CHAPTER ONE The Man in Irons #2
Calder cradled one wrist against his stomach. His fingers trembled when he tried to bend them.
“Slowly,” Gideon said. “Don’t force them.”
He took Calder’s right hand between both of his before thinking better of it.
The contact was startling.
Calder’s palm was rough with old rope burns and riding calluses. His fingers were long, the nails broken close. Gideon pressed his thumbs gently into the swollen flesh, checking circulation, and felt Calder watching him with an intensity that made the air inside the cell seem thinner.
“Can you feel this?” Gideon asked, touching the tip of his smallest finger.
“Yes.”
“This?”
“Yes.”
Gideon moved to the next finger.
“That?”
Calder’s gaze remained on Gideon’s mouth. “I can feel all of it, Marshal.”
Gideon released him.
Rusk made a contemptuous sound behind them. “Playacting. He was using those hands fine yesterday.”
Gideon rose so quickly his shoulder nearly struck the cell door. “Yesterday?”
The sheriff shrugged. “Had questions for him.”
“Questions leave bruises shaped like fists in Red Mesa?”
“Sometimes answers need encouragement.”
Calder’s left eye was nearly swollen shut. Blood had soaked his shirt over the lower ribs, and now that Gideon knew what he was looking for, he could distinguish parallel marks across the fabric. Not from a fist.
From the quirt on Rusk’s desk.
Gideon stepped out of the cell and closed the distance between them.
Rusk was not a small man, but he retreated half a pace before remembering his deputies could see him. His hand drifted toward the revolver beneath his coat.
Gideon’s voice became very quiet. “If your fingers touch that grip, Sheriff, I’ll break your wrist before you clear leather.”
The corridor seemed to contract around them.
Rusk’s hand stopped.
“You come into my jail—”
“Under federal authority.” Gideon placed the transfer order against the sheriff’s chest. “This document requires you to surrender Jude Calder alive and fit for transport. It does not grant you permission to question him. It does not authorize punishment. And it does not make your temper an instrument of the United States government.”
“You calling me a liar?”
“No. I’m telling you precisely how I’ll describe you in my report.”
The deputy near the gun rack looked away.
Gideon took the quirt from the desk. Dried blood darkened its braided end. He wrapped it once around his fist, then set it atop the transfer order.
“I’ll be taking that as evidence.”
Rusk’s face went purple beneath the sunburn. “Harrow won’t appreciate being delayed because you decided to nurse his brother-killing pet.”
Behind Gideon, the chain at Calder’s ankles scraped across the floor.
The sound was slight. The change in the prisoner was not.
The wounded man’s amusement vanished so completely that Gideon glimpsed what the wanted circular had tried and failed to capture. Calder’s expression emptied. His body went still. Violence did not flare in him; it settled into alignment.
Rusk saw it too and smiled.
He wanted Calder to move. Wanted him to lunge, threaten, prove every bruise necessary.
Gideon turned his back on the sheriff and reentered the cell.
“Look at me,” he said.
Calder’s attention remained fixed on Rusk.
“Calder.”
Those storm-colored eyes shifted to Gideon.
“He isn’t worth the rope they’d use afterward.”
Calder’s jaw worked. For a moment, Gideon thought he might spit blood at him. Then the hard line of his shoulders loosened by a fraction.
“You don’t know what he’s worth,” Calder said.
“Not yet.”
The answer appeared to interest him.
Gideon looked toward the office. “Water. Clean cloth. My saddlebags.”
No one moved.
He faced the deputy. “Now.”
The young man obeyed.
Gideon made Rusk and both deputies leave the cell door open and stand where he could see them. He did not trust them alone with his back turned, and he trusted them even less with Calder’s.
The deputy returned with a dented basin, a stack of rags, and Gideon’s leather medical roll. The water was lukewarm and smelled faintly of the well, but it was clean.
Gideon set the basin on the floor and knelt.
Calder looked down at him. “This part of federal service?”
“Keeping you alive is.”
“That sound like disappointment?”
“If I wanted you dead, I’d leave you with Sheriff Rusk.”
Calder’s split lip curved despite itself.
Gideon wet a cloth and wrung it out. “I’m going to clean your face.”
“You planning to tell me before every breath you take?”
“Only the ones involving you.”
That silenced him.
Gideon placed two fingers beneath Calder’s chin and turned his face toward the window. The stubble along his jaw rasped against Gideon’s fingertips. Calder went very still, but he did not pull away.
Gideon cleaned the blood beneath his nose first, then his cheek.
The cloth passed over the corner of Calder’s mouth.
His lower lip was full even beneath the swelling, split through the center where a ring or a boot had struck it.
Gideon pressed the damp cloth there and felt Calder’s breath warm his knuckles.
