howdyjourney

[howdyjourney]

At first I was there for the spice but girl YOU CAN WRITE?? everything is so vivid and real, this should be a movie fml

🫠

so lovely of you, I’m speechless. happy you like the story so far 🤍

[howdyjourney]

Sing Your Body Electric

- chapter 4 -

who: William H. Bonney x Original Female Character

genre: western romance longfic (multiple chapters)

this chapter: adventure • implied sexual activities • protective Billy • possessive Billy • horny Billy • sexual tension • body worship •

(lmk if you want to be tagged)

Previous chapter

Chapter four

High noon pressed its flat, white palm over the prairie, squeezing every scent of sage and scorched grass one last time before autumn claimed the land for frost. Billy and Eva crested a knuckled rise where buffalo grass surrendered to baked clay. Below them, La Junta sprawled in a tidy grid, clapboard fronts facing the single main drag like teeth in an ill-kept grin. A weather-split sign arched over the road, letters flaking: POP 327. A tumbleweed cartwheeled beneath it, thumped a post, and pirouetted on down the ruts as if chased by the simmering wind.

Billy reined the mare to a halt, resting one forearm across the saddle horn. Heat shimmer lifted from her black mane; flies worried her tail. He scanned the town—two-story hotel with a sagging balcony, a brick bank new enough to shine, and farther south a sawmill whose thin steam plume bent east under the relentless breeze. But it was the white-washed chapel near the river that snagged Eva’s attention.

She straightened in the saddle, pushing the brim of Billy’s spare hat up with two fingertips. “Look,” she breathed, the single syllable full of a hope she tried—and failed—to disguise. A simple steeple, clapboard siding bright as bone, and a bell that winked in the sunlight. It might have been Eden for how her shoulders eased.

“Preacher’s place,” Billy said. The words came slow, weighed against father-memory and pastor’s lies in every border town he’d ever drifted through. But he kept judgment from his voice. If she needed to believe in a kind parson before the world proved otherwise, he could spare her the snarl—at least for a mile or two.

Below, a freight wagon rattled past the livery; men in shirt-sleeves heaved sacks while two children chased the dust kicked by the wheels. La Junta looked tidy, law-abiding, small enough that gossip carried on clean laundry lines. The kind of place folks named kittens after Biblical queens and stored pickles by the dozen. A place, maybe, that would shelter a lost dove with good manners and a willing heart.

Billy unhooked his canteen, drank, then passed it back. Eva swallowed two careful gulps, wiped her mouth with the inside of her wrist, and handed it over. Their fingers brushed—brief, familiar—and Billy felt the echo of that accidental touch in places he wished it wouldn’t settle. Goddamn it. It’d been a while—a month or two, maybe—since he last had a woman underneath him. Or on top—as he’d sometimes preferred, if the view proved worthy.

She hoisted an optimistic smile. “Reverend first, you figure?”

“Reckon so.” He corked the canteen. “Man of God oughta know charity.”

“Charity,” she repeated, half tasting the word. “Feels strange, askin’ for it.”

“You ain’t askin’. I am.” Billy tightened the cinch one notch, keeping his gaze on the distant chapel windows. “Besides, folks with roofs can spare a corner for someone willin’ to sew and read Scripture to children.”

She glanced sideways, lips curving. “You volunteering me already?”

“Only sellin’ what’s true,” he said, nudging her boot with the toe of his spur. “Come on, peach. Let’s get you indoors ‘fore that wind skins us.”

They nudged their mounts downslope. Dust rose in little corkscrew columns ahead, dancing across the wagon road like restless spirits. As they passed beneath the sagging POP 327 sign, Billy flicked its bottom with the brim of his hat—half salute, half test of luck. The weathered board thunked, held fast, as though warning them to mind the arithmetic of bodies and intentions inside the limits it guarded.

Eva drew a quiet breath, sitting tall despite the travel stiffness in her spine. Billy caught the hope riding her posture and felt an unnameable twist in his gut—equal parts protectiveness and some darker, selfish curl of heat. He cleared his throat, glancing away toward the storefront awnings that rustled like tired flags.

“Keep your eyes up,” he murmured. “Town’s small but men’s tongues ain’t.”

“Yours included?” she teased, managing a flick of sass that softened the worry drawn fine around her eyes.

He smirked despite himself. “Mine’s watchin’ your back. Reverend Brackett’s house is just past the mill road. Let’s see if he walks the verses he preaches.”

They rode on—hooves muffled now by compacted clay—carrying dust, hope, and the first electric threads of a lesson neither yet knew: charity offered often hides a price, and sometimes the outlaw trail is the safer sanctuary after all. But that truth, and the fire it would spark in Billy’s chest, was a mile and a preacher’s grin away.

**

The road to Reverend Brackett’s parsonage curled past the river like a dry snake, ironweed sprouting in the wheel ruts. White clapboard walls peeked through dust-silvered cottonwoods, and a hand-painted sign—Grace Fellowship of the New Covenant—leaned sideways, nailed to a stump. Beside the house stretched a once-proud garden: hollyhocks drooping on broken stakes, roses gone to brittle hips. The air smelled of river mud and oversteeped tea.

Billy swung down first, boots thudding on the packed earth. He offered Eva a hand; she slid from the saddle with practiced quiet. Dust billowed around her hem, a faded calico blue that made her skin look sun-kissed and softer than it had any right to be. He felt, rather than saw, the curtain in the parlor twitch.

Door squeaked open. Out stepped Reverend Philemon Brackett—a man of medium height and over-oiled hair, collar too tight for the heat. His smile stretched wide but never touched the watery eyes that changed from Billy’s face to Eva’s figure and back, as though tallying coins.

“Brother Bonney,” he greeted, voice syrup-sweet and damp. The handshake he offered came slick with perspiration. Billy gripped once, firm, then freed his hand to wipe subtly on his trouser seam.

“Reverend,” he returned, neutral. He tipped his hat Eva’s direction. “This here’s Miss Eva. She’s in need of righteous roof and honest company till we track kin.”

Brackett’s gaze slid to Eva—first her face, then the length of her braid, then lower. He plastered on a look of grave concern. “Lost lamb,” he murmured. “My heart aches to see gentle souls adrift.” The way he said aches made Billy’s knuckles itch.

Eva folded her hands at her waist, offering a polite nod. “Thank you for seein’ us, Reverend.”

“Of course, child.” He angled sideways, ushering them toward a narrow porch cluttered with empty crates and a cracked washtub. “Come, come—shade’s better under the eave.”

Billy climbed the three steps; floorboards groaned. The reverend produced a ledger the size of a family Bible from a side table and opened it to a blank page already stained with sweat rings. “For accountability,” he explained. “The bishop appreciates orderly records.”

Billy accepted the stub of a pencil. “Name. Date. Donation if able,” Brackett prompted, voice a shade too eager.

While Billy bent to scrawl, Brackett eased closer—close enough Billy felt humid breath at his ear. The preacher’s words slid out soft and slick: “Checked your little bird inside for disease?”

Billy’s pencil stalled mid-stroke.

“Would be a shame,” Brackett continued, “to stable spoiled goods.” A chuckle buzzed. “Pretty white dove like her will sweeten the house for my… personal devotions.”

Time stuttered. Billy’s jaw flexed so hard a muscle jumped near his ear. He set the pencil down with deliberate care, thumb flattening the wood until the lead snapped.

Slowly, he straightened. Turned. Reverend Brackett’s smile tried to hold, but something in Billy’s eyes turned it waxy. The outlaw’s voice came low, measured. “Beg your pardon?”

The reverend lifted both palms, faux-pious. “Only meanin’ the Lord guides shepherds to tend vulnerable ewes.” His gaze switched again to Eva’s bodice. “Some need… closer tending.”

Billy’s hand shot out, fists a knot in the man’s neatly pressed lapel, jerking him forward so their noses nearly touched. “You lay shepherd hands on that girl,” he growled, “and you’ll meet your savior inside a pine crate before sunset.”

