CHAPTER TWELVE Wear the Chains
The mission had lost its bells, its roof, and every saint light enough to carry away, but its walls still held the day’s heat.
They reached it in the final hour before sunset, when the Arizona sky had gone copper at the edges and the desert shadows stretched long enough to hide a man.
What remained of the bell tower leaned over the road like a broken finger.
Wind had stripped most of the whitewash from the adobe walls, exposing brown earth beneath, and the wooden cross over the chapel doors hung crooked from one rusted nail.
Gideon nearly fell when he dismounted.
His left boot touched the ground, his wounded side tightened, and the strength simply left his leg. Jude caught him beneath both arms before his knee struck the dirt.
For one breath they remained locked together against the horse’s hot flank. Gideon’s cheek pressed to Jude’s temple. Jude’s arms crossed Gideon’s chest, holding him upright while the black gelding shifted beneath the sudden weight and blew dust through its nostrils.
“I had it,” Gideon said.
“You had the ground picked out real nice.”
Gideon tried to straighten. Pain moved beneath his ribs like a blade being drawn slowly from a sheath.
Jude tightened his hold.
“Don’t,” he murmured.
“I need to walk.”
“You need to stop pretending every step is testimony before a judge.”
Gideon turned his face. Jude was close enough that his breath warmed the corner of Gideon’s mouth.
Dirt darkened the hollows beneath Jude’s eyes, and the bruising left by the mine had spread from his temple into a mottled stain along his cheek.
There was dried blood at the collar of his shirt from where Harrow’s men had reopened the graze across his shoulder.
He looked exhausted, half-starved, and more beautiful to Gideon than any man had a right to look while holding another upright in the dust.
“I can walk,” Gideon said again.
“I know.”
Jude did not release him.
The words struck deeper than the argument. There was no mockery in them, no doubt. Jude knew Gideon could force his body across the mission yard, could bite down on every sound and reach the chapel under his own power. He also knew that ability did not make it necessary.
Gideon let some of his weight settle into Jude’s arms.
Together they crossed the yard.
The chapel doors had warped apart, leaving a black seam between them.
Jude pushed one open with his shoulder and helped Gideon inside.
Sunset entered through the missing roof in broad pillars of red light.
The old altar remained at the far end, cracked through the center but still standing.
Sand had drifted over the floor tiles. A lizard darted beneath the remains of a pew, and somewhere behind the sacristy wall a loose shutter knocked softly in the wind.
Jude lowered Gideon onto a bedroll spread beside the altar.
His hands did not leave Gideon at once. One remained behind Gideon’s shoulders while the other rested against his stomach, broad and warm through the shirt.
Gideon felt each finger distinctly. He felt the careful pressure with which Jude supported him, the slight tremor in Jude’s thumb, the heat of his palm over the muscles Gideon had held rigid for most of his life.
Only when Gideon was steady did Jude step away.
He led the horse behind the mission, stripped off the saddle, and concealed the animal in the ruined stable where three walls and a sagging roof would hide it from the road. By the time Jude returned, Gideon had removed his coat and opened his shirt.
The bandage around his ribs was dark with old blood.
Jude stopped in the doorway.
“That happen on the ride?”
“No.”
“Then you knew it was bleeding.”
“Yes.”
“And elected not to mention it.”
“We were being hunted.”
“We are still being hunted.”
“We reached the mission.”
“Which is why I’m deciding whether to wash that wound or use the remaining water to drown you.”
Gideon looked at the half-full canteen hanging from Jude’s hand.
“You would need more water.”
“I would find some.”
The anger in Jude’s voice was real, but so was the fear beneath it.
Gideon recognized it because he had carried the same fear since forcing Jude through the fissure in the mine.
It lived in every glance they gave each other now, every hand held a moment longer than necessary.
They had both felt the other man’s body go slack. Neither had learned how to forget it.
Jude knelt and set the canteen aside. He peeled the blood-stiffened bandage from Gideon’s ribs one slow turn at a time.
Gideon’s breath caught.
Jude stopped immediately. “Too much?”
“No.”
“That was not a convincing answer.”
“It pulls where Harrow’s man struck me.”
“Then say that.”
“It pulls.”
Jude’s expression softened by a fraction. “Thank you.”
He wet a clean corner of cloth and washed the blood from Gideon’s side.
His touch was practical, but nothing between them felt merely practical anymore.