“Tell me if the pressure is too much.”
“It isn’t.”
“You don’t win anything by lying.”
“What do I win by telling the truth?”
Gideon met his eyes. “A better chance of reaching Santa Reina.”
For the first time, Calder’s confidence faltered. His gaze moved briefly toward the men in the office.
“Then we’d better ride before dark.”
“We’ll ride when I know you won’t die in the saddle.”
“I can sit a horse.”
“That wasn’t the question.” Gideon rinsed the cloth. Pink unfurled through the water. “Where else are you hurt?”
“Nowhere that’ll kill me today.”
“Calder.”
“Marshal.”
The word sounded different in his mouth. Lower. Almost private.
Gideon ignored the sensation that moved beneath his ribs. “I need to examine the blood on your shirt.”
Calder leaned his head back against the wall. “Do what you came to do.”
“That isn’t permission.”
The prisoner stared at him.
Outside the cell, Rusk muttered something beneath his breath.
Gideon waited.
At last Calder said, “Yes. You may examine me.”
Gideon opened the shirt from throat to waist. Several buttons were missing, and the remaining ones slipped through torn holes. He folded the cloth aside.
Calder’s chest was hard and spare, built by saddle work rather than a gymnasium or parade ground. Dark hair spread lightly between his breastbone and navel. Sweat made his skin shine in the narrow blades of sunlight coming through the bars.
Bruises marked him everywhere.
One bloomed over his right ribs in black and violet, with yellow beginning at the edges. Another lay across his stomach. Three long welts curved from his left side toward his back, two closed and one split.
Gideon’s anger sharpened until it felt clean.
He placed the flats of his fingers above the darkest bruise. “I need to feel the ribs.”
Calder nodded.
Gideon pressed carefully, moving one rib at a time. Calder’s muscles tightened beneath his touch. The reaction traveled through Gideon’s fingers into his palm, intimate not because it was invited but because it was trusted.
“Breathe in.”
Calder inhaled.
His chest rose beneath Gideon’s hand. He stopped halfway.
“Again,” Gideon said. “Slower.”
Calder obeyed. Gideon felt the expansion of his ribs, the heat gathering in his palm, and the hard beat of a heart that refused to hurry for anyone.
“Nothing feels broken,” Gideon said. “Possibly cracked.”
“Your bedside manner lacks poetry.”
“My patients usually prefer accuracy.”
“Do you have many prisoners take off their shirts for you?”
Gideon’s hand stilled.
Calder watched him through half-lowered lashes. It should have been mockery. Perhaps it was. But beneath the words, Gideon heard a question neither of them could safely ask in a jail where three armed men listened.
He withdrew his hand. “Turn around.”
Calder shifted with visible effort until he faced the wall. His open shirt slid from one shoulder.
The marks continued across his back. Old scars lay beneath the new ones: narrow white lines crossing his shoulders, a round puckered mark near his left side, and one long ridge descending beside his spine. A bullet. A knife. A whip. Gideon knew each language flesh spoke after violence.
Calder had survived fluently.
Gideon cleaned the open welt. When the cloth touched it, Calder’s shoulders flexed but he made no sound.
“You can curse,” Gideon said.
“Would it improve your work?”
“Might improve your disposition.”
“My disposition was ruined years ago.”
“So I’ve read.”
Calder glanced back. Their faces were suddenly too close, Gideon leaning over his shoulder, Calder’s shirt fallen open, the heat of his body rising between them. Gideon could see a vein beating beneath the skin of his throat.
He straightened before the moment acquired a shape he could not deny.
He coated the welt with salve and covered it with clean linen. His fingers brushed the edge of Calder’s shoulder blade as he secured the bandage. Calder released a breath, slow and controlled.
“Done,” Gideon said.
“Pity.”
Gideon began packing the medical roll.
“Was that a joke, Marshal?” Calder asked.
“No.”
“Another pity.”
Gideon handed him a clean shirt from the saddlebags. It was Gideon’s spare, made for a larger man, but in better condition than what Calder wore.
Calder looked from the shirt to Gideon. “You dress all your murderers?”
“Only the ones bleeding through their own clothes.”
“How tender.”
“Put it on.”
Calder did, though the movement required him to bite back pain.
The dark gray fabric hung loose around his waist and strained slightly across his shoulders.
Gideon found himself watching Calder button it.
He disliked the familiarity of seeing another man inside his clothes.
He disliked more that the sight did not feel wrong.
He retrieved his own restraints from the saddlebags.
The wrist irons were steel, joined by six inches of chain. The edges were smooth from years of use and careful maintenance. Gideon checked the locking mechanisms, then crouched before Calder again.
“Hands.”
Calder extended them.