The parson’s breath hitched. “Brother—violence under a church roof—”

“Ain’t inside yet,” Billy hissed. He released the lapel with a shove that rattled ledger pages. Brackett staggered, shoes scraping dirt.

Eva stepped up, concern knitting her brow, but Billy lifted one calming finger—stay. She obeyed, though confusion showed in her eyes.

Billy swept the ledger shut with a palm-slap that echoed. “Appreciate your time, Reverend. Found we’d rather trust the sky.”

Brackett sputtered, smoothing his collar. “You reject sanctuary?”

“Sanctuary’s only holy if the walls are clean.” Billy tipped his hat mock-politely, pivoted on a heel, and strode to Eva. “Come on, peach. Man’s house is full of maids already.”

Eva blinked. “Full of… maids?”

“Enough to start a choir,” he muttered, guiding her down the steps. “And ain’t none of ’em singing hymns.”

Behind them Brackett called, falsetto cracking, “The Lord will judge!” A crate skittered off the porch as his foot caught it.

Billy looked back. He tipped his hat back, pinning Brackett with a gaze that made the man swallow his next excuse whole. Then, with deliberate contempt, he turned his head and hawked a long rope of dust-thick spit over the porch rail. It hit a cracked hollyhock leaf with a wet thwack.

“That’s my tithe,” he said, and pivoted on his heel.

He helped Eva into the saddle, swung up behind her, and clicked the mare into a trot, dust pluming. Only when the parsonage dipped from view did his shoulders ease.

Eva twisted slightly to peer at him over her shoulder. “Billy? What did he say?”

He kept his gaze forward, expression iron. “Asked if you could cook enough pies for a houseful of greedy men.” A grim half-smile appeared on his face. “Told him you were plum outta dough.”

Her brow knit, sensing the lie, but she let it rest. The wind tugged a loose strand of hair across his cheek; he tucked it behind her ear with a gentleness that surprised them both.

“Let’s find honest ground,” he said, voice still tight. “Town’s bigger than one crooked pulpit.”

They rode on, hollyhocks wilting behind them, the preacher’s sanctimony shrinking to a speck in the shimmering heat. In Billy’s chest, anger coiled with something fiercer: the raw need to keep that white dove far from any man whose hands looked more like claws than wings.

**

Sun balanced high and relentless when they reached Mrs. Mayhew’s establishment at the corner of Main and Willow—two stories of prim white siding, shutters painted a shade of blue that had once been cheerful but now showed sun-cracked wrinkles like an old debutante’s smile. Lace curtains fluttered in every window, and the stiff brass welcome mat on the porch declared PEACE TO ALL WHO ENTER in letters nearly rubbed smooth. The smell wafting through the open door was equal parts lilac water and yesterday’s boiled cabbage.

Billy tied the mare at the hitch rail, pocketed the reins, and offered Eva a hand up the shallow steps. The boards had been scrubbed so hard they squeaked beneath their boots; a bouquet of wilting asters guarded the threshold.

The door creaked inward before they could knock. Mrs. Mayhew herself materialised—a stout woman corseted to immobility, gray hair pinned in a tight crown of braids. Half-moon spectacles perched on the end of her nose. She gave Billy a brisk up-and-down—taking in trail dust, Colt at the hip—then let her gaze slide to Eva. It snagged on the gentle flare of her hips beneath the calico. Spectacles dipped lower, magnifying watery eyes that lingered a beat too long.

“Afternoon,” Billy said, tipping his hat with cordial restraint. “Looking for a room—short stint. The lady needs respectable lodging.”

Mrs. Mayhew’s lips puckered in something near a smile. “Respectable is my specialty.” She stepped back, motioning them into a dim foyer lined with crocheted runners and a smell of starch. “However”—she clasped soft, doughy hands at her waist—“sadly we are full to the rafters.”

Billy’s jaw worked. “Surely you’ve a spare cot.”

She peered over the rims of her glasses again, this time openly assessing Eva from braid to boot tips, then moving her gaze to Billy as though tallying profit margins. “Perhaps,” she allowed, voice sugar-coated but grainy underneath, “the young miss could sleep in the kitchen loft.” Her smile sharpened. “Separate fee for… laundry services.”

The pause after laundry hung thick as hardtack. Eva blinked, uncertain. Billy felt the shift—heat rising from his collar to the roots of his hair. He forced a polite edge into his tone. “She’d be washing clothes only,” he said, stressing each word.

Mrs. Mayhew adjusted her spectacles. “Oh, I’m sure she’s adept with—stains.” The double meaning landed with a moist thump. Her tongue clicked roof-ward in faux sympathy. “Traveling puts a girl in need of male oversight.”

Billy’s smile iced over. He removed his hat, smoothed the brim once—slow—then settled it back. “Ma’am,” he said, voice low, “she doesn’t boil for swine.”

Color mottled the matron’s cheeks. “I beg your—”

“Good day.” He caught Eva’s elbow—gentle, but firm as a reins pull—and pivoted for the door. Boards squeaked protest as he guided her down the steps. Behind them, the lace curtains fluttered indignantly in Mrs. Mayhew’s drafty gasp.

Outside, heat hit like a forge. Billy breathed it in, tamping fury. Eva kept pace, skirts swishing. At the hitch rail he released her arm, rubbed a thumb over the spot he’d gripped.

“Billy?” she asked, voice soft but steadier than hours ago. “That wasn’t just about laundry, was it?”

He angled a half grin he didn’t feel. “Woman’s got more dirt under her rug than in her whole washhouse. No loss.”

Eva studied him, suspicion and gratitude braided in her eyes, yet she let it go. She reached to scratch the mare’s forelock instead, whispering something soothing in Spanish she’d picked up from ranch hands down the trail.

Billy exhaled through his nose; the breath tasted like hot iron. Two strikes in one day—preacher and matron both. Town was making a point: decent roofs cost more than coin when a girl was soft-skinned and alone. He shoved that revelation deep but it burned anyway, simmering alongside the unwanted image of Mrs. Mayhew’s greedy look crawling over Eva’s delicate curves. He knew of women who had different tastes, if one could’ve called them that.

“C’mon, peach,” he muttered, swinging into the saddle. “This burg’s got one more door to knock before I call it rotten.” He held out a hand. She took it, trusting, and he hoisted her up behind. Her arms circled his waist automatically, warm through trail-dust cloth.

As they turned back toward Main Street, Billy spat dust into the road—another tithe, salty and hard—and felt the mare gather under him. If La Junta had any honest corners left, they’d best show themselves quick, else he’d carry this girl clear to the sunset before letting another soul weigh her like meat on a hook.

**

La Junta’s general store squatted at the crossroads like a fat toad, green shutters propped open to spill the warm, sugary perfume of molasses and cured meats into the dust-swirled street. A dingy bell jangled overhead as Billy nudged the door with a boot and steered Eva inside.

The interior was dim after the glare outside, lit only by sunbeams slicing through clerestory panes. Wooden barrels stood in ranks—flour, coffee, soda crackers—while shelves sagged beneath calico bolts and tins of axle grease. Somewhere in back, a fly‐specked canary warbled inside its cage. The place smelled of rawhide, brown sugar… and opportunity, if you were the kind who tilted profit off travelers.

The clerk—barely twenty, hair slicked to a gleam with too much tonic—looked up from balancing a slate. He pasted on a salesman’s smile as bright as the nickel buttons on his vest. “Afternoon, folks,” he chirped. “Top o’ the heat to you.”

“Bulk oats,” Billy said, tipping his hat back and scanning the bins. “And a cotton bandage roll.”

“Certainly, sir. Oats by the pound.” The clerk bustled forward, but halfway stopped when Eva stepped from Billy’s shadow, surveying the glass jars of peppermint sticks. The young man’s eyes snagged on the delicate curve of her bodice like a burr on wool.

