Nielli had finally fallen asleep on the corner of the cedar bedstead. She lay curled on her side, still wearing her heavy wool stockings and her flannel dress, her small face buried in the soft folds of the patchwork quilt. Her breathing was slow, deep, and untroubled; for the first time since Elias had ridden into the canyon, the girl was sleeping without her hand within reach of an iron barrel.
Elias sat on the low wooden stool by the hearth.
He had stripped off his flannel shirt, sitting bare-chested in the red light of the dying fire. The ragged white scar along his ribs gleamed like mother-of-pearl against his tanned, muscled flesh; his left forearm, swollen and purple from the lashing of the broken wire, rested on his knee over a clean piece of oilcloth.
Aiona knelt on the floorboards beside him.
She had set an enamel basin of boiling water on the hearthstone, infused with dried chamomile flowers and the crushed resin of mountain fir. A strip of clean linen hung over her shoulder; in her right hand, she held a small bone-handled bodkin and a spool of stout silk thread that had belonged to her mother.
"This is going to bite, Elias," she whispered, her voice low so as not to wake the child.
"I've been sewn up before, Aiona," he replied, his voice rough as river sand. "Cavalry surgeons don't use silk. They use waxed linen and an awl."
"I am not a cavalry surgeon," she said firmly.
She dipped a clean cloth into the steaming herbal water, wrung it out with her strong, calloused hands, and pressed it directly against the torn flesh of his wrist.
Elias did not flinch, but his breath caught in his throat with a sharp, hissing sound. The muscles in his broad back bunched into hard knots; his fingers clamped onto his thigh until his knuckles turned white. The scent of hot fir needles and bruised skin rose between them, thick and sharp in the small circle of warmth.
Aiona leaned closer. Her dark hair, freed from its braids for the night, fell in soft, loose waves around her shoulders, brushing against Elias’s bare knee. She worked with exquisite care, washing away the dried black pepper, cleaning the jagged edges of the puncture wounds where the wire barbs had ripped through the fascia.
"You took a terrible risk with that boy's horse," she murmured, her eyes focused on the wound as she threaded the bodkin with the dark silk.
"Nielli knew what she was doing," Elias said, his gaze fixed on the top of her head, watching the firelight dance in the dark strands of her hair. "She didn't shoot to kill. She shot to break his balance. She has her father's eye."
"She has your nerve," Aiona countered softly. "Three weeks ago, she would have dropped that gun and hid behind the meal chest. You gave her something she never had before."
"What's that?"
Aiona paused. She lifted the bodkin, the needle gleaming in the red glow of the coals, and looked up into his face. Her dark eyes were huge, deep, and entirely without defense.
"A reason to believe that being good doesn't mean being helpless," she said.
She bent her head back to her task.
With three swift, practiced passes of the needle, she drew the gaping edges of the skin together, tying each knot with a double turn of the silk that bit into the flesh with a tiny, sharp tug. Elias watched her fingers—those small, scarred, indomitable hands that had pulled timber from the washouts and held an iron sledgehammer through fifteen-below weather.
They were gentle now. Unbelievably gentle.
When the last knot was snipped with her small shears, she did not immediately pull away. She laid her palm flat against his forearm, her thumb stroking the uninjured skin above his wrist with a slow, tender rhythm that sent a warm, terrifying shiver down his spine.
"The wire is finished, Elias," she said, her voice dropping into a register so quiet it seemed to blend with the hum of the chimney.
"I know," he said.
"The outlaws are taken. The patent is secure. Marshal Cole will record the survey in Cheyenne next week."
"I know."
She lifted her head again. Her face was inches from his chest; he could feel the steady, rapid beat of her heart through her woolen bodice, her breath warm against his bare skin.
"Then your work here is done," she whispered.
The words were not a dismissal. They were the terrifying question that had hung between them since the morning he awoke with his hand open on the floorboards. It was the open door she was offering him—the final, agonizing choice between the endless, lonely trail he had traveled for ten years and the terrifying, vulnerable warmth of the home they had defended with their blood.
Elias looked at her.
He thought of the trail south toward the Green River. He thought of the high passes, the cold, solitary campsites, the dry hardtack eaten in the saddle, and the terrible, crushing silence of a life where no man knew your name and no woman waited for the sound of your horse's hooves on the gravel.
He had called that freedom. He had called it safety.