Chapter 30
Jonas woke to the smell of soap, wood smoke, and something bitter he could not immediately place.
For several confused seconds, he expected to see the rough-hewn ceiling of the shack above him.
Instead, lamplight moved softly across plaster, and heavy curtains covered the window beside the bed.
A fire had burned low in the small grate, leaving the room warm enough that one of his arms had escaped the blankets sometime during the night.
Then pain pulsed through his right leg.
Memory returned with it.
Silas. The gunshot. Martha.
Jonas opened his eyes fully.
She was asleep in a chair beside the bed.
Her head rested awkwardly against the high wooden back, her face turned toward him even in sleep. Someone had washed the blood from her hair, but the strands remained tangled around the bandage wrapped around her head.
Angry red marks ringed both wrists where the rope had cut into her skin. She still wore the same dress from the shack, though the hem was streaked with mud and one sleeve had been torn near the shoulder.
Jonas watched the slow rise and fall of her breathing until some of the tightness left his chest.
He remembered her face above him as consciousness slipped away. He remembered hearing Tobias call for Reuben and Martha saying his name as though she could keep him awake by force alone.
After that, there was very little.
A wagon, perhaps. Dr. Keller's voice. Pain so sharp that it had broken through whatever they gave him and dragged him halfway awake before darkness took him again.
Jonas shifted experimentally.
The pain that followed made his teeth clench.
Martha woke at once.
Her body jerked upright, one hand gripping the chair arm before her eyes found him. For an instant she looked frightened and disoriented. Then relief transformed her expression so completely that Jonas almost forgot about his leg.
“You're awake.” She leaned forward, stopping herself before she reached for him. “How do you feel?”
“Like someone shot me.”
A soft, breathless laugh escaped her. She pressed the heel of one hand against her eyes, and when she lowered it, there were tears there. “Apparently being injured hasn't improved your disposition.”
Jonas looked down toward the blankets covering his leg. “Did Keller get the bullet out?”
“It went through.”
He raised his eyebrows.
Martha nodded, some of the tension leaving her face now that she had something practical to explain.
“He said you were fortunate. It missed the bone and the large vessels. He cleaned the wound and stitched what needed stitching.” She glanced toward the washstand, where a basin, folded cloths, and several small brown bottles remained in untidy evidence of the doctor's work.
“You lost enough blood to frighten everyone, but he doesn't think the injury will leave any permanent damage if you behave yourself.”
“Then I'm doomed.”
This time her smile lasted a little longer.
Jonas let himself look at her properly.
The marks around her wrists were worse in the brighter light. There was bruising along one side of her jaw, and a faint shadow darkened the skin near her temple.
His amusement disappeared.
“How badly are you hurt?”
Martha followed his gaze and tugged her sleeves down over her wrists. The gesture was automatic, but Jonas noticed it.
“I'm all right.”
“Martha.”
She sighed and settled back in the chair. “Dr. Keller says the blow to my head was serious enough that I should rest but not serious enough to have damaged anything permanently. My shoulder is bruised. My wrists look worse than they feel.”
Jonas doubted that last part.
“You were unconscious when Silas took you.”
“I know.” She lowered her eyes to her hands. “Percy saw.”
At the boy's name, Jonas remembered the terrified face in the pasture.
“How is he?”
“Angry.”
That sounded promising.
Martha's mouth curved faintly. “Eliza says he spent half the night insisting that everyone should have let him come with you. He is also deeply offended that Silas managed to tie him up at all.”
Jonas let out a slow breath. “Good.”
Martha looked up.
“That he's angry,” he clarified. “Not that he was tied up.”
“I knew what you meant.”
For a moment, the room settled into quiet.
Morning had not yet fully arrived. A thin wash of gray showed around the curtains, enough to tell Jonas that dawn was close. Somewhere below them, floorboards creaked. The inn was beginning another day despite everything that had happened.
Jonas looked toward the familiar ceiling.
“I'm at the inn.”
“You are.”
“How?”
“Your brothers had to carry you to a place they could get a wagon through.” Martha rubbed her palms together, then seemed to remember the raw skin and stopped. “Reuben wanted to take you straight home from there, but Dr. Keller said moving you twice would be foolish.”
“Reuben agreed with that?”
“No.”
Jonas could picture the argument without hearing it.
Martha's expression softened. “Tobias convinced him.”
That, too, he could picture.
“What happened to Silas?”