“Well now,” he breathed, forgetting the oats. “Ain’t you the rose this desert’s been missin’?”

Eva startled slightly, then managed a polite smile. “Just road-dust and freckles, sir.”

“Freckles can be charmin’,” he replied, leaning an elbow on the counter. “In fact—” With a flourish he lifted a sample platter: bite-size wedges of candied yam, sugared and glossy. “Seasonal treat from Mississippi plantations—thought maybe your delicate palate might fancy a taste.” His gaze never left her chest.

Billy shifted, blocking the line of sight like a shutter slamming. “She’s got teeth enough to chew, but you’re lookin’ too low to worry about her palate.”

The clerk blinked up at Billy—forced a laugh. “No offense, mister. Just thought the young lady might earn a dollar handin’ these samples to stagecoach passengers. Pretty thing draws crowds, you understand.”

Billy’s eyes narrowed, flint-grey. “She ain’t bait on a hook.”

The clerk’s grin wilted. “Didn’t mean—”

“Meanin’s clear.” Billy’s voice stayed smooth but steely as the Colt riding his hip. He plucked a yam cube from the tray with thumb and forefinger, popped it in his mouth, chewed once. Then reached again—palmed five more specimens, rolling them like dice along his knuckles. “Consider these payment for the insult.”

Clerk sputtered, “Sir, those samples—”

“Now they’re tuition.” Billy flicked a sardonic half-grin, pocketing the sweets. “Lesson is: eyes stay north of the Mason-Dixon line of a lady’s collar.”

Eva’s cheeks flamed, equal parts mortification and gratitude. Billy gathered bandages, tossed a coin onto the counter with a clink. “Oats delivered to the horse trough out front, if you don’t mind.” He tipped his hat again—gesture curt but polite enough to leave no legal bruise—and steered Eva toward the door.

As they exited, the bell jangled protest. Sunlight slapped them fresh; wind tugged at Eva’s skirts. She walked two steps before she spoke, voice pitched low. “I could’ve handled that.”

Billy unwrapped one candied yam cube, held it to her lips. “Know you could. Just quicker my way.”

She bit the yam, caramel glaze catching at the corner of her mouth. “You stole that.”

“Compensation for ocular trespass,” he said, popping a second piece between his own teeth. “Besides, preacher said I should tithe.”

Eva huffed a sound half laugh, half sigh. Sticky syrup shone on her lower lip; without thinking, Billy thumbed it away. The tiny touch pulled both their gazes together for a heartbeat too long.

He cleared his throat, turned for the hitch rail. “This town’s fresh outta honest doors, peach. We ride soon as that oat sack hits the ground.”

“Where to?” she asked, trailing after, still tasting sweet yam and maybe something warmer.

“South,” he said, slinging the bandage roll into the saddlebag. “Edge of nowhere’s safer than the middle of so-called civil.”

Their eyes met again—hers thoughtful, his resolved. The mare stomped once, as though impatient with human follies. Billy mounted, offered a gloved hand down. Eva placed her palm in his, let him swing her up behind. As they turned toward the end of Main, sun cut across the storefront glass, throwing a glint like a drawn knife. Billy flicked the reins, pocketed the rest of sugared yam cubes, and together they rode beyond the town that weighed virtue by the ounce and beauty by the pound.

**

Dusk slid down the sky like a bruise, turning the high desert purple at the edges. An abandoned sheep shed crouched on the lee side of a knuckled hill—gray boards warped, half the roof missing, but three standing walls still kept the wind off. Billy led the mare under the sagging lintel, where cracked troughs and trampled wool ghosts told of better seasons. He unsaddled by feel, muscles running on habit more than thought, while Eva knelt at a pocket hearth of fieldstones someone long gone had piled against the south wall.

She coaxed a sliver of flame from dry sage stems, set the blackened skillet, and unwrapped the clerk’s purloined treasure. More of the candied yam wedges had melted together into a glossy amber brick. She sliced it into rough hunks, arranged them like sunrise fragments, and the sugar hissed as it met heat. The smell—caramel and earth—filled the shed, twining with the sharper scent of sheep lanolin baked into old boards.

Billy finished looping the lead rope, grabbed two tin plates from his bedroll, and squatted opposite the fire. Orange light slicked across his jaw, highlighting the dust caked in day-old stubble. Eva spooned one glistening chunk onto each plate, then sat back on her heels, skirt pooling in the straw.

They ate in silence for a minute, the only sound the wind fingering the roof slats and the distant bark of a coyote testing the dark.

Eva licked syrup from her thumb, smiled faint. “That clerk seemed nice enough,” she ventured. “Offered me work, after all.”

Billy’s spoon halted midway to his mouth. He lowered it, tapped the rim of the tin twice before answering. “Nice don’t stare holes in a woman’s bodice.”

She frowned, startled. “Stare?”

“Whole time I haggled oats,” he said, voice low. “His eyes never left your chest. Job wasn’t samples—it was you, trussed up for gawkers.”

She glanced down at the calico buttons that rose and fell with her breath, cheeks coloring in the fire-glow. “I… I didn’t notice.”

“That’s the trouble.” He forced the spoon back to his lips, chewed the sweet flesh without tasting it. “Men count on you not noticein’.”

Silence spread, broken only by the pop of sap in the fire. Eva’s gaze fixed on the embers, shoulders drawing up as if a cold draft had found her despite the heat. After a long moment she reached across, laid her fingertips on the sleeve of Billy’s coat. The touch was feather-light, but he felt it in every limb.

“Thank you,” she said softly. “For seeing what I didn’t.”

He only nodded, not trusting the roughness in his throat. Her hand lingered, then slipped away.

**

If wolves prowl every clapboard door, he thought, then the safest den for her is my own shadow.

The idea settled like a brand on wet hide—hiss, steam, permanence. He watched lamplight flit across her cheek, turning the fine down at her jaw to pale gold. In that glow she looked both too young for the blood on her past and too woman for his peace: the gentle slope of shoulder revealed where her shawl had slipped, the curve beneath her corset that men kept measuring with their eyes. He pictured Mrs. Mayhew’s greedy stare, the clerk’s slick smirk, Brackett’s salivating whisper—and felt a coil of anger knot with something darker, hotter. Desire was a dumb animal; duty a razor-edged halter. Both tightened on him now.

He scooped the last of the yam, swallowed. She trusts me, he reminded himself. Don’t you dare cheapen that. But the memory of her bent over the fire, skirt kilted, still moved behind his lids like a sin-stoked lantern slide. He exhaled slow, banked the fire of it as best he could.

**

Eva packed the tins away, doused the tiny flame with a whisper of water. Stars climbed through the roof’s missing boards—pinpricks at first, then swaths of milky dust. She spread their blankets over sweet, crushed straw and crawled into hers fully clothed, boots to the wall. Billy settled a foot away, Colt within reach, legs complaining.

She turned on one elbow, voice barely a breath. “Will we try another town tomorrow?”

He stared up at splintered rafters, reading constellations through gaps. “No,” he said at last. “We ride at dawn. South trail’s empty this time of year.”

“Empty sounds safe,” she murmured, though uncertainty trembled under the words.

“Safer than four walls hunted by men who want what ain’t theirs.” He shifted. “Long as you’re under my coat, nobody touches you.”

Moonlight knifed through a crack, caught her face. She studied him—maybe weighing what kind of promise that was. Then, quietly: “Under your coat’s kept me warm before.”

He grunted—agreement, gratitude, something. Outside, the coyote barked again, farther off now. Eva curled down, trusting. Billy watched until her breaths evened, then let his gaze roam the sky.

Desire and duty, he thought, two bullets loaded in the same chamber. He cocked an ear to the wind, feeling both weights press against his ribs, and made a vow to the stars peeking through the roof: any man who tried to claim the soft-skinned girl beside him would meet the Kid first.