The cloth moved over skin Jude had kissed at Sundown House, over the bullet furrow Jude had stitched inside the cave, over scars he had traced in daylight at the Calder homestead.
Gideon knew the exact shape of Jude’s hands now.
He knew which finger had been broken badly enough that it no longer lay straight.
He knew the callus along Jude’s palm from years of rope and reins.
He knew how those hands changed when they held a weapon, a razor, a coffee cup, or Gideon.
Jude cleaned the wound and wrapped Gideon’s ribs again. When he tied the bandage, he placed two fingers beneath the knot to be certain it would not tighten against Gideon’s breathing.
“There,” he said. “You may continue being impossible.”
“I’m grateful.”
“You don’t sound it.”
Gideon caught Jude’s wrist before he could draw away.
Jude went still, but he did not resist.
Gideon turned Jude’s hand and pressed his mouth to the center of the palm. The kiss was brief. It was not apology enough for any of the fear between them, but Jude’s fingers curled against Gideon’s cheek as though accepting it.
“We have until dawn,” Gideon said.
Jude’s hand remained against his face. “Then we have longer than I expected.”
Gideon wished he could believe that made them fortunate.
Jude sat beside him, shoulder touching shoulder, and drew Noah’s ledger from the oilskin satchel.
The book looked insignificant lying between them.
It was narrow enough to conceal beneath a coat, bound in cracked brown leather, its corners warped by damp and age.
Yet men had been driven from their land for what was written inside it.
Others had been worked to death, sealed in a mine, shot beside their homes, or hanged beneath the color of law.
Noah Calder had died for trying to place the truth in honest hands.
Marisol Vega might die for it before the following sunset.
Gideon opened the ledger across his thigh.
“Santa Reina has four roads,” he said. “Harrow will watch all of them. Cutter will have deputies at the depot and courthouse. The jail occupies the eastern half of the lower floor. The federal courtroom is above it.”
“And the gallows?”
“Courthouse square.”
Jude’s jaw tightened.
Gideon used a piece of charcoal to sketch the town in the sand between the tiles. One dark line became the main road. Another marked the courthouse. He added the jail yard, the stable, the telegraph office, and the alley between the land office and the Santa Reina Sentinel.
“They will bring Marisol out shortly before sundown,” he continued. “Harrow wants witnesses. A public death allows him to frighten every rancher named in this book.”
“And Cutter?”
“He will want you in the courthouse before the hanging. Alive long enough to learn where you hid the ledger.”
“So you give him exactly what he wants.”
“I give him what he believes he wants.”
Jude studied the map. “A disgraced marshal and his escaped prisoner riding up together will not fool a blind undertaker.”
“We will not ride up together.”
The silence that followed carried the faint knocking of the loose shutter.
Gideon reached for his gun belt. The federal handcuffs hung from the leather in front of the holster, cleaned of the blood and mine dust that had darkened them. The steel caught the dying light.
Jude’s gaze lowered to them.
Gideon unhooked the cuffs and placed them in the sand between them.
“I go in wearing the badge,” he said. “You go in wearing those. I tell Cutter I used the warrant against me to draw Harrow’s men away while I tracked you. I tell him I recaptured you after the mine and that you hid Noah’s evidence somewhere outside town.”
“He knows you refused Harrow.”
“He knows Harrow had me beaten. He does not know what a man might say after another day without water or sleep.”
“He knows you love me.”
“Harrow suspects. Cutter knows only what Harrow told him.”
Jude looked at Gideon. “And what do you tell him?”
“That I made the same choice I made with Samuel.”
Pain entered Jude’s face before he could hide it.
Gideon hated the words even as he spoke them. Hated the thought of shaping Samuel’s death into a lie Cutter would recognize. But shame was a language corrupt men trusted. Cutter believed every man possessed a price because he could not imagine anyone acting without one.
“He will believe I chose the badge,” Gideon continued. “My name. My life. He will believe I delivered you because I finally remembered which one I valued most.”
“Can you make him believe that?”
“Yes.”
The answer came too quickly.
Jude turned back to the irons. “Because you have practice.”
Gideon did not defend himself.
“Yes.”
Jude drew one knee up and rested his forearm across it. His bruised knuckles flexed once before going still.
“And after he opens the courthouse?” he asked.
“I get us near the cells. We find Marisol. We place the ledger before the judge and as many witnesses as we can reach.”
“And if Cutter searches you?”