The question changed the room.
Martha's shoulders straightened. Whatever exhaustion had softened her features a moment earlier gave way to something more deliberate.
“Sheriff Crane has him.”
“And the others?”
“Most of them too. Two tried to run when Crane arrived. Fergus and Tobias helped stop one. The other made it farther before Reuben and one of the men from town caught him near the road.”
Jonas absorbed that. “Anyone killed?”
“No.”
“Good.”
Jonas stared toward the faint glow beneath the curtains. Men connected to the Voss Gang were locked somewhere in Willow Crossing. At seventeen, he had imagined that possibility differently. He had pictured satisfaction. Perhaps vengeance.
Instead, he mostly felt tired.
His father was still dead.
Nothing that happened to Silas could change that.
“What did Crane say?” Jonas asked.
Martha's fingers tightened together.
Jonas saw the answer before she gave it.
“I told him everything.”
He turned his head toward her.
She met his gaze, though the color had begun draining from her face.
“When?”
“Last night. After Dr. Keller finished with you.”
“You'd been struck in the head and kidnapped.”
“And I was awake.”
“Martha.”
“I told Crane I would confess.” She drew a breath, then released it slowly. “I wasn't going to use what Silas did as another excuse to wait.”
Jonas did not know what to say to that.
Martha looked down at her wrists again. “I told him about Amos. About how I learned what the gang was. The messages, keeping watch, the robberies. I told him about the train and what I did when the deputies came after us. I told him Amos escaped with stolen money and that we used some of it to begin our life here.”
“And the gold?”
“I told him what Silas said. That Amos took more than I knew about and that Silas believes the rest was hidden somewhere.” A crease formed between her brows. “I told Crane I genuinely don't know whether that's true.”
Jonas believed her.
The realization did not surprise him now.
He had believed her in the shack too.
Trust was a strange thing. One part of it could break while another remained intact. Martha had hidden enormous pieces of her past from him, yet when she looked him in the eye and said she did not know where Amos's gold was, Jonas had never doubted her.
“What happens now?” he asked.
Martha's mouth tightened. “Crane is sending word for a deputy marshal. He said Silas and the others may be wanted in connection with crimes outside Willow Crossing, especially after what I told him about Gideon.” She paused, and Jonas saw fear move beneath her effort to remain composed.
“As for me, he wouldn't promise anything.”
Jonas frowned.
“He shouldn't,” Martha said before he could speak. “Not yet.”
The words were quiet but steady.
“He said my voluntary statement and willingness to cooperate will matter. So will the fact that I haven't committed any crimes since coming here, at least none he knows of.” A brief, humorless smile touched her mouth. “But that isn't the same as saying there won't be consequences.”
“No.”
Martha looked relieved that he had not tried to argue.
“I told him I'll cooperate with whatever the marshal needs. If there are names I remember, places, details about the train robbery, I'll give them. Anything that helps them understand what the gang did.” Her hands folded tightly in her lap. “I should have done it years ago.”
Jonas watched her.
A few days earlier, he might have heard those words as another plea for forgiveness.
He did not now.
She was frightened. He could see it in the rigid set of her shoulders and the way her thumb worried the seam of her skirt. But beneath the fear was something he had not seen when Silas first arrived.
Acceptance.
Martha was no longer bargaining with the truth.
Jonas shifted against the pillows, and pain dragged sharply through his thigh. His face must have betrayed it because Martha half rose immediately.
“Do you need Dr. Keller?”
“No.”
“He said if the pain became worse—”
“It isn't worse.”
She hesitated before sitting again. “He also said you would say that.”
Jonas almost smiled.
Martha did not.
The silence between them changed.
They had discussed everything except the reason both of them were afraid to look directly at the other for too long.
Jonas thought about what he had said in the shack.
But I love you.
He did not regret it.
That did not make the rest simple.
Martha seemed to reach the same conclusion. She drew a breath and rested both palms against her skirt.
“About what you said yesterday—”
“I meant it.”
Her eyes lifted sharply.
Jonas held her gaze. “I wasn't delirious yet.”
A faint flush appeared across her cheeks, but the sadness in her expression remained. “I meant what I said too.”
“I know.”
She looked toward the dying fire.
Jonas could see her trying to decide whether to continue.
This time he waited.
Eventually Martha said, “I don't want you to think that because Silas took me, or because you came after me, everything between us has to be all right now.”