That vow rode shotgun in his thoughts as the night deepened, and he did not quite notice when vigilance blurred into sleepless dreaming—of cotton dresses, silver rivers, and a peach-curved silhouette that no wolf or preacher, clerk or matron would ever touch so long as Billy Bonney had breath in his body.

**

Billy propped one shoulder against the lone juniper that shaded their makeshift camp and told himself—again—not to look.

Didn’t help worth a damn.

There she was, ten paces off near the creek-edge, sleeves pinned above her elbows, skirt kilted to mid-calf while she scrubbed his shirts on a flat rock. Tiny thing. All bird-bones and big eyes, so jittery she near jumped out of her skin whenever a grasshopper popped. And yet she’d insisted on “earning her keep,” whatever that meant, bustling about camp with more eagerness than sense. Washing clothes no one asked her to wash. Humming hymns so quiet they were practically apologies. Acting like scrub-water and lye were gentler company than him.

Probably were.

Billy spat dust, folded his arms, and kept watching.

Fool girl, he thought, irritated as a burr in his boot. Shoulda left her with some nuns back in La Junta. She’d be tucked safe behind clapboard walls by now, instead of kneeling out here where any stray coyote—or worse—could wander past.

She wrung a shirt, shoulders straining against cotton thin as Bible paper. A single braid, dark and glossy, swung down the small of her back. When she leaned forward to dunk the cloth again, that braid brushed the rise of her backside—round and high, perfect as a peach. He felt something in his gut tighten, coil, turn near painful.

Lord save me, he cursed inwardly. Look at the size of her. A breeze’d blow her cross Kansas. Whole of her’d fit between my hands—‘cept maybe that damned rump.

God but that caboose was a torment: heart-shaped curve outlined by the plain muslin of her petticoat, hips flaring just enough to make a man think sinful, sleepless thoughts. No matter how many times he told himself he wasn’t interested—not in silly, skittish, cling-eyed things—she’d turn to fetch more water and he’d lose every stitch of good sense he owned. Nights, he’d lie awake in the tent, listening to her breathe soft on the other bedroll, staring holes in the canvas while need crawled under his skin like fire ants.

He shifted, folding his arms tighter, pressing them low over the belt buckle suddenly too snug. Ain’t right, he scolded himself. She trusts you. Looks at you like you’re some white-hat hero when you’re nothing but a gunslick outlaw with his neck in a noose every sunrise. He sniffed. And what does she do? Thanks you with laundry and jittery smiles. God help us both.

Eva sat back on her heels, brushing a stray curl from her cheek with the back of a sudsy wrist. The sun caught her profile: up-tilted nose, lips soft as rose petals, smudge of freckles arching over a timid smile as she studied a tiny tear in his shirt sleeve. Suddenly she looked so earnest Billy’s annoyance pancaked into something strange—tender, helpless, like a fist unclenching.

Why’s she gotta be so… gentle? he wondered, half resentful. World’s mean. Folks are meaner. Soft things get trampled. He remembered her weeping that first night, curled under his coat, whispering thank you like it hurt. The memory loosened feelings in his chest he’d rather stayed knotted.

She shifted again, turning to rinse the shirt. Skirt hem slid higher over her calves, revealing white stockings and the delicate notch behind her knee. Billy’s breath hitched. Sweet mercy. His palms prickled, itching to palm the curve where thigh met hip, haul her backward till that ass of hers pressed flush to him, till she squeaked like a startled wren—then went boneless when she realized he wouldn’t hurt her, only hold, only—

He swore under his breath, yanked his hat low to hide the flush creeping up his neck. Indecent, he warned himself. Ungrateful, too. She ain’t here for you to stare holes through. Yet his mind kept wandering: to how small her waist would feel encircled by his hands; to how those shy lips might part on a whisper if he ever dared kiss her softly or hard enough to draw blood; to the sight of that backside presented in the lamplight of the tent, nightgown rucked high while he—

His jaw clenched hard enough to ache. He pushed away from the juniper, paced a few steps, kicked a pebble into the dust. Wanted to blame her for the heat pooling low in his belly, the pulse beating rough beneath his belt, but it wasn’t her fault he was a man too long on the trail with nothing soft but saddle leather for company. Still, the aggravation felt safer than the yearning, so he clung to it.

Look at her—jumping if a cricket sings, eyes wide as saucers when I so much as cough. Silly’s what she is. Cowardly, too. He remembered how she’d trembled when thunder cracked two nights back, burrowing into her blanket like a prairie dog. No grit from the whorehouse left in her, none at all. Needs walls and parlors and chaperones, not tents and gunfire.

He glanced over—just in time to see her rise, straighten, stretch her back with arms overhead. Sunlight painted her through cotton: the soft slope of belly, the delicate rib curve, the sweet indention of navel. But it was the rear view that robbed him clean. Petticoat hitched on the swell of that sweet rump, shadow etching perfect lines that tightened his throat and left his thoughts mud-thick.

Christ alive, he groaned internally. All irritation melted into raw want. Wanted to stride over, haul her against a tree, mouth at her throat till she clutched his shoulders and gasped his name. Wanted to tip her against the tent pole at dusk, skirt fisted round his wrist while he pressed hot kisses down the column of her spine. Wanted—God help him—to sink palm-deep into that heart-shaped curve, feel her tremble, hear her startled moan when he squeezed just so.

Desire throbbed between his thighs, fierce, insistent, shaming. He dragged a hand down his face, breathing dust and frustration. You’re losing your mind, William. He forced his gaze skyward, counting clouds, anything to anchor himself. Get her to the nearest town, drop her at the mission, ride on. End of story. Yet even while he vowed it, another image stabbed at him: Eva in the nearest town, surrounded by clean-shaven boys her own age, some store clerk handing her peppermint sticks, maybe asking for a stroll after Sunday service. She’d smile—shy, sweet—and that curve of hers would sway beneath a brand-new calico. And those boys would notice. Oh, they’d notice.

A growl rumbled low in his chest. Jealousy—jagged and ridiculous—flared brighter than any campfire. None of your doggone business who she smiles at, he reminded himself. But the thought of her walking away, vanishing into some neat clapboard life, left his gut hollow.

Fine, he conceded inwardly, maybe I keep eyes on her ‘til she’s squared away proper. ‘Til she’s safe. He glanced again: she’d bent to lift the washbasin, backside rounding like a sunrise. Heat shot through him. Safe from outlaws, he amended grimly, and safe from fools like me.

At that moment she looked over, caught him watching. Big brown eyes blinked, startled. A flush rose to her cheeks. She offered the smallest smile—nervous, grateful, trusting. Something in Billy cracked clean through.

He cleared his throat, tugged the brim of his hat. “Water’s cold upstream,” he called gruffly. “Best rinse there. Less silt.”

“Oh—thank you,” she stammered, gathering the basin. She hurried past him, skirts swishing. He kept his stance, jaw tight, tracking every sway of her hips until she vanished behind willows. Only then did he sag against the juniper, exhale hard, and mutter a curse that hung in the hot air.

God help me, he thought, half-plea, half-promise. Get this girl where she belongs before I do something devil-stupid. And if You can’t do that—at least give me strength not to dream about humping that damned rump tonight.

But he already knew he would.

[howdyjourney]

fuck, you wrote Lily of The West fic on Ao3? that’s the best Billy fic I’ve found that’s COMPLETE youre fire!!

yes, dat me 🤠

thank you so much, I love the feedback 💕

folks yall on fire with asks/requests today, I’m smitten 😭🌹

for anyone interested I’m sylviahughes on ao3

[howdyjourney]

https://www.tumblr.com/howdyjourney/787259838580293632/enemies-to-lovers-billy-longfic

something dark… and extremely slow burn. i was gonna suggest a kidnapping gone wrong? but honestly any enemies to lovers works

oooh kidnapping is a nice idea indeed 😏 dark slow burn too. once I’m done with SYBE (about 17 chapters) I’ll work on it, thank you 🌹

[howdyjourney]

do you write dark fics? like actually dark -smut, noncon etc?

