of the letters to Carter and Price, financial advisors by day and cutthroat scoundrels by night. He inscribed upon the paper a missive—a short one, kept strictly to the point. They were to cease any and all current and future payments to one Alexander Bennett, care of his guardian, Ida Bennett-Carlisle, of Chicago, Illinois.

Even writing the name Bennett made Byers’ fingers tighten on the pen. Desperate men made for decent fodder, but he’d expected so much more out of Eden. He kept this to himself, choosing not to reveal the matter of Alexander’s father’s demise. The boy would be better off not knowing that he’d come from a line of monumental failures. The sins of fathers inevitably passed to their unwitting sons, and Byers supposed it was best that the boy live in ignorance while he could. The world and all its tempting vices would come calling for him soon enough.

Byers paused, waited for the ink to dry, and then folded the paper. He passed this to Silas, who took it and carefully clasped it between his wizened fingers. He fetched a second sheet and set to work.

The second letter was addressed to one Andrew Milton. Byers had considered and reconsidered this particular letter many times over the course of the last weeks. He’d heard the name of this man passed among the men of the Aurum, particularly from the lips of Cornwall, that pompous idiot from New Hanover. He’d hired him once before when a bunch of thieves—O’Driscolls, if memory served—tried to raid his property in the Heartland Oilfields. Byers paused, giving himself a moment to consider his words carefully. It wouldn’t do to upset the gathering of the Aurum, not when there was the potential for a great boom in business to be done—not to mention the carrying out of his well-laid plan.

Then a thought crossed his mind and the path onto which he’d begun to tread altered.

Byers scribbled a rather hasty note to Milton, warning him that he’d caught wind of a plot to infiltrate the Aurum’s yearly soiree, a gathering of some of the country’s finest and wealthiest gentlemen, by a band of outlaws. He’d be rewarded handsomely if he sent some of his best men to watch over the party, to be held in two weeks’ time at the Fairclough Estate in New Yorkshire.

He passed the letter to Silas, took up his whiskey, and sat back in his chair. He asked Silas, “That contact Bennett had taken up with—is he still with us?” Byers rapped his fingers on the arm of the chair as the final strings of his plan began to weave together.

Silas furrowed his brow; he’d never cared much for the man Bennett had secured, but business was business, and beggars couldn’t very well be choosers. “I believe so, sir. As far as he knows, Bennett is still very much alive.”

It was just as he’d thought, then. Byers nodded, sipped his drink, and said, “Tell him to make sure she comes. If he manages to survive the night, he’ll receive payment in full, plus a small stipend for her successful return.”

The old man’s face betrayed no emotion. He respectfully inclined his head, straightened, and made for the door. Silas paused halfway to the threshold and turned, a thought suddenly occurring him to him.

“Apologies, sir,” he began, “but what would you like done about your…guest?”

Byers blinked at him. He’d almost entirely forgotten about the girl; he usually did, when their usefulness was spent and the night had finally worn off into the cold, startling light of day. The ones Silas fetched for him were all the same in the end: earthen hair, fair skin, and eyes as green as emeralds—all nothing more than forgeries, mannequins cursed with the likeness of Clara. But no matter how many bruises he left on their fragile, pliable skin, no matter how many hard he fucked them while uttering her name, no matter how many times they screamed and cried and begged him to stop, he still woke up feeling hollow and wanting.

They were weren’t her. They were never her.

Byers’ thoughts wandered back to the necklace in his pocket as he drained the rest of his glass. He set the empty vessel down with a decisively plunk and lifted his gaze to Silas.

“Pay her,” he grunted, suddenly and overwhelmingly disgusted by her lingering presence. “Make sure she says nothing.”

Silas nodded. “Of course, sir.” The old man resumed his short trek to the door, slipped out, and closed it softly behind him.

It wouldn’t be long now. Byers rose and poured himself another dram of whiskey and wandered back to the window, where Blackwater lay splayed out and wanting before him. He was sure he could smell the acrid stench of Flatiron Lake though the window remained closed. Somewhere further up the lane the thick, brick walls of the first bank in Blackwater were being erected, a testament to the wild leaps in proper civilization the town had made. But Byers’ eyes drifted in a different direction, beyond Manzanita Post and the wooded hills of Tall Trees. It stretched beyond the snaking length of the Lower Montana River and into the land beyond, where the foothills swept across the land before eventually sharply rising into the crags and peaks of Devil’s Ridge.

Sometimes he wondered if Clara knew he’d always been watching her. Wyatt Byers played with the idea of his most prized possession thinking of him as she lay awake at night, surrounded by the shadows and filth of whatever derelict conditions to which she’d subjected herself. He wondered whether or not she sought him in her dreams, remembered how it’d felt when he’d touched her, how she’d promised never to leave him.

His hand clenched around his glass.

She’d promised.

She’d promised never to leave him.

And because Clara had broken that promise, Byers had had no choice but to follow in her wake, chasing after her echo and suffering all the while without her. He’d only ever wanted to make her happy, to make her understand that he could bestow upon her all the potential, all the possibility, she could ever want. And Claramae Howard had done nothing but spit it back in his face. Instead of believing in him, she’d gone off to cavort with thieves and murderers and liars, throwing in her lot with the likes of Arthur Morgan rather than staying where she could have a proper future.

But it was no matter, he affirmed silently to himself as he sipped from his freshly poured glass. She’d be his in the end, and the outlaw would get what was owed to him, come hell or high water. A sensible man—and a true hunter, at that—left nothing up to chance. If one wanted something done correctly, one had to go about seeing to matters themselves.

Wyatt Anderson Byers watched Blackwater unfold around him all the while keeping his gaze firmly on the horizon. Soon, Clara would be back with him, and everything would be as it should. The outlaw would be dead and she’d be bound to him, and all of this would be nothing more than a dust-filled memory.

Soon.

Chapter Text

The arrow flew wide, missing its intended target by a foot.

Arthur Morgan swore as the doe ran off into the woods, spooked by its near-death encounter. His hand tightened on the wooden bow, his grip hard and angry enough to snap the damned thing in two.

Charles Smith straightened from where he crouched at the roots of a tree. He clutched a handful of small, green plants and eyed him with the same sort of silent, penetrating glance Hosea often employed.

“That’s the second one this morning,” Charles observed. He was quietly calm, a steady, grounding presence, though Arthur couldn’t quite appreciate the value of his constancy in that moment.

He slung the bow over his shoulder, his mouth set in a grim line. “I told you,” bit out angrily, “I ain’t good with a bow.”

Charles’s expression was changeless. “You’ll learn,” he encouraged as he gestured toward him with the handful of plants. “But that ain’t what’s making you miss.”

Arthur frowned but said nothing. Mr. Smith had a way of seeing to the heart of a man, a fact which both astounded him and made him wildly uncomfortable. Arthur was a man who prided himself on being resolutely stoic; the less folk knew about him, the better, as far as he was concerned. And yet, despite hardly knowing him for more than a few months, Charles had already found a way to see past the veneer of hard, unyielding ire that Arthur wore like a second skin.

It was infuriating, truth be told. And yet, the man was right.

He glanced over his shoulder to a nearby tree. Claramae Howard sat at its roots, nestled between the great, winding behemoths with a book tucked firmly in her lap. Her palm cupped her chin as she read, her eyes greedily roving over the pages as the barest hint of a smile crested on her lips.

Arthur’s anger smoldered and threatened to smother him. His frown deepened as he watched her, his thoughts tumbling like leaves in an errant burst of wind. The problem was this: ever since the night in the mine, he’d woken at first light each day with the memory of her warmth still lingering on his skin.

He hated it nearly as much as he craved it, which only made Arthur confused, which inevitably led to embracing the familiar comfort of frustration. It was easier to wade through ire than it was to consider what it meant that he’d dreamt of her these last nights. He’d risked his sorry hide to save her from a mess she’d managed to get herself into, and yet the only thing his dreams could conjure at night was the knowledge of what it had been like to hold her.

Charles took a step forward, his gaze following Arthur’s. He nodded toward Clara and said softly, “You two talk yet?”

Arthur looked at him. “What you mean?”

Charles only sighed and stared at him.

He knew what he meant, of course, which only served to stir and strength his already pernicious mood. Charles had said as much on the ride back from the mine, though Arthur had put it to rest alongside the memory of that night in general. Well, most of the memories, it seemed, save for one.

Arthur threw out a hand toward Clara. “She don’t talk, Charles. She argues and, when she’s grown tired of that, she insults.”

His fellow outlaw was not moved by the argument. He only shrugged as he sifted through the plants in his hand, which only made Arthur all the more irritated.

“It’s not that she doesn’t talk,” he reasoned as he eyed Arthur with intent. “It’s that you don’t really want to listen.”

Arthur stared at him. Of course, he didn’t want to listen! Nearly every word out of her mouth was a remark designed to instill within him an insatiable need to break things. He’d become convinced that one did not converse with Clara; one only braced themselves for brutalization and hoped to come out in one, slightly fractured piece at the end. What could he possibly say that wouldn’t sound foolish and distorted? What words could he utter that she would understand without fear of judgment or consternation? None—that was the true answer.

And yet Charles Smith continued to stare at him, his gaze quiet in its persistent intent, which only further stoked his budding animosity toward the entire matter. Arthur’s shifted where he stood, suddenly desperate to move, to be anywhere but in this particular moment, and made a final decision

He would talk to her—but not about the night in the mine. There was nothing to say about it, he reasoned for the thousandth time. Clara had been in trouble and Arthur had gone to help her, as he would have done for Charles or anyone else in the gang. He let out a grunt of resignation and stalked off toward where she sat, feeling more ridiculous with every step. What in the hell did Charles know about it, anyway? Clearly, he had no idea what kind of person Clara was—after all, he wasn’t the brunt of her particular breed of vast, unending annoyance. Just because Arthur would have killed every man twice over just to see her safe didn’t make her any less irritating.

Arthur halted when he reached her, his hand sliding to his gun belt. He considered for only a moment what he would say. “Any time you want to be useful, Ms. Howard, just say the word.”

Clara never took her eyes off the book as she flipped the page. “Go away,” she replied sharply as her chin landed once more in her palm. “I’m reading.”

His temper flared. “Let me get this straight,” he said as he gestured toward the book. “We’re out here tracking and hunting for this gang, and you get to sit here and read all morning.”

She lifted her eyes to him, her lips pursed. “I think you mean Charles has been doing all the tracking and hunting,” she said with stoic sarcasm. “You have done nothing but hit trees and rocks.”

Oh, this woman.

Arthur reached out and snatched the book from her hands. He peered at it, noting the title and author stamped in gold leaf on the cover: Pride and Prejudice, it read, by the author of Sense and Sensibility.

Clara scrambled up from her nest of roots as she leaped for the volume. He twisted effortlessly out of reach as he inspected the item with pronounced dubiousness. “‘By the author of Sense and Sensibility’?” He announced, twisting and turning the book as it though it might provide him with some measure of understanding.

She sighed and placed her hands on her hips. “Of which you have none,” she retorted as she thrust out her empty hand. “Give it back before you ruin it.”

“Why you read this stuff, anyhow?” Arthur carefully rifled through the pages, taking care not to tear the nearly pristine pages. It was well-made, its value evident in the binding and quality of the paper. He imagined the dedication Clara placed into the care and keeping of her books; one had only to look at the glint of inescapable pleasure in her eyes at the mere mention of reading to know the tome would never come to harm. And, true to his character, Arthur stood there like a fool, marring it with his filthy, unworthy hands.

Clara flexed her fingers, beckoning for the return of her book. “Some of us value intellect more than guns, Mr. Morgan.”

He gave her a flat look. “Guns are deadlier than words, Ms. Howard.”

“Oh, no,” she said with a deliberate shake of her head. “In that—and many other things, may I add—you are wrong.”

Arthur lifted the book and said, “Guess maybe I should hold onto this, seeing as how I ain’t got a lick of sense.” He turned his back on her and tucked the book under his arm.

Clara leaped at him. Her fingers barely touched the book before he twisted on his heel, handily removing it from her grasp. Arthur held it up over his head, keeping it well out of her reach. She gave him one, singeing glare before she braced a hand on his shoulder, pulled herself up, and snatched the book from his hand with a great swing of her arm. Unfortunately, her enthusiasm was misplaced; Clara lost her balance and tipped forward, forcing Arthur to catch her around the waist to keep them both from toppling. She slid back down to her feet with a whoosh of breath, her book held tightly to her chest.

Arthur’s arms were still around her a moment later. Her hand still lingered on his shoulder, her chest pressed against his. One hand cupped the small of her back as the other drifted along her hip, instinctively memorizing the slope of the generous curve.

He’d been here before, in the heart of the mine. He’d dreamed this night after night, plagued by the memory as much as the portent of its meaning. All it did was remind him that he was a shadow whose time in the sun would end just as violently as it’d begun. His eyes lifted to hers. They traced the path plotted by the light smattering of freckles along the tops of her cheeks. His gaze slid to her lips, pursed and perpetually capable of gutting him with a single utterance. The rest of the world seemed tedious and dull compared to the vibrant luminescence of her spring green eyes and their gold-encircled hearts.

Arthur’s brow furrowed when he saw her eyes widen for a moment before narrowing back into their usual slits of consternation. She pushed away from him, careful to keep her book well out of his reach. For his part, Arthur dropped his hands to his sides, though he couldn’t explain why his skin felt colder and more barren without her warmth.

Clara squared her shoulders as she lifted her chin. “Idiot,” she hissed.

“Witch,” Arthur replied instinctively. The insult was half-hearted; his addled brain fumbled with flimsy thoughts, all of which seemed unable to escape the inevitable conclusion that he was an unforgivable, pathetic fool. More to the point, Arthur couldn’t quite remember why he’d been so angry at the start of the hunt. Now, all he could think of was the sudden, clawing need to revisit one of his drawings—he’d gotten the flare of her hips slightly wrong, and the error felt as egregious as a bullet wound to the heart.

He was spared further contemplation by Charles, who sauntered toward Taima with a furtive glance in their direction. He reached for his saddlebag and pulled forth a small glass vial as he gave one final inspection to the plants he held in his hand. He nodded toward the mare, whose burden it was to suffer the carcass of a doe Charles had tracked and taken down earlier that morning. Boadicea wasn’t as lucky, though by no fault of her own; Arthur had only managed to secure a handful of rabbits in all the time they’d spent among the tall birches and mountainous pines.

“About time we head back,” he announced as he crushed the buds of the plants between his fingers. He carefully added them to the vial, its contents a strange and vastly unappealing shade of green. “We have enough to last us a couple more weeks, if we’re lucky.”

Arthur sauntered toward Boadicea, quite sure it was safer to be anywhere other than in Clara’s general space of occupation. He tugged on the straps of her saddle, its worn and slightly damaged leather as resilient as his mount. He tightened the fastening on the rabbits, keeping his eyes on the stringy, reeking flesh.

“Should last us a good while,” he muttered. The drawing resurfaced in his mind, its imperfections as vivid as the details he would use to correct them. He wasn’t sure why it was so important to get them right; he’d spent restless hours crafting the image with only the meager light of his kerosene lamp to guide his hand, unable to sleep until the picture in his head was finally scrawled in his journal. He wasn’t entirely surprised to find Clara Howard staring back at him when all was said and done; the woman had a way of pestering him even while she slept.

Clara flipped through her book as Charles gave the glass vial a shake. “Any idea where we’re heading next, Arthur?” he asked as he held the vial up toward the budding sunlight, his eyes squinted in inspection.

Arthur hadn’t given it much thought; he never did. He trusted Dutch—trusted him to do right by the gang, to lead them where opportunity was at its peak. There was nothing more beyond that. “Ain’t sure just yet,” Arthur answered. “I suppose we’ll stay at least until the law catches up with us.”

Charles lowered the vial, seemingly satisfied with what he saw. “As it does.”

Arthur nodded. “As it does,” he repeated in affirmation. A quick glance revealed that Clara’s attention was on him. The arm that cradled her book was rigid, her hand poised in the process of turning another page, and her expression cautiously curious.

Wherever they moved, he knew, her past would follow. Byers was out there, closer than either of them could guess, and he knew it weighed on her nearly as much as it weighed on him. He couldn’t fight against an unseen opponent; he could not intimidate and threaten that which did not exist. Of all the things of which Arthur was capable, of all the particular and vicious skills that he’d put to use over the years, not a single one of them could save Clara from what was coming next.

“Well,” Clara said with a defiant lift of her chin. “Wherever it is Dutch intends on sweeping us off to next, I certainly hope it’s more exciting that this godforsaken state.” She shut her book with a mark of finality as she glanced sidelong at Arthur.

He snorted. “And I hope,” he replied as his hands drifted to his gun belt, “that you’re more useful wherever it is we end up.”

Clara narrowed her eyes at him. Charles let out a long, weary sigh as he gave Taima a reassuring pat on the flank. “I’ve heard talk around camp,” he began, his voice even and deliberate. “Sounds like there’s a big job coming up.”

Arthur looked at him, a frown already etched on his face. Dutch and Hosea had already brought him into the fold on the job proposal, if one could call a half-concocted rumor borne from the lips of Micah Bell a job.

“I ain’t heard too much about it,” he confessed as clutched his gun belt with a heavy hand. “And seeing as how it’s Micah who claims to have a lead, I wouldn’t be too sure of anything just yet.”

Clara raised an eyebrow, her attention clearly piqued. “What sort of lead is this, then?”

He gave her a long, withering look. The less he thought and spoke of Micah, the better, in his personal opinion. He let out a sigh, shrugged, and replied, “Something about a gathering of rich folk somewhere in New Yorkshire.” Truth be told, he hadn’t been listening very much once Dutch told him where the lead had come from. Arthur wasn’t sure which was the more ridiculous notion—that Micah had even the faintest idea what a decent take looked like, or that the gang would involve themselves in a soiree for the better half of civilization. They might as well shoot up Kingston, for all the attention that would draw to them.

Her brow furrowed. “What do you mean?” The sarcasm had fled from her voice, leaving behind only a terse, tight air of concern.

Charles gave the glass vial another shake. “That’s how Micah tells it, though I can’t say that he says is worth much.”

Arthur gave a solemn, agreeable nod. He tossed a hand in the air and explained, “Dutch thinks there might be something to it—bunch of rich folk gathered together might give us a chance for some decent scams, if we play our cards right.”

But Clara hardly seemed interested in the idea of scams. The concern was now etched on her face, its presence dampening the light in her eyes. “Does he know what it’s called?”

“The party?” Arthur asked.

“Yes, you dolt,” she bit back as Charles rolled his eyes.

His temper flared again, hampered only by the tight lines of anxiety that now marred her expression. She was trying desperately to hide them, he knew; she might be a force of nature but even Clara was not immune to the perils of humanity. “I don’t remember. The Aura, I think, or—”

“The Aurum.” This time her eyes grew distant, putting miles and miles between them faster than Arthur could catch up. Her shoulders tightened and her fingers clasped her book as though it were the only thing grounding her to the moment.

Charles’ gaze danced between them, sensing the change in her mood. “You know it?”

Arthur’s gut shifted with discomfort. The fluid and vast shift in her mood was enough to tell him that something was off, a balance tipped in the wrong direction. He watched her, his instincts flaring at him to do something, anything, to make it right. Finally, Clara took a breath and pressed her lips together. The mask was back in place, though he could see the fractures left behind by her newfound knowledge.

“It’s an organization for the country’s richest men,” she explained, each word deliberate, revealing nothing she didn’t want to remain concealed. “They hold it every year, usually in the same place, but...” She drifted off, her eyes once more distant and unseeing. “They trade money and business almost as much as they trade in secrets and blackmail.”

Charles crossed his arms, his eyes still watching her pensively. “Sounds like it could be promising—dangerous, but promising.”

Arthur hardly heard him. Clara was lost somewhere in memory, driven to a place where he could not follow. Instinct screamed at him again, its claws digging into his consciousness and demanding him to pay close attention to what he knew he was missing.

“They’ll all be there,” Clara said, her tone weighted with trepidation. “Leviticus Cornwall, John D. Rockefeller, Andrew Carnegie—” she paused, her eyes lifting to Arthur’s—“Wyatt Byers.”

To Arthur’s great surprise, it wasn’t the hard edges of the name as it took shape in his mind that invoked his anger. It wasn’t the countless forms Byers had taken in his wildest, most violent imaginations that made his heart pound with bloodlust and his hands itch for his revolver.

It was the look on Clara’s face as she understood that her ghost had never truly been a ghost at all; he’d been a shadow, watching and waiting and plotting each careful step so that, against all odds, her path would wind toward one inevitable outcome: him.

A single flutter of thought cut through the chaos swirling in Arthur’s mind. It was a whisper, something half-formed and still malleable, but present, nonetheless. He felt its strength grow, giving form and substance by the already turbulent storm of emotions wrenching its way through his heart. Clara already knew about the Aurum—she’d known Byers would be there, his station guaranteeing his invitation.

And yet, she’d said nothing of it to him. All these weeks and months of chasing and running, of killing and lying, all for her to keep this truth—this one, above all!—from him.

“Mae,” he heard himself say, his voice as ragged and perturbed as he felt, “did you—”

The sound of hoofbeats clattering through the underbrush cut off his question. Arthur drew his gun, instinctually stepping behind Clara as she tugged her knife from its sheath. Charles was already turned toward the source of the sound, a shotgun poised and ready to fire.

John Marston ducked beneath a low-hanging branch and glared at the three of them as he pulled up on the reins. “Jesus,” he muttered, “here you are.”

Arthur holstered his weapon with a curse, his thoughts still lingering on the portent of his suspicion. “The hell you doing here, Marston?” he growled.

John didn’t dismount. The sense of urgency about him was palpable, though he wasn’t quite dumb enough not to sense that he’d stumbled upon a moment better left unacknowledged.

“Trelawney’s been seen in town,” he announced with a guarded glance at Arthur. “Dutch wants us to see what’s what.”

Irritation flooded Arthur’s veins as he gritted his teeth and glared at John. The very concept of dealing with Trelawney’s mangled sense of propriety and deception was nearly enough to drive him mad. He could hardly think straight with all thoughts tangled up in a mess of acrimony and betrayal.

Charles holstered the shotgun and raised an eyebrow at John. “How’d you know where to find us?”

John nodded to Clara. “She told me where you was all hunting.”

Arthur whirled and gaped at Clara. His gut tightened as he looked at her, his instinct to protect her warring with the increasing sensation that she’d deliberately kept him the dark. “Why?”

She frowned at him, taken aback by the vehemence with which he spoke. She was trying to hide behind her mask again, tugging on its frayed edges until she was sure no one could see what lay underneath. “Do you usually leave camp for hours on end without telling anyone where you’re doing?”

Without hesitation and before Arthur could think of a single thing to say, Charles and John both chorused, “Yes.”

Arthur fumed as he glared at the lot of them. What a shit day this had turned out to be. “Fine,” he said as he sent his hand cutting sharply through the air. “I’ll go and see what Josiah wants.” He stalked toward Boadicea; he needed to leave, and soon—he could feel the desperate need to dispel the wash of anger-spiked adrenaline from his blood.

Clara turned on her heel and headed toward Marion. Arthur’s purposeful steps paused as he watched her slip her book into her saddlebag and glance at him over her shoulder.

“I’ll join you,” she said, her levity forced and hollow. “I haven’t met this Trelawney yet.”

For the first time in as long as he could remember, Arthur nearly insisted on refusing her accompaniment. The thought felt wrong, twisted up with guile and distrust, and he forced it away.

“Just try not to get us killed,” Arthur replied wearily as he mounted up. He gave Boadicea and encouraging pat as she stamped her hooves, eager to be off on another adventure.

John, his mission complete, turned tail and headed back through the thick bands of trees toward camp. Charles hurried to Clara’s side, laying a thick hand on Marion’s neck as he reached up and handed her the vial.

“It’s a tonic,” he explained to her as Arthur watched, his body restless and his mood tattered. “About two doses’ worth. Should be good for just about anything, save for a bullet wound.”

Arthur snorted despite himself. “Won’t do much good, seeing as how I’m likely to get shot at, riding with her.”

Charles and Clara both turned upon him an impudent, scathing pair of glares. She tucked into her saddlebag with a quick word of thanks to Charles. He promised to see them back at camp and they headed off, ducking beneath low hanging branches and limbs eager to throw them from the backs of their horses.

The matter of the Aurum didn’t sit right with him.

Between Michah’s involvement with the matter and Clara’s foreknowledge of its attendees, Arthur felt doubt plague him, wrenching and tearing at his thoughts as they rode along. He tried to ignore it, to use what little reason he had to make sense of the thoughts that raged and tore through his mind. But doubt was the seed of his anger. It haunted him as they rode, bearing down on him as they picked their way through the woodland hills at the base of the mountains toward Kingston. Arthur already knew how this would end—he’d seen this story before, had already written and lived its conclusion.

And it always ended him with him stained with blood and irrevocably, eternally, alone.

*

There was a certain aspect of pretentiousness that made Arthur Morgan wildly uncomfortable.

The saloon in Heritage sprawled around him, its high, clean windows spilling in more light that he thought was strictly necessary in a place where less than savory business was conducted. He frowned at the polished wood of the bar and tables and shifted irritably at the sight of the gaudy, colorful wallpaper that swept across the space. Folk adorned the tables like ornaments, their smiles wide and their drinks full, all of them entirely at ease in this ridiculous riot of color and society.  

Arthur’s eyes dipped to the empty glass on the table before him. It was empty, much to his dismay, and he was very nearly overcome with the swift, exacting need for more whiskey.

He leaned back in his chair and sighed. A man at a nearby table cast a furtive glance over his shoulder at Arthur. A sheen of morbid curiosity lined his face before smoothly shifting into a hard, unyielding look of disdain and suspicion. Arthur narrowed his eyes and let his frown deepen of its own accord. The curious man’s eyes widened before he whirled back around to his companion. Arthur looked away; if this was the price of embracing civilization, it was too high a cost. He would rather linger on the fringes of the world, free to live life under the open sky with only the wide, untamed country as his guide.

A high, bright laugh snagged his attention. He looked up, recognizing the sound at once, and found the source still lingering at the bar, her arms crossed on the wood top and a telltale smirk of impending mischief on her face. She spoke to the bartender, a weasel-faced man with a flimsy spine and even flimsier constitution. He was the sort of man Arthur wouldn’t look at twice; none of the patrons of the saloon were, if he were being honest, though he knew they watched him with a sense of viable wariness. But no one watched Clara, not in the same way they watched him. They watched her because she was the only spark of life in this dull, dreadful town. They watched her because somehow, she looked as though she belonged here; she could belong anywhere, Arthur realized, and no one would ever know the dark, terrible secrets she kept.

