Chapter 10

LilLi

I heard the horses before Calder said a word, three sets of hooves coming up slow along the road, deliberate in a way that told me plainly these were not men in any hurry, men who believed the dark and the quiet hour had bought them all the advantage they needed. I felt my whole body go taut with a stillness I hadn’t known I was capable of holding, the Colt a solid, waiting weight against my thigh where it sat hidden in the fold of my skirt, and I found myself thinking, in the strange sideways way the mind moves in moments like that one, of Tian, and of my mother, and of every hard thing I had already survived that had somehow, without my fully understanding how, prepared me for this one.

Calder rose from beside me without a sound, moving to the window with the careful, unhurried economy of a man who had done this kind of waiting before and knew better than to let urgency make him clumsy now. “Stay back from the light,” he murmured, low enough that it wouldn’t carry past the two of us. “Let them come to us. Talbot’s watching same as we are.”

I did as he asked, though every instinct in me wanted to move toward the door rather than away from it, some fierce, protective animal thing rising up in my chest that had nothing to do with courage and everything to do with the fact that my daughter was asleep, or trying to be, not thirty feet away in a room these men meant to burn around her if we let them.

The seconds between hearing those hoofbeats and seeing the riders clear enough to make out their shapes stretched longer than any span of time I could remember living through, my whole body strung tight as a drawn bowstring, my ears straining past my own pulse for any sound that might tell me how close they’d come, how much time remained before whatever was coming actually arrived. I thought, in that strange suspended stretch of waiting, of Emmie asleep down the hall, trusting the door between her and the night to hold, trusting the two of us to keep whatever promise we’d made her that everything would still be standing come morning. I thought of Tian, briefly, the way I still did in moments when courage was asked of me and I needed some older strength to draw from. And then the thinking stopped, all at once, because the riders had come close enough now to see clearly, and there was no more room left in me for anything but watching.

The riders came into the edge of the yard slow, and through the gap in the curtain I watched three shapes take form in the thin moonlight — Rourke in front, same as he’d always ridden, and his two hired men trailing just behind, one of them carrying something long and thin that caught the moonlight strange, and it took me a moment to understand I was looking at a torch, unlit yet, but held ready, a length of wood wrapped thick with oil-soaked rag at its end.

“Vance!” Rourke’s voice carried loud across the yard, pitched to be heard through walls, through doors, through whatever thin defenses he imagined a homesteader and his family might still believe protected them. “Come on out here. Got something to discuss with you, and I’d as soon do it face to face.”

Calder didn’t move toward the door. He’d told me earlier, laying out Talbot’s plan, that the sheriff wanted Rourke drawn all the way out, his intentions shown plain before anyone made a move against him, and so we waited, the both of us, watching through the gap in the curtain as Rourke sat his horse in our yard, waiting for an answer that wasn’t coming.

He didn’t wait long before his patience ran thin. “Fine,” he called out, and there was an ugly satisfaction creeping into his voice now, the sound of a man who’d expected resistance and found silence instead, and had decided to read that silence as fear rather than caution. “We’ll do this the hard way, then.”