I have and I would, I love dark fics and they’re among my favs. would take me longer to finish such a story tho. anything in particular?

[howdyjourney]

when’s the smut part coming out? 😭

tomorrow! first spice 🌹

[howdyjourney]

enemies to lovers billy longfic?

would love to! anything specific on your mind? 🌹

[howdyjourney]

you’re a gift to this fandom (btk)

thank you dear 😭🌹

[howdyjourney]

Sing Your Body Electric

- chapter 3 -

who: William H. Bonney x Original Female Character

genre: western romance longfic (multiple chapters)

tags/warnings: This fic is Explicit / 18+ only. Minors, please step off the porch.

(not exhaustive):
Outlaws & Runaways • Slow Burn (rewarding) • Oral Sex • Handjob • Face-Sitting (f)—“from behind” / bent-over hay bale • Rough Sex & Soft Sex in equal measure • Praise Kink • Body Worship • Protective Billy • Scar Kissing • Mild Restraint • Gunshot Injuries / Recovery • Period-Typical Violence & Racism (historical context) • Runaway Heiress • Found Family Outlaws • Slow-Burn to Very Hot-Burn

(lmk if you want to be tagged)

Previous chapter

Next chapter

Chapter three

The arroyo rolled out before them like a spine cracked open—dry-ribbed, half-shadowed, with the sour scent of creosote thick on the wind. Billy tugged the mare’s reins until she stilled on a sloped patch of gravel just beneath a cluster of yucca stalks. Sunset bled red across the broken sky behind them, lighting the trail dust gold for a breath before dusk swallowed it whole.

He raised his chin toward the eastern horizon—storm skirts dragging their hem along the far hills, but no thunder under them. For now, it was holding.

“This’ll do,” he muttered, more to himself than the girl swaying in the saddle behind him.

Eva didn’t answer. Hadn’t said a damn word since they left town save for a soft thank-you when he handed her a strip of jerky at midday. Now she moved like a doll whose strings had been frayed to thread—small, stiff, silent.

Billy dismounted easy, boots landing in the dust with a muted thunk. He reached to help her down without thinking, but she tensed the moment his fingers brushed her ankle. So he stepped back, lifted his hands a breath, and waited.

She tried on her own. The moment her right foot hit ground, her knees buckled—too much riding, too little blood. He caught her elbow on reflex, steadying her with the same hand he used to break broncs.

“Careful,” he said gruffly.

Her eyes jerked up to his, wide with the same storm-colored fear he’d seen on the porch back in town. She didn’t speak. Just nodded once, shaky. He let go.

They stood a beat in the hush. Crickets started up somewhere close, hidden under sage. A coyote yipped miles off, a thin thread against the wind.

Billy turned toward the flat patch of packed dirt that sat half-sheltered between two cottonwoods and knelt beside his saddlebags. The inventory took thirty seconds flat: one crumpled wool blanket each, half a canteen of water, pouch of tough jerky, tin of flint, a folding knife, and the revolver he’d reloaded three times since dawn. It wasn’t much.

He glanced at Eva again.

She had wandered to the nearest brush-pile—nothing but wind-cracked mesquite branches and a skeleton tumbleweed—and was gathering sticks in her arms, careful not to look his way. Her hands were bleeding again at the knuckles. She hadn’t wrapped them properly, and God knew what kind of filth she’d touched in that brothel.

He swallowed the words that rose to scold her. Let her try. Let her do something.

He turned to the mare, talking low under his breath as he hobbled her hind legs with a twist of rope. She was a good horse—stubborn but smart. Trusted him more than most people did.

When he stood again, Eva had returned with an armful of dry kindling. She knelt slowly, easing herself onto her heels, and began building a small cone the way someone might fold napkins for Sunday service. Precise. Gentle. Too gentle for this land.

Billy took a step closer and squatted down beside her. Reached out and adjusted the base of the cone with two fingers.

“You want a fire to last, gotta build it meaner than that,” he said, voice low, not unkind. “These winds’ll eat that right up.”

She looked up, lashes clumped from dust, hair streaked and loose from the braid she hadn’t had time to fix. Her face was pale, mouth chapped, and still she nodded, absorbing it.

“Sorry,” she murmured. “I’ve never lit one on my own.”

“Well,” he drawled, scratching the match across his flint tin, “learnin’s quick out here. Or else you don’t last long.”

She watched with wide, steady eyes as he coaxed the flame, fed it, sheltered it with a cupped hand. The brush caught with a dry hiss, and the smoke that rose was clean. The creosote burned slow. Good.

Eva shifted back onto the blanket he’d tossed down behind her. She sat cross-legged, small shoulders curling inward, hands on her knees like she didn’t know what else to do with them.

Billy stood and rolled out his own blanket a few feet away. Didn’t speak, didn’t fuss. Just glanced up once, out past the canyon ridge, where night was beginning to swallow the shape of the earth whole.

The desert cooled fast. Firelight caught on the white edge of the scar that ran from the nape of her neck down beneath her torn collar—clean, healed over, ugly in the way all truth was.

He didn’t ask.

He sat with his back to the wind and started carving slivers off a piece of jerky with his pocketknife. Offered one out flat-palmed.

She hesitated, then took it.

Neither of them spoke.

Behind them, the wind changed—cooler now, clean. A second fire sparked somewhere far off in the hills. Billy didn’t know yet if it meant more trouble or just some other poor bastard trying to stay warm.

Either way, he’d keep the Colt loaded. Keep the girl close. Just until she remembered her name. Or stopped crying at night.

Whichever came first.

**

Creosote snapped in the flames, resin sparking like tiny comets that died before they could clear the ring of stones. Billy crouched over the fire, boot-heels dug into dust, pocketknife gliding through a strip of jerked beef. The blade rasped each time it shaved off a sliver, measuring out silence the way a metronome counts empty bars.

He threw the first slice toward Eva. It landed on the tin plate between them with a tap too loud for the hush.

She hesitated, then lifted it to chapped lips. The salt hit the split at the corner of her mouth; she sucked a hiss through her teeth but didn’t let the sound go any louder. Billy pretended not to notice, kept slicing—steady, slow, thin.

Coyotes tuned up somewhere down-slope, mournful yips curling into the violet sky. Wind changed and brought camp-smoke across the circle. Eva’s shoulders jerked the way a skittish colt twitches at flies; her back bowed from the smoke, and Billy saw it again—the lash welt, raw-edged beneath torn calico, angry red where damp cotton rubbed.

He looked back to the knife, let the thought sit.

Jerky rationed, he reached into his coat and produced a palm-sized flask. Unscrewed the cap. Whiskey fumes curled up—the good kind, sharp enough to bite but smooth enough to swallow. He offered it across firelight.

Eva shook her head. “Thank you… but no.” Her voice rasped; dust still lined the words.

He returned the cap with a slow twist, took a mouthful himself—felt it burn down then bloom warm in the gut. Passed the flask anyway, set it beside her plate like a dare.

She pretended not to see.

Wind kicked up again, smoke drifting. She flinched sharper this time, blinking fast. Billy flipped his knife closed, rooted in the saddlebags until metal clinked. Tossed a tin across; it landed in the sand near her knee.

“Horehound and bear fat,” he muttered. “Won’t sting as bad as that salt.”

Eva lifted the tin, thumb brushing grit from the lid. She opened it carefully. The salve smelled of pine pitch and wintergreen, sweeter than she expected. Using the ragged hem of her sleeve, she scooped a fingerful, reached awkwardly over her shoulder, dabbed where she could reach. The cream went slick across broken skin; the burn eased a fraction.

“Thank you,” she whispered—to the fire really, because Billy’s gaze had gone to the sky, charting something invisible.

He only grunted in reply, cut one more strip of meat.