He reached for his glass and let out a soft curse when he discovered it was still empty. She was at once familiar and unknowable, a friend and a stranger. And yet, despite all of this, Arthur could not forget the look on her face the moment she’d heard about Micah’s lead. Nor could he forget, he silently and begrudgingly admitted, the way she felt wrapped in his arms.

Arthur watched as Clara took two blessedly full glasses of whiskey from the bartender and made her way back to the table. A veil of dark and deadly secrets existed between them, the sort that bullets and bravado could not penetrate. She was still keeping things from him—Arthur didn’t know much, but of that, he was entirely sure.

And it hurt him more than he cared to admit.

Clara placed one of the glasses before him. “I’m starting to think this Trelawney fellow isn’t going to show up,” she muttered as she flopped into the chair. She held up her glass and gave it a sniff before wincing and taking a tentative sip.

Arthur took his glass and fought the urge to down the entire thing in one go. His mood, which was already decidedly off color to begin with, soured further the more he concerned the divide that still existed between them.

“He’s here,” he muttered in resignation. “Wouldn’t have heard about him if he weren’t skulking around the place like a goddamn fox.”

Clara lowered her glass and cupped her chin in her hand. Arthur looked away, his chest suddenly tight, and took another, healthier sip from his glass. She asked, “You don’t like him much, do you?”

The matter of Josiah Trelawney was a rather convoluted one, at best. It wasn’t that Arthur disliked the man, but there seemed to be a perpetual thorn of jealousy that lingered in his heart whenever the sometimes outlaw came around. By some miracle or another, Josiah Trelawney was both of man of society and a complete and utter degenerate. But more than that, he’d managed to do what Arthur could not—he was two people at once, a fact that only served to remind Arthur of his greatest and most terrible failure. He drank, letting the question linger for a moment longer. He supposed Clara wasn’t the only one holding tightly to secrets; he’d never told her about Eliza and Isaac, nor the entirety of his years with Mary.

Arthur knew precisely how she would look at him if he told her. Some secrets were worth the price; these were not.

“Ain’t about how I feel,” he finally answered as the taste of whiskey lingered in his mouth. “He brings in good leads, even if he’s as slippery as an eel in an oil slick.”

Clara watched him for a moment, her finger tapping a steady rhythm on her cheek. “What’s on your mind, Mr. Morgan?”

His glass was empty again. His thoughts burned like wildfire through his skull, each one more scorching than the last. He shifted against the hard back of the chair, trying and failing all the while to quiet his turbulent mind.

Secrets were a heavy burden, their presence an impossible weight on his already scarred and damaged heart. They persisted between them, carving a divide that felt more cavernous by the day. Arthur clenched his fist on the table, fighting against all odds not to look at her. It went without saying that if he looked at her—really looked at her—then his steady, cold resolve would falter ever so slightly.

And that was how men found themselves dead.

He unraveled his fingers and laid his palm flat on the table. “When exactly was you planning on telling me about this Aurum business?”

To her credit, Clara’s face betrayed nothing. But when he finally hazarded a glance, he saw the barest flicker of surprise ripple through the green fields of her eyes. She lowered her hand and sat back in the chair, her fingers playing idly with her half full glass. “I didn’t know,” she finally muttered.

Anger roared through him. He dug his fingers into the infernally polished surface, desperate to break something. “I’m getting real tired of hearing you say that.”

Clara shook her head and shrugged. “What is it you want me to say, Arthur?”

“The truth, for one,” he answered.

She leaned forward, her carefully blank expression now mangled into one of irritation. “I knew about the Aurum, yes, but I didn’t know it would be here.”

They were teetering on the edge of the moment, neither one of them willing to risk the fall. Hope clashed with violent resignation in his tired soul. He was a dishonest man craving a shred of honesty, a hypocrite in truest form. And yet he knew that he would follow her to whatever end, whether or not she finally deigned to tell him the truth. Arthur hated it and accepted it as fact.

“And Byers?” he finally asked as he finally wrangled the words out of his mouth. “You going to tell me you didn’t know about him?”

Clara narrowed her eyes and her jaw tightened. “What’s that supposed to mean?”

Arthur wasn’t exactly sure what he meant, but now that he’d started, he knew he couldn’t stop, not while his veins were flooded with rage. He flicked a hand toward the window and said, “All this time, you knew he was watching you. And after that goddamn mine—” he paused, suddenly overcome with the feeling of her body against his—“Now all of a sudden you hear tell of some club for rich folk meeting in New Yorkshire, and it just so happens to be the very same one he belongs to?”

Her lips pressed together in a thin, barely visible line. Anger hot enough to match his burned in her eyes as she glared at him. “You think I knew all this would happen?” she asked, her voice quiet and betraying the true extent of her ire.

Arthur shrugged. He was swiftly losing control, giving way to his blazing hot fury. “I guess I ain’t too sure about nothing no more.”

Her mouth curdled into a snarl. Her hands wrapped around the edge of the table, her fingers pressing hard into the wood. “You moronic son of a bitch,” she hissed. “I have never lied to you, not once.”

He huffed a mirthless, cold laugh. “You ain’t exactly been honest about all this, neither.”

A look of stark disgust crossed her face. “Oh, and I suppose you’re the patron saint of honesty, now.”

Arthur pressed a single finger to the table, his rage tempered into cold-edged steel. “You’re going to tell me everything, right now,” he demanded, his voice as cold as the unforgiving outlaw he was, “or this is done.”

Clara said nothing. She stared at him, her mouth parted in abject shock. A fleeting, terrible thought crossed his mind as he pondered whether or not he’d gone too far this time. But the memory of his arms around her cut him to the quick almost as thoroughly as the knowledge that a man he had never met sought to tear her away.

She abruptly rose from her seat and anchored her hands on the table. Clara leaned forward until her furious face loomed in front of his, her eyes filled with nothing but the hatred of stunning betrayal.

“Threaten me all you want,” she said with feigned calm, “but my business is my business.”

The thread of Arthur’s last shred of control snapped. He vaulted from the chair and slammed his hand against the table, a blow hard enough for the wood to tremble and nearly buckle beneath his gargantuan rage. “How am I supposed to protect you if you ain’t honest with me?” he roared, his voice echoing hollowly off the walls of the saloon.

It was only then that Arthur became aware of several things at once. The first was that the patrons in the saloon had largely forgotten their own conversations in favor of their rather loud and violent one. The second was that Clara’s face was merely inches from his own, close enough that he could see the fathomless shades of green and the flecks of purest gold at their center. Arthur’s shallow, angry breaths were each made of her scent, strong and present enough to addle his already chaotic thoughts. Arthur fumbled for control, feeling once more as though he were toeing the edge of some great and terrible unknown. But a small voice at the back of his mind, the one he largely ignored in favor of impulse and instinct, whispered that he’d always known precisely what it was. Even now, in the throes of anger, Arthur knew that it was—

But the third thing of which Arthur was aware was that somewhere in the midst of their argument, Josiah Trelawney had appeared and was watching them with great amusement.

He gave Arthur a hearty yet cautionary clap on the shoulder; the bartender’s eyes had wandered in their direction, his face etched with the wariness that bespoke a visit from the law, if they weren’t careful. With a great force of will, Arthur wrapped a fist around the tumult of confused and bitter anger, returning at once to the cool, level-headed detachment that suited him far better than the more human essence of feeling.

“Just as angry and volatile as I remember,” Josiah said with as much fondness as a man whose falsehoods rivaled even that of Lucifer could muster. “How I’ve missed you, dear boy.”

The patrons had largely returned to their conversations, though a few sets of wandering eyes lingered on them for a moment longer. Arthur could only imagine what the trio might have looked like to the others in the saloon: the prim, well-spoken Josiah Trelawney; the haughty, defiant beauty of Clara Howard; and the hard-lined, sharp-tongued foolishness that was Arthur Morgan.

“Josiah,” he muttered as he relinquished himself back to the chair with doomed finality. “Guess we ain’t quite so well hidden as we thought.”

His eyes flicked to Clara, who watched Josiah with a mixture of curiosity and surprise. Her attention was entirely elsewhere, as though she’d forcibly shoved any and all thoughts of Arthur out of her mind. He couldn’t blame her for that, especially after the way he’d spoken to her.

“You can’t outsmart a fox, Arthur, only delay the inevitable.” Josiah answered with a wink. He swept an upturned hand toward Clara. “And you,” he said with an encouraging smile, “must be dear Clara.” She lifted her hand toward his and Josiah took it, placing a chaste kiss on the back of her palm. “Josiah Trelawney, at your service.”

Their argument faded into memory as something hot and ferocious clawed at Arthur’s chest. His hands tightened into fists as he stared at the way Trelawney’s hand encased Clara’s, the sight of his lips on her skin burning through him like the vengeance of a bullet. He watched as Clara blinked in surprise at Trelawney and her lips crept up into a tentative but unmistakable smile. Arthur, on the other hand, contemplated how he might explain Trelawney’s sudden and violent death to Dutch.

He shouldn’t have been such a goddamn fool, he thought. Maybe if he hadn’t said all those things, Clara might smile at him like that.

“A pleasure, Mr. Trelawney,” she replied as he placed her hand carefully back onto the table. Arthur slowly unclenched his hands as the ferocity ebbed enough to feel some measure of control.

The Englishman pressed an affronted hand to his chest. “Please, call me Josiah.” He sat back and looked at the both of them, his hands folded in his lap. “That was quite a row. I do hope I haven’t interrupted something important?”

Arthur sighed and answered tersely, “Yes.”

Clara crossed her arms and shrugged. “Not at all.”

“Wonderful,” Josiah answered with grating jubilation. He crossed one leg over the other and folded his pristine, white-gloved hands at the peak of his knees. His face became strangely wistful as he said, “Dreadful state, New Yorkshire—on the cusp of Californian greatness and yet stuck in the dull, transient monotony of the Midwest. However,” he interjected as he raised a finger at the first sign of argument from Arthur, “there are those who can provide—entertainment, shall we say, for those of us ill-suited to the more refined tastes of civilization?”

He stared at Josiah, pondering the flowery, trussed up double-talk. Even more distressing, though, was the fact that Clara was still smiling at Trelawney, even with all the confounding mirage of meaning floating aimlessly out of his mouth.

Arthur shrugged and ground out, “You really expect me to understand all that?”

Josiah raised an eyebrow at him. He leaned toward Clara and muttered, pointedly loud enough for him to hear, “You’ll have to forgive Arthur, my dear. He’s always been a bit contentious, you understand, but it seems advanced age does have the quite the disagreeable effect on constitution.”

Heat pooled in Arthur’s veins as Clara turned a thin-veiled, displeased smirk in his direction. “Oh, I’m well aware.”

Arthur looked away, his anger already beginning to seep into his bones. “Jesus,” he hissed.

Josiah waved a hand, dismissing the conversation. “There’s whispers of a gathering called the Aurum, as it were—a place where the rich and well-to-do fondle each other’s egos and exchange nearly enough coin to rival the secrets that spill so fluidly from their lips.”

The words rankled Arthur’s already tenuous control. He could feel them pecking at the fist that held his unholy fury in place, edging him closer and closer toward the doubt that still whispered at the back of his mind. Clara, for her part, remained entirely motionless, her mask a stoically conscientious attempt to guise the cold apprehension that froze the light in her eyes.

All of this went entirely unnoticed by Josiah. “One of New Yorkshire’s own was set to attend the soiree—did you know this state was equally known for its coal mining and its whiskey distillation?” He glanced toward the bartender, whose wary gaze still hovered on the trio. “And none was quite so prolific at the task than J.T. Cole, erstwhile owner of Laoch Whiskey. He used the Scottish method, hence the coals—and he would have attended this year’s gathering, had it not been for his unfortunate and untimely demise.”

It was Clara who spoke; Arthur didn’t trust himself to form words that would rend and tear and scrape along Trelawney’s grating enthusiasm. “What happened to him?” she asked, her eyes narrowed as she considered the information, piecing together thoughts to which Arthur would never be privy.

“He was found dead nearly two months ago,” Josiah replied, his eyebrows raised. “His wife, Prudence, was set to inherit his fortune upon his death; instead, she was surprisingly deposited into an asylum in California. Rumor has it, however, that Mrs. Cole wasn’t exactly who she claimed to be.” He turned over his shoulder, gave a little wave to the approaching figure, and asked brightly, “Isn’t that right, Archie?”

The bartender glanced over at the sound of his voice and gave the trio a single, curt nod.

Arthur threw a hand toward the bartender, his already limited patience fraying and becoming all the more tenuous with each moment that passed. “Who the hell is Archie?”

Josiah turned back to him, his lips pursed and his gaze deliberately and infuriatingly condescending. “Archie is a mutual friend, Arthur. You see, he knew J.T. Cole, however limited their interactions may have been, but he also knew Prudence Hayward. Rumor has it that her first two husbands had died under decidedly mysterious circumstances, leaving their sizeable inheritances to her. Cole, in his final days, had grown wise to his wife’s alleged former lives and hid his fortune somewhere on the grounds of his family’s home.”

Arthur stared at the man, his temper boiling, and his already tattered mind further infringed upon by the unlikely, convoluted tale of a rogue woman with violent and deadly tendencies. He cared nothing for the plights of rich men or their rumored lost fortunes; he cared only for the truth, of which he seemed to have gathered very little as of late.

“I didn’t come here to listen to half-truths and rumors from a bartender,” Arthur snarled with a deadly look toward Archie. He rose from the table, his patience finally and entirely worn out. “Find someone who cares to run your fool’s errand.”

The words were harsher than he’d intended, but what was done was done. Arthur wanted nothing more of alleged fortunes and phantom tethers to the likes of Wyatt Byers. Whatever the Aurum was, whatever they intended to do with the likes of the people of New Yorkshire, was of no consequence to him. They could burn the state down, for all he cared.

His concern lay elsewhere, however unwanted it may be. She glared at him now, as if sensing his thoughts and finding them wanting.

“Arthur,” she said sternly, “sit down.”

If it had been anyone else, he would have buried them beneath the force of his scathing anger. He would have choked the retort from their throats by sheer force of will until they remembered to whom they were speaking. But when Arthur turned, his instinctive rage flickering like firelight beneath his skin, and saw the strength and ferocity in the verdant gaze that met his, something very strange and wildly unexpected occurred.

He took a breath, felt the anger flee, and sat.

Josiah’s eyes widened as he looked between them. He shook his head in disbelief and mused, “If I hadn’t witnessed this myself, I would have thought it impossible for Arthur to listen to anyone but Mr. van der Linde and Mr. Matthews.”

Arthur clenched his fists and took a steadying breath. Clara’s eyes were still on him; he wouldn’t look at her, but he could feel their weighty presence on him. He wasn’t sure why he’d listened to her; perhaps it was because he knew he’d upset her and, in a rare show of reasonability, decided it best not to press the matter further. But really, if he was being honest, it was because she’d somehow tamed the rage inside him. The sound of her voice had smothered it, made him almost human again, and he wasn’t quite sure what to do with that.

“There is a rather disconcerting aspect to this particular tale,” Josiah cautioned, his voice finally taken on a modicum of sense. “Archie tells me that he’s heard tell of a woman resembling Prudence Cole, though her presence has yet to be confirmed.” He crossed one leg over the other and draped a hand over his knee. “I suggest you find poor Mr. Cole’s fortune and quickly, before other, less deserving folk take it upon themselves to chance fate.”

Clara raised an eyebrow and sat back in her chair. “You’re not coming with us?”

Arthur rolled his eyes. The day Josiah Trelawney did even an ounce of the work he doled out to the rest of the gang would be the day Arthur became an honest man. “He’s too busy doing whatever it is men like him do when they ain’t ordering the rest of us around like cattle.”

Her hard, unyielding gaze landed on him. Her eyes were perfect slits of brightest green, their depths as sharp and exacting as her tongue. “Shut up, Arthur.”

Josiah reached out and gave Clara’s hand an appreciative pat. Arthur, on the other hand, sat brooding and ill-tempered, wondering how long it would take him to break every bone in Trelawney’s hand.

“She really is quite clever, isn’t she?” Josiah said with a pointed look at Arthur. “As it is, I will leave this matter in your most capable hands.” He rose from his chair with catlike grace and smoothed his hands along the length of his perfectly pressed, silken vest. “Leave the matter of this Aurum to me.”

Clara swallowed and looked away. She rose steadily from her seat, her hands braced on the table as she retreated once more back into herself, putting more miles between them than Arthur cared to consider.

“I guess it’s worth a look, then,” Clara said after a long moment. There wasn’t much in the way of confidence in her voice, but what little there was of that she more than made up for in grim resolution.

Josiah flashed her a brilliant smile as Arthur resolutely and reluctantly got to his feet. “Wonderful!” he exclaimed as he once more took Clara’s hand and brought it to his lips. Arthur turned away, knowing full well that if he watched it for a second time, he wouldn’t be able to stop himself from tearing the mustache from the British man’s face.

“You can find the Cole homestead in Glen Flora, a pleasant little hamlet just north of here,” Trelawney explained as they made their way toward the exit. They had barely reached the door before he leaned in toward Arthur and hurriedly whispered, “Whatever it is you’ve done to upset her, I suggest you fix it—and quickly.”

Arthur frowned but said nothing. He caught sight of Clara as she silently slipped past him, her gaze determinedly forward as they made their way toward the hitching post outside the saloon. He considered Josiah’s words as the sometimes outlaw mounted up, tipped his hat in farewell, and promised to call on them when the time was right.

He didn’t know the first thing about fixing that which was broken.

He mounted Boadicea, Josiah’s words still pestering him as he gripped the reins. His was a brutal and abrasive power; his words could shatter even the purest of intentions, his touch capable of tearing every inch of this world apart. All he’d ever done was make things worse; his viperous tongue and rapid-fire temper ensured that. Whatever trust Clara had placed in him had been fractured by the words he should never have uttered.

But even as she rode off without a word toward whatever lay ahead, Arthur knew he would follow her. He would always linger in her shadow, forever begging her forgiveness and hoping that one day, she might deign to pull him back to the light.

*

The silence between them was as vast as the miles of open land around them.

The hills of northern New Yorkshire enfolded them as they tethered Marion and Boadicea to the thin, wiry trees that topped the small summit on which they stood. Glen Flora sprawled around them in beatific acres of green, fertile land bathed in a swath of golden sunlight. The home of former whiskey magnate J.T. Cole sat nestled on a patch of quiet, unsuspecting land. A barn loomed behind the main house, a specimen of classic architecture with a sweeping porch and tall windows that gazed upon the land like wide, beseeching eyes.

Clara fell back against the tree trunk at her back with a sharp sigh. The heat of the afternoon sun frayed her already worn and aggravated nerves; she crossed her arms, holding in the mountainous wave of biting acrimony that hovered just beneath the surface and found, despite herself, that her gaze wandered of its own accord to the man at her left.

Arthur lounged against a nearby tree, his hat pulled firmly over his eyes—likely to blot her out of sight and out of mind, she thought with a curl of her lip. She squinted through the slant of afternoon sun at his shadowed face; each breath was deep and thorough with the promise of sleep, though the tension of instinctual awareness cut along the edges of his face. Clara glowered as she watched him, studying the squareness of his jaw and the lips that were still pressed firmly together even in the strange, unknowable place between wakefulness and sleep.

The echo of his words had followed them on the long trail to their destination. They festered like old wounds, pouring forth their poison until it was all she could do to stave off the bitterness of betrayal that threatened to choke her half to death. After everything they’d been through—after the promise of forging a path forward together—Arthur still harbored an unseen strain of suspicion toward her intentions.

She looked away. His ignorance was her bane; he didn’t understand the years she’d spent tucked away from the world, relinquished to single sphere of existence, entirely controlled by a man who sought conquest in everything. Her skin had worn the evidence of his whims; Clara had lost count of the nights she’d spent hovering the dark, her nightmares etched with his face.

Her eyes drifted back to him. Arthur couldn’t understand because she’d never told him. It was her secret, her great shame, and it felt wrong to bring it to her lips—that would make it true, an inescapable fact. Sometimes she could fool herself into believing she’d shed her past life like a useless second skin. Sometimes, she could pretend to be the person she’d always wanted to be.

Arthur let out a soft snore. His hand twitched, his fingers clenching briefly into a fist before relaxing back into the tenuous bonds of fitful sleep. He’d promised to protect her—not because she’d asked but because he’d wanted to, for one reason or another.

And now he didn’t believe her.

Clara frowned and kicked him in the boot.

He started, pushing his hat back onto his head as his hand dipped toward his gun. His head swiveled, searching for the source of his sudden disturbance before finally landing on her. His summer blue eyes seemed darker as his lips formed a deep, perturbed frown.

“The hell is wrong with you?” he asked as he pinched the bridge of his nose with his fingers.

She said nothing. She didn’t trust herself to speak, despite the torrent of blistering, caustic words that lingered behind her tightly pressed lips.

He sighed and fixed his slightly skewed hat. His frown faded a bit as he settled back against the tree. “You see something?” he asked, making a half-heartened attempt to soften the rough-hewn edges of his voice.

“You have eyes, don’t you?” Clara spat, unable to control her rising anger.

Arthur gaped at her, his lips pressed into a thin line. “What?”

A thousand nights of pain and sorrow rushed through her veins. “Oh, that’s right,” she bit out, her voice drenched in bitter sarcasm. “You don’t trust me.”

At least Arthur had the good sense (however limited it might be) to appear chastised. He looked away, his face shadowed by the brim of his hat. “I never said that,” he muttered as he folded his legs and draped his arms over his knees. “I said you ain’t given me much reason to.”

Clara fought back a scream of rage. He would never understand—no one would. Why should she trust him now, after the way he’d thrown the past weeks and months back at her in the saloon like the shards of a broken blade? What reason had she to be honest in a world spoked by lies and propelled by deception? Perhaps she’d lost the ability to tell the truth; perhaps living in her own lie, in the conjuration of her own damaged heart, had driven her away from the truth.

Or perhaps, if she was still an honest person, she might have been willing to admit that she was afraid—afraid of her past, however much she buried it; afraid of who she might become if she felt her fear rather than suppressed it; afraid of what Arthur might say if he knew.

“If you don’t trust me,” she said stiffly, each word a burden, “then maybe I shouldn’t be here.” Running was easy—it was safe and simple, uncomplicated by fear and feeling. If she ran fast and far enough, then none of this would matter anymore.

Arthur’s face was wary, his eyes brimming with caution. “What you mean?”

But he knew just as well as she that this life was impermanence as its finest. Clara had known the moment she stepped into the fold of the van der Linde gang that, someday soon, they would all fade back into nothingness only to be made new again somewhere else. It would be no different for her to do it on her own.

This was the price of secrets, after all.

She couldn’t stop the storm spilling off her lips. “If you think I led him here on purpose, that I went through hell and back just to fall into his arms again, then it’s time for me to leave.”

The barbed words stung; she could see the poisonous effect on his face, despite the shadows that clung there. Arthur hung his head and shook it slightly as he muttered, “I didn’t—”

“You did,” she snapped, turning fully to face him. She slapped a palm over her stampeding heart, hoping the pressure might save it from bursting through her ribs. “I didn’t choose him—he chose me. I didn’t ask him to tear my will from piece by piece until there was nothing left of who I was. I don’t want to be this person, Arthur, but this is what he made me, and I am fighting to get back what he stole.” She paused as the great weight on her soul shifted slightly, allowing her a fraction more room to breathe. “I thought you understood that, but I suppose I was wrong.”

Clara pushed away from the tree. Her breaths were staggered, her mind flooded with the height of frustration and the sifting, slinking feeling of despair. She lifted her chin as she checked her weapons, eager to feel the familiar, comforting steadiness of her knives and gun. She cast only a single glance at Arthur as he got to his feet, his eyes tortured but his silence painstakingly resolute.

Fine, then—that was that.

“When this is done,” she said tersely over her shoulder, “I’ll pack and be gone by morning.”

Arthur flinched, his brow furrowed. He shook his head at her, his expression pinched with confusion. “Mae, you don’t—”

“Let’s go,” she commanded as she gave Marion one final pat. She ached to run now, to flee these last and final moments with the man who’d sworn to protect her. She’d been foolish to believe it, to consider that anything might have been different. Nothing changed, just as nothing stayed the same—she would forever be caught in a vicious, unending cycle of betweenness, forever lingering in the void between who she was and who she still thought she could be.

Clara turned on her heel, desperate to get the job done and over with, but she didn’t make it far. She whirled when Arthur’s hand landed on her arm, his grip loose enough for her to twist away but heavy enough to beg her not to.

She forced herself to look at him. His hand remained where it was, his fingers unsure yet steady. A flicker of brutal pain clouded his eyes for only a moment before he forced it away, leaving behind only the stoicism of conviction.

“I know he hurt you,” Arthur said, his voice strangely soft. “And I ain’t going to stop you if leaving’s what you want. You don’t belong to no one but yourself.” He paused and swallowed, his eyes never once wavering in their silent promise. “And he ain’t never going to hurt you again.”

Clara tried to hold onto the blistering, festering anger that had so enraged her only a moment ago. She tried to mirror the echo of his scalding words in the saloon, to punish herself with their strength until there was nothing left of her trust in him. Perhaps even a small part of her wished he would let her go; it would be easier that way, for the both of them.

Why, then, did she hesitate?

His hand drifted down her arm, his fingers brushing against her skin for the barest moment before he pulled away. Arthur pressed his lips together and looked away, his face grim with resignation.

“I’ll ride with you, see you to someplace safe,” he murmured cautiously. “That is, if—if you’re still thinking on leaving.”

Clara looked down to where the ghost of his touch still lingered on her skin. The night in the mine flooded back to her, the smoke and blood and pain all chased away by the memory of his arms enfolding her. He’d risked life and limb for her—how could she have forgotten that?

“I never thanked you,” she said. “For coming for me in the mine.”

Arthur’s brow furrowed. He shrugged, cleared his throat, and answered, “Ain’t no need to thank me. Any one of us would have done the same, even—”

Clara laid a hand on his arm, stretched up on her toes, and pressed her lips to his cheek.

She let her lips linger just long enough to taste the barest hint of sweat on his skin before she pulled away. A new and far more pressing truth spread like wildfire through her veins; her heart danced to a strange new rhythm, one she hadn’t the faintest idea of how to understand. She felt wildly out of control and yet perfectly grounded at the same time. There were a thousand different reasons to leave, but she needed only one reason to stay. And somehow, Clara thought, she’d known the reason all along.

