Chapter 1 - The Weight of an Answer
The click of the rifle hammer carried a clean, deadly finality through the quiet pines.
Rowan did not hesitate. The pain in his bruised ribs flared as he lunged forward, his shoulder striking Elira and driving her down behind the thick trunk of a fallen cedar before the shot could tear through the space where she had been sitting.
A heavy bullet slammed into the wood above them, sending a sharp spray of bark and dry splinters raining down over their heads.
“Stay down,” Rowan muttered, his voice low and tight as his hand instinctively went to the bone-handled knife tucked into his belt—the only weapon they had managed to salvage.
Elira pressed herself flat against the damp earth, her breathing shallow but controlled. She was not panicking; she had expected this, even if she had hoped for one more day of grace. “He’s alone,” she whispered, her lips barely moving against the dirt. “Or he was ahead of the others.”
“One is enough to make a graveyard if we don’t move,” Rowan replied, his eyes scanning the shadows between the trunks.
From the darkness beyond the dying campfire, the voice came again, rough and edged with cruel amusement. It belonged to a man named Vance, someone Elira knew all too well from the settlements further east—a bounty hunter who wore a badge when it suited him and discarded it when the price was higher.
“Come out now, girl, and save yourself another beating,” Vance called out, his boots crunching deliberately over dry twigs to establish his position. “And leave the stray you picked up in the dirt. He’s got no stake in this blood.”
Rowan looked down at Elira. In the dim light filtering through the canopy, her face was pale, streaked with dust and old sweat, but her eyes were steady. She was waiting to see if he would take the easy way out—if he would crawl away into the brush and leave her to the man who hunted her.
Instead, Rowan shifted his weight, testing the dull ache in his side. “He thinks I’m a stray,” Rowan murmured, a hard, humorless edge touching his mouth.
“Are you?” she asked quietly.
Rowan looked her straight in the eye. “Not anymore.”
Before Vance could fire a second time, Rowan didn't run away from the sound; he moved parallel to it, melting into the dense undergrowth with the quiet, deliberate patience of a man who spent his life working unpredictable stock in rough country. Elira didn't stay behind either. With her hand resting on the hilt of her small knife, she slipped off in the opposite direction, creating a split front that Vance hadn't anticipated.
A twig snapped to the left. Vance spun, firing blindly into the brush.
That was all the opening Rowan needed. He closed the distance in three long, silent strides, coming out of the shadows behind a cluster of sumac bushes. Before Vance could cycle another round into his breech-loader, Rowan slammed into him, driving the larger man hard against the trunk of a pine.
The rifle dropped from Vance’s hands with a dull thud. He swore, swinging a heavy fist that caught Rowan squarely on the jaw. Rowan tasted copper, but he didn't let go, wrestling Vance down into the pine needles with a heavy thud that knocked the wind from both of them.
Before Vance could draw his sidearm, a shadow fell over them.
Elira stood above the struggling men, her boot planted firmly on Vance’s wrist, pinning his hand to the dirt while the small knife hovered inches from his throat. Her hand did not shake.
“You’re a long way from the agency, Vance,” she said, her voice dropping to a dangerous, icy whisper.
Vance glared up at her, breathing hard, his chest heaving beneath Rowan’s weight. “They’ll hang you for the raid, Duskwind. And they’ll string this white boy up right beside you for harboring a fugitive.”
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“Let them try,” Rowan said, pressing his forearm harder against Vance’s chest until the man choked on his next breath. “Because right now, you’re the one looking up.”
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