Silence widened again, filled with the memory echo running circles in Eva’s skull: the clack of Stub Pearsall’s feed-shed door, the clink of shackles closing on Isaac’s wrists, Jonah’s one quick cry before he bit it down. She tasted dust and iron and her stomach bucked. Swallowed. Forced the jerky down—it felt like rusted wire scraping inside.

She focused on little things: The way the flames curled around creosote twigs; the smell of yucca blooms drifting in from the wash; the silver edge of a waxing moon just climbing the distant rim. Anything but chains.

Across the fire Billy shifted, rolling his sore knuckles, rope burn crusted dark. His hat brim hid his eyes, but she felt them on her when she dabbed the salve again. Felt the question he didn’t ask.

The coyote chorus lifted, closer now. Billy scanned the gloom, dropped another stick on the fire. “They won’t bother,” he muttered. “Not with us still movin’.”

Eva nodded, cupping the tin closed. She set it beside the whiskey—two silent offerings between them, amber and pine.

Jerky finished, Billy wiped knife on trouser thigh, slid it home. He looked like a man built of leftover day—dust on his collar, sunburn creasing the ridge of his cheekbone, eyes tired but bright as the sky. The storm in the east threw distant lightning again, heat-forks that stitched cloud to mesa with silent thread.

Eva hugged her knees, blanket draped cape-like round small shoulders. Salt still seared the cut in her lip but less now. The salve cooled stiff flesh along her back. She drew a breath deep enough to hurt, then let it out.

Billy tossed her the water canteen next. “Sip. Last half ‘til morning.”

She obeyed, letting cool trickle chase jerky down. Passed it back. Their fingers didn’t quite touch but sparked anyway, something electric in the near-miss. He capped it, placed it by his blanket.

Fire popped. Smoke rose straight for a breath, then the wind shifted and spared her. She closed eyes in fragile relief.

Billy leaned back on elbows, boots crossed. “Tomorrow we aim north of the rail spur, skirt La Paloma draw. Less patrols.” He said it flat, a man calling weather. No argument, only information.

Eva opened her eyes. The fire painted him copper and ember—guardian and outlaw both. She wondered which side of him weighed heavier. Wondered if it mattered.

“Thank you,” she repeated, softer. For the salve, the water, the silence—they all felt the same.

He tilted his hat brim fractionally. “Ain’t no bother. Name’s Billy.” But the words were gentler than the pipe-iron tone she’d come to expect.

Coyotes fell quiet, letting twilight settle. Stars pricked the velvet overhead, first one, then a scatter, then a thousand. Fire’s warmth licked Eva’s shins; breeze cooled her back where ointment glistened. Tears threatened again—hot, stupid—but she held them. Only dry-swallowed once, tasting pine, salt, and sky.

Night stretched, tense but survivable. Between them lay salve tin, half canteen, whiskey flask—their meager covenant. And beyond the crackle of wood and the far-off rumble of a storm too tired to chase, the desert turned darker, older, and patient for whatever fate dared follow next.

**

The desert fell silent once the coyotes gave up their chorus, as though sound itself had hunkered down to wait out the night wind. Billy nudged a blackened stick, but the dying fire only hissed and settled lower, no spark left to coax. Stars had thinned behind a bank of cloud rolling in—stealthy, slate-colored, blotting constellations one light at a time. Lightning strobed along the far eastern rim, too far for thunder yet.

He sat cross-legged on his blanket, hat brim hiding half his face, and tried to let fatigue drag him under. Instead, every sense stayed pricked: the creak of hobble-rope as the mare shifted, the distant rattle of yucca pods, the softest scrape of calico as Eva readjusted on the other side of the ashes.

She was doing it again.

Sniffle. Pause. Wet swallow. Another sniffle.

Not loud—hell, a mouse in dry grass made more racket. But each little sound scraped down Billy’s spine like tin on tin. It wasn’t just the noise. It was what it carried: the picture of five captives locked in Stub Pearsall’s feed shed. He hadn’t asked, but he’d seen the grief in Eva’s eyes when the scarf slipped from her bodice while she spread her blanket. He’d looked away—mercy, or maybe cowardice.

Sniffle.

He exhaled through his nose, long and slow. Rolled to one knee, adding another branch he knew wouldn’t catch. All it did was sputter smoke. When the gray ribbon drifted Eva’s way, she flinched—lashed back stinging under salve—and hugged her knees tighter, shoulders shaking just once before she brutally stilled them.

Billy rubbed the bridge of his nose till it hurt. Finally shoved to his boots and planted himself over her, arms folded so tight the seams creaked.

“The damn woman ain’t stopped crying since the fire.”

He hadn’t meant to say it aloud, but the words leapt like sparks. She jerked her head up; fire-glow caught tear tracks on cheeks caked with trail dust.

“Not loud or dramatic,” he went on, voice flat as caliche clay. “Just them awful little sniffles, scraping my nerves like a tin spoon in a tin cup.” He gestured at her curled shape—blanket, bruises, iron stubbornness. “Look at you. Like something too soft for this world. Something a hawk’d pluck off the earth without trying.”

She pressed her lips together—pain bit her split and a fresh tear spilled.

Billy ground his heel, irritated at himself as much as her. “I ain’t a nursemaid,” he muttered. “Ain’t your preacher, ain’t your kin, ain’t your damn husband.”

She didn’t answer. Only stared at his boots—the same boots he’d used to stomp out the last flame because heat drew predators. Lightning struck again, painting everything stark white then black.

“Should’ve left you with ’em,” he snapped, meaning the brothel bruisers, meaning maybe the law. “They’d’ve eaten you alive, but at least it’d be over quick.”

Still nothing. No cuss, no sob. Just those little broken breaths that refused to die out. And that did it—anger slipped its reins, bolted straight into guilt. Goddamn it.

He scrubbed a hand down his face, paced once, came back and hunkered beside her. She jumped as if expecting a blow. That cut him worse than any word.

“Oh, for Christ’s sake.” He kept his voice low, like coaxing a spooked mare. “I ain’t gonna hurt you. Dragged your sorry hide outta that whorehouse, didn’t I?”

She nodded—a tiny, shaky motion, eyes fixed on the dirt between them. Up close he saw soot clotted in her lashes, smelled road dust in her hair, copper on her breath where her lip bled anew.

“Give me your name again?”

A long beat riding the wind. Then, barely audible: “Eva.”

Of course it’d be something soft and biblical, and doe-eyed. He exhaled hard through his nose. “Fine. Eva. Sleep, if you can. Tomorrow we ride at first light. First damn town I find with a preacher or doctor or someone willin’ to take you in, I’m leavin’ you there. Understood?”

Another nod—tinier.

He rose, muttering curses that had no bite, kicked out a space for his bedroll a few paces off. Not far enough; not when she lay small and shaking and secret-curled like that. He laid down, pulled blanket up, hat brim low, and swore to stare holes in the night until exhaustion won.

He wasn’t gonna touch her, although he could’ve.

Wouldn’t even look.

Wind picked up, skating cold fingers across the wash. The last ember winked out. Somewhere beyond the dark, a coyote answered lightning with a lonesome howl. A gust tore through the arroyo, lifting grit, and she whimpered—sleep-ragged, raw. The sound arrowed straight into his chest.

“Goddamn it,” he breathed.

He rolled up, shrugged off his long duster—trail-worn, lined with thin flannel—and crossed the few steps between blankets. She’d hunched into a ball, spine a trembling curve under frayed calico.

Slow, almost tender, he draped the coat over her from shoulders to boots. Didn’t speak. Just settled it and retreated before she could catch his scent off the lining.

Back on his own blanket he lay rigid, staring into cloud-black sky. Wind quieted. After a minute her breaths evened out, softer, muffled beneath the coat. His lids drooped at last, the ache in his bones winning over vigilance.

Storm clouds swallowed the final star. In the hush before sleep Billy heard one last sniffle, quieter now, soothed by his coat’s borrowed heat. And for reasons he couldn’t name, the sound didn’t grate this time. It settled like a promise in the dark.