“Thank you,” she said with a soft smile. Arthur said nothing; he only stared at her, his expression torn between abject shock and incredulity.

She held up a finger and pointed it at him, the spark of wild adrenaline still pulsing like fire through her veins. “But just because I’ve thanked you doesn’t mean I don’t still think you’re useless.”

He blinked at her, his lips parted as though he might speak.

“Well,” she said with a sigh as she turned back toward the path that would lead them toward the house. “I suppose it’s high time we fetch this fortune, wouldn’t you say, Mr. Morgan?”

He managed a nod, his eyes still wide. “Sure,” he muttered.

Clara led the way, the rift between them closing steadily and surely behind her, the taste of his skin still lingering on her lips.

*

Arthur Morgan would never forgive himself for making her want to leave.

Her words lingered with him, haunting every step he took in her wake. Every word he’d thrown haphazardly at her had amounted to a single, inescapable fact: he was incapable of permanence. He’d dug his own grave in the saloon; he could feel it still, hovering just out of reach, waiting for the moment when he would finally throw himself headlong into it  and spare Clara the pain of his foolishness.

But she’d kissed him.

That, too, haunted him as they climbed up onto the porch and stalked their careful, silent way toward the back door. The windows glared at them, affronted by their presence; the barn hovered like a silent sentinel at the back of the property, its red-hued face damaged and worn by the sun. He berated himself as they moved along, cautious and yet sure that the prevailing silence proclaimed the property—and its supposed fortune—uninhabited and untouched.

It wasn’t a kiss, not really, anyway. Once or twice he caught himself raising a hand to his cheek where the phantom of her gesture still presided. Her lips were warm and soft, the memory of it all too brief. Each time he recalled the moment, he forced it away, burying it beneath the comfort and reliance of self-deprecation.

She’d only been trying to thank him, however ridiculous the notion was. Clara would have thanked anyone who’d saved her; perhaps she’d even already thanked Charles when he wasn’t looking.

He made the mistake of imagining her lips against Charles’ cheek and felt the clawing, fierce roar of hatred writhe beneath his skin. Charles Smith was a far better man than he, but the thought of Clara displaying any amount of affection toward him—toward anyone—rattled his temper and drove him his propensity for unprovoked violence.

But she’d kissed him, however brief the contact had been, and Arthur couldn’t bring himself to push the memory out of sight and out of mind. It seemed wrong, somehow, to hamper the small gift she’d unwittingly given to him. Instead he resolved to etch the moment into his mind, sealing it with all the hope he’d long since abandoned. Arthur knew he would rely on this memory when she finally left him; he would need it like a dying man craved a breath of air after he’d already starved his lungs of it.

Clara hovered beside the backdoor to the house, her brow furrowed in concentration. He joined her, taking position opposite her, his hand hovering on his revolver. The cold steel was a boon, a refreshing reminder of the man he was and would always be. He let the outlaw take form, then, relinquishing the thought of Clara’s lips back into the recesses of his woeful, abandoned dreams.

She glanced over her shoulder toward the barn, her shoulders tight and her fisted hands hovering near her weapons. When Clara looked back at him, her lips were set in a grim line. “I’ll check the barn,” she muttered.

The barn? Who in the hell would leave a fortune to rot in a barn?

“No,” he replied as he laid a hand on the doorknob. “Stick to the house.”

He knew before he’d even uttered the words that, for the thousandth time that day, he’d said the wrong thing. The gleam of perpetual defiance blazed in the spring green of her eyes as she lifted her chin and set her shoulders.

“I’m checking the barn,” she insisted. “I’ll catch up with you when I’m done.”

Arthur’s hand tightened on the knob. He tried to assure himself that the idea was ludicrous, that it made far better sense for the both of them to search the sprawling, dual-floored estate in an effort to recovery Cole’s rumored fortune. But a small part of him, the part that still remembered how to be human, understood that the thought of leaving her alone was worse than the prospect of taking a bullet to the head.

He’d already let her go off on her own once before and nearly lost her in the process.

He instilled as much of the commander and enforcer he was into his voice. “I said no,” he retorted, taking a half step toward her to solidify his power and presence. “We check the house—together.”

Clara raised an eyebrow at him. “Are you giving me orders?”

Arthur fumbled with his response. He’d been paying too much attention to her lips and the way they formed words, his mind growing far too curious as to how they would feel if they—

“No!” he hissed, throwing his free hand toward the door. “Now get inside so we can get all this nonsense over with.”

She took a single, decisive step backward, a defiant yet entirely mischievous grin playing on her lips. Then she darted down the steps and toward the barn, never once deigning to look over her shoulder.

And Arthur Morgan stood there, his head still full of her lips, wondering when he was ever going to stop being such a goddamn, full-fledged idiot.

He wrenched the door open in a fit of anger, forgetting and not caring that he was making about as much noise as a stampede as he entered the house. He supposed it didn’t matter; the house was, according to Trelawney, vacant. If there were squatters here or other disingenuous folk looking to claim a dead man’s fortune for their own, Arthur would welcome the chance to shoot them.

That, at least, he supposed he still knew how to do without mucking it all up.

The backdoor led into a small, narrow hall. Closed doors loomed on either side as he stalked into the former Cole home, his eyes roving over the tattered wallpaper and the ill-kept floors. Arthur frowned; for a man who built a fortune on one of man’s worst vices, J.T. Cole didn’t seem very intent on keeping his home up to par.

He searched the rooms at the back of the house. The beds were still made, their corners impeccably folded in stark contrast to the faded, dreary appearance of the rest of the house. His eager, careful hands sifted through chests that lay dusty and undisturbed at the foot of the beds; his fingers clawed through pockets in search of anything that might lead him to a more fruitful monetary claim. Drawers and cabinets were barren, save for bottles of perfume strong enough to fell an ox and a few pieces of lackluster but still worthwhile jewelry.

Hardly a fortune befitting a man on par with Wyatt Byers.

Arthur wandered into the main foyer, his thoughts as grim and foul as his mood. His pockets were decidedly light but the weight on his heart was a heavy, cumbersome burden. He eyed a staircase leading up to the second floor, his mind harkening back to what Clara had said about Byers.

She hadn’t said much. Her words were guarded yet pointed, more than enough for Arthur to sense the layer of carefully veiled fear beneath them. He’d spent a lifetime learning how to frighten even the most stout-hearted of men; he knew the sound of it when he heard it. More often than not he relished it, let it taint his blood until the dark thing in his heart rose to meet it.

Arthur couldn’t bear the thought of a frightened Clara.

He climbed the stairs, trying and failing to set his mind to the task at hand. But the upstairs only held more of the same emptiness, the shadows and silence far more plentiful than the money. The lack of opportunity sent his mind whirring again, spiraling back to her.

He’d meant what he’d said to her—no one, not even Byers, would hurt her if he had anything to say about it.

The hallway upstairs led to more rooms, more chests, and more miniscule valuables. Arthur stumbled upon a photograph in one of the bedrooms, its gold frame slightly marred by time and forgetfulness. A man stood before what was clearly a backdrop—a rather opulent, slightly absurd garden of florals and vine-covered trees. His back was as straight as an arrow, one stiff arm crooked and nestled with the slimer, wiry arm of the woman to his left. She was slight, her form hardly reaching to his shoulder. She was draped in a swath of white frills, her veil an ethereal halo crowning her dark hair. Where the man’s eyes seemed distant and occupied, the woman’s gaze was present and directed solely at the camera, as though she sought to peer through time itself into the soul of the man currently holding the memory.

Arthur flipped the frame. An elegant hand had written in pen, James Taylor Cole and Prudence Cole—16 August 1897.

He placed the photo back on the nightstand. They’d only been married a few years, then. Arthur let his steps carry him toward the window which, he discovered after a glance through its dirty panes, faced the barn nearly head on. The door was slightly ajar—Clara had likely left it open to allow some of the bright afternoon sunlight to filter into the otherwise gloomy and dark interior.

His fingers clamped on the sill. Arthur didn’t want her to leave. The thought of it was nearly enough to tip him back into the perpetual pool of rage that lingered in his heart. And yet, what could he do to stop her? Clara did nothing to which she hadn’t already set her mind; whatever he said to the contrary would fall on deaf ears.

He’d been wrong to think she’d hid the Aurum from him. Arthur added it to his growing list of mistakes, knowing full well that he would pay the price for it sooner rather than later. And, he supposed, that price would be her departure. That was the price of secrets, it seemed—there was no hope to keep the good when all one did was dole out the bad.

A sound crept into his senses, drawing him away from the window. Arthur frowned, his hand darting to his gun, his eyes watching the doorway to the bedroom. It’d been light, like the whisper of a shutting door; possibly he’d imagined it, as now there was no echo of footsteps to proclaim the presence of someone else in the house.

Perhaps it was Clara, returned from the barn. Arthur let his hand fall away from the gun, waited a moment more, and then resigned himself to the fact that Trelawney had been wrong. It wouldn’t be the first time one of his leads turned out to be nothing more than a fairy tale; Arthur had robbed enough stages in his name and come out a bit worse for wear and none the richer to prove it.

He sauntered back down the stairs, defeated and ill-tempered. Arthur crept toward the front of the house, where the foyer opened up into a large, well-lit sitting room. The dining room and kitchen sprawled off to his right, the air tinged with the stench of foul and rotten food. Arthur frowned as he made his way toward the living area, drawn at once to the hearth and the stone-facade chimney at its heart. It seemed rather predictable, he thought, for a rich man to hide his supposed fortune in the same place a man of average wealth might, but who was he to judge?

Arthur braced a hand on the wooden mantle and crooked an arm up into the chimney. A rush of coal-black air slipped into his lungs and he paused a moment to cough the bitterness up and spit it back onto the floor. His fingers searched, feeling for all the familiar places, before he let out a grunt of frustration when he found nothing.

Then his fingers brushed against something soft and pliable. He fumbled for it, letting out a curse as it drifted back onto the ashes and flecks of gray-haired wood that still lingered in the hearth. Arthur stared at the object, carefully sifting through the ash for it, before a realization struck him cold and hard.

They were still warm.

Arthur snatched the item and twisted to face back across the room, into the foyer, and toward the hall beyond. A sense of tepid wrongness snaked around his instincts, warning him to be wary. The silence was nearly tangible, oppressive in its presence, as he slowly straightened and peered at the thing that had been hidden in the chimney.

It was another photograph. The same woman from the wedding photo—Prudence, he silently corrected—stared back at him, her strange, dark eyes piercing straight through him. Who in the hell had put this in the chimney? Arthur wasn’t easily frightened, but there was something about the woman’s face that made him wildly uncomfortable. It wasn’t only the sight of the woman’s eyes that set his instincts alight with caution.

The other half of the photo was missing, the jagged yet rounded edges blackened and charred from the insatiable hunger of fire. Arthur held the photo closer, his gut churning with wild suspicion, and noted that a hand lay on the woman’s knee, though the rest of the body had been severed flame and ash. It didn’t take much for Arthur to surmise that the photo, like the ashes below, had been recently subjected to a fiery end. That could only mean…

A single, strangled scream cut through the afternoon before being summarily doused back into silence.

*

She shouldn’t have kissed him.

Clara closed the crate with a decisive thud, wincing at the cloud of dust that rose in its wake. She straightened, brushing bits of hay and filth from her pants, resolving herself back to the gloom and shadow that filled the skeletal remains of the barn.

The place was not exactly the rousing scene of opulence she expected to find. Perhaps the whiskey business wasn’t quite as lucrative as Trelawney made it seem, though it had certainly been enough to garner the attention of the Aurum. Clara wandered through the barn, her thoughts turning as dark and dismal as her surroundings. She’d been so consumed with running, with putting one foot determinedly in front of the other in an effort to dislodge her past, that she hadn’t thought of the gathering at all.

The Aurum had never been held this far west. In the years she’d attended on the arm of Wyatt Byers, it had always been tucked away in the east, the seat of much of the nation’s riches. Clara brushed her fingers along the crates, many of them emblazoned with the Laoch brand. She knew firsthand just how far a man’s wealth could take him; she supposed it wasn’t a far stretch to assume that his wealth could take him beyond the boundaries of the east, toward the lingering wilds of the west.

He would follow her to the ends of the earth. He would trace her steps, lingering in the shadows she left behind, ready to tear her from the freedom that hovered just out of reach. And now Arthur…

The sound of sharp hissing drew her attention. Clara turned sharply toward the sound, her hand dipping to her knife. She waited, breathing steadily and with caution, and listened.

Nothing.

She took a few tentative steps forward, her eyes peering through the gloom. Her steps had brought her to the far end of the barn, where more Laoch whiskey sat boxed and forgotten. A thick layer of dust covered each one as Clara sidled around them, careful not to disturb more of the dust as her thoughts inevitably wound their way back to Arthur.

The taste of his skin hadn’t left her.

Clara lifted her hand to her face. Her fingertips brushed against her lips, remembering the coarseness of his stubble and the slight bitterness of sweat. The moment would stay with her; she knew in the same way she knew that her dreams had become more restless as of late. Because ever since the night in the mine, her dreams hadn’t been terrorized by the fear and pain Byers had inflicted upon her; now, her dreams were painted with summer blue.

Her boot connected with the corner of one of the crates. Clara let out a curse and wheeled back, bracing her hand on the lid. It shifted, nearly sending her stumbling headlong into the container of whiskey, but she just managed to catch herself on the edge.

“Nice work,” she muttered angrily to herself. Clara went to straighten but paused when something strange caught her attention.

She narrowed her eyes and peered through the darkness at the bottles. Clara reached in and pulled one up by the neck and held it up toward the slim slant of light that slipped through the door.

It was empty.

The rest of the Laoch bottles were the same, each one devoid of even a single drop of whiskey. A thousand possibilities ran through her mind as she held the cool, firm glass in her hand, each one more unlikely than the last. Clara stared at the empty bottles as reason drew her to one inevitable outcome.

They’d never been filled to begin with.

It took her only a few moments to relieve the crate of its hollow burden. Dust coated her lungs, her skin, and her clothes but she pressed on, her gut swirling with anticipation. When her fingers met the bottom of the crate, they explored the edges, her nails pressing into the wood, begging her suspicion to be confirmed.

When the bottom lifted, she nearly crowed with victory.

Clara hefted the bottom, wincing at the unexpected weight. She tossed it away, bracing a hand against it to avoid sending it crashing back down onto her head. She looked into the now exposed false bottom, her heart pounding as a slow smile crept onto her lips.

J.T. Cole’s fortune—a slew of bank bonds, stacks of cash, and glittering jewelry—lay before her, all of it ripe for the taking.

She began to load her satchel with handfuls of the bonds and cash. So preoccupied with the task was she that she paid no attention to the covert whisper of a hiss that flitted through the shadow. So consumed with filling her hands with sparking valuables was she that she didn’t see the woman come up behind her until it was too late.

A pair of cold, hard hands wrapped around her throat, cutting off a gasp as they dragged her away from the crate. Clara’s fingers clawed at the bind around her throat, her legs kicking desperately and with futility at the floor. Her lungs burned as she dug her nails into the hands holding her, digging and scraping at skin until she felt trickles of blood coat her hands.

All at once her assailant tossed her to the floor. Clara gasped, her hand leaping to her throat while the other grappled for her knife. Her thoughts were addled from lack of air, her vision blurry and sparkling in the corners as her lungs demanded more sustenance. She rolled onto her knees, still gasping and grasping for control, just as her assailant delivered a swift and powerful kick to her middle, expelling every inch of air from her already aching lungs. Before she could recover, a hand clutched her braid and sent her head snapping into the floor.

Hot, sharp pain lanced through Clara’s head. She clutched her knife as her addled thoughts wandered to the fringes of her battered skull, each one less coherent than the last. A dark, shifting shadow bent beside her and the cold grip returned, this time latching firmly onto her wrists and yanking them behind her back. Her fingers lost their grip on the knife and it clattered to the floor and into the gloom of the barn.

Clara let out a raw, ragged scream of rage. It burned through her, mixing dangerously with the pain that throbbed through her head and her side. The binding cut into her wrists, the pain as familiar as her nightmares.

She heard the hissing again as her captor tossed her onto her back. Clara kicked out with her legs, but the form easily danced away. Pain still crashed through her skull like flecks of lightning; Clara forced her eyes to focus, to dull the pain long enough to take note of the face of the person who would very soon feel the full force of her wrath.

A few blinks brought with it the clarity she sought. The form took shape—a slight, decidedly feminine form cut out from the shadows along with a pair of equally dark, brooding eyes.

A woman? But—

Realization dawned clear and cold, sweeping through Clara’s blood like winter ice. She gritted her teeth and kicked out again, her fingers scrambling along the floor for the familiar feel of her knife. She would carve Prudence Cole’s heart out before all this was done.

That was a vow she intended to keep.

Prudence loomed above her, a gun clutched in her hand. Something was wrong with her arm. She held it tightly against her body as a writhing, sinuous shape slithered along its length. The hiss came again, louder this time, and Clara knew without a shadow of a doubt what it was.

The woman stepped into the slim bit of light that managed to touch the shadows this far into the barn. The snake on her arm lifted its head, staring at Clara with viperous intent. Its long, impossibly sharp teeth glared at her, their venomous promise as deadly as the gun the woman held toward her.

She realized with a start that she knew the gun. She’d taken great pains to select the pearl handle, much to a certain outlaw’s discontent; the grip was etched with a pair of letters that proclaimed its ownership, the C and H adorned with a flourish that had elicited a substantial eyeroll from the only person from whom Clara would have tolerated it.

Prudence tilted her head and let out a burdened sigh. “Oh, my sweet girl,” she said in a voice tinged with the mockery of sadness, “You should never have come here.”

*

Arthur dropped the photo and drew his gun.

He ran back through the rooms and down the hall, cursing himself with every step. He’d promised to protect her—he’d promised, but he was far better at breaking them than keeping them, and Arthur understood as he burst through the backdoor, his gun at the ready, that he would forever lament breaking this one.

Lovesick fool, a voice whispered at the back of his head. Somehow, he didn’t have the conviction to contradict it.

He sprinted across the lawn as fast his legs would carry him. Every inch was another mile, every second an inescapable eternity. Arthur pumped his arms and legs until they ached, ran until his lungs threatened to burst, and still it was not fast enough.

It would never be enough—he would never be enough.

Arthur wrenched open the door of the barn and threw his revolver out in front of him. His finger hovered over the trigger, his blood roiling with the need to exact his steel-coated justice. The scream still pealed through his thoughts, its echo drowning out everything else. He didn’t care about a fortune lost to the wiles of time; he didn’t care about a widow whose past might be drenched in the blood of the men she’d sent straight to hell.

Every throb of his horrid, strangled heart beat for Clara. There was nothing and no one else beyond that.

“Mae!” he barked, his eyes roving through the shadow and gloom that lingered in the barn. Every breath was tainted by the sharp, earthen scent of mold; the shadows hung around him, threatening to encroach on the meager light that streamed through the open door behind him.

His only answer was terse, bitter silence.

Arthur’s voice was strangled and raw as he yelled, “Mae, answer me!”

He needed to hear her voice. It was a visceral need, one that clawed and scraped through him until his tattered soul bled its desire. Arthur’s hand tightened on the revolver, the cold steel biting into his hand until his bones threatened to crack. His blood sang with the need to pull the trigger; he craved the scent of gunpowder and raw, molten steel, of terror and vengeance and the final, tipping point of hatred. He’d promised to protect her and to that he held; he dared the world to stand in his way.

Rustling cut through the silence.

Arthur swung toward the sound. His thumb slammed down on the hammer, his finger hovering steadily over the trigger. Rusted and dull equipment hovered in the shadows like wraiths; crates hung by the walls, their shapes distorted by the oppressive, seemingly endless shadows. Stalls lined the far wall, their thresholds adorned with long forgotten brushes and tack.

But not all the shadows were stagnant; there was life in them still, their writhing forms coalescing into two forms that shuffled forward, their steps grating and dragging along the wood floor. The dark thing unfurled in his chest, jubilant at the thought of the blood that would be spilled. The red haze of bloodlust crept into the corners of his vision as his focus narrowed to the barrel of his gun and the bullet that would inevitably find its mark.

He froze when a pair of furious verdant eyes latched onto his through the dark.

Clara grunted as she stumbled forward. Her lips curled around a tattered gag, suppressing her voice. Her shoulders twisted and bucked in an effort to break the bonds that kept her hands locked behind her back.

The glint of a gun pressed against her head.

There was no end to Arthur’s rage. It burned through him, blackening what was left of his soul and eating away at the remnants of his heart. He became it, letting it fester and rot until the only thing left him was the insatiable, unequivocal urgency to kill.

Arthur trained his gun on the person whose grave mistake it was to hold Clara prisoner. It would be nothing to end them; the dark thing demanded it, screamed at him to pull the trigger and be done with it. But it was only the sight of Clara that stayed his hand, of the pure, raw hatred burning in her eyes that kept him grounded in what was left of his humanity.

She was shaking her head at him, her chest heaving and her face red with unbridled fury. But the dark thing roared again, and Arthur’s eyes shifted away from Clara to the form beside her.

Arthur rarely cared to remember the faces of the people he killed. He knew he would see them again during his swift and thorough descent to hell; until then, they would haunt him, reminding him of his path. They were all just ghosts in the end; there was no sense in quailing over adding another link in the chain that weighed down his soul.

What he didn’t expect was to see the face of Prudence Cole beside Clara, her white hand wrapped firmly around the revolver.

Clara shook her head again. She let out a strangled, culled sound, one sharp with panic. Arthur’s eyes flicked to her, the muzzle of his own gun still trained on Prudence’s heart. The bullet would find its mark, of that, he was unequivocally sure—but not with Clara in the line of fire. The dark thing might crave death, but even his most ardent hatred knew her life far outweighed that of anyone else.

Lovesick fool, the voice whispered at the fringes of his mind.

“You hurt her,” he growled, his voice strained by the weight of his bloodlust, “and I’ll kill you.”

The vacant yet sharply focused look on Prudence’s wan, pale face was far more disconcerting in life than it had been encapsulated in the boundary of a photograph. She tilted her head at Arthur, as though she found his hulking, threatening presence curious, and dipped her eyes to the floor. Clara twisted again, another sharp sound of warning butting up against the gag, but Prudence held her fast. She was powerful, despite the slightness of her form.

It went against Arthur’s nature to harm a woman; the thought was generally abhorrent and emasculating. But Prudence Cole had sealed her fate the moment she laid her hands on Clara.

“No,” Prudence mused. “I don’t think you will.”

Arthur couldn’t rightly explain what he witnessed.

A slithering shadow crept up behind Prudence’s leg, twining its length around her leg. Arthur balked when the crown peered around the woman’s boot, its venomous eyes landing not on him but its closest, more appealing prey—the one that was already bound and gagged, the one that would be helpless to fight back.

He’d seen enough rattlesnakes to recognize one when he saw it. And now, against all odds, the serpent had trained its attention on Clara.

Prudence glanced down with distinct fondness at the creature, the gun still hovering at Clara’s temple, “Medusa will behave herself,” she said nonchalantly. Her dark eyes flicked to Arthur as she added, “If you do.”

Arthur’s heart roared with the desperate urge to end the woman now, to see her blood spill across the wooden planks and her body rot away into dust and ash and nothingness. His finger hovered on the trigger, his muscles begging him to pull it, but he didn’t. He thought of Clara—of the way her eyes always gleamed with unbridled mischief and the biting, unrelenting sarcasm that always riled and impressed him. He thought of the night in the mine and the relief he’d felt when his arms wrapped around her. He thought of her lips as they pressed against his cheek, igniting within him a warmth he had not felt in years.

Arthur would have set every inch of the world on fire and gladly watched it burn if it meant saving Clara.

It took every inch of his control to lower the gun, despite the instinct that railed against it. He slowly holstered the gun, keeping his eyes on the woman all the while, and knew he was a bigger fool than he even thought. If it had been anyone else, he would have shot the woman and let them fend for themselves. Lovesick fool, his mind whispered to him again, this time its tone far more damning than he’d like it to be.

Prudence smiled and slipped the gun into her waistband. She wrenched Clara backward, dropping her without a care onto the ground. The rattlesnake snapped forward, looping its curling body along Clara’s leg as it raised its head, its knife-sharp teeth eager to tear into her flesh. She lay frozen, her gaze locked with the snake’s in a standoff of wills.

Arthur wasn’t a reasonable man. Reason was a limitation, one that inhibited the ease with which he could shoot a man and simply be done with it. Reason locked away impulse and instinct, both of which Arthur knew far outweighed the sensibility he knew he lacked—after all, Clara had told him as much. In a strange and unexpected turn of events, reason was the only thing holding him rooted to the spot. He knew the woman’s threat was real; if he so much as twitched a muscle in Clara’s direction, the snake would strike, and he would lose her forever.

He might still lose her—she might still leave him, if they survived this. But Arthur pushed the insistence aside and turned his attention back to Prudence, who sat with a huff of weariness upon one of the crates that loomed like hulking shadows in the barn.

She patted the one beside her. A bottle of Laoch whiskey, the very same one distilled by her erstwhile husband, sat beside her. “Shall we begin?”

His glare was as furious as the bloodlust that still tainted his blood. “What is it you want?”

Prudence furrowed her brow. She held up the bottle. “Whiskey, for one.”

The woman was out of her goddamn mind. Arthur glanced at Clara—he could see the stunted rise and fall of her chest as she sucked in shallow breaths, careful not to disturb the snake still coiled around her boot.

“I ain’t doing shit,” Arthur snapped, his lips curling into a snarl, “Not until you let her go.”

She let out a terse, irritable sigh and placed the bottle back down on the crate and turned toward the snake. Arthur watched as she made a single, sharp gesture with her hand. The snake snapped its jaws, its tail sounding off its titular rattle. It pulled away slowly, keeping its eyes on is prey, its flared head undulating with the promise of danger.

Arthur imagined what it would be like for his hands to wring the woman’s neck. He pictured his fingers bruising and rending flesh until the air fled her lungs and shriveled from the lack of it. The dark thing trembled with pleasure at the thought and, with great force of will, he shoved it away.

Prudence gestured toward the crate with her hand.

Arthur took one step forward. When the snake did nothing, he took another, each one deliberate and cautious. He lowered himself carefully onto the crate, his heart slamming against his ribs as his hand itched for his revolver.

“Good,” Prudence muttered. She lifted the bottle, removed the cork, and passed it Arthur.

He stared at it. He imagined breaking it and using the shards to puncture the vein in Prudence’s neck. It would be messy; he’d be coated in her blood, but that was beside the point. Arthur glanced furtively at the rattlesnake. He was fast, but not that fast; a move to break the bottle or go for his gun would send it striking toward Clara before he could think twice.

A lot of good he was, then.

She shoved the bottle toward him again, her eyes daring him to defy her. Arthur snatched it from her hand and held it, wondering how long it would take for her to suffocate if he was to wrap a hand around her throat. He hoped it would be long and terrible.

Prudence crossed one leg over the other and looked at the snake and its beleaguered victim. “Snakes have quite a lot in common with humans,” she mused. “I discovered that at a young age, when a rattlesnake bit my youngest brother.” She looked away, her expression distant and lost in memory. “I didn’t bother trying to save him. It was far more fascinating to see what the venom did to the body.”

The dark thing swirled in Arthur’s chest, unfurling its wings and demanding her blood. He tightened his grip on the neck of the bottle as he considered the way his knife would carve out his vengeance on her prone, helpless form.

She looked back at him, her lips pressed into a thin line. “I know why you’re here.”

Arthur said nothing. He knew if he moved, if he uttered a single word, he would kill her and then Clara would die. For her, he would stow his bloodlust, if only to buy her a few moments. He would do anything for her. That’s what you did when you—

Prudence cut the thought off with a swift and accusatory, “She stole it from me, and I want it back.”

Arthur narrowed his eyes. “She ain’t done a goddamn thing.”

She silenced him with a look. “Oh, but she did. You see, I knew my husband hid his fortune somewhere in here. He always did love his work more than me—not that I cared very much.” Her lips curled in a thin, wan smile. “But I am willing to make an agreement with you.”

The bitch had some nerve. He would enjoy beating it out of her, if he got half a chance.

“I ain’t doing shit,” he snarled at Prudence. “You let her go—then we’ll talk.”

Prudence let out another sigh. She nodded toward the bottle. “The only decent thing my husband did was make whiskey. Try some.”

The acrid, bitter scent of the drink teased him, urging him to take a sip. It would calm him, he thought; he needed a steady hand for whatever happened next. And if it shut the woman up long enough for him to think, then that would be worth it. His eyes were only on Clara as he tipped the bottle to his lips and let the smokey sweet drink coat his mouth and burn away the murderous edge to his rage.

Prudence eyed him with mild curiosity as he placed the bottle back on the crate. She might have been pretty once, but her features belied her savagery. Arthur thought of the picture he’d found in the hearth, her husband burned to ash and forgotten.

“You killed him,” he said. The whiskey still coated his mouth and lingered on his tongue. He swallowed again to dispel the burn, though it remained despite his efforts.

She didn’t bother to nod; the shadow that passed over her gaze was enough for him to know the truth. “And the two before him. His wealth was appealing; the others weren’t nearly so well off. But he had to die, otherwise I wouldn’t have what I rightly deserved—the very same fortune your friend discovered, I’m afraid.”

Clara’s eyes cut to her. Arthur could see her fingers moving beneath her, the slight tremor of her shoulders as she carefully, quietly, searched for something.

The whiskey scalded his stomach. Heat rose in his throat, singeing his mouth and tongue. His heart trembled in his chest, but he forced his focus back to Prudence.

“Lot of good it did you, it seems,” Arthur bit back.

She shrugged, entirely nonplussed. Prudence snapped her fingers and the snake retreated. Arthur gripped the edge of the crate as Clara watched it slither back to its master. His muscles tensed and, for a moment, his breath hitched in his lungs.

Something wasn’t right.

Prudence lowered her arm and the serpent wound itself around her arm. It hissed in greeting and she stroked its hooded crown, a smile to rival the sharpness of its teeth on her lips.

“They didn’t let me keep Medusa in the asylum,” she said. “I found her here, waiting, as though she knew I’d come back.” Prudence picked her head and looked at him, her brow furrowed. “Did you like the whiskey?”

Numbness swept through the heat. He tried to open his lips but found them clumsy and unequal to the task. His insides were on fire and his heart slammed against his ribs. He looked at Clara. Her eyes were wide as they watched him, panic written across her face. She rolled toward him, her chest heaving with stunted breaths.

Arthur turned back to Prudence. Her eyes were already on him, the shadows in their depths as venomous as the snake she held on her arm. She let out a low, insidious chuckle.

“Did you know,” she said, “that whiskey is the perfect vehicle for rattlesnake venom?”

His pulse roared in his ears. His body trembled as a feverish sweat drenched his skin.

Prudence continued, her fingers gliding along the scales of the snake. “I had to be a bit creative with my first two husbands—tea doesn’t work quite as well, you see. But that fool J.T. and his distillery were the perfect ruse.” Her smile widened as dark, seething victory flashed in her eyes. “And it works faster once its ingested.”

Arthur sucked in a leaden breath as the distant, vacuous sound of a muffled scream snagged his attention. He turned, his brain sluggish and sloshing against his skull with the movement and faced Clara. She strained against her bindings, her eyes wide with a rage-filled panic. Perhaps it was the last hope of a dying man, but Arthur thought her scream sounded like his name.

His strength failed him. Arthur slipped off the crate and fell heavy to his knees. Bile rose in his throat and the world began to slide in and out of focus. Prudence didn’t bother moving from where she sat, a dark and brooding queen on her broken throne. Arthur’s fingers clawed at the floor as the venom boiled in his veins and exploded in his heart. Arthur looked to Clara, her bright, unyielding ferocity the only light in the perpetual darkness. Even as pain wracked his body, even as he felt the threads holding his fragmented self together fray, Arthur kept his eyes on her.

The last thing Arthur saw before his vision blurred was Clara snapping free of her biding, her knife clutched in her hand as she tore the gag from her mouth.

His arms trembled as he fought to hold onto what little control of his body he had left. He’d been a fool to worry about her; she’d never needed anyone—not even him. And yet, a swift and encompassing ache rose within his rogue, withering heart; he never thought he’d be the one to leave her in the end.

It was a well-deserved tragedy, he thought, to love a woman who had never—and would never—need him.

*

She was going to watch Arthur die and there was nothing she could do about it.

Clara felt the scream rise up in her gorge. It burned through her throat, frayed the edges of her weary soul, and burst from her lungs with all the desperate fury in her faltering heart, but the sound of it lived and died on her silenced lips.

He was going to die.

This was the price of secrets: they poisoned everything they touched and brought even the hardest, most reluctant hearts to their knees.

Clara was done with secrets. They took and took until there was nothing left, until fate wound its yoke around her neck and tethered her to its will. Too long she’d been buried beneath a volition that was not her own; too long she’d been suffocated by broken hope and lost dreams. It was time fate understood that she was no longer its prisoner—Clara was the master of her own fate and she dared it to test her resolve.

She clutched her knife tightly in her hand. Clara hadn’t expected to find it so easily; it’d been a great stroke of luck, marred now by the inescapable sense of urgency that ripped through her. Her eyes darted to Arthur—the hand braced on the edge of the crate on which he sat tightened on the wood, his knuckles turning white from the strain. Slow, budding tension was etched on his face; he kept swallowing, his gorge rising and falling with the effort.

You’re not going to lose him.

Clara tightened her fingers on the handle of her knife, letting the slim weapon anchor her to the moment. She forced evenness into her breaths, staving off the throes of panic that lapped at her resolve as she carefully and quietly cut through the binding at her wrist.

Arthur was shaking—she could see the trembling in his arm and the quaking of his broad shoulders. His eyes blinked rapidly, fighting for focus, as Prudence stroked the serpent lashed to her arm. Clara’s focus narrowed to the woman, to the victorious smile playing on her lips, and imagined the feeling of her knife sliding between her ribs and straight into the black void of her heart.

She took one breath, then another. Then her hand darted to the gag around her mouth, gave it one swift tug, and freed her voice.

Arthur slid from the crate and down to his knees. Prudence’s head snapped to her, her expression shifting into one of unbridled rage. The snake on her arm snapped its jaws, its tail rattling its vast displeasure.

Clara knew what would happen next.

Prudence gestured with her hand and the snake jolted from her grasp. It was faster than Clara thought, its body whipping through the air and onto the floor with deadly intent. She didn’t think—she rolled away, her hand still tight on her knife, and scrambled to her knees. The snake followed her every movement, its jaws open and its teeth glistening with venom.

She was woefully unprepared for such a standoff, but it had taken David only a single stone to fell a giant.

Clara sent the knife plunging for the serpentine foe. The impeccably sharpened blade cut through the sinuous body, severing its head from the rest of its scaled and writhing body.

Prudence let out a howl of rage and despair. She rushed at Clara, her hands like claws and aimed precisely at her throat. Her dark eyes were wild with murderous ire, her lips pulled back in snarl that nearly matched the vehemence of her former companion. Clara ducked beneath her outstretched arms and swung her knife up through Prudence’s ribs and straight into her heart.

Visceral satisfaction flooded her as she gave the knife a single, deliberate twist. Prudence’s mouth was open, her eyes wide with enraged shock, as she sunk with deathly gravity to the floor. Clara waited until the light fled from her eyes, until the cool veneer of death slipped over her face in a permanent, immovable mask.

Clara waited until the first trails of blood seeped from the wound. She watched them fall in dark rivulets across the tattered shirt, until she was certain that the woman was firmly at the gates of hell where she belonged. She tore the knife from the wound and sheathed it as she got to her feet. Clara took back her gun and slammed it into the holster with vicious finality.

The sound of ragged breathing sent her stumbling headlong back into the moment. Clara ran to Arthur and knelt beside him, one hand gripping his broad shoulder and the other one pressed to his forehead. His skin was slick with sweat and his eyes fought for focus as she measured the blistering strength of his fever. It was hellishly, insatiably, hot.

You’re not going to lose him. The thought was abhorrent, impossible, and yet she felt the tremors of its echo rattling her senses and eating away at her resolve. Clara sucked in a breath, the taste of it tinged with the faint essence of blood and sweat.

“You don’t look so good, cowboy,” she muttered as her hand dipped to cup his cheek.

Arthur huffed, though she wasn’t sure if it was a laugh or a vie for breath. He shook his head and feebly tried to push her hand away. “Go,” he rasped. “Don’t worry about me.”

She ignored him. Clara got to her feet and slipped her hands beneath his arms. “Just shut up, Arthur, and stand.”

He glared at her for a moment, its effect diminished by the sheen of fever in his eyes. Arthur gritted his teeth and let out a terse groan as he pushed away from the floor, bracing as much of his considerable weight on his shaking legs as he could muster. Clara held tight, her heart leaping with the effort, but it wasn’t enough. He stumbled and slid back to the floor, narrowly avoiding a collision with the nearby crate.

“Mae, he said again, this time with more insistence. “Just get the hell out of here.”

Clara let go of him long enough to kneel in front of him, her chin lifted in grim resolve. Her heart slammed in her chest, each beat a cadence to strengthen her will. Without thinking, she placed her hands on either side of Arthur’s head, her thumbs neatly wicking away the sweat that lingered there. He froze and, for a moment, the cloud of fever in his eyes gave way to sharp, startling clarity.

“Listen to me, you idiot,” she hissed at him. “I am not leaving you—not now, not ever. We’re both getting out of here. Do you understand?”

Fate would not decide this for her. If it was intent on keeping them apart, then it would suffer the force her wrath. But, no matter the force of her conviction, she would still have to contend with the silent killer still lurking in his veins. He was fading, and fast—Clara wracked her brain, picking apart her thoughts in search of an answer, suddenly and wildly desperate for anything that might help him. She’d meant what she said. She was not leaving the barn without him, come hell or high water.

Clara gasped as the memory struck her as hard and fast as a bullet. The tonic Charles had made for her was still in her saddlebag.

She tore her eyes from Arthur and glanced toward the threshold of the barn, quietly and quickly assessing how long it would take for them to make it to the horses. Miles and mountains still lay between them and the salvation of camp but traveling there without giving him the tonic was out of the question. If she could just get him to the horses and give him the tonic, then she could worry about the rest later.

You’re not going to lose him.

If she had to drag Arthur Morgan by the heel out of the barn, she would do it. She would tear down mountains and lasso the moon, if only it would save him. There was nothing she wouldn’t do for him; there was no path forward that did not have him in it. Fate was powerless to stop her. That was the way of things, she supposed, when you loved someone.

Clara shoved away the terrifying thought. A fresh and fierce strength culled the sharp panic in her veins. Arthur blinked as she stood and crouched beside him, bracing both of her hands along his broad back.

“Charles’ tonic is in my saddlebag,” she explained as she gave him an encouraging push. “Let’s get out of here and get you well.”

Her skin pulsed with the warmth of his fever. His shirt was damp with sweat, making it all the more difficult to assist him as he struggled to gain his footing. Her fingers pressed into his back, instilling in him as much strength as she could muster, but it wasn’t enough. He stood just long enough to tip into the crate, his hands scrambling for purchase as Clara fought to maintain her hold on him. Clara held fast to him as he struggled to right himself. He braced his hands on the crate, his corded muscles taut and shaking with the effort. Her chest grew tight with worry as she wrapped her fingers in the fabric of his damp shirt and tugged, silently urging him on.

Arthur shook his head and tried to shift out of her grasp. “Just go, Mae,” he murmured, his words strangely stitched together from numbed lips.

His summer blue eyes were fever bright, almost startling in their clarity, but Clara could see the hollow shroud of resolution lingering in their depths. He’d promised to protect her and even now, when faced with the promise of his own mortality, he thought only of saving her.

She clenched his shirt tightly with her hand and set her jaw. “I am not telling you twice, Mr. Morgan,” she demanded through clenched teeth. “Get your ass up.”

In a rare turn of events, Arthur listened. With her help, he managed to climb to his feet. Clara clasped his arm and draped it over her shoulders and wrapped her arm around the bulk of his middle. He held tightly to her, his blistering skin sending warmth cascading over her in waves and began to trek to the door.

By the time they made it to the quiet of the afternoon, Arthur’s steps began to falter.

Clara held him, urging him forward with each and every step. Her eyes were trained on the tree line, where she could make out the hulking shapes of their mounts as they idled in the shade. She whispered encouragement to him, each step hurried yet deliberate in purpose. They didn’t have far to go; they could make it, she insisted, unwilling to consider the alternative.

“Not much farther,” she breathed as she groaned against the force of his weight. “Keep going.”

He plodded forward, his face pale and drawn yet strangely determined. The summer blue of his eyes was foggy, dampened by the venom racing its way through his veins. “Whatever you say, boss,” he muttered, the words hardly more than stunted gasps.

They were going to make it. Clara was going to get the tonic and she was going to save him. She silently shouted the words with each step; she screamed into the void of fate, daring it to defy her will and promising swift and exacting retribution if it did.

Arthur lost his footing the moment they reached the clearing. He nearly took her with him as he fell to his knees. Clara managed to catch herself, dislodging her arm and using his momentum to lay him carefully upon the ground. Her hand darted to his chest and balked as his heart threatened to burst from its prison.

“I’ll get the tonic,” she murmured as she got to her feet and sprinted for Marion.

The seconds slipped into one another. Time became irrelevant, its power insignificant as Clara shoved her hand into the saddlebag and brought forth the tonic. Everything hinged on Charles’ skill—if this didn’t work, then there was nothing else she could do.

Clara shoved the errant thought away, her heart pounding with urgency as she turned on her heel and fled back to Arthur. She slid to a stop beside him and tore the cork from the vial. Her hand shook only slightly as she brought it carefully to Arthur’s lips. She placed a hand on his cheek, holding his head in place as she tipped the contents in between his lips. Arthur swallowed only a few ounces before he sputtered and shot up, knocking the vial from Clara’s hand.

She watched helplessly as the tonic spilled across his shirt and the vial tumbled, empty and useless, onto the ground. His head fell back, his eyes fluttering closed as he took in a long, ragged breath. A brush of rough fingers caressed her wrist, the touch wandering yet insistent. Clara clasped her hand over his hand, holding it tightly in her own

Clara tried to conquer her fear and failed. It filled her heart, tearing through her resolve with unequivocal might. “Arthur,” she said, his name trembling off her lips. “Stay with me.”

He didn’t move.

Clara squeezed his hand and placed the other on his stubbled cheek. Her chest tightened as she willed away doubt and panic. There was no place for it here, not when Arthur needed her. She pulled in a long, shaking breath. Her thumb brushed across the rosy peak of his cheek as she leaned closer, breathing in the herbal scent of the spilled tonic.

“I will never forgive you if you leave,” she bit out through clenched teeth as she held his hand to her chest. “Do you hear me, Arthur? I will never forgive you.”

You’re not going to lose him.

Clara steadied her hold on his hand and waited—waited for his eyes to open, for his summer blue gaze to settle on hers; waited for his hand to tighten on hers until there was nothing but the feel of his warmth on her skin. She let out a shaking breath and waited. Clara Howard waited because there was no path forward that did not have Arthur Morgan in it. She would stand guard over him while he slept and when he woke, they would press forward together.

This was the price of secrets: to hold tightly to the hand of the one you loved and daring fate to tear them away.

*

Arthur thought hell would be hotter.

Reverend Swanson had warned him of the fires that awaited him in the pit of eternal damnation. Arthur had been younger then and even more foolish than he was now; he’d listened to the half-coherent, slurred sermons with disdain and stiff reproach. He’d never understood Dutch’s tolerance for the rambling, cantankerous clergyman who delivered the word of God with as much efficacy as a wolf in sheep’s clothing.

The gospels always ended with words of caution, spoken unto the masses by a faceless deity who wandered the heavens while the rest of his creation rotted away with vice and sin. Swanson had told Arthur in one of his notorious bouts of nightly pandering to the good graces of outlaws that one day the earth would be consumed in a hellish conflagration—Satan and his demon horde would finally break the boundaries of their cage and walk among men, consuming flesh and bone and soul, while the chosen departed for the heavens to sit among the angels.

That was how Arthur pictured his fate: hot and terrible and filled with every ounce of vengeance and hatred he’d ever doled out to the innocent and undeserving. He imagined his son and his mother watching from on high as he burned along with the worst of them. Sometimes, Arthur thought they might find a grim satisfaction in his furious demise; he’d done wrong by them, however much he’d promised he’d do right, and he was owed far more pain that he got. But there were plenty of other moments, not just the ones in which Swanson described his future in grim and futile detail, when Arthur looked forward to the end. The life he’d chosen had never been a true one—the path was always twisting and turning, his purpose shifting and hollow. He raged through the world like hellfire, scathing and destroying what and when he could in the name of a cause he wasn’t entirely sure existed. That was the way things were; he would die a villain, as well it suited him, and that was simply that.

So, when his eyes fluttered open and the rush of imperfect humanity nearly suffocated him with its impossible weight, Arthur felt cheated. This wasn’t the hell he’d been promised. Perhaps even the devil had no use for him in hell. It wouldn’t surprise Arthur; perhaps he was doomed to wander through eternity as a ghost, neither one thing nor the other.

The world was difficult to make out. Colors blurred together in a dizzying fog that marred the clarity of his vision. He pressed his eyes closed, allowing his desperate lungs a moment to remember the proper sensation of air, before opening them again, this time with surprised eagerness.

There was smoke—somewhere there was wood burning. The brisk, crisp scent of evening proclaimed its presence. But just beneath the heavy, oppressive smells of the world, there was something else, something so vividly familiar: lavender and mint.

This couldn’t be hell, then. It was no place for Clara, he knew, though he had no doubt she would have had a thing or two to say to the devil, if given half a chance. Arthur stiffened as something wet and cool landed on his forehead. A gentle but persistent weight held it in place and, though the cold had been startling at first, its effect was instantaneously pleasing. The more he came back to himself the more he could feel the lingering sensation of heat on his skin—decidedly not hellfire, but warm, nonetheless.

He breathed in her scent, letting it lull and calm him. She was here and, despite what may lay ahead in the natural course of his eternal soul, that served him just fine. Arthur wanted to be wherever she was; there was no other place that seemed quite as worthwhile as that.

He shifted slightly, flexing his fingers to ensure they still worked. A heady flush of deep, throbbing aches followed suit, plaguing his joints with all the permanence of the human condition. The cooling weight on his forehead—a cloth, he figured, as his thoughts finally organized themselves into a certain measure of coherence—lifted and he lamented its loss. He blinked and the world came a bit more into focus, however begrudgingly it did so.

Arthur waited to feel the cool slip of cloth again. Instead, he felt the barest, softest brush of Clara’s skin.

All at once he ignited. Heat flooded him, reminding him what it was to feel—really feel, rather than just the mimicry of sensation. He bended to her touch, wanting more of it, more of the realness her presence provided.

He decided hell could wait. A fraction of heaven lay in her touch and it was the closest to holiness he’d ever be.

Clara smoothed her palm across his head as her thumb brushed along the strands of his hair. Her touch was as illicit as it was invigorating; there was a danger to this, he knew, one that toed the line between what was and what could be. But when she took her hand away, leaving him cold and barren and lifeless once more, he craved it still, the yearning burning through him until there was nothing left but the memory of her.

He opened his eyes, wincing as the crush of humanity smothered him once more. The world slid into focus—the tree canopy overhead, the plume of gray smoke that drifted from the meager campfire nearby, and the sight of a thick braid tossed over a hunched shoulder.

Clara tipped her canteen over a cloth, cursing as an eager rush of water pooled in her hand and tipped onto her legs. He watched her as she wrung out the cloth, her brow furrowed in consternation. Her lips were pursed, and the tops of her cheeks painted a gentle, rosy hue.

Lovesick fool, the old voice whispered. Arthur swallowed, his throat scraping with painful dryness. He said her name but the sound of it died in his throat. Arthur took a breath, swallowed again, and managed to croak, “Mae.”

She whirled, her eyes wide and her lips parted in shock, the still dripping cloth clutched in her hand. Clara watched him for a moment, her verdant eyes as bright as the flames burning nearby.

Then she was upon him, her palm cupping his cheek. Arthur instinctively flinched, the touch unexpected but most welcome, and relaxed when he saw the concern written across her features.

“Are you alive?” she breathed. Her hand moved from his cheek back to his forehead, lingering there as she checked for the telltale warmth of a fever.

Arthur swallowed again and nodded. “I think so,” he replied as the stiff ground pressed into his already aching and weary spine. He winced and forced his muscles to relax. “Maybe not.”

He found it difficult to think while she was this close. The air was filled with her scent and he breathed it in, pulling as much of it into his lungs as he could muster. Her hand landed on his chest, her fingers tightening in the fabric of his shirt and his breath hitched in his lungs; he could feel the phantom touch of her skin through the thin, worn shirt and his mind spun out of his grasp, wondering what it might feel like if she—

Clara’s head dipped toward him until her forehead brushed against his.

Arthur didn’t move.

He was acutely, perfectly aware of all the places where her body touched his, where the warmth of her skin ignited the spark already burning in his chest. Arthur closed his eyes and breathed her in, knowing that all of this was but a fleeting moment, one that he was never meant to have. But Clara held tight, her relief as palpable as the thundering pulse that clattered in his veins.

If he were a different man, he might lift a hand and place it on the enticing curve of her hip. If he were a different man, he might slide his fingers through her hair and relish in its softness. If he were a different man, he might take advantage of the inch that lingered between their lips, a distance that both terrified and emboldened the spark he’d long since buried.

All at once she pulled away, so suddenly that Arthur felt the loss like a bullet wound to the gut. Then she wheeled back and shoved him as hard as she could in the shoulder.

She thrust her hands onto the hips he’d been considering only a moment ago. “You idiot,” she hissed through clenched teeth. “You had me worried sick.”

Arthur frowned. He gingerly sat up, carefully bracing his weight on his forearms. “Ain’t you supposed to be considerate of the dead and dying?”

Clara rolled her eyes, the sight of it so familiar that he felt his heart leap with pleasure. “Don’t be so dramatic, Mr. Morgan. You were barely dead,” she explained, though he thought he could still see the lingering tension of apprehension in her eyes. “Besides, snake venom is entirely curable.”

He’d known her long enough to sense an unwinnable battle when he saw one. He hefted himself up with a tight groan until his back was against the tree behind him, suddenly and immeasurably grateful for its sturdy presence. He folded his legs before him and draped his arms over his knees and let out a long, heavy sigh.

“How’d you get me out of the barn?” he asked as he rubbed the back of his sore and aching head. Memories of the afternoon flooded his mind, clashing against all the thoughts of her that had so thoroughly captivated him.

Clara lifted her chin, her eyes assessing him with careful consideration. The horizon was tinged with the bruised gold of sunset; it wouldn’t be long until the first stars sifted through the coming night, crowning the sky with their heavenly presence.

“It wasn’t easy,” she finally admitted as she shifted where she sat, turning slightly back toward the warmth of the fire. “You’re as big as a house, you know.”

Arthur huffed a laugh and dropped his hand. He leaned back against the tree, grateful for its solid presence. By the looks of it, Clara had already set up camp: she’d fetched their bedrolls from the horses and a couple of battered but opened cans hovered near the fire. Clara grabbed one of them and passed it to him.

“I thought it best if we stay the night. I wasn’t sure how long it would be before you…” She let the words fall away and pressed her lips together, as though afraid of what she might have said.

He took the proffered food and peered inside the can. Beans, then—standard fare for the lost and broken outlaw with only a small corner of the world to call home. Arthur tipped the can to his lips, his stomach tightening with sudden hunger. Clara swirled the can of food, her lips pursed and her face grave.

Arthur glanced sidelong at her as he lowered his can, his chest suddenly tight with concern. “What’s wrong?”

Her eyes lifted to his. The firelight danced across her features, crowning her in its golden hues. And yet her eyes remained fiercely green, their depths as confident and defiant as her spirit. She took a breath and said, “I didn’t know about the Aurum—you know that.”

He could tell by the set of her mouth and the lift of her chin that a part of her was still angry with him; he’d fractured her trust, given her every reason to walk away and leave him high and dry, but not because he was sure she’d been lying. At some point, when he hadn’t been paying close enough attention, the woman had gone and ensnared him. She had a power over him that brought his sense of the world to its knees. Everything he’d ever known and what little he believed in seemed inconsequential in comparison to the bright, inescapable spark of her presence.

Arthur knew she’d never lied to him. He’d only ever been angry at what he already knew to be true: he would protect her from the man who sought her with every wretched breath he had, knowing all the while she would leave him in the end.

His jaw tightened as he gave her a stiff nod. “I know.” Arthur glanced down at the thick, syrupy layer of beans that still coated the bottom of his can. He poured the rest down his gullet and halfheartedly tossed the can away, eager to be rid of the thing.

He knew he shouldn’t ask. He should bury the question where it belonged, forget it had ever been brought to life by the chaos of thoughts that burned through his angry, tormented mind. But his tongue whipped around the words, lassoing them before he could change his mind.

“You still thinking about leaving?” Arthur asked, taking great care to keep his voice even. He already knew what she’d say—there was no sense in fooling himself any more than he’d already done.

Clara tilted her head, her brow furrowed. “Do you want me to leave?”

Arthur had already lived a life without her. He considered what it would be like to go back to that past, the one he’d forged out of bloodstained hatred and the bitterness of hard-won anger. He wondered what it would be like to drown her memory in the bottom of a bottle, to know that she existed somewhere else, in a place where he was not. Arthur pictured her finding the freedom she sought and building a life with it—maybe she’d marry, have children, and grow old with only the barest, fleeting memory of an outlaw who’d only ever proven himself to be a great and terrible fool.

He decided he would rather be in hell.

Instead the outlaw just shrugged and glanced at his rough-hewn, gnarled hands. “Whatever you think is best, I guess.”

She said nothing. Arthur kept his gaze resolutely forward. He was already picturing her gathering her things and leaving him behind. It served him right, he knew; he was born a fool, he’d die a fool, and when he finally took the plunge into eternal damnation, there would be no one there to mourn him. He heard rustling beside him and clenched his jaw. This was it, then—when he turned, he would see precisely what he was meant to see: the end of the last decent thing to ever have happened to him.

But Clara only laid out her bedroll beside him, giving it a few firm whacks to flatten it. Arthur stared at her, wondering if for a moment he was still in the throes of poisoned whiskey, as she tucked herself beneath a blanket and turned on her side to face him.

“It’s just as well I stay,” she mused as she nestled into the thin pillow. “You can barely take care of yourself as it is.” Clara yawned and closed her eyes, the ghost of a smirk still playing on her lips.

Eventually Arthur stretched out onto his own bedroll. He folded his arms beneath his head and, try as he might to focus on the fresh coating of stars in the deepening night, he could not help but turn and gaze upon Clara’s sleeping form.

She was going to stay.

It was hours before he finally allowed himself to drift off to sleep. He spent them watching the slow, even crest and fall of her chest as she slept. Her cheek was nestled against her hand, her features softened by the promise of dreams. A strand of hair had come loose from her braid and curled across the top of her cheek in a gentle caress.

He would have died for her and done it gladly.

It wasn’t often that Arthur spoke the truth. His tongue had been scarred and scalded by the lies he’d told, his world bent and twisted around them until it’d become unrecognizable, distorted by the damage and deaths he’d helped dole out. Truth wasn’t a path on which Arthur Morgan cared to tread; it stripped away masks and falsehoods and brought with it only pain and unending loneliness. He’d tried running from it. He’d made every attempt to bury it between bullets and unquenchable anger because there’d been no other way. How many times would he delude himself into thinking he could toe the line between one world and the next before he understood that he belonged to neither?

This was the price of secrets: Arthur Morgan loved Claramae Howard. He loved her despite the fact that she could never belong to him. She would always be within arm’s reach yet a world apart, and that was that.

Chapter Text

Dutch Van der Linde was an enigma wrapped in charm, charisma, and a vicious propensity for revolution.

This was precisely what had drawn Hosea Matthews to him in the first place. He was clever, to be sure; his whip-sharp tongue and the mischievous yet purposeful gleam in his eye had been enough to tell him that Dutch was something new and different altogether. The world paled in comparison to the bright, insatiable promise of rejuvenation that Dutch exuded. When Hosea considered the matter in the years that followed, he was sure that there was no other option than to follow this man to the ends of the earth.

The old man sat back in his chair and peered at the map. The edges were worn and some of the corners shorn off, but it had held up all these years, yet another testament to the merits of persistence. Dutch’s handwriting—and a bit of his and Arthur’s, too—left a silent trail of their past exploits; notes about leads, both failed and successful, were scrawled in the thin margins; in some places, entire names of cities were crossed out, usually in the throes of the bitterness that came from failure. But Hosea largely ignored these familiar markings. Instead, his eyes slid to the defiant, eager circle that surrounded the northern tip of New Yorkshire and the sharp, deliberate line that ended with a firm arrow pointed directly at Blackwater.

Hosea drummed his fingers on the arm of the chair, his eyes inescapably trained on the arrow. “Thought we was supposed to be heading west,” he mused, placing emphasis on the last word.

Dutch let the smoke from his cigar lazily drift from his lips. He lounged comfortably, with all the ease of a god upon his hard-won throne. “And how, exactly, do you expect us to do that if we don’t have any money?”

Hosea scratched at his chin. “We got enough money to get us there, at least.” It was the same argument they’d had a hundred times before; he couldn’t help but feel as though he were traveling in a circle, damned to repeat the same phrases over and over while Dutch watched from on high, intent on his own path.

The man in question looked, as Hosea expected, entirely unmoved by the prospect. He leaned forward, closing the distance between them. “You’re not thinking of the future, Hosea. You’re just like Arthur,” he said with a wave of his hand. “Always living in the past.”

Hosea let a grin play on his lips. “Sometimes the past has a way of reminding us who we are. Besides,” he said as he indicated the rest of the camp with a hand, “folks are settled in. They’re happy.”

“I know that,” Dutch insisted, his tone bordering on petulant. He pointed to the map, his finger placed directly over the circle that haloed Fairclough Estate. “We have a chance to make some real money here. And then, once we manage that, we can make our way to Blackwater.”

Hosea frowned. “Blackwater? What do you expect to find there?” They’d wandered through the town long ago, back before an errant, quick-tempered boy called Arthur had quite literally stolen and fought his way into their lives. Blackwater was certainly not the lively, opportunity-soaked paradise that always seemed to catch the sharp-eyed attention of Dutch Van der Linde.

Dutch let his finger trail along the old map, as though gently caressing the place where his mother was buried. He’d shown Hosea the gravestone on their last foray into the dusty, unsettled parts of West Elizabeth. “Micah’s heard tell of a riverboat,” he mused, his voice distant despite the eagerness that lingered in the corner of his eyes.

Hosea let out a long sigh. He crossed his arms, pondering the pattern of words he’d say next that would best avoid the conflict he knew would come at some point. Arthur, who more often than not had difficulty knowing when to keep his mouth shut, had already wandered down this path with Dutch and with little to show for it. Hosea, on the other hand, had deliberately kept his opinion to himself, and with good reason: Dutch heard what he wanted to hear. Words tainted with doubt and falsehood went unheard, while those spouted from a silver-tongued thief who knew how best to twist and wind the truth around a single, inevitable lie more often than not found their mark.

“Micah’s been to Blackwater recently?” he asked, keeping his tone light and full of curiosity.

Dutch lifted his finger from the map and tapped the ash from his cigar. There was a hard edge to his gaze now. “Does it matter?”

Hosea shrugged. “No, I supposed not. I’m just curious how he managed to find out about that party for rich folks and a riverboat half a state away.”

The silence lingered for a moment, though not long enough to convince Hosea that his words had had any sort of implication. The set of Dutch’s mouth and the unyielding, determined set of his shoulders revealed that his mind was already made up.

When he finally turned to look at him, Dutch said, “Soon, Hosea. Give it just a little more time, and we’ll finally, finally, be able to disappear.” His lips curled into the ghost of a smirk, the very same one he’d given him the night they’d met. Hosea still felt its pull, even after all these years. “Maybe then you and Arthur will stop doubting me so much.”

Hosea let out a soft chuckle. “Ain’t you I’m worried about—not yet, at least.” He left the possibility hanging in the air like the smoke that drifted from the cigar; there for only a moment before flitting away with the breath of the mountain wind.

A familiar, hulking shape slipped out from the small city of tents and wagons. His hat was slightly askew, and he gave the brim a firm tug, tipping it back into place. His steps carried him to where Dutch and Hosea sat, a king and his fool upon a pair of rickety thrones.

“Arthur,” Hosea called with a wave. The man in question lifted his head at the sound of his name, his mouth set in a grim line. His expression softened when he saw them and his slow, sauntering steps turned in their direction.

Dutch leaned back in his chair and crossed his ankles. “We were just discussing the fact that you don’t think Micah’s leads are sound.” His eyes slid for a moment to Hosea; he had caught on, then.

Arthur tipped his shoulder against the pole at the entrance to the tent. His hands gripped his belt, wrapping around the worn leather as though it were the only thing tethering him to the moment. His sharp, cool gaze flitted between the both of them. “Which leads was that, exactly?”

“The party, for one,” Hosea answered. “And the riverboat in Blackwater for another.”

Arthur’s eyes narrowed with concern. “Blackwater?” he asked, his voice laced with a strain of incredulity. “What’s he worried about Blackwater for? Thought we was supposed to be heading west.”

Dutch waved away the question. “That ain’t what we’re here to discuss. This party could be our ticket out of here,” he said, the familiar air of possibility laced through every word. “It’s the perfect opportunity to take everything those fools wrenched from the hands of hardworking folks and put it back where it belongs, just like we’ve always done.”

Hosea nodded. He wasn’t exactly sure when Dutch had started believing their gang of misfits and miscreants was to be counted among the destitute and forlorn, but it was, as many things were, now an inescapable fact. “You up for this one, Arthur?”

Arthur’s eyes drifted for a moment, lost in the thoughts he so rarely allowed to surface. Hosea had grown used to the cloud of grim, angry determination that so often fogged his better sensibilities, but this was starkly different. Hosea followed the track of his sight line; it took him only a moment to find where Arthur’s gaze instinctually went.

“I ain’t too sure about this one, Dutch,” Arthur said, his voice strained and forced, as though the words did not come naturally to his lips. He turned back to them, his face drawn with the beginnings of concern. “We’re bound to stir up trouble, especially seeing as how this was Micah’s idea in the first place.” His mouth twisted around the name as though it were a bitter, foul-tasting curse.

Dutch being Dutch, he squashed the concern with the vitality of his unique brand of optimism. He gestured toward Hosea and said, “You’re worried about a little trouble when we have among us the best con artist this country has ever seen?”

Hosea couldn’t help the small surge of pride that flitted in his aging, weary heart.

Arthur sighed and lifted a hand to the back of his head. After a moment, he let it drop uselessly to his side. “We’re going to need some more information,” he muttered with a shrug. “Can’t go into this blind; have to play it right.”

Dutch nodded sagely. “Micah’s already on it.”

Again, Hosea saw the twist and writhe of Arthur’s lips into the barest hint of a scowl. His eyes drifted once more, slipping toward the far end of camp, where a certain tent sat tucked on the border between the crags and rocky slopes of the mountain. Hosea knew immediately that Arthur’s concern lay not with the potential for risk and the decided lack of pertinent information that surrounded Dutch’s proposed enterprise; instead, it lay where it ought to, where a simple truth still lay suppressed and guarded as well as any of the secrets they’d kept over the long, arduous years.

It was a thought to ponder another time; for now, Hosea shifted in his seat, wincing slightly at the tremor in his old bones. “It might be our best chance to get the hell out of here,” he said with a look between the both of them. “Lord knows we got a lot of heat on us already. It would do us good to find someplace else to lay low, start a new life.”

“We’re going to need you for this one, Arthur,” Dutch insisted as he leaned forward. “You’re the best of us.”

And, just as it had done time and time again, the confidence Dutch’s words exuded was enough to smother the dissent Hosea could sense brewing in Arthur’s heart. Their outlawed son gave a single, quick nod before his brow furrowed and his lips pressed into a thin line.

Hosea drummed his fingers on the arm of the chair, his thoughts circling back to the silent, unconfessed source of Arthur’s muted but all too present disquiet. “Bring Clara in on this,” he said with a firm nod. “We’ll need someone with a brain on this operation.”

Dutch’s brow half rose with a cautious sense of curiosity. Arthur, on the other hand, looked as though he had suddenly stumbled from a dream only to find that waking was far less preferable than unconsciousness.

“Why?” he asked, barking the question in the gruff tone he generally reserved for robberies and stilted power struggles.

Hosea fought the grin creeping onto his lips. The idiot was smart when he allowed himself to be; he’d taught Arthur long ago that being caught did not mean giving up. Anyone could spin a tale to serve their own purposes, even when the endings were less than favorable.

“We need people we can trust,” Hosea explained and with a glance in Dutch’s direction. “Gotta play this one close to the chest if we want to keep our necks out of the noose.”

Arthur said nothing for a moment, though the fierceness in his eyes revealed the bitter clash of thoughts in his resolute mind. He crossed his arms, leveled his gaze at Dutch, and asked, “You letting Micah in on this?”

Dutch let out a sharp sigh. “Arthur, I am asking you not to start all this mess again.”

For the barest hint of a moment, Dutch’s rigid plea did its work—it snaked around Arthur’s will, clenching and biting until it subdued it long enough to allow the persistence of his own ambitions replace whatever it was Arthur might have said. But it was not enough to dampen the spark that lingered in Arthur’s eyes, one that persisted as did the faint brushstroke of stars against the coming of the bright, unrelenting dawn.

Arthur said with carefully veiled skepticism, “You know my feelings on him, Dutch.”

“Sounds like you don’t trust Clara to handle herself,” Hosea said as he folded his hands in his lap. Perhaps it was a scalding, unnecessary blow to fling at a man already toeing the edge of what he was and what he might be, but Hosea was sure of one thing: Clara was the sort of woman a man wanted to keep around. Bessie had been cut from the same cloth; they were the sort of women whose tongues were made for lashing, who scoffed at bluster, and who cut their men down to the quick to remind them that they were human and not the gods they so often imagined themselves to be. They weathered storms and embraced hardship and anchored themselves with unrelenting permanence.

Arthur straightened from the pole, his eyes flashing with hard-edged anger. Hosea watched as memories of his own time with Bessie floating aimlessly through his mind, their crisp edges dulled by time.

“I trust her,” he said with as much conviction as he could muster. He lifted a hand and pointed to the camp proper. “It’s him I don’t trust.”

Hosea shrugged. “You try asking her what she thinks about all this?”

Arthur’s brow furrowed. His lips parted, his tongue always quick and senseless enough to answer before he gave enough consideration to what he might say. In the end, though, his words faltered, and he clenched his jaw shut in grim resolution.

“Fine,” he bit out angrily.

Hosea nodded. He’d hoped for a bit more if he was being honest, but he supposed it was enough of a start. Bessie had been a much tougher nut to crack, after all; he supposed he didn’t have much to worry about.

“Good,” he replied. “We’ll have to move quickly on this one.”

Arthur said nothing; his attention had wandered again, back to the tent on the edge of the camp. After a moment he breathed out a short, sharp sigh and nodded. He turned, gesturing with a finger at the both of them, and asked, “You ain’t going to make me dress up, are you?”

Dutch raised an eyebrow. “It’s a party, Arthur.” He held out his arms and added, “Live a little, will you?”

Hosea laid a hand on Dutch’s arm. “Do you remember when swindled that fool in a high stakes poker game?”

Arthur, sensing what was coming, placed his hands on his hips and looked anywhere but at the pair of reminiscing men before him.

Dutch’s lips curled into a grin. “We’ve swindled a lot of folk over the years, Hosea.”

“Oh, you remember this one,” he insisted with a raised finger. “We was in…Arizona, I think. You were an oil magnate from California, and I was—”

“The governor of New Hanover’s brother,” Dutch finished with a soft chuckle. “Now I remember.”

Hosea smirked at Arthur and tapped the brim of his old, well-worn hat. “I wore this hat, you see—not this one, but one I stole off some idiot outside of Tucson. Blue as the sky, it was, with a peacock feather sticking out of the brim.”

This drew a hearty laugh from Dutch while Arthur tried very hard not to roll his eyes.

“How much did we take from them, Hosea?” Dutch asked once the laugh had subsided.

Hosea, whose memory wasn’t what it used to be, pondered the query for a moment. “Three hundred, I think?”

His partner in myriad crimes shook his head and waved away the supposition. “Had to be more than that.”

Arthur stalked toward the tent opening and called out, “I’ll just leave you two to it, then.”

They persisted in the memory in the few moments it took for Arthur to make his quick exit. Laughter shook their weary bones until the weight of their cause seemed easier to bear, even if only for a moment. Hosea couldn’t remember the last time they’d allowed themselves to be unburned by the past and the concern for the future; it was a rare moment in which the guise of the outlaw fell away, leaving behind only a pair of old, dear friends strapped together in the fondness that comes with remembering an easier, more peaceful time.

Dutch, his cigar now finished, tossed the remnants away to smolder in the brittle grass outside the tent. He gestured toward the opening and asked, “What was that all about, anyway?”

Hosea gave Dutch a pointed look. “Oh, you know exactly what that was about.”

It took a moment for the realization to hit home. When it did, Dutch’s expression became tight with shock and surprise. “Clara?” he asked, his tone as incredulous as it was brittle with suspicion.

The old man nodded. “Been that way for a while now. But you know how he is with that sort of thing.”

Dutch, his eyes still wide, lifted a hand to worry absently at his mustache. “Guess I never thought that after…well, you know.”

Hosea knew, of course. “These things always happen unexpectedly.”

“Guess so,” Dutch muttered. He shifted in his chair, the surprise well and truly gone, replaced now with a hardness that Hosea couldn’t quite place. “Just hope it don’t end up like it did last time. I need him, Hosea—we all do.”

Hosea, who knew how to talk a man into just about anything, also knew when it was prudent to keep his thoughts to himself. He let the words linger for a moment as he considered, as he so often did, what might happen in the future. Dutch’s eyes were already set on the distant horizon, toward possibility and, of course, the inevitable sense of danger. The road would be hard, just as it’d always been. They would fight and lose, win and rejoice; Hosea suspected there’d be more graves to dig before all was said and done, despite Dutch’s talk to the contrary, but there was always something else beneath the pain and turmoil, something far more valuable than the riches that begged to be taken.

He just hoped Arthur would learn to see that something more had been standing right in front of him all along.

*

The mountains were mocking him.

Arthur Morgan could feel it just as surely as Hosea’s crisp, clear words still lingered on the back of the morning breeze that nipped at his skin. They ate at him just as the shadow of the mountain did, wearing away at what little control he had over…well, everything.

He lifted a hand to adjust the brim of his hat. Even the damned hat didn’t seem to fit well these days, as though it, too, had rebelled against him to prove a point that perpetually eluded his already addled, foolish brain. The frown etched on his lips deepened as he stalked through the camp; it’d been there for as long as he could remember, a fact that lived in defiance of the mountains that sought to rule from on high, and it was to that he held even as the meaning of Hosea’s persistence lodged squarely in his roiling gut.

The old man was clever and quick, more so than Arthur had ever been or could hope to be. He saw nearly all that he sought to keep hidden, perhaps against his better judgment, and the conversation in the tent had been no different. But, as Arthur slipped through the camp largely (and blessedly) unnoticed, the truth of the matter once more rose up in rebellion and threatened to topple his purposeful, deliberate saunter to his destination.

The days since their return from Glen Flora had been tenuous, at best; the venom he’d consumed had taken far worse a toll than he’d anticipated, though he’d still managed to avoid the strong, ever-present pull of death. He’d been tired yet restless, aching and yet full of vigor, the dichotomy of extremities making him feel as though he’d finally well and truly lost his way.

His steps slowed as he reached the edge of camp, where the outlying pitched tents loomed like gloomy sentinels on perpetual watch. His own lay not far, hardly more than a stone’s throw away, but his summer eyes lingered on one tent, its folds of canvas stretched taut by what he already knew to be an insistent, impatient hand. Arthur set his shoulders, bolstered his resolve with the weight of Hosea’s words, and sauntered with every flimsy ounce of confidence he could conjure toward the open tent flap.

He didn’t make it far before his lungs filled with the floral, crisp scent of lavender and mint. Arthur froze as the perfume wound its way through his senses, blotting out the world until there was nothing more than her essence, its presence thoroughly alive and invigorating. If Arthur had taken a moment to bend toward honesty, he might have admitted that the snake venom was not entirely the cause of his lingering disquiet.

Clara Howard had barely spoken to him.

Hell, she’d seemed to make every effort to avoid him, not that he could find it within himself to blame her. He didn’t even want to be around himself most of the time, especially in the cold, snow-tinged nights when the world found its way toward silence and his thoughts ran rampant until the dawn. Arthur glanced over his shoulder and, finding no one watching him with undue interest, cautiously crept toward the open flap of her tent.

He’d borne the silence as any man would, with a head full of stubbornness and an aching heart, summarily punctured by Clara’s sudden and conspicuous turn toward indifference. What did it matter, he’d thought in the long, bitter nights if she’d chosen not to associate herself with him anymore? He’d be spared the constant, nagging sarcasm that seemed always to spill like water from her lips, drenching him in the sort of haughty superiority that drove him to the edge of madness. Arthur had contented himself with the knowledge that her absence, in a manner of speaking, would alleviate the burden of worry that had taken root in him somewhere along the line. Her business was her business, after all, and he would likely live to see thirty-seven if she found someone else to pester with all her worldly dilemmas.

Arthur gripped the edge of the flap and peered into the darkness beyond. The scent was nearly overpowering, enough to knock him straight to his knees if he let it. He swallowed, holding his breath so that he might retain some ounce of sense, at least, and took half a step into the entrance, as his eyes sorted through the shadows.

It was empty.

He felt his heart sink like a stone in his tight, burning chest. Her pillow still had the indentation from where she’d slept, likely curled on her side, judging by the placement of peaks and valleys of fabric. The thick, woolen blanket had been carelessly tossed to the side with one flick of the hand, judging by the mess tucked against the side of the tent. Arthur’s gaze snagged on the corner of a book that peeked from beneath the blanket, as though it were unwilling to face the coming day.

Arthur stood for a long, tenuous moment in the threshold, trying and failing not to breathe in the scent that had become so entwined with every thought of her. He had no idea where she was—she could be halfway across the world by now, he thought, and he’d still be standing at her tent like a lost, lonely fool who couldn’t admit that all the sleep he’d lost could be traced to one simple, cemented fact.

He was terrified of losing her.

Arthur let out a soft curse and dipped into the tent, his blood coursing like a raging, hot-headed river in his veins. Every hour he’d spent convincing himself he was better off without her only proved how entirely and unequivocally she’d become a part of everything that was familiar to him. The days in which he’d stumbled through the dregs of life seemed lost and nearly forgotten; he could not think on much of anything without taking her into account—her mischievous, sometimes taunting smile; the unburdened lilt of her laugh; the way her verdant, hopeful eyes saw what the world had to offer and dared it to contradict her will.

Arthur stepped to her bedside, careful not to disturb the trunk she’d shoved beneath the cot. A mirror loomed in the corner, its purpose to reflect back to him the error of his judgment. A small, haphazard pile of books sat upon a stool beside it; Arthur didn’t need to look to know that each of them would, despite the weariness of travel, show little to no signs of abuse or harm. Instead, he bent and slipped the book she’d clearly been reading during the night from beneath the cavern of blanket and tilted the cover toward the strangled yet persistent sunlight. The cover was an exceptional craft of artwork; flower buds like roaring fires jutted up from the root of the cover, their green vines like bold, impenetrable pillars. The title was tucked among a field of the brightly burning flowers, the letters as whimsical as the rest of the bold adornments of the tome.

Sleepy Hollow, the flowers revealed. And there, among the roots, lay the author’s name: Washington Irving.

None of this made much sense to Arthur, though he hadn’t exactly expected it to. But he found the cover to be intriguing, at least from an artistic point of view and found himself flipping through the pages before he could think better of it. The act felt elicit, as though he’d chosen to rob a bank instead of search through a book without the owner’s permission. Arthur found he didn’t much care; the book was as much a part of her as the perfumed air, and he found that he’d much rather be here, among the burning flowers and printed words than anywhere else where she was not.

The problem was that Arthur loved her—what’s more, he knew it, and found he could not dislodge the feeling from his heart.

It was an infuriating thing to love, even more so because Arthur had done it before and failed so spectacularly that he knew it wasn’t worth the trouble to try again. But even as his eyes wandered over the frankly ridiculous names on the pages—Ichabod Crane, Brom van Brunt, Katrina van Tassel—Arthur felt his pulse quicken as the small, whispered truth flitted through his mind for the hundred thousandth time since they’d come back from Glen Flora.

Arthur loved the woman, damn her, and now she wouldn’t even talk to him.

“So much for that,” he whispered through tightly pursed lips. A storm of rage and sorrow roared through him, tumbling through the crags of his heart until he was left with nothing but the sense of impending, inevitable loss. This was the path he’d chosen to walk, after all; if this life had taught him anything, it was that he couldn’t hope to hold onto the good if he only delt out bad. He would love Clara despite his best intentions, and she would fall further and further away until he was left with nothing but memories and half-hearted hope.

That was what love did, after all. It promised everything and gave nothing. Love was a wilting, caged flower that only grew out of reach. It was a ring bought with the best intentions only to lay forgotten among the fragments of broken, stilted promises; it was a pair of wooden crosses jutting from the ground like the limbs of a fallen tree.

“What are you doing?”

Arthur had been caught plenty of times in his life. It was an occupational hazard, after all, and one that often ended with well-timed escape (though more than a handful of those same instances saw a younger, more volatile Arthur tucked away to stew behind a set of thick iron bars). He’d learned over the years how best to manage such an unfortunate turn of events, so he did what any man backed into a corner would do under such duress.

He smoothed the shock out of his features and willed the thrum of his erratic heart into compliance. “Looking for you,” he answered without looking up, his tone rigid with false aggravation. Arthur snapped the book closed and tossed it onto the bed; the outlaw had slipped back into its rightful place, blotting out the foolish man who’d been lost among the hopes and dreams of love.

But when he looked up and saw Clara standing at the mouth of her own tent, Arthur forgot how to be an outlaw. He forgot what it meant to spill lie after bitter lie from his tongue, how to steal with wanton abandonment from any who dared cross his wild, untamed temperament. All he could think of was the way her fingers brushed against the canvas flap and the crease of consternation that marred her brow. Arthur found his mind wandering down the paths made from the flare of her hips, his thoughts traveling along the length of her braid as it fell along her shoulder.

And Arthur Morgan felt his heart lurch almost painfully in his chest at the sight of the woman who had stolen everything from him.

Clara Howard raised an impertinent eyebrow at him as she crossed her arms over the full swell of her chest. Arthur hadn’t meant for his eyes to wander in that direction, but he also hadn’t meant to be caught inside her tent.

“And you thought entering my tent without permission was the way to discover my whereabouts?” she asked, her voice cutting yet wary.

Arthur cursed himself, the world, and her as he turned to face her, his hands instinctively gripping his belt. He pulled together the fragments of his control and shrugged. “Ain’t like you been around much these days,” he said, the words tight despite his effort at nonchalance. “Thought maybe you’d up and left.”

He had feared it, of course, though he would never admit it aloud. Clara gestured toward her belongings and asked, “Does it look like I’m planning on leaving?”

“Guess I don’t know what I know no more,” he slung back as his worries, both old and new, gnawed at the back of his mind. Arthur nodded toward her, his lips pursed tightly together. “Where was you, anyway?”

“Let me get this straight,” Clara said as she stepped into the tent and pointed at him. “You come into my tent, unannounced and uninvited, go through my things, and then expect me to tell you where I’ve been?”

Arthur felt his resolve slipping, a fact that simultaneously made him incredibly anxious and vasty irritated. He sighed and shook his head, letting the useless façade drop. “It ain’t like that, Mae.”

She dropped her hand and frowned at him. After a moment she lifted her chin, her eyes sparkling with that unquenchable fire of defiance, and stalked toward the bed. Clara snatched her book from where he’d dropped it.

“This has too many big words for you, anyway,” she muttered as she flung her braid over her shoulder and crossed the tent to her stack of books. Clara placed Sleepy Hollow atop, her fingers lingering on the cover as if in silent, loving promise to return. “And I was with Charles.”

What little Arthur had of rational thought insisted that if she was going to be safe with anyone, it would be Charles Smith; irrational thought, the sort which made many of his hasty, often disastrous decisions, railed at the idea of Charles being anywhere close to her. Did she smile at him in the way that always made Arthur feel like he’d never before been doused with a fraction of sunlight? Did he make her laugh in that easy, teasing way that always seemed to remind Arthur that things weren’t always as grim as they seemed?

His hands tightened on the belt until the leather creaked and cried out in protest. “Doing what?” he asked, all attempt to hide his consternation entirely gone.

Clara faced him and rolled her eyes. Her hand dipped into her pocket from which she plucked a small glass vial, its contents nearly as bright as the spring green fields of her eyes.

Arthur recognized it, could still taste the liquid as it slid down his throat and cooled the fever of venom from his aching body. He frowned as she held it out to him, unsure what its presence might mean.

“He taught me how to make this,” she explained. Her words were gentle this time, less taut and more edged toward the softness she so rarely exuded. Clara flicked her hand toward him. “Here, take it. Just in case you need it.”

Arthur’s fingers slowly clamped around the cool glass. “You ain’t planning on poisoning me, is you?”

Clara’s smile was muted, tentative, but firmly on her lips. Arthur’s pulse quickened at the sight of it. “Not just yet, no,” she replied. She quickly held up a finger and added, “But don’t fool yourself into thinking I’m beyond slipping some into your whiskey the next time you come into my tent without an invitation.”

He stared at the vial. She’d made it…for him? It was a strange thought, one that he simply could not make settle in his head. Arthur pushed the confounding notion away and tucked the vial carefully into his satchel. When he looked up, he noticed that Clara was far closer than he’d realized.

Arthur cleared his throat. “Always knew you was a witch,” he said.

“And you,” she countered with a smirk, “will always be an idiot.”

His boot slid forward a few inches. Her scent was overpowering him now; it was a force of gravity all on its own, taunting him and pulling him closer and closer to his downfall. Clara’s eyes widened a fraction as a faint aura of pink slipped across her cheek like an errant brushstroke.

“Glad we got that settled then, Ms. Howard,” Arthur said. His heart slammed against his ribs and he forced his fingers to remain latched on his belt, lest they wander where they were not welcome.

Clara absently smoothed her hands along the midnight blue of her shirt. “Try not to forget it, Mr. Morgan,” she replied, her words breathless.

Arthur imagined a hundred different versions of that very moment. If he’d been born into a different life, he might have considered saying the words that pulsed with bated breath in his lungs. He’d said them to Mary, though they echoed hollowly in his memory; he’d even managed to say them to his son, though not nearly enough. But in every varied version of the moment, Arthur wondered what it would be like to hear his lips form the words and give them to Clara.

He even wondered what it would be like if she said them back.

Instead, Clara let out a sigh, and Arthur stumbled out of possibility and back into harsh, stinging reality. She hurried toward the tent entrance as Arthur felt the hollow, aching loss of his wonderings, however foolish they were, and waved him on.

“Come on,” she said over her shoulder. “I’ll get you a coffee.”

There was nothing else to do. He followed her, knowing that it was only coffee, only another day in which they’d find themselves wrapped up in one scheme or another. Bullets might fly, blood might spill, but in the end, things would end as they always did, with Arthur Morgan lost in dreams where Clara Howard wanted him as much as he needed her.

*

It hadn’t been the promise of a fresh vial of health tonic that had driven Clara Howard from the warm confines of her bed to the willing expertise of Charles Smith.

She’d woken sometime in the night. One moment she’d been asleep, lost entirely to the thralls of slumber; the next her eyes drifted open of their own accord, shuddering her back into the weighty confines of a half-lived life. Clara had rolled onto her back with a sharp, bitter sigh as the warmth of sleep faded, giving way to the swift, sharp cold that pressed in on the camp from the mountains of Devil’s Ridge. Her bones ached with the chill as she’d clamped her teeth together, riding out the urge to shiver. She would not cow to the mountain’s will; she’d lived through that loss once before and refused to give in even to the tempestuous, insurmountable wiles of nature.

Clara, her mind still drifting in the fog of lost sleep, rolled onto her side and let her hand slip along the length of the thin pillow beneath her head. Her fingers caressed the rough canvas of the cot as the wisps of fading dreams danced idly at the edges of her memory. It would have been all well and good if all of her dreams had chosen to fade with the night. Instead, a single, errant conjuring shuddered back to life, its presence as sudden and unexpected as though it had been a piece of cloth snagged on a jutting nail. Clara froze, less from the cold and more from the shock of the flash of images in her mind, each one painted as bright and bold as the mornings over New Yorkshire.

Clara’s fingers wound through the edges of the pillow, holding tight even as she felt the world spin swiftly and suddenly out of her control.

She’d thought she’d turn and find Arthur Morgan beside her, just as she had in the dream that had nearly been lost.

It spilled through her, its edges as bright and crisp as the letters stamped onto the pages of her beloved books. The more it held her in its thrall, the more she discovered that she’d been right to think of it less as a dream and more as the firmament of memory; she’d felt exactly this the morning after the events at Glen Flora. She’d woken to find the sun caressing her face, the world still peaceful and quiet, and the still sleeping form of Arthur only a hand’s breadth away.

Clara swallowed and pressed her wide eyes closed. Her fingers clenched in the worn fabric of the pillow as the dream-memory persisted, blotting out the unfavorable world, the one in which she had not woken into the steady, unyielding presence of the outlaw.

But she’d wanted to, and somehow that was both better and startlingly worse than expecting it.

She shook her head, rolled onto her side, and let out a brief but stunted sigh. A part of her relished the new and fresh ability to dream of someone other than Wyatt Byers. How long had she spent suffocating beneath his invisible thumb? How many nights had she nearly tumbled from this very cot, a scream caught fast in her throat, as her limbs throbbed in remembrance of all the marks he’d left on her skin?

Clara stewed, lost in the confines of the here and now even as the tendrils of hopeful dreams brushed against each and every reluctant, waking thought.

She knew precisely what this was.

She’d known it long before Glen Flora, before Eden Bennett stole her away, even before the train robbery gone so viciously south. And now she could no longer hide from it. Even her dreams had rebelled against her, leaving her open enough to face the truth with what little will she had left.

Eventually, she found the wherewithal to dress, despite the heavy reluctance of sleep-laden limbs. Clara tugged her corduroy jacket around her, relishing the warmth of the wool lining. It stayed with her as she sifted numb and tired fingers through the remnants of her braid before twining the thick, wavy strands back into order. It lingered still as she ducked out of her tent and wandered through the hovering haze of the coming morning. She wandered through the camp as one might amble through a dense, creeping fog. Clara might have let her feet take her where they would if she hadn’t stumbled upon Charles Smith.

He couldn’t sleep, either, though the reason for it was left only to supposition. Clara had little trouble convincing him to take her down the slopes of the mountain toward the forest at its feet, where the herbs for his signature tonic lay in wait. She listened dutifully as he showed her which ones to pluck and which ones should have only their petals removed; he watched with a wary eye as she ground the proper number of herbs and tipped them into the crystal-clear waters that ran from the heights of the mountain and let the tincture settle into the bright green tonic that had saved Arthur.

Charles had never asked why she’d been so intent on crafting another tonic; she supposed most of the gang had already heard tell of the spectacular disaster that was Josiah Trelawney’s lead. Despite the comfortable silence that drifted between them as they hiked back up to Deepwater Pass, Clara knew that the quiet, stoic knowing that clung to Charles like a second skin had been more than enough for him to see through the guise she kept up in a half-hearted attempt to seem…what, exactly?

It was the same question that plagued her as she stalked back to her tent and found, much to her surprise, the source of all her trouble flipping through her copy of Irving’s Sleepy Hollow. She supposed she should have been furious—she certainly would have been if it had been anyone else—but instead, she felt her resolve falter and her mind go swiftly and suddenly blank.

And now, as she handed Arthur Morgan a cup of steaming coffee and sat beside him on the log, the question rose up again, snaking around her thoughts as thoroughly as her errant dream: What are you so afraid of?

Arthur took the cup with a nod and tipped the black brew to his lips. Clara took a tentative sip of hers, knowing full well what awaited her: cloying, sour bitterness that would coat her mouth for the better part of the afternoon.

“Jesus,” she muttered with a wince as she quickly lowered the cup.

Her companion chuckled, quietly masking his own grimace at the taste. He lowered the cup and glanced sidelong at her, his summer eyes bright enough to rival the dawn. “Wasn’t sure why you insisted on coffee, but I weren’t going to be the one to stop you.”

She pressed her fingers deeper into the cup, savoring the warmth since she refused to savor the taste. “That’s because you know better,” Clara answered with a smirk.

Arthur braced his elbows on the wide set of his knees. He looked better than he had when she’d nearly dragged him back to camp with venom still swimming in his veins. There was a smile on his lips, however tentative and wary it might be.

“That I do,” he said as he took another bracing sip of Pearson’s coffee.

Silence drifted between them, but it was not the easy sort of settled, calm minds. This was a rage of storms, a pulse of stubborn tremors that rattled her thoughts and drove her pulse toward a wild stampede. Her fingers tightened around the cup as the dream and the question stabbed at her, both equally demanding the attention she could not afford to give them.

Clara reached up and tucked a stray strand of hair behind her ear. “So,” she began with as much cordiality as the tempest in her heart would warrant, “Why were you looking for me?”

His expression tightened as his heated summer eyes drifted toward her. His jaw tightened as his hands wrapped tightly around his cup, despite the heat that must have afflicted his skin.

“Hosea and Dutch was talking about that party,” he said as he reached up a hand to rub at his chin. “Seems like Dutch is intent on going through with it.” He paused and dropped his hand, turning so that his shadowed face was angled toward her. “They want you on the job.”

It wasn’t surprise that trilled like a high, discordant song through her and nor was it fear; Clara’s eyes focused on the black liquid in her cup as a singular voice, the very same one that had haunted her dreams for far longer than she cared to admit, slipped in through the growing cracks.

Don’t you see? You and I, we belong together.

But his voice no longer haunted her. It no longer sifted through the night toward her, snaking its tendrils around her heart until she knew nothing but the coldness and emptiness of the fear that bore his name. She didn’t belong to him—she never had, and now it was Arthur’s voice that triumphed over the din of Wyatt Byers, reminding her always that Clara Howard belonged to no one but herself. But there was still a game to be played, a match to be challenged and won. And, for the first time in as long as she could remember, Clara was more than willing to play.

When she spoke, every word was clear and full of the freedom that lay just within her grasp. “I’m in.”

Arthur’s head whipped toward her, his face lined with shock. He straightened, the brim of his hat finally dispelling the cloud of shadow that had fallen upon his visage, and turned to face her. He let out a sigh and shook his head. “Was afraid you was going to say that.”

Clara crossed one ankle over the other and turned so that the space between them was far less distant. “Were you hoping to talk me out of it?”

She watched as his brow furrowed and his shoulders gave her one, stunted shrug. “No,” he answered before sighing and turning toward the budding campfire. “I don’t know.”

Her hand lifted and landed firmly on his arm. Clara wasn’t entirely sure where the idea had come from, and for a moment the feeling that she’d done something illicit and dangerous nearly stopped her heart cold. But the longer her hand lingered on his skin, the more his heat beat away the cold that seemed intent on freezing her in the past.

If she wasn’t mistaken, she could have sworn that he leaned into the touch so that her palm lay flat across his muscled arm.

“Arthur,” she said as she ignored the damned fluttering in her heart and lifted her chin with all the powerful conviction she could muster, “you can’t keep me from this. This is my fight.”

He looked away but did not shy from her touch. His brow smoothed with something like resignation as he gave her a half-hearted nod. “I know.”

She quickly withdrew her hand, already lamenting the loss of his warmth, and folded it instead over her own arm. “Besides,” Clara said with a wry grin, “someone has to look out for your sorry ass, and that might as well be me.”

Arthur chuckled, the sound warm and full as it filled his chest. Clara leaned into the sound; it wasn’t enough to erase Wyatt Byers, but it was enough to put him out of mind—for now, anyway. She watched, the grin still on her lips, as he took a sip of his coffee and turned the ghost of a smile toward her.

“Guess I owe you,” he said with some limited resignation. “You saved me from that snake, after all.”

“Yes,” Clara agreed as she raised her eyebrows. “And don’t you forget it.”

“I won’t, Ms. Howard,” he affirmed as a strange, warm glint flitted across his summer eyes. “I won’t.”

When the question came again, it rattled her brain, startling her out of the moment and back into the tremulous presence of dreams and forgotten memories. It plagued her, sliding through her veins with a strong enough current to cut her straight to the quick.

What are you afraid of?

Clara shook her head and tossed her nearly full cup of coffee onto the grass. She frowned as the brown rivers slipped through the rocks and blades of sharp, persistent green, wondering how much of it would survive in the throes of the cold that still lingered on the mountain.

“What I would give for a decent cup of tea,” she lamented as she cupped her chin in her hand.

Arthur snorted. “Tea?” he asked, his tone incredulous. He held up his cup and said, “I didn’t realize coffee ain’t suitable to your tastes.”

Clara rolled her eyes but cast a wary glance toward the crates where Pearson lingered, his cleaver slamming through hunks of freshly hunted meat and purchased (mostly purchased, she amended, as Sean Macguire had returned from a job only yesterday with a sack of potatoes and a handful of hastily plucked carrots).

“I like coffee just fine,” she admitted. “Just not Pearson’s.”

Arthur’s lips widened into a grin. “Must be all them years of high society and refinement what ruined your taste for the plainer things in life.”

Clara rolled her eyes and limited her response only to a silent, pointed jab of her elbow into his solid, unyielding ribs. “Shut up.”

He let out a soft chuckle and dumped the rest of his drink alongside hers. Arthur dropped the cup beside the log and swiped his hands on his pants.

“So, he said as he draped his arms across the tops of his thick, muscled thighs, “you decide on sticking around, then?”

Clara glanced at him, wondering how best to answer the question. His eyes lingered on hers and, though she couldn’t be sure, she thought she saw the faintest glimmer of something like hope flutter on broken wings in the fathomless blue of his eyes.

“I’ll stay,” she heard herself say, “if that’s what you want.”

Arthur blinked and pressed his lips together. He turned away, letting his eyes fall toward the writhing fire. “Ain’t about what I want,” he said, as though all the fight had quite suddenly gone out of him.

Clara stood on the edge of knowing, her heart swaying with the inertia of the promised fall. She stared into the great unknown, felt the terror rise up to meet her like the icy tendrils of the mountain air, and swiftly beat it back.

This was not then.

He was not him.

She could still be her.

Clara always had been, even when her tired hands plucked the broken pieces of her heart and stitched them haphazardly back together. She would be after this, too.

Because Arthur Morgan was not Wyatt Byers, and she didn’t have to be afraid anymore.

She watched him, the fire dancing at the edge of her sight, and wondered what it would be like the say the words that burned on the tip of her tongue. She considered how they would feel as her mouth formed around the words, how they would taste when they finally spilled from her lips.

Instead, Clara cleared her throat and let a slow, tight smile slide onto her lips. “Well,” she breathed with as much levity as she could conjure, “Seeing as how you likely won’t live out the year if I’m not here, I might as well stick around.”

Arthur blinked and the unknowable tension that had at once arrested them fell away like rusted and broken shackles. His lips promised a smile as he let out a soft, muted sigh.

“Whatever you say, miss,” he said as the fire playfully danced before them. “Just don’t go getting yourself into the sort of trouble that requires my attention.”

She shifted back, her expression one of mock affront. Clara pressed a hand to her chest and, after feeling the rapid pulse of her heart beneath her palm, replied, “Me, get into trouble? What a horrid thing to imply, Mr. Morgan.”

This time his smile widened, and she felt the cracks in her resolve slide toward closure. Arthur chuckled, the sound of it like a low tremor in his chest, as he braced his hands on his knees and eyed her with mischievous intent.

“Horrid,” he countered, “but entirely true.”

Clara snorted despite the slow, tenuous smile that crept onto her lips. “You wouldn’t know true if it hit up upside the head,” she murmured. Something wild and powerful fluttered strangely within her breast. The dreams she’d shed upon waking found their way back to her, damning the sunlight as they crept into the crevices within her defenses.

It suddenly felt as though she were toeing the edge of something great and unknown, and she didn’t quite care if she fell headlong into its thrall.

“Arthur!”

They both whirled at the sudden sound of his name. The fire crackled nearby as one of the thick logs popped and hissed in defiance of the flames, the heat swallowing the now lost moment and reducing it to little more than embers that singed the frayed, weary edges of Clara’s heart.

Bill Williamson gave a single, curt wave toward the outlaw, his perpetually narrowed eyes and furrowed brow heralding his stormy, irritable disposition.

“We got something that needs doing,” he explained. His eyes cut swiftly to Clara and narrowed for a moment in ignorant consideration before settling into reluctant acceptance. He threw a hand toward her. “Bring the woman, too,” he muttered as he turned and head back the way he’d come.

The moment fell away, as so many others had. She resigned herself to its loss, the sting present but bearable, and shifted her focus to whatever it was Bill Williamson had carved out for them to do. His reluctant order for her to join them was as much praise as she was likely to get from the brooding, ill-tempered outlaw; ever since she’d swindled him out of ten dollars, he wasn’t exactly inclined toward friendliness.

But even as the minutes stretched into long, tenuous hours, even as the day gave way to the inevitable pull of luscious night, Clara tucked away the harbored hope that another moment might find its way into the forged bonds of fate. She allowed the first blooms of hope to take root within her even as the whispered words swept through her again.

What are you afraid of? 

*

It was Arthur Morgan’s opinion that whiskey was good for two things: starting fires and drowning memories.

He tipped the bottle up to his lips and took a long, healthy swig of the bitter, slightly honeyed taste of the Kentucky draught. He leaned back against the wagon and hastily stacked crates that formed the only solid wall of his tent, relishing the feel of its solidity. Arthur shifted the bottle in hand and let his eyes drift to the label, his gaze roving over the words and letters without much of an attempt to make sense of them. Nearly a quarter of the bottle was gone, and he still wasn’t sure if he was intending on burning something down or choking the life out of errant memories.

Arthur sighed and shifted his weight, propping one foot against the wagon and letting the hand that held the bottle drift down to his side. The mountain had already draped the camp in its long, unfiltered shadows; the afternoon had passed in a blur of bullets and blood, the hours there and gone in a hail of gun smoke. The campfire roared in defiance of the cold that had already begun to creep in alongside the shadows; voices flitted through the air, all of them recognizable and familiar in a way that reminded Arthur that he was still just a ghost, lingering on the fringes of a world content to let him pass quickly into myth.

The cacophonous trill of Sean Macguire’s voice slithered up Arthur’s skin as the echo drifted across the camp. Bill, being the insufferable idiot that he was, had allowed the errant Irishman to attend their job. It’d been difficult enough to manage Williamson, who so often forgot to use what little brains he had that it was a wonder no one got shot. Sean was another animal altogether, an untamed one that continually slipped through the limited bonds of Arthur’s control. What was worse, he couldn’t keep his goddamn mouth shut and, after the surprising success of the job, sung his own praises the entire way back to camp, and Arthur was left to stew in the stark disappointment that both Bill and Sean had survived their encounter unscathed.

As it was, Sean was spinning yet another grandiose tale of their robbery with little care for actual fact and his irritating Irish flair for the dramatic. But it wasn’t the strung-up falsehoods that had driven Arthur to the whiskey—it was the name that fell so often from Sean’s lips, the very same one that whispered through his dreams and sang through his veins.

Clara. Always Clara.

Arthur wrenched the bottle back to his mouth and let the burning promise of forgetfulness pour down his throat. Fire crashed through his veins; he begged for it, pleaded for the fire to eat away the forbidden pulse in his heart and the dreams that had driven him toward an impossible want.

He coughed and lowered the bottle, spitting out the remnants that hadn’t quite made it down his throat. But, despite his persistence to the contrary, Arthur found his eyes sliding away from the campfire and toward another tent. A sliver of golden light drifted through the opening and, for a whiskey-addled moment, Arthur considered moving toward the light.

He grimaced, his hand tightening on the neck of the bottle until even the glass cried out for reprieve. His eyes flicked toward her tent, focusing once more on the spot of soft yellow amid all the darkness. Clara was out of reach; even now, his hand ached to reach for the light, to remember what it was like to embrace it and hold it close. But his hands were far too bloody, far too hewn from the roughness of the path he’d carved for himself.

No—better she stayed where she was, safely out of his shadow.

“It ain’t like you not to celebrate with the rest of the boys,” a soft, honeyed voice said near his ear.

Arthur started, his hand sliding toward the holster he’d only just realized he’d shed and left on the chair alongside his hat. Mary-Beth Gaskill smiled at him, her freckled cheeks flushed and her eyes far too bright with the sort of knowing that Arthur knew would capture him in its vice.

He swallowed, suddenly and wildly desperate for more whiskey. “I can hear Sean just fine from over here,” he muttered, his tone far more petulant that he cared to admit.

Mary-Beth flicked her fingers toward the whiskey bottle in his hand. Arthur passed it to her, and she took a sip, grimacing all the while, and quickly passed it back to him. Arthur chuckled, grateful for the unexpected moment of levity, and returned his gaze back to Clara’s tent.

So much for inconspicuousness, he thought with a grimace.

Mary-Beth sidled up beside him, her shawl pulled tight against the coming chill of the night. Arthur felt the weight of her gaze on him and he shifted where he stood, holding tight to the bottle the held either salvation or damnation. His bet was on the latter.

“Arthur,” she said, pitching her voice low, “I think you’d feel better if you went and spoke to Clara.”

He sighed. His thoughts swam, butting up against one another in the current of whiskey and doubt that flooded his skull. Arthur had tried talking before. He’d tried to talk Mary out of marrying Barry Linton, only to be forced to watch her leave; he’d tried to warn Eliza of the consequences of falling in with the likes of him, only to have to bear the weight of two crosses. There was nothing he could say to Clara that would change a damn thing.

All of this amounted to a single, murmured resignation. “Wouldn’t do much good, I reckon.”

She slipped in front of him, her lips pursed, and her eyes narrowed in displeasure. Mary-Beth snatched the bottle out of his hand and jabbed a finger toward Clara’s tent.

“Go on, Arthur,” she demanded.

He crossed his arms and frowned. “No.”

Mary-Beth, who was charming and intelligent and all the things from which an outlaw strayed, set her jaw and countered, “Hosea once told me that you can forgive a man on the run, but you can’t forgive a man for standing still.”

Arthur rolled his eyes. Even when he wasn’t there, the old man had a manner of inserting his hard-won wisdom where it wasn’t wanted. “I don’t even know what that means,” he grumbled.

“It means,” she insisted as she took a bold step closer, “that it’s better to take risks than it is to live life without them.”

Arthur looked away, unwilling to face the truth in her eyes. Hadn’t he done that already? All it had done was lead him here, to the shade beneath a mountain as his heart fell ever more toward a woman who would never need him.

Mary-Beth sighed and laid a gentle hand on his shoulder. Her expression softened, losing its momentary insistence. “Some risks are worth taking, Arthur.

“And what if it ain’t?” The thought of failure—the thought of pushing her firmly out of reach—was crippling.

A daring smile crept onto her lips. “And what if it is?”

Arthur would never be sure if it was the whiskey that had convinced him or the knowledge that Mary-Beth would have struck him down if he hadn’t followed through. He could only remember pushing away from the wagon and stalking through the camp, careful to avoid the notice of the figures still clustered around the roaring fire. His steps slowed as he drew closer to her tent. The warmth of the light called to him, beckoning him forward, and Arthur crept toward it, unable to stop himself. His heart lurched in his chest and his head buzzed with the lofty detachment that came when one had tried to drown out the world with whiskey. Arthur stared at the opening, his head swiveled, searching for anything or anyone that might convince him to go back to his tent. There were some risks worth taking, but this wasn’t one of them.

And what if it is?

Arthur cursed his own stupidity and slid a hand through the tent opening. He pulled the canvas aside as he cautiously stepped forward, his head turned slightly away out respect.

“Mae?” he called out softly. The scent of lavender and mint drifted out into the night. Arthur breathed it in, instinctively leaning into the perfumed essence, and let the familiarity of it calm his rapid-fire pulse.

His call was met with only silence.

He let out a frustrated breath and turned, half hoping to find Mary-Beth standing over his shoulder so he could tell her how foolish the entire notion had been. But the longer he stood there, the more Clara’s scent swept away his searing doubt.

She was worth it. She always had been.

But Arthur froze at the sound that cut through his silent reverie. It wasn’t her voice calling to him, as he might have hoped it would—it was the sound of her laughter, ringing through the darkness with startling clarity that forced him to drop his hand and turned toward its echo.

His eyes found her immediately. Arthur was always looking for her, sifting through the dull faces of the rest of the world for hers. She sat among the other gang members at the campfire, her eyes bright and her lips turned up in a charming, true smile. Arthur watched her for a moment, taking in the sight of her amusement even as he knew she would never look upon him with the same levity. A surge of hot, damning jealous for the other men at the fire clawed through him. Why should they bear witness to the sight of her smile? What had they done to deserve it while he lingered in the darkness, alone and forgotten?

He watched as Sean Macguire leaned into view, draped an arm around Clara, and drew her in to place a kiss on her cheek.

Arthur did not stay to watch what happened next. He retreated back into the darkness where no one could see him writhe and seethe with the bitterness of self-reproach, where he could be left alone to wallow in own hatred.

He spared only a moment to send up a brittle prayer that the whiskey could be enough to burn away the love he’d so foolishly let creep back into his heart.

*

By the time Sean Macguire had concluded his fifth retelling of the robbery, Clara Howard was entirely sure he’d forgotten her involvement.

She sat beside him near the campfire, the earthen scent of smoke and ash clinging fast to her clothes and senses. Uncle lounged nearby, his feet kicked out toward the flickering flames and a bottle held loosely in one hand. John, whose face was etched with the anguish of his most recent spat with Abigail, simmered silently with a piece of half-carved wood in one hand a small, sharp knife in the other. Javier sat cross-legged beside John, his guitar in his lap and his fingers playing a soft, lilting melody that plucked at Clara’s heartstrings—or would have, if Sean’s mouth would cease for even half a moment. Clara sighed as her eyes slid to the empty space across the fire. She wrung her hands in her lap for the hundredth time that night; she felt out of sorts, adrift in a sea of lost minutes where she felt Arthur’s absence like a punch to the gut.

Sean let loose a string of wild, raucous laughter. Charles, who’d taken up a seat beside her, turned a rather sharp look of mounting irritation toward the Irishman, though his expression remained that of carefully practiced stoicism.

He leaned over to Clara and whispered, “I wouldn’t say nothing if your knife slipped out of your hand and into his gut.”

Clara chuckled and brushed a stray strand of hair behind her ear. She forced her eyes away from the empty seat and turned to Charles. “You mean you aren’t entirely enraptured by his stories, Mr. Smith?”

He rolled his eyes and rubbed his hands together before holding them out toward the fire. “Did you ever hear the tale of how the turtle flew south for the winter?”

Her eyes darted to the shadowed place where Arthur should be before sliding back to Charles. She sighed again, smiled, and shook her head.

Charles settled in, glancing up at the otherwise preoccupied gang before leaning in toward her. “It’s an old Oneida legend my mother once told me. One day, the turtle spotted a flock of birds flying overhead and asked where they were going. ‘We’re flying south for the winter,’ they answered. The turtle asked, ‘What’s in the south?’ and the birds told him of all the food and warmth that could be found there. The turtle thought it sounded wonderful and asked to accompany them.”

Clara, who knew the promise of a proper tale when she heard one, waited until the ordained moment in which a storyteller permitted an appropriate inquiry. A smile climbed onto her lips as she said, “But turtles don’t fly.”

He nodded. “The birds reminded him of that, but he pestered them until they agreed to take him. But Turtle could not stop asking questions about their journey, even when the birds cautioned him to be quiet. Eventually, his curiosity got the better of him, and he fell, tucked himself into his shell, and landed, unharmed, on the ground. He buried himself in the mud and the birds carried on their journey to the south.”

She pondered the story for a moment, the smile still caught on her mouth. “What you’re saying is,” she pondered, “that I should bury Sean in the mud, so he’ll shut up?”

Charles held up his hands, a silent warning that her interpretation was hers and hers alone, though she didn’t miss the glimmer of muted mischief in his eyes.

She opened her mouth, perhaps to press him further when Sean Macguire’s arm crashed around her shoulders. Clara floundered, barely managing to hold onto the log beneath her as he wrenched her close. Her head nearly collided with his and the stink of sweat and liquor nearly overwhelmed her. She straightened as much as his dead weight would allow and frowned when he anchored her to his side.

“And our girl Clara, here,” he slurred as he held up the bottle as if to toast her. “A cleverer lass you never did see!” He jabbed a finger at her and she had just enough time to turn her head to avoid a near-direct stab to the cheek. “Who would’ve thought them knives would come in handy in a gunfight, eh?”

Uncle held up his bottle—or, at the very least, made a valiant attempt at it—and took a long healthy swig. John only looked at her, his storm-cloud eyes still dark and brooding; Javier’s played a sharp trill on his guitar and nodded toward her, though the toll of Sean’s stories showed in the strain on his face.

She looked to Charles for assistance, but his single raised eyebrow told her that she was on her own.

“Damn turtles,” she whispered as Sean drank from his bottle. He looked at her, his gap-toothed grin wide and beaming with self-indulgent pride, and she began to wonder if Dutch van der Linde would be very upset if, in fact, her knife did slip out of its sheath and into his roiling, whiskey-filled gut. Or perhaps she could do as Charles inadvertently suggested and bury his head in the mud—

Clara froze when she felt his wet, sloping lips on her cheek.

Sean pulled away, his chuckle daring and conniving. Clara narrowed her eyes, placed her hand on his chest, and shoved him as hard as she could. The Irishman nearly toppled over, only barely managing to catch himself while taking special care not to spill a drop of his drink. The grin was still on his face, entirely undaunted by her reaction.

Clara lifted her chin as her blood simmered hotly beneath her skin. “Do that again,” she warned, “and I’ll gut you where you sit.”

John snorted as flecks of whittled wood fled into the fire. “Just do it now and spare us all the trouble.”

Sean ignored the remark and made some attempt to right himself in his seat. “Sure, sure, Miss Clara. But mark my words, you’ll be coming back for more before the night is out!”

Clara swiped her palm across the slithering wetness on her cheek and rolled her eyes. She turned, intending to return back to the quiet solitude that surrounded Charles, and caught sight of another figure in the shadows.

She stilled, her heart clenching tight in her chest. Arthur stood beside her tent, his face draped half in darkness and half in the warm light from the lamp she’d left on. She watched, her body suddenly cold despite the fire, as Arthur turned away and slipped back into the darkness of the camp.

He’d seen what Sean had done. She knew it as surely as her lungs filled with tepid air, as certainly as her heart leapt wildly in her chest. Arthur had seen Sean kiss her, however unwanted it had been, and now he was gone.

“Clara,” Charles whispered to her. “Go talk to him.”

She said nothing; her eyes remained on the space where he’d been standing. The seconds slipped into minutes and drowned in an eternity where she had only the shadows for company. Her hands tightened into fists in her lap, her nails biting sharply into the skin of her palms. The spark of her fire in her heart roared in protest, begging her to kindle it with a single, elusive promise, with a single truth she’d kept suppressed and forgotten all these years.

What are you afraid of?

She rose, sparing a moment to give Charles’s shoulder the barest squeeze, and faced the darkness of her fears with the single, burning flame in her chest. She’d spent too long afraid, become too much a part of the shadows she’d let harden the edges of her heart. It’d been easier, then, to give everything she had to the emptiness that came with fear’s terrible grip; the price of freedom had already cost her too much, after all.

This time, she would not retreat to the comfort of her own tent.

This time, as she crept through the darkness, each step surer than the last, Clara finally allowed herself to believe she had an answer to the question that had plagued her for so long.

And this time, she wouldn’t let it slip through her fingers.

*

Arthur could not let go of Sean’s lips on Clara’s skin.

It haunted him as he burst into the stark emptiness of his tent and snatched up his unfinished bottle of whiskey. It tormented him as he tipped the bottle to his lips and let the liquor scorch its way through him, burning him from the inside out. It held him in its vice grip as pressed the heel of his palm into his eyes, wishing he could claw the image from his mind with every tumultuous second that passed.

All it had done was remind him that some risks would never be worth the taking, despite Mary-Beth’s flowery talk.

All it had done was affirm that Clara would never want him.

Arthur stalked to the barrel on which he kept his razor and cracked, tarnished mirror. He braced a hand on the lip of the wood and held tightly to what little solace he could scrounge up from the bottle. All Arthur had was ghosts and broken memories; it was all he deserved. He held tight to the shattered fragments, feeling them puncture his already shriveled heart. But even as he wallowed in the pain and begged it to consume him, all he could muster was the sight of Clara’s smile.

The fire of the whiskey spread through his veins, eating away the echo of Mary-Beth’s lingering words, as he slammed the bottle with finality onto the barrel. The mirror trembled and the razor slithered along the rim of the shallow bowl that held the residue of his shaving soap. He closed his eyes and braced both hands on the lip of the makeshift table, pressing his fingers into the wood until they cried out for reprieve. His heart slammed against his ribs, his thoughts swam in a haze of lavender and mint.

His eyes landed on the cracked surface of the mirror, splitting his reflection into tarnished fragments. Arthur’s eyes traced the lines that spread like cracks from the corners of hooded, somber eyes; scars jutted from sunburned skin, each one a testament to the killer that raged within him. The mirror showed him what Clara surely must see—not a man but a figment of one; not a human but a violent, blood-soaked ghost.

Arthur’s hand swept out and sent the mirror crashing to the dirt at his feet. But the glass remained intact, the cracks in his façade holding together in a mockery of the turmoil that raged within him.

Clara would never want him; even monsters could not hide from the truth of their nature.

“Arthur?”

He stiffened. He’d know her voice anywhere; the cadence of it was wound around his own stilted heartbeat. It swept through him like a blessedly cool breeze, taming the hatred that burned just beneath the surface of his too-tight skin.

Arthur turned slightly toward the entrance to his tent. He could see her figure cut against the light from his kerosene lamp, the sight of her presence nearly enough to make him forget the truth of his predicament. But all he could see was her smile and Sean’s lips and the darkness in his heart wrapped him in its black, blood-tinged wings until even her scent seemed to fade back into the dregs of memory.

“Thought you was enjoying yourself out there,” he rasped, each word laced with the bitter tang of venom. He faced the canvas wall before him, his fingers curling around the lip of the barrel. “Seemed like it, anyway.”

He listened to the careful sounds of her steps as she crept into the tent. Of course, she wouldn’t ask permission to enter; when had Clara waited for permission for anything? She certainly hadn’t asked before she’d stolen away what was left of his heart. The thought crashed through him and Arthur reached for the bottle, desperate to drown it away.

Clara sighed. “Look, Arthur, what you saw was—”

He turned and moved toward her, even as the crisp scent of lavender and mint drifted toward him, demanding his attention. Her eyes dipped to the whiskey clutched in his hand, a frown etched on her face. Arthur wanted her to hate him. It would be easier if she did.

“What I saw weren’t none of my concern.” He took a quick sip of liquor and squared his shoulders. He tamped down his feeling, lacing treacherous emotion with cold, unyielding ice. Eventually, she’d see what he was and relinquish the hope he always saw harbored in her verdant gaze.

Even now he saw it and refused to let it poison him further.

Her eyes narrowed in suspicion as she crossed her arms. “I didn’t ask for it. I didn’t want it.”

Relief, sweet and duplicitous, swept through him. Arthur held tight to the hollow well of the darkness in his heart, unwilling to let it go for even a moment. He forced his shoulders into a shrug and took solace from the comfort of the bottle in his hand.

He replied, his tone cutting, “Like I said, ain’t none of my business what you want.”

The words were vipers, each one designed to cut through even the hardest of hearts. They would hurt, he knew, but Clara would recover; she was strong, far stronger than he was, and she’d be better off. It was time she knew with whom she was dealing.

Clara looked momentarily stricken, her lips parted in shock at the callousness of his words. Her eyes blazed with the swiftness of her temper as she dared him to speak, to lie to her again as easily as he already had.

But Arthur remained silent. They always left him in the end; she would be no different.

She lifted her chin and the familiar, exasperatingly endearing air of defiance crept onto her face. “What the hell has gotten into you?”

He shrugged again and forced compliance into his aching muscles. They twitched and writhed beneath his skin, desperate to reach out and ease the pain he saw sharpening the verdant aura of her eyes. Arthur nodded toward his tent opening.

“You best get back. Enjoy the rest of your evening with Mr. Macguire.” Even the name tasted sour in his mouth; he craved the burn of the whiskey though he knew it would do nothing to sate the ache in his chest.

Clara’s defiance remained, wavering only for a moment before smoothing back into place. “You can’t mean that.”

He held out his arms, hoping against hope she would draw her knife and deliver the blade into his trembling, treacherous heart. “What you want from me, Mae?” He shook his head, his mouth twisting into a hard grimace. “Ain’t nothing for you here.”

Clara’s arms dropped to her sides. Her eyes never left him, and her scent still wore away at his senses despite his efforts to the contrary. Arthur took in the sight of her: the drape of her braid as it hung over her shoulder, the slope and curve of her hips, and the faint trace of freckles that trailed like a constellation across her cheeks. He committed each aspect to memory, already knowing he would spend the night drawing this moment as a reminder of what he was and what he would never have.

Any minute now, Clara would realize that the hopelessness that lay with him. She would chalk it up to foolishness, to finally discovering the monster wearing the guise of a man, and know she was better off without him. Clara would leave and Arthur would remain, just as he had with the rest of them.

He waited, but none of that happened.

Instead of leaving, Clara closed the distance between them.

Instead of striking him, her hands cupped his stubbled cheeks.

Instead of damning him with a swift curse, Clara Howard pressed her lips to his.

And Arthur Morgan, both monster and man, who had faced death and won more times than he could count, knew that he would gladly perish in that moment if only her lips would stay on his.

Before he could commit the taste of her to memory, Clara pulled away. Sharp and gutting agony cut through him; his hands ached to touch her, to pull her back to him, even as he knew she would fade if he held her too tightly. His eyes fluttered open and twin pools of brightest green met his, their depths shining brighter than the stars he knew hung overhead.

“Oh, Arthur,” Clara breathed as her thumbs traced a slow caress over the tops of his cheeks. “Don’t you know?”

He didn’t know.

How could he know anything beyond the too fleeting taste of her? How could possibly comprehend anything that wasn’t the feel of her skin on his? Clara slid back on her heels, letting a single, soft hand linger on his stubbled cheek. Arthur’s heart lurched in his chest; he detested the thought of her skin soiled by his touch. He felt the barest brush of her fingers as they tentatively laced through his shirt.

She’d kissed him.

She was still here, and she’d kissed him, and Arthur wasn’t quite sure what was supposed to happen next. His story had already been written, the blood-tinged ink splashed upon the tattered pages. This hadn’t been part of the plan.

Clara took a breath and lifted her chin, her eyes burning with her own unique brand of defiance. Arthur could do nothing but stare, his eyes tracing across the peaks and valleys of her plump lips, wondering what it would be like if she kissed him again.

He wished she would.

“Say something, you idiot,” she breathed.

Arthur had never been good with words. They twisted around his mouth like snakes, every syllable poisoned with bad intentions and poorer manners. He hadn’t learned how to speak softly or utter the quiet musings of a man who knew his place in the world. But he found in that moment that he would have said anything, conjured up any aimless string of sounds, if only it would please her.

“I—” he began, hating the inadequacy of the single, useless syllable. He cleared his throat as her fingers clutched at his shirt, demanding that he reveal to her what she wanted to hear. Arthur swallowed, opened his mouth, and tried again to speak. The only thing that flew to his lips, the only word he could think of in that precious, tenuous moment to say, was the name of his son.

Because she didn’t know. And Arthur knew, even as he felt the jagged twist in his gut and the writhing wrench of his ill-suited heart, that she wouldn’t kiss him again if she knew.

He sighed, the sound hardly more than a rasp of brittle lungs. “Mae, I—”

But Clara, who was as much a thief as he was, stole the words from his lips with another kiss. Her lips lingered this time as the taste of her swept him up in the throes of its sweet elixir. She gave him a single, impatient tug on his shirt, and Arthur, who had always been powerless to stop her, fell himself fall, hard and fast and without restraint, into her.

He was the spark, and she was the flame. Her lips pulled from him the lost fragments of a soul; they gravitated toward her, beckoned by the promise of her touch and her kiss. The more her lips moved against his, the more Arthur felt the stitching together of the shards of who he’d been and the idea, the barest consideration, of who he might be again. His heart staggered wildly in his chest when he felt her tongue sweep over his. Heat seared through him like the cutting edge of a knife; it cleaved from him the sorrow he’d carried with him, reminding him that there was still something worth having in the cold, violent expanse of the world.

Arthur’s hands crept out of their own accord, his fingers dancing along the wide sweep of her curves. Clara’s mouth moved against his with barely tamed eagerness; in a single fluid movement, she slid the straps of his suspenders off his shoulders. Fire roiled within him as her arms wound around him and Clara’s hands trailed their intoxicating warmth up his back to pull him closer.

He took hold of her hips as her kisses deepened. Her hips pressed against his and the feeling of her closeness nearly sent him to his knees. Arthur took firm hold of her, unwilling for even a moment to let her go, to let the night whisk her away back into the dreams he’d kept only to himself in the confines of the dark. His breath hitched in his aching lungs as the slow, careful weight of her hand slid across his torso. He was heady with the taste of her, lost in the sweetness that coated his tongue and became entwined in every newly alive sense. Fire pooled in his center, igniting the wild race of his heart, as Clara slipped the tips of her fingers below his waistband.

And just as quickly as it’d risen, the fire in him died, leaving him barren and cold and swallowed up in the darkness of a single, sallow memory.

Swift and exacting agony cut through him, bringing him back to himself. The vast expanse of unending loneliness hung between them as Arthur relinquished his hold on her and gently, painfully, pushed her away. Clara’s lips tore away from his; he hated feeling less of her, already spoiled at what little he’d had. The need to be with her was like a desperate, sawing blade through his heart.

“I—I can’t,” he stuttered. The words rasped through his lips, washing away the taste of her. Clara had baptized him with her kiss; now, he had to damn himself all over again.

She shuffled back as he dropped his hands uselessly to his sides. Her brow furrowed, her eyes blinking as though she’d stumbled out of a dream back into the life Arthur insisted on instilling with ruin and rot. He watched, the hands that had held her only a moment before clenched into tight, immovable fists, as her brow creased with the beginnings of cold consternation.

Clara pulled her hands from him and Arthur bore the loss as he had with everything else: silently, foolishly, and filled with all the trimmings of bitter remorse. Her voice was ragged as she uttered the words, “Can’t or won’t?”

Arthur closed his eyes. Her green eyes had hardened to winter ice, frozen over by his refusal. “I promised I’d keep you safe,” he answered, the words just as frayed and lacking as he felt. “This ain’t how I do it.”

Hellish fury simmered in her gaze when he opened his eyes and tentatively met hers. Clara’s lips pursed, twisted and clenched with all the terrible things he knew she wanted to—and should—say to him. He would have welcomed it, been glad for every blistering remark, if only it would put an end to the simmering, monstrous ache in his chest.

“Answer the question, Arthur,” she said through tightly gritted teeth.

He reached for her hands like the ridiculous, unimaginable fool he was. Clara jerked them away, her fury nearly palpable, as Arthur let his hands fall back to his sides.

“You should have someone who can give you what you need,” he explained, even as the words tumbled like crushing stones from his numbed lips. “That ain’t me.”

This was the part where Clara walked away. This was the end of the story, where the lines were written with the final, true understanding that he would never be enough for her. His burdens were too many and his offerings too few; there was nothing he could give her that she would want. This was the part of the story where the villain scorned redemption in favor of damnation; this was the part where Arthur braced against the shift in the earth, tilting him ever further down toward the pits of hell.

But Claramae Howard, who so rarely did what Arthur expected, did not leave. Instead, she reeled back and punched him square in the chest.

“You selfish son of a bitch,” she snarled at him.

He blinked at her, unsure if she’d heard what he’d said. “What?”

She shoved him this time, her hands colliding with his shoulders with unbridled ferocity. Arthur nearly stumbled backward but caught himself on the barrel.

“What gives you the right to speak for me?” She spat, her voice ringing hard and high with her temper. “What feeble thought crossed your ridiculous, moronic mind that made you think it was acceptable not to ask me what I wanted before you made that decision?”

Arthur had, of course, made things unimaginably worse. Instead of the steady resolution of loss, Clara had stumbled headlong into hot, searing ire. Her face was carved into a mask of weighty outrage as he held tight to the barrel, hoping against all lilting hope that it might keep him from falling straight onto his sorry ass.

“You don’t understand,” he began. He winced, instantly regretting the words.

Her hand flew out, the movement quick but jagged as the sting of her fingers grazed his chin. She took a full step closer to him, pushing him further into the barrel.

“Listen to me, you unfathomable imbecile,” she snarled. “I want you. I chose you.” Clara jabbed a finger in his chest; it might as well have been her knife. “And don’t you ever think you get to tell me what I don’t understand.”

The memory scraped and clawed through him. He could feel the words gurgling in his throat and he swallowed them back, trying desperately to avoid what he knew must come next. Arthur took a strained breath and tried again.

“Mae,” he breathed, hating and loving the taste of her name on his lips and wishing it was her mouth instead, “I ain’t who you think I am.”

Clara snorted and crossed her arms. “Oh, trust me, you’ve made that abundantly clear.”

The darkness in his heart clutched him, wrenching him back down into its familiar, endless depths. Arthur’s hand tightened on the barrel as his heart strained and fought to beat again. “You need to go,” he managed to say through his grimace.

“No,” she nearly shouted. “Not until you tell me why.”

Arthur looked away. The frigidity of anguish spilled into his veins. “I can’t do this,” he muttered. “I can’t.”

Clara did not relent. She was a goddess looking upon a feeble man and finding him entirely wanting. “Tell me why.”

He whirled on her, lost in the throes of the pain he’d buried long ago. His voice was torn and frayed by anguish as he shouted, “Because I had a son!”

The night shattered into silence. Arthur heard only the dull, trudging throb of his heart; he could see nothing but the cold shock of utter disbelief that flooded Clara’s face. Darkness cooed at him, brought to life by the remembrance of his greatest failure. He let it flow, never once taking his eyes off Clara as he said again with cold aloofness, “I had a son.”

She took a few slow, deliberate breaths. He watched as if from a great distance as she unwound her arms and lowered them slowly to her sides. He waited as the darkness strung out the moments between them, rending the tender, intimate ones he’d only been able to glimpse.

Her voice managed to sift through the sudden miles between them. “What happened to him?”

Arthur looked away. The edges of his heart that she’d softened became unyielding iron as the memory flooded every thought, every crevice, every sense. He only managed to say through half-numbed lips, “He passed away.”

The last memory Arthur had of his son was the day he’d taken him fishing. Eliza had been reluctant, seeing as how the river was nearly two miles down the track and she was still angry with Arthur for the lateness of his arrival. Eventually, she’d relented, and Arthur and Isaac had fished for hours; the boy had been intent on catching their dinner, as it were, and he was sure that his success would impress his mama. Sometimes, Arthur could still hear the echo of his laugh or feel the steady, slim hands beneath his as he helped him reel in the wriggling bass.

Arthur succumbed to the darkness entwined with his soul. Clara would only end up leaving him, just as Isaac and Eliza and Mary had. Even now he could see her from the corner of his iron gaze, her face still writ with wariness as she strung together the pieces of his loss. Now, he knew, she would finally understand. Now, Clara would look to better men, safer men, who wouldn’t tear her from the light and into the unending darkness.

He froze when he felt the slip of warm against the palm of his hand. Arthur glanced down sharply and watched, stunned into a stupor, as Clara’s palm brushed slowly, tentatively, over his. The darkness recoiled from her warmth, her precious light, and for a moment, Arthur regained enough sense of self to lift his eyes to hers.

This couldn’t be.

Even now she defied his insistence. Clara’s fingers twined with his and clasped his hand tightly, pulling him back into the moment. His heart staggered back into a steady rhythm as her touch, her presence, her warmth, chased away the evil that had wanted so badly to rage against her. The shock was gone, replaced with the constant, infallible pulse of her will.

She squeezed his hand and held his gaze firmly with hers as she said, “Tell me about him.”

Her touch was an anchor in a sea of tumultuous, pernicious memory. Arthur looked down at the place where they stood rooted together; she burned away the darkness and wrenched from his sickened heart the long-forgotten feeling of humanity.

He’d been a ghost for so long, but she made him feel real, and it was enough. And Arthur, who had wandered as a phantom these many long, turbulent years, found it within him to tell Clara the story of his son.

She listened, her hand tightly woven with his, as he dragged the words up from the depths of his withered soul. They spun a tale of a younger, more volatile Arthur who’d become enamored with a young waitress after the dissolution of his engagement to Mary Gillis. He told her of the comfort they’d found in each other, how they’d carried on the affair until the time had come for the gang to move on. Somehow, he managed to tell of the night he’d gone to bid young Eliza farewell only to find out that she was carrying his child. Words spilled in cathartic rhythm as he told her of Isaac—how he seemed to grow older and wiser with each sporadic visit, how Arthur had taught him to fish and ride a horse and write, how Isaac had just gotten good at writing his name when…

Clara squeezed his hand, a silent reminder that she was there, and he was still real. He held tightly, desperately, to her, and told her of the day he’d found two crosses made of knotted, mottled wood, the very same day a neighbor had come across him and revealed the fate of the young mother and her son who’d lived in the now empty, cold house.

The dam he’d built to cage the flood of memory broke as the last words fell from his lips. Image after faded image swept through him, cracking and shattering every thought, scorching every drop of blackened blood in his veins. Arthur bore the weight of it, knowing all the while that it would crush him to nothing. But then he felt the tight, unyielding grip of Clara’s hand in his. She gave it a single, firm tug as she crept closer, bridging the distance between them as she pulled him from the vast, unknowable current of wicked remembrance.

“Arthur,” she whispered as he floundered and flailed, “it wasn’t your fault.”

Of course, it was.

He was a ghost, cursed to wander among the living, never again to feel the breath of life. And yet…

Clara lifted their joined hands, clutching his larger, calloused, and more bloodstained one against her chest. He felt the furious pounding of her heart as soft, insistent fingers swept along his jaw and pulled his chin up to face the full, undaunted spring of her eyes. Arthur felt the breath hitch in his lungs, but not from agony; he felt the wild, rapid pace of his heart falter, but not from the burden of his failure. It was Clara, always Clara, who chased away the writhing blackness that he’d instilled in his soul.

Her palm came to rest on his cheek. “It wasn’t your fault,” she breathed. Her fingers wound a bit tighter through his, as though she might impress each word into his skin, searing them brightly into his tainted memory.

Arthur was suddenly and sharply desperate for her. The fire she’d stoked within him took flight, its phoenix wings rising from the burnt and smoldering ashes of his festering anguish. The darkness remained, as he knew it always would, but its presence was left to the dregs of memory, its shadow like the fading presence of a specter in the long, terrible night.

There was only Clara, who should have left but stayed with him.

There was only Clara, whose kiss had breathed something like life back into his heart.

Her warmth spilled along his neck as her thumb gently caressed the scar that marred his chin. Arthur felt his free hand inch toward her, his fingers aching and reaching for more. His head dipped to hers as he pulled in breath after long, shuddering breath of her scent.

“Arthur,” she whispered hotly against his lips. Her eyes never left his, not once, even as he fell, scraping and clawing, toward the speck of humanity she’d ignited within him. “Your past doesn’t define you. This world insists on telling us we are nothing more than ghosts,” she said, each word laced with truth he didn’t think he deserved. “But we are so much more. You are so much more.”

A ferocious ache overwhelmed him as she drew closer. He held onto every word as a dying man might cling to salvation; he wanted more of whatever grace had been bestowed upon her. Arthur needed the press of her hips against his, the feel of her curves as they molded perfectly to him. Without her, he knew he would become lost again in the darkness, forever to wander among the blood and lies that kept him reluctantly chained to this dying world.

Whatever she would offer him, he would accept, even if only for a night.

The need became a living, breathing thing as Clara’s lips hovered near his, close enough to kiss and yet far enough that the space between them might as well have been a chasm.

A tender, almost shy smile played on her lips as she murmured, “I only see you.”

When she kissed him, the last of Arthur’s chains fell away, and he remembered what it was like to be human.

*

Once, Claramae Howard had chosen to believe in love.

She’d held tight to it in the years following her mother’s death and harbored its glowing ember when her father drowned in bottle after bottle until he, too, perished. Love whispered its promise when her uncle gave her to a man made of hollow words and crushing, bruising hands. It persisted even after she gave the single kernel of hopeful affection to the man who’d beat it from her, carved it from her heart with every cutting word, and left it broken and tarnished at the feet of her battered body.

Love wasn’t practical. It could not lie for her, steal for her, or force the blade of her knife into heart after heart. Love did not make the bruises and marks fade any faster, did not dull the throbbing, insistent ache his cruel words left behind. Love did not give her the strength to leave, to wander, fading and restless, into the west; love could not bring her the freedom for which she longed.

It’d taken only one kiss for long-lost love to spill through the fissures of her heart; it’d taken one kiss more for Clara to give it all to Arthur Morgan.

His arm clutched her waist, tugging her forward until the space between them was little more than an afterthought. Her lips moved greedily against his, desperate to take as much as they were willing to give. Arthur met her kiss for kiss, wandering hand for wandering hand, until the fire inside her roared with singular purpose.

Clara dragged her fingers down his back, craving the feel of the taut muscles beneath his sweat-starched shirt. She slipped her hands beneath his waistband and, when he made no move to stop her, pulled free the shirt hem and set to work on the buttons.

The slow rumble of a moan escaped Arthur’s lips as he trailed a line of eager kisses across her cheek and down the nape of her neck. Clara allowed herself a single, sultry smile as she nearly tore at the stubborn buttons. Her fingers snagged on one in particular, the damnable, useless ornament refusing to relinquish its hold on the fabric. But Clara could feel his heat pulsing beneath the thin cotton barrier and the longing to touch him was a visceral, unconquerable thing. She slid her hand at what skin she’d managed to free, relishing the feel of him as her touch crept along the broad, powerful expanse of his chest.

He gasped and stiffened as she splayed her hand over his heart, where his reignited pulse slammed out its penitent rhythm. His skin was hot to the touch, encouraged by their refusal to bow to fate; her fingertips brushed along long-healed scars, instilling each one with the tenderness of acceptance. Every second that passed was another moment in which Arthur surrendered to her touch; every kiss he placed on her lips was a silent vow of devotion, no longer hindered by fear and loss.

She realized with mild surprise that Arthur was working furiously to dislodge her own buttons, his insistence almost painful in its voracity. Clara managed to free him of his confines, sparing only a moment to marvel at the size and power that contradicted the tender carefulness of the hands that held her. Arthur placed a kiss on her cheek as she shed her own shirt, letting it pool to the floor in a useless heap. Clara shed the rest of her clothing, desperate to free the heat that swept across her skin in searing brushstrokes, stopping only when she reached her underthings.

A single, solitary note of reluctance crept into her addled mind. What if she wasn’t enough? What if Wyatt Byers had been right all along?

What if no one else would want what was left of her?

But Arthur, who had only let her go long enough for her to dispel her clothing, laid a heavy, tentative hand on her hip. His summer eyes blazed with the same fire that raged through her as he raised a hand and let his rough, calloused fingers dance along the top of her flushed cheek. Clara leaned into the touch as the night threatened to chill her to the bone, its cold leeched away by the persistence of Arthur’s presence.

His eyes, which so often gazed upon the world with unflinching hardness, softened with affectionate wonder as he breathed, “You’re beautiful.”

The last of Clara’s fear fell away as love—vital, triumphant love—soared with vibrant wings through the cracks in her now healing heart.

She pressed her lips to his as she quickly and confidently slid the straps of her silken drawers from her shoulders. Clara shivered as the night kissed her newly revealed skin. She felt vulnerable but strong, dizzy and yet entirely herself.

This was right.

Arthur’s kiss was insistent, nearly demanding, as he crushed his lips against hers. He banished the night as he drew her in with an arm around her shoulders; he stoked her fire as he bucked his hips against hers.

She gasped as felt the evidence of his longing pressed firmly into her abdomen.

Clara threw her arms around his neck, letting out a tight, eager moan as the heat of his skin scorched her own. Bolstered by her reaction, Arthur’s hand swept down to cup her backside even as she felt another, more frenzied jolt of his hips on hers. He buried his face in her neck as his hold on her tightened. Clara raised her leg and the hand on her backside clamped on her thigh, holding her firmly in place as his girth hovered just above her fiery center.

“Arthur,” she hissed in his ear, his name hardly more than a strangled moan. “Please.”

He swept her up and carefully laid her onto his cot, never once breaking their kiss. The cot protested their combined weight as Arthur positioned himself between her legs, his chest pressed solidly against hers, both of them unwilling to separate for even a moment. Clara widened her hips as he settled against her, his fabric-clad length moving against her aching center with barely contained desire. Arthur swept a hand up her side, pausing only when he reached the generous swell of her breast. Arthur took hold of the mound and slowly thumbed the pert bud at its center.

Clara bit back a cry as she dug her nails into the rippling muscle of his shoulders. Arthur’s groan was nearly feral as his lips stole away the sound of her cry.

She had just enough control of herself left to fumble for the button of his infernal pants. The fabric was stretched nearly to its breaking point, hardly able to contain him any longer. The button flew open and Clara’s fingers brushed along the first hint of his cock. She supposed she shouldn’t have been surprised at his size, given the sheer bulk of the man.

Spurred by the promise of freedom, Arthur kicked off the last remaining vestige of his clothing. He held himself above her, his eyes boring into hers as the need for him nearly sent Clara into a frenzy.

His chest pressed into hers as he took in a long breath. For a moment, the heat of passion was gone, fled in favor of sharp concern.

“Mae,” he whispered as his forehead tipped onto hers.

Clara blinked at him. Suddenly she understood; he’d been here before, she thought, though it’d been with another woman, in another life. History had a strange way of repeating itself, and she saw the fear of it hidden in the blaze of his summer eyes. A finger of cold touched the fire raging wildly in her belly. Clara brought her hands to cup his face and gave him a single, sorrowful kiss.

“I can’t,” she whispered. She was surprised to find old pain rise up in the echo of the words, there and gone as quickly as she’d uttered them.

Arthur’s brow furrowed. “Can’t?”

She shook her head and held him as though he were her only anchor—and, in a way, he was. “I can’t have children,” she blurted.

Understanding dawned on Arthur’s face. Clara held his eyes with her own, clutching him despite the hurt that still stung her at the thought of what she would never have. A part of her wondered if, in another life, Arthur would have wanted children—if, in that separate, non-existent life, she might have been their mother.

Arthur did not look upon her with pity or disappointment, as so many others might have. Instead he placed a chaste kiss on her cheek and conceded, “We don’t have to, if you ain’t comfortable.”

Oh, this ridiculous, insatiable, affectionate idiot.

Clara wrapped her legs around his waist and drew him back down toward her. Arthur grunted as he fought to maintain some sense of balance, even as his eyes darkened with the heat of desire.

“I want you,” she managed to say before she gave his hips one final, decisive tug.

And then he pushed inside her.

Clara gasped at the fullness of him. Her hands clamped onto his shoulders as he inched into her, slowly filling her. Arthur let out a low, tight moan as his fingers tightened around the edge of the cot, nearly crushing the mess of wood and canvas. Clara spread her hips a fraction more, wincing slightly as he slid deeper, his impressive length coaxed further toward the conflagration already pooled in her belly. Arthur heard the sound and glanced sharply at her, his faced etched with concern.

“Am I hurting you?” he asked as he held back, ceasing his movement.

She shook her head, momentarily unable to form proper words. The tightness was fading now, giving way to the beginnings of pleasure.

“Just been a while, I guess,” she murmured.

Arthur’s lips flickered into a grin. “Me, too.”

Clara, who’d spent her life lost among words, found that she cared little for them in that moment. She kissed him, her fingers snaking through his hair as Arthur lowered his hips again, guiding himself along until she claimed every inch.

His pace was steady and slow as he moved inside her. Clara gave herself to the feeling, lost in the sensation of his body against hers. They fit together—perhaps not perfectly, she thought, but with a sense of righteousness that stoked the fire within her with every shallow thrust. Arthur was gentle, every kiss and touch filled with the sort of reverence reserved for worship.

And worship her he did.

It wasn’t long before her heat wound itself into a tight coil of anticipation. Her hand slid down his back, tracing a perfect path along his carved muscle until she reached the firm crest of his backside. Clara took hold, just as he’d done with her, and lifted her legs until her hips were splayed wide and welcoming for him.

He groaned as he thrust harder, faster into her, each jolt of his hips becoming wilder and more insistent. Clara gave him a squeeze as she tightened her legs around him, holding him against her until each brush of his full, thick cock pushed her closer to the edge that loomed before her.

The build-up became overwhelming. Every inch of him sent a jolt of hot, searing pleasure through her until there was nothing left of rationale thought, of former, broken fears. There was only his heartbeat beside hers, his body now a part of hers, and nothing more.

Arthur’s pace became erratic. He shuddered against her once, twice, before he withdrew, his face tight with nearly painful containment.

“God, Mae,” he hissed as he remained rigid and waiting above her, reluctant to spoil her with what was surely to come next.

Clara pawed at him, desperate to have him back inside her. “Arthur, please,” she pled, as she clenched her thighs around him. “It’s okay.”

Arthur hesitated a fraction of a moment more. Then, he shoved himself back inside her. She let out a sharp cry as this time his fullness completed her. Thrust after jagged thrust sped her toward the edge and this time, he would not keep her from falling off.

Clara wanted nothing more than to fall into him.

Her arms tightened around him as she buried her face in his neck. She breathed him in, heady with the scent of musk and sweat.

“Oh, God,” she moaned through tight lips.

He buried himself into her before pulling out just far enough to make her nearly violent with need before diving back inside her. Each thrust slammed against her without thought or care to a sensible rhythm.

“Please don’t stop,” she begged. Her edge opened wide before her, expanding into a bright, endless spark of release. “God, Arthur, don’t stop!”

Arthur shoved against her as she unraveled. Wild, untamed pleasure washed over her in pounding waves as she cried out, cutting off the worst of the noise as she pressed an open-mouthed kiss to his shoulder. He followed swiftly after her, his hips bucking against hers one final time before Arthur spilled inside her, holding himself against her until every last heated drop filled her still aching center.

Clara kissed him, each one more feverish than the last, as her body shuddered back into a sense of drowsy, heady calm. Arthur trembled above her, his muscles quaking as he fought to hold himself up. She brushed her hands along his sweat-dampened brow, the tops of his reddened cheeks, and the wide sweep of his shoulders. Arthur, who seemed unable to do much besides linger inside her for as long as she would allow, placed a quick kiss on her lips.

She didn’t want to let him go. Clara felt whole with him, and he with her; the thought of separating, of becoming two fallible, imperfect beings once more was so entirely abhorrent that she wrapped her arms around his neck in an effort to banish the idea entirely. Arthur slid an arm beneath her, lifting her so that her pounding heart remained in sync with his; he breathed her name onto her skin as he slowly, reluctantly, came back to himself.

But even the sweetest dreams had to end, she thought bitterly as Arthur slowly withdrew, leaving her feeling hollow and rudderless. He lowered himself beside her, his back to the wagon that made up the only wall of the tent not crafted from canvas. Clara rolled toward him, still needing his warmth and touch, as he tugged the thin, worn blanket from beneath their twined bodies and draped it over them.

He pulled her close until her curves were flush against him. Clara tucked her head onto his shoulder, lulled into blissful contentment by the steadiness of his heartbeat. Arthur pressed his cheek to the top of her head as his fingers stroked the length of her spine. Once or twice, she felt a smile tug on her lips as he swept his hand along the top of her lower back, his fingertips teasing the top of her backside.

“Stop that,” she murmured sleepily even as the smile remained in place. The fire within her hadn’t entirely died, and her tired mind had already begun to wander down darker, more indecent paths.

Arthur’s weight pressed further into the cot as sleep drew him into its harbor. He splayed his hand obediently onto her hip. “Whatever you say, boss,” he grumbled, his voice heavy with fatigue.

Clara looped an arm around him. “You’re not so bad—for an idiot, that is.”

He chuckled, the sound like a low rumble in his chest. “Guess you ain’t so terrible, what with you being a witch and all.”

Her smile widened as she hugged him. They fell into silence as sleep welcomed them like an old, eager friend. Clara was only dimly aware that, for the first time in a long time, she would not dream in solitude.

This time, Arthur would be beside her, just as he’d always promised he would be.

Chapter Text

The man could smell the acrid stench of shit from a mile away.

It clung to him like a second skin, wafting along the tepid breeze as he ambled his way through the sleepy town of Heritage. It was tucked in the foothills beyond the reach of Devil’s Ridge, lost among the plains that marred New Yorkshire like smallpox scars. Animals bleated and snorted, the sounds hardly decipherable from the useless pandering of the townsfolk—if one could call the little shithole a town, that is—which only served to irritate the lone rider.  And when he was irritated, he often got drunk. And when he got drunk, he got violent. And after he got violent, he got drunk, and so the endless cycle continued until there was hardly anything left besides the ones who irritated him and the ones who amused him.

It was a trick of the gods, really, for such a man as he to be subject to these trials and tribulations. But, alas, that was the way of it, and it hadn’t exactly gotten him nowhere, after all.

He was going somewhere, that much was for certain—both literally and figuratively, he considered with a snide, self-satisfied smirk. His horse dutifully followed the track toward the station with hard-won obedience. The man’s last horse had taken quite a beating before it finally came to heel, and even then, it insisted on defying him at nearly every twist and turn. This was one that was less objectionable and far more suited to subservience. He didn’t mind a spot of trouble every now and then (particularly the sort he’d had a hand in causing) but when it came to animals, they served only one purpose.

Unlike some folk he knew, he didn’t go around like a heartsick waif, fawning over the beasts with a brush and a handful of half-rotten sugar. Horses were for working, and work them he did because it made sense.

So little these days made much sense. The west was a mess, a far cry from the unknowable paradise that had driven the easterners here, to begin with. The land was caught between the tremors of encroaching civilization and its last, dying vie for freedom. He never much cared for such battles; he supposed it could be likened to the battle between Heaven and Hell, though he hadn’t read enough of the Bible to be sure of it. Hell, he hadn’t read any of the Bible, though it hadn’t stopped him from appreciating some aspects of it. He’d always had a particular affinity for the story of Cain and Abel.

He used to feel a strange, morbid sense of camaraderie with the eldest, murdering brother. Some folks only wanted to listen to one side of the story; they never cared for the truth, so long as they had their villain and their hero. It made sense to them, and he supposed he couldn’t entirely fault them for it.

Besides, the man had found a revolver was rather effective at determining the truth.

The rider dismounted at the train station, taking care to tightly wind the reins around the hitching post. The dumb beast was liable to wander off, given half a chance, and he wasn’t keen on finding his own way back. He ascended the stairs and entered the ticket office, sparing a tight-lipped grimace of a smile to the clerk behind the cage. The man frowned, his shoulders as tight as a two-bit whore, and quietly shuddered back into the shadows as he made his slow, deliberate way across the foul-smelling office. The shit was predominant even here; no wonder people were in such a rush to leave.

A woman lingered in a corner seat, her luggage tucked between her legs. The man’s steps slowed just long enough to let his hungry eyes linger on the swells of her breasts. He imagined what they’d look like as she rode him, what they’d feel like as he took hold of them and squeezed. Her face wasn’t much to look at, but he was willing to bet the sum in his pocket that she’d made some pretty sounds while he—

The woman glanced at him. She froze, her lips parted in shock as though the lewdness of his thoughts were written on his face, and quickly turned away.

He let out a sigh and continued on. Women were like that, thinking they were bent for more than fucking and breeding. They could be kind and sweet one moment and then high and mighty the next, just like that no-good, tempestuous one he knew. It made him angry to think of her, of all the other women that had scorned him and tossed away his advances as though he were no better than the rabble that occupied this town.

The man’s hand drifted to his revolver, took what comfort he could from the cold, hard steel, and exited the ticket office to the platform. The woman, the ticket clerk, and the whole rest of the godforsaken town of reeking fools could burn for all he cared. They’d get what was coming to them.

And he’d get what was coming to him, he thought with a satisfied, eager smile.

The bitter embrace of high noon assaulted him the moment he stepped onto the platform. Wafts of foul, shit-stained air lingered, mixed now with the acrid, hellish tendrils of steam that lazed through the afternoon. Folks milled about the platform, their conversations easy and brimmed with excitement as they drifted on and off the locomotive. The man had never understood the appeal of the steel-clad behemoths. He supposed it was handy when one was hellbent on arriving to a place sooner rather than later. They did, however, make for some decent robbing.

As it was, the man set off along the edge of the platform toward the rear of the train. A quick glance at the clock jutting from the rear wall of the ticket office revealed that he was, rather surprisingly, right on schedule. The train wouldn’t pull out for another fifteen minutes, which was enough time to settle matters before he hightailed it out of this murky, backwater hovel. There was still plenty of work to do, and he wasn’t exactly keen on letting the details linger and fester. There was a natural order to things, a way about the world that kept it all trussed up and neat like a prized parcel. It could do with a bit of chaos when the moment warranted, but in the end, all things came due, and he intended on being there to collect when it did.

It wasn’t hard to spot the caboose. His eyes drifted along the emblazoned letters of the rail company, the tall, finely crafted letters gleaming in the midday sun, proclaiming its ownership by the Southern and Eastern Railway. The rear car varied only slightly from the otherwise nondescript, entirely average cars that made up the locomotive. His steps slowed as he read the name stamped across the entire expanse of the car. Every letter was ostentatious, larger and more present even than the company’s lettering.

CORNWALL.

The man’s eyes narrowed at the name. He’d never heard it before, and it was certainly not the name of the man he knew occupied the car.

He walked on. It didn’t matter whose name was on what, as long as he walked out of here knowing he was getting paid.

The door to the private car swung open, momentarily startling him. He danced half a step back as an old, liver-spotted man peered through the threshold, the startlingly deep cut of a frown etched on his sagging face. Pewter-colored, beady eyes assessed him with the sort of careful, quiet scrutiny that came with old age and silver spoons tucked between pouted lips. He watched as the attendant fetched a gold filigree pocket watch and peered at the time, as though searching for any reason at all not to let him in.

The man held out his arms with a sour flourish. “I am nothing if not punctual, sir.”

The attendant glowered at him, slipped the watch back into his pocket, and stood rigidly beside the open door. “He’ll see you now,” he mumbled between tightly pursed and aggravated lips.

“Much obliged,” he drawled as he sauntered up the steps. He made it a point to clamp a dirt-stained hand on the attendant’s immaculately pressed suit. He stiffened beneath the touch, his face drawn and pale at the audacity of the gesture. He chuckled and stepped away, pushing aside the flaps of his coat so that his revolvers remained on full, undaunted display. It was only a bit of fun; he had no intentions of killing anyone today, though to be fair, he generally never had the inclination. It always just happened by design—and, more to the point, to people who deserved it.

The man ducked beneath the opulent crystal chandelier that dangled like captured stars from the rather low ceiling. White tiles carved with unnecessarily intricate designs ran the length of the ceiling, giving way to exquisitely polished dark wood walls. Brocaded curtains edged the surprisingly modest windows; his boots thudded on a pompous swath of royal blue carpet, fringed with gold-threaded tassels and woven with patterns intricate enough to rival the ceiling tiles hovering above him. Bulbous lamps with puckered mouths resided at intervals on the walls and furniture with tufted, silken upholstery created the semblance of a parlor. Heavy, hulking bookcases flanked the far end of the car, their shelves lined with leather-backed tomes that looked far too important to be of much interest. He spared all of this a passing, glance of distaste; instead, the bulk of his attention shifted to the car’s occupant currently seated behind the desk in front of the bookcases.

A pair of cool, storm-gray eyes watched him with quiet disinterest. Sharp cheekbones gave the occupant’s otherwise youthful visage the sort of cutting, hard-willed determination that was so often attributed to older, more experienced men. His honey-stained hair was neatly parted and pomaded to within an inch of its life, evidence to the subtle, iron grip with which he handled his affairs. He lounged in the chair, one leg tossed carelessly over the other. One hand clutched a half-full glass of whiskey while the other’s fingers twined around a glittering necklace with a single, stunning sapphire nestled delicately against his palm.

Wyatt Anderson Byers said nothing. He indicated the seat in front of the desk with a half-hearted tilt of his whiskey glass. The man strode forward and fell with a weary, comfortable sigh into the stiff-backed bit of extravagance.

“I trust you’ve made all the arrangements necessary to meet your end of the bargain?” Byers asked, though his attention had shifted for the moment to the sapphire.

The man considered the bauble. It would be simple to kill him and be done with it; the necklace would fetch him a good price. He’d likely spend it on a few drinks and a fast trick or two, but what upstanding gentleman worth his salt wouldn’t? But it wouldn’t do to kill Byers—not now, anyway. Not when there was still a large sum of money to be made.

“I said I would, and I did,” he replied as he folded his hands in his lap. “I always get the job done.”

Byers’ eyes cut to him, their veneers as dark and brooding as thunderous skies. “I must say that you are surprisingly competent for a thief, liar, and murderer for hire.”

The man lifted an eyebrow. “If you’re good at something, never do it for free, is what I say.”

A snide, tight grin marred Byers’ lips. It was a crass thing, a common expression unequal to the task of properly conveying its intended meaning. Even the man, who could care less about sentiment, found the ill-fitting gesture slightly disconcerting.

Byers tucked the sapphire necklace into his pocket and took a sip of the whiskey. His guest eyed the glass with interest, waiting for the moment when he would be asked to partake in a dram as a show of camaraderie.

“Take care that you do not harm her,” he said with weighty deliberateness. “Our agreement is forfeit if you do.”

The man sighed as the realization dawned on him that he would not, in fact, receive any whiskey. “Listen, mister. Let’s be clear about one thing—I’m here for the money. Whatever I got to do to get that money, I’m doing it, even if it means making sure your precious little princess arrives at the ball on time.”

Byers’ hand clenched on the glass. His jaw worked and he looked about to utter something properly scathing, using all those clipped, pointed words befitting the rich and entirely out of touch. The man leaned back in his chair and fought to keep the smile off his face.

The problem with rich folk was that they often forgot they were still human. A bullet to the heart could kill them as well as anyone else, regardless of the coins that filled their coffers.

After a long moment, Byers said, “Make sure he’s there too.” He spoke the word as one might scream a curse, the single syllable dripping with vicious, venomous ire.

Byers’ guest frowned. “You mean that fool, Morgan?” He was getting awfully tired of hearing that name. It seemed to whisper on the very back of the wind, drifting after him like a self-righteous ghost. The man could do nothing without hearing Arthur Morgan’s name spoken like he was the second coming of Jesus Christ, for shit’s sake.

Despite this, he satisfied himself with the thought that whatever Morgan had going on with Byers’ woman would surely get him killed. His only lament was that he wouldn’t be the one to pull the trigger.

“Milton’s men will be there,” Byers explained tersely, his admittedly limited patience for cutthroats seemingly at its end. “You won’t have to worry about him—or the rest—soon enough.” He paused, sipped his whiskey, and let his gaze drift out the window. “The ferry is due in Blackwater in a month’s time. The arrangements have been made. If you’re as talented as you claim, then the money is yours, and Milton’s men will take care of the rest.”

The man, momentarily satiated with the promise of more money, nodded. “And is there, uh, some sort of compensation for timeliness and dedication?” he asked, lifting an eyebrow and giving Byers a wide, encouraging grin.

Byers sneered and waved away the question. “Silas will see to it.” His gaze returned to the window. “Our business is concluded. Whatever happens in Blackwater—more specifically to you—is no longer my concern.”

The man took this as his cue to leave. He rose slowly from the chair, cast one last longing look at the whiskey, and delivered a mocking bow in Byers’ direction. He turned on his heel and sauntered toward the door, where the decrepit Silas handed him a sizeable stack of bills for his trouble. The man snatched it up, eliciting a hard glare from the aging attendant, and stepped toward the sunlight.

“Men like you have no place in this world.”

He stopped and turned, frowning at Byers. There were bottles to drink and women to fuck, and the longer he stayed in this godforsaken pit of despair, the less time he’d have doing what mattered most. But he tucked the money in his pocket (he couldn’t be entirely sure that Silas wouldn’t try to take it back), faced Byers, and let out a sigh by way of reply.

Byers drummed his fingers on his desk as his eyes slid back to his erstwhile guest. “You were born nothing, and you will die as nothing. And yet, you live to the contrary. Tell me, then—do you believe making a deal with me will change your fate?”

Christ alive, rich people were out of their goddamn minds. Perhaps it was surrounding themselves in extravagance that made their brains go all funny; possible they were born with full pockets and not a single viable thought in their heads. Byers seemed mildly intelligent, which only made the question sound more out of place. Fate was a poor man’s excuse for unaccountability. You either were, or you weren’t; you had a place in this world, or you didn’t. If you weren’t first, you were last, and that’s all there was to it.

“I believe there’s winners and losers,” Micah Bell replied, “and nothing else besides.”