Chapter One #2
The word beat through her again, weaker now. The word repeated through her silently now, desperate enough to sound like a prayer.
Nathan stood. She heard him cross the room quickly, too quickly, and then his hands were on her shoulders.
“Daisy.”
She hated the softness in his voice. “Who is he?”
“Give me the bottle.” It wasn’t a demand, merely a statement, though it carried weight.
“Who is he, Nathan?”
On the sofa, the injured man breathed. Once. Twice. Then, in a voice scraped raw by pain and fever, he whispered, “Daisy?”
The bottle slipped from her hand.
She barely noticed Nathan catching it.
The room seemed to tilt around her. Three years vanished in an instant, swept away by a single broken whisper.
She knew that voice. She would have known it anywhere.
The name had been barely more than breath.
Broken. Uncertain. But it reached into the grave where she'd buried her girlhood and tore everything open.
Flint.
Flint Callahan.
The room disappeared. The years disappeared with it.
She was twenty-three again, feverish and frightened, waking to a world of gray, begging Nathan not to send for him.
She was standing in the doorway of the Callahan barn with Flint’s hands warm around hers, while he promised he would build her a house wherever she wanted.
She was writing a letter she never sent because every word sounded like a chain around his future.
She was leaving him.
She was breaking them both.
“Daisy,” Nathan said again.
She pulled away from him.
Her knees felt unsteady, but she wouldn't sit. She wouldn't faint like some delicate thing from a parlor novel. She'd survived darkness. She could survive a voice.
Even his.
“What happened to him?” she asked.
Nathan hesitated.
Her anger returned, sudden and bright. “What happened?”
“I don’t know all of it.”
“Then tell me what you do know.”
“He was beaten. Badly. Ribs, likely broken. Knife wound along his side. Bruising everywhere. Maybe internal injury.” Nathan’s voice dropped. “If that man had found him an hour later, I doubt Flint would still be breathing.”
Daisy pressed a hand to her mouth.
“You don't need to see this.”
A bitter laugh broke from her before she could contain it. “I will never see this, Nathan.”
His hand loosened at once.
For three years, she'd imagined meeting him again in every cruel way possible. Passing him on the street and hearing him say nothing. Hearing he'd married some bright-eyed ranch girl who could see his smile at sunrise.
Finding him at the Callahan ranch during one of Clara’s visits and having to explain why she'd vanished, why she'd lied, why she'd decided his life for him without asking what he wanted.
Never once had she imagined this.
Flint dying in her parlor while her brother tried to hold him together with bandages and stubborn will.
She lowered herself to her knees beside the sofa.
“Flint,” she whispered.
His breathing changed.
“Don’t wake him,” Nathan said quietly. “Not if we can help it.”
“You gave him laudanum?”
“As much as I dare.” Nathan wiped his hands on a rag.
“Will he live?”
Nathan didn't answer quickly enough.
Daisy closed her eyes, though it made no difference. She tried again. “Will he live?”
“I'm trying to make certain that he does.”
She nodded once. The answer wasn't enough, but it was the only one he had.
His fingers moved against the sofa cushion. Searching, perhaps. Or only reacting to pain. She wanted to take his hand. The desire startled her with its intensity.
Yet she remained motionless beside the sofa. Three years ago, she had chosen silence over honesty, distance over trust. Whatever right she might once have had to reach for Flint Callahan had been surrendered then.
Nathan continued working beside her, and the hours that followed seemed to blur together. The kettle whistled. Water was heated and carried back to the parlor. Bloodied cloths were replaced with clean ones. Nathan stitched wounds while Daisy fetched whatever he needed before he could ask for it.
Flint drifted between consciousness and fever.
Occasionally, a word escaped him, though most were impossible to understand.
Once, she thought she heard Wyatt's name.
Later, he muttered something about cattle and storms. Then, sometime near dawn, his voice sharpened unexpectedly as he cursed a man named Amos.
At that, Nathan went still.
“Who is Amos?” Daisy asked.
“Not now.”
The answer told her there would be danger beyond the blood.
Outside, the wind moved along the house. Somewhere far off, a train whistle cried through Cheyenne, lonely and shrill. The sound belonged to another world. A world with tracks and schedules and men who arrived where they meant to go.
In Daisy’s world, the past had just been dragged bleeding across her threshold.
At last, Nathan sat back with a long, exhausted breath.
“For now,” he said.
Daisy didn't ask what that meant. She knew. It meant the bleeding had slowed. It meant the stitches held. It meant dawn might come before death did.
Her hand still pressed the cloth to Flint’s side.
His voice came faintly, dragged from somewhere deep and dark. “Daisy.”
Tears burned behind her unseeing eyes.
For three years, she'd told herself she'd done the merciful thing. She'd told herself Flint would forget her. That he would go on to a better life, one unburdened by her darkness, her fear, her limitations.
But the man on her sofa didn't sound as if he'd found a better life. His voice sounded scraped, hollow. And somehow, he'd ended up here, bleeding on her sofa with her name still in his mouth.
“I’m here,” she whispered.
Nathan said nothing.
Flint’s fingers tightened the smallest amount around her wrist. Then he slipped under again.
Daisy bowed her head. She didn't know who'd done this to him.
She didn't know why he'd been left in an alley like refuse.
She didn't know what danger had followed him to her quiet home.
But she knew, with a certainty that settled deep and cold inside her, that the life she'd built so carefully was over.
Nothing about the house felt the same anymore because Flint Callahan was breathing inside it.