**

The fire had guttered to twin eyes of red, each blinked by the wind until only a soft orange pulse lingered beneath the ash. Billy lay on his side facing it, hat tipped forward. He’d closed his eyes an hour ago—maybe two—but sleep wouldn’t come. Every time the desert hushed, a coyote answered the silence with a primeval yip, and his eyelids peeled back again.

Across the dead coals, Eva slept—or something near it—fetal beneath his duster. Moonlight, at last pried from storm, silvered the top seam of the coat where the shoulders stretched too broad for her slight frame. He could mark every rise and fall of her breath: small, steady, tentative, like lungs still learning to trust the air.

Horse money gone, he reminded himself for the twelfth time. Eighty-five dollars—Jesse’s cut, Tom’s cut, his own. Spent like creek water on a stranger. Jesse’ll chew my hide, then garnish my teeth for interest. An image flared: Jesse’s easy grin stiffening into that flinty stare, a joking threat about debts turning real. Tomorrow’s problem. The desert only knew today.

Billy shifted, felt the rope burn on his palm catch the blanket wool. He rubbed thumb across it—raised ridge still tender from that godforsaken payroll job. Funny how skin healed slower when a man had guilt to pick at it. Beneath his fingertips the welt throbbed with phantom memory of the rope tearing free while he wrestled the gelding meant to be his. Gelding still stood back in town behind Farnum’s livery rail, waiting for a buyer with more sense than sentiment.

He let his gaze drift to the duster-swaddled girl. Little flutter at the hem: an exhale. She’d stopped crying after he covered her, but he could see streaks of salt on her cheek catching starlight. He’d seen women weep before—saloon doves, ranch widows, half a mining camp after a cave-in—but something about those muffled sniffles gnawed at him. Maybe because she’d tried to stand her ground, chair-leg spear and all, before her will cracked.

Or maybe because the scar on her back looked too damn much like the ones he’d watched men carve into mustangs—in that first awful breaking when freedom bucked against rope.

“No giving her back,” he murmured—soundless vow to the fire ghost. Even if Jesse cussed him six ways from Sunday. Even if it meant riding a sway-back mare clear to La Junta. Some things a man couldn’t undo; trading a girl for a horse would not join that ledger.

A gust parted the clouds overhead. Stars poured out—Milky Way bright as fresh-spilled flour across black slate. Billy tipped his hat back to drink it in; constellations anchored him better than whiskey ever had. He lifted a hand, tracing invisible lines.

“There’s the Hunter,” he whispered, voice gravel-soft so as not to wake her. Three bright belt-stars still glittered despite dawn’s creeping glow. He slid his finger west. “And the Scorpion—see his tail curve? Old stories say the Hunter and Scorpion dance forever, never meeting.” He chuckled, sound half breath. “World’s full of bad marriages.”

Something in his chest unknotted. Words tasted strange—talking to air—but the night felt like a church with no preacher, only sky for a roof. His mind drifted back twenty years: a clapboard shack in Silver City, Mama humming “Sweet By and By” while she patched the only shirt he owned. Voice thin but sure, stitching hope into every note. He hummed a fragment now, catching the minor lilt his ma always favored:

“We shall meet on that beautiful shore…”

The breeze carried it across the ash bed to the curled shape beneath his coat. Eva stirred, but didn’t wake. Her breath simply deepened, as if the tune rolled into her dreams to stand guard.

Billy’s throat tightened. He cleared it raw, rubbed at rope burn again. Funny how loneliness snuck in when the wind got honest.

He laid back, hands laced under his head, hat brim canting so he could keep the stars. Named them under breath—Cassiopeia’s crooked chair, Pegasus sprawling headless, the Archer drawing aim at nothing. Felt the earth turn beneath.

When the coyote chorus finally fell mute and the moon tipped west, he let lids drift halfway, still tracking coat-rise, coat-fall. Each time the fabric lifted he found a strange comfort—proof the girl breathed, proof he hadn’t bought a corpse with Jesse’s money, proof some worse fate hadn’t snatched her away while he watched the sky.

Gonna owe Jesse more than coin, he mused. But a man’s gotta owe himself first. He tucked that truth away for morning.

Somewhere east, lightning flickered a parting shot, storm spent. Stars reclaimed the emptiness. Billy inhaled desert night—creosote, sage, hint of smoke—and felt his bones loosen at last.

“Safe till dawn,” he promised the dark, not sure if he spoke to her or the ghost of his ma or maybe to himself.

Then, under the watchful hush of galaxies wheeling ancient and indifferent, Billy Bonney finally closed his eyes—fingers still brushing rope burn, breath timed to a blanket’s quiet tide—and slid into a light sleep thin as gauze, ready to tear at the slightest wrong sound.

But for now, the night held its peace.

**

The desert held its breath in that thin seam between night and morning when shadows look the same color as old bruises. An eastbound breeze rustled the yucca swords, then stilled. The mare snorted once and went quiet.

Eva jolted upright with a choked cry.

Billy’s eyes snapped open, Colt half-drawn before he’d fully left the blanket. Heart hammered, gaze knifing through gloom—no riders on the ridge, no rattler near the fire-pit, only the girl trembling beneath his duster, breath sawing like she’d outrun hell.

She hugged her knees, forehead pressed to them. When the wind shifted, he smelled iron—fresh seep from her lash cut opened by the nightmare. Her shoulders twitched at every phantom strike.

He eased the revolver back into its holster, slid a yard closer across the gritty ground. “Storm’s gone,” he said, voice pitched low and steady. “Only coyotes singin’. Nothin’ here but you an’ me.”

She lifted her head. Moonshadows bleached her face; tears silvered the curve of her nose. “I—I’m sorry,” she whispered, voice frayed. “Thought I was—” She swallowed, couldn’t finish.

He’d seen the look before: new colts after first branding, soldiers fresh from their maiden fight. The mind keeps swinging when the whip stops. He kept his tone gentle as smoothing hair from a spooked horse’s eye. “Ain’t no harm here, Eva. Just wind and scrub.”

She shivered, arms tightening around thin ribs. Billy pulled the canteen from his saddle roll, crawled close enough to hear the click of her chattering teeth. Held it out.

“Try a swallow.”

Her fingers hovered, then retreated—flinch born of long bad nights. So he uncapped it, tipped the mouthpiece to her lips. Water sloshed; she drank, shaky but eager, the curve of her lower lip brushing warm metal. Salt from dried tears slid with the water down her chin.

He felt her pulse where his free hand steadied the back of her head—a rapid hummingbird beat. The moment stretched. Her eyes met his over the canteen rim, and something eased—as though she’d decided not all hands meant harm.

When she’d taken enough, he capped the bottle. Her palm reached instinctively to steady it; her fingers grazed his wrist before she realized. Soft. Warm. First voluntary touch. It left a tingle running up his forearm clear to the rope burn scar.

“Thank you,” she breathed, voice still ragged but steadier. “For the water… for the coat.”

He shrugged, tried for offhand. “Wind turned mean. No sense lettin’ you freeze.”

She drew a breath that hitched. “That wasn’t the cold that woke me.”

Billy sat cross-legged now, Colt forgotten, distance halved between blankets. “Dreams can bite worse than cold.” He didn’t press; truth needed its own pace.

Eva exhaled slow, gaze drifting to the paling eastern sky. “It was the post,” she whispered finally. “The rope. I could smell the wood. And… hear them cheerin’.” Her voice cracked. She rubbed her arms briskly, as though the motion could scrub the memory off skin.

He wanted to say something—sorry? empty comfort?—but none felt true. So he offered the only vow he could keep: “We’ll find sunrise together first,” he said, nodding toward the lightening horizon, “then make decisions when we can see what’s ahead.”

Her lashes lifted, surprised. A pause—then the faintest ghost of a nod.

Wind carried a chill; he noticed she’d shucked his duster during the nightmare. He nudged it closer. “Use it.” She slid arms back in without argument this time, burying chin in the collar. The coat looked ridiculous on her—wide at the shoulders, hem puddling her hips—but the shaking eased.

“You sleep now,” he said. “I’ll keep watch.”

She hesitated. “You need rest, too.”

“Been restin’,” he lied. “Got eyes enough for both.” He tipped his hat brim to show the good humor in it.

She laid down, blanket over duster, face half-turned toward the fire pit’s glow. Breaths still trembled, but less each pass. Just before her lids fell shut, she murmured, “Storm’s gone… but thank you for bein’ the roof anyway.”

He frowned at the phrasing, but it warmed something he pretended wasn’t there. “Roof’s only good as its beams,” he said, hoping she’d slipped past hearing. She gave no reply.

Billy settled back, elbows on knees, scanning ridges washed blue-gray by dawn’s earliest hint. The Milky Way had faded to a memory, but one bright star still burned low over the eastern rim—day’s first promise.

Inside his chest, the hummingbird echo of her pulse lingered against his wrist. He flexed the hand, rope burn singing, and kept his gaze watchful as the sky drifted from indigo to dull pewter, waiting for enough light to chase the whip-dreams back into whatever dark hole birthed them.

**

First light seeped into the arroyo like water into dry cloth—slow, patient, staining the eastern rim a shy pink before admitting gold. Billy struck flint to tinder, coaxing the night’s last ember into a finger-high flame. The tiny blaze licked the blackened tin cup nestled in the coals; soon the water inside began its faint, hopeful hiss. He added two knifepoint scoops of grounds—cheap as axle grit—and watched them swirl.

The aroma, bitter and clean, curled into the chill air. It felt like a handshake from a new day.

Across the fire pit, Eva shifted under the duster. She’d slept after the whip-dream, though restless: a few muffled whimpers, one startled gasp that died the moment Billy murmured “Easy, it’s just wind” without even opening his eyes. Now she blinked awake, lashes crusted with dust, cheeks flushed where the coat’s collar had trapped warmth.

She tried to rise and winced, hand flying to the swelling welt beneath her shoulder blade. The blanket slid, exposing raw skin already oozing through the salve.

Billy set the coffee beside the fire to steep. “Hold up,” he said, rising in a crouch. He unbuckled his spare bed-roll strap, looped it into a soft cinch. “Blanket can serve better than burrito.”

Eva smiled—small, crooked. “I’ve never worn wool couture.”

“Desert don’t judge fashion.” He guided her to stand, wrapping the blanket around her waist, then threaded the strap twice and cinched it snug at her hip. The wool now draped like a rough riding skirt, freeing her legs but covering thighs. “Keeps saddle-rub off them knees.”

She tested a step, still tender, but lighter. “Thank you.” Then caught a whiff from the tin and wrinkled her nose. “Smells like somebody boiled a boot.”

He allowed the faintest smirk. “Boots were all we had south of Mesilla.” He poured a swallow into his dented cup, handed it over. “Try it ‘fore you bad-mouth.”

She sipped. Grimaced theatrically, eyes watering. “Mercy. That’ll scour a man’s sins without need of preacher.”

Billy chuckled—two low notes, surprised at himself. He poured his own measure, lifted it toward the rising sun. “To sins still worth keepin’.”

Eva tapped her cup to his. “And to maps that ain’t lost yet.” Her gaze slid downward—where the folded paper hid against her ribs. A cloud of grief crossed her face, but she breathed through it and the shadow passed.

They drank in companionable quiet, steam pluming from their mouths. Far off, a single meadowlark tried out a reed-thin trill. The night chill retreated inch by inch, and with it Billy felt the tension in his shoulders ease to a manageable knot.

He ran route lines in his head: Broken Yoke fading east; the rail spur south—too risky with bounty wires; San Mateo Butte north—Apache territory chancy but passable. La Junta lay two days ahead if the mare kept her gait and flash floods stayed in their banks. In his mind’s eye he saw the spindly telegraph poles along the Santa Fe track like gallows waiting to hang news—news of reward posters, news of a sorrel gelding unpaid. Best keep a desert’s breadth between them and rail.

Stay off the freight road, he vowed silently, and dodge every town where a sheriff’s got fresh ink.

Eva finished her coffee, wiped her mouth with the back of one hand. “Still bitter,” she judged. “But warm.” She glanced at him side-long, almost playful. “Might let you brew again, if I’m desperate.”

He tipped the cup to her gallantry. “High praise.”

The morning star—last sentinel of night—faded as dawn caught full fire along the cliff tops. Billy stamped out the embers, packed their scant tinware into the saddlebag. Eva tried to help lift the blanket roll; pain twinged, but she swallowed the wince. Determination glimmered behind dust and bruises.

At the mare, Billy cupped his hands for her stirrup. She balked—memory of the livery rough-handling—but he steadied her boot with a murmured “Easy now,” and she eased into the saddle without a cry. His duster still swathed her shoulders, twice-folded sleeves dangling like a child in her father’s coat. She gathered it close against the cool breeze.

Billy mounted behind, careful of her wound. For a heartbeat they fit awkwardly: his knees bracketing her hips, her head not quite level with his chin. Then the rhythm of the mare’s first step pulled them into alignment, bodies swaying in the same small arc.

He sent a look backward—Broken Yoke now only a smudge of smoke rising in the valley—and ahead, where the pink sky promised both heat and possibility. He nudged the horse to a walk, then a trot.

Just before the arroyo rose to plateau, Eva spoke, voice low but certain: “Thank you for waiting on sunrise.”

Billy’s fingers tightened on the reins. “Couldn’t leave without seein’ if it kept its appointment.”

The mare crested the ridge, hooves striking pale rock. Wind caught the coat hem, snapping it like a half-raised flag around the girl he wasn’t sure he’d meant to save, wasn’t sure he could let go. Below, the desert unrolled vast and blank—a ledger yet unwritten.

Morning star winked out. They rode west, small shadows stretching long before them, toward towns not yet chosen, toward debts not yet paid, toward a horizon wide enough—maybe—for both sins and mercy.

[howdyjourney]

https://www.tumblr.com/howdyjourney/787238877616291840/can-i-request-a-dark-tom-one-like-hes-a-mafia

yes i mean a long fic!! id love it as a longfic if ur able 🫶🏼

thank you, I’ll see what I can do 🤍 modern AUs are still a bit a of a novelty to me (although I’ve written some) as I’m primarily a western/HG writer, but I like a challenge. especially a dark one 🥰

[howdyjourney]

can i request a dark tom one? like he’s a mafia boss and kidnaps her or smth? and there’s loads of drama and adventure and he’s an asshole but it’s enemies to lovers type thing

a longfic you mean? cos I don’t really write blurbs/oneshots. but it’s a fun scenario, I think I can cook it 😎 thank you! x

[howdyjourney]

what do you teach? the western style is so spot. on.

English and American lit. Currently working on my PhD project on western narratives precisely, so, that helps 😭 thank you! 🤍

[howdyjourney]

gurl where have you been with your fics?? I CANT WAIT TO READ MORE do you have discord?

always here, on ao3 and wattpad, just suck at self-promotion 😭 thank you 🤍

I do, but send me a DM first

[howdyjourney]

If your new billy fic is as hot as Lilly west I will piss my pants 🫠

dear, it’s much hotter , you wait n see 🔥

[howdyjourney]

Sing Your Body Electric

- chapter 2 -

who: William H. Bonney x Original Female Character

genre: western romance longfic (multiple chapters)

tags/warnings: This fic is Explicit / 18+ only. Minors, please step off the porch.

(not exhaustive):
Outlaws & Runaways • Slow Burn (rewarding) • Oral Sex • Handjob • Face-Sitting (f)—“from behind” / bent-over hay bale • Rough Sex & Soft Sex in equal measure • Praise Kink • Body Worship • Protective Billy • Scar Kissing • Mild Restraint • Gunshot Injuries / Recovery • Period-Typical Violence & Racism