The Shy Ellen
Copyright© 2026 by Heel
Chapter 2
Sleep did not come kindly to Ellen Harper.
When it came at all, it brought her sister back.
Mary crawled through dust that turned to mud beneath her hands, her dress dark and heavy with blood. She reached for Ellen, mouth open, trying to speak. Behind her came laughter—short, broken bursts that snapped Ellen awake every time.
Ellen learned to dread nightfall.
She woke with her heart hammering, fingers clawed into the blanket as if it were flesh. Sometimes she smelled gunpowder. Sometimes she heard hooves outside the cabin and reached for a rifle that was not there.
After a week, she stopped sleeping.
Cole Brennan noticed without being told. He watched her hands shake when she poured coffee, the way her eyes jumped to every sound, the hollowness settling beneath her skin.
“Dreams?” he asked one morning.
Ellen nodded.
“Good,” he said. “Means you didn’t look away.”
She had looked away once. That was enough for a lifetime.
Memory clung to her with cruel precision. Not just Mary falling, but the men themselves—the way they sat their horses, the way they laughed, the careless confidence of those who had never been punished.
One detail returned to her again and again.
The rope.
It had trailed behind the tallest rider’s saddle, frayed and dirty, whispering against the ground as he moved. Ellen remembered noticing it because Mary had noticed it too—her eyes flicking toward it for half a second, as if sensing danger in the man who carried it.
There were others.
The one who fired the shots spoke with a lazy drawl that bent certain words wrong. When he laughed, it came in short coughs, like he was choking on his own breath. His revolver hung low and forward, the grip wrapped in dark leather, stitched twice at the base where it had been repaired instead of replaced.
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