Prologue
They buried her at the edge of nowhere, where the grass grew tall and the wind never stopped moving. No preacher. No mourners. Just Colt Everhart and Tahsani Red Elk, standing over a rough pine box while the girl who’d lost everything clutched a chipped tin horse like it might bring her mother back.
Colt hadn’t spoken much all day. The words stuck in his throat, dry as trail dust. He kept his hat low and his hand near his hip, like someone might shoot grief out of him if he let it show.
Tahsani, as always, stood quiet. Still as stone, but watching everything. Juniper Lark — Junie, she said, in a voice too brittle for thirteen — hadn’t cried once. That worried him more than tears.
“She say anything?” Colt finally asked, breaking the silence with a voice that sounded like boots on gravel.
Tahsani shook his head. “Not since last night. Just keeps holding that toy.”
Colt’s fingers twitched. “She’s not mine.”
“She ain’t mine either,” Tahsani said, soft. Then: “But she don’t have no one else.”
Junie stood a little ways off, the prairie wind catching the ends of her braid. She didn’t look at them. She hadn’t since the grave was covered.
Colt exhaled, slow and tired. “This wasn’t the plan.”
“Plans break,” Tahsani murmured. “People too.”
They didn’t look at each other. Couldn’t. Not here, where a wrong glance could cost everything. Not when they’d spent years pretending they were just friends who rode together, not two men who shared silence in the dark and warmth under canvas when the nights got too cold.
Now they had a girl. A kid who didn’t belong to either of them — but who’d end up buried too, if they walked away.
Tahsani crouched, resting a hand against the earth.
“I’ll stay with her tonight,” he said. “You ride back. Fix up the barn. She’ll need a place to sleep.”
Colt paused. Then nodded. Just once.
He looked back at the girl before he mounted up. “You coming, Junie?”
She didn’t answer right away.
Then she turned — slow, steady — and said, “I ain’t got nowhere else, do I?”
That was the first thing she’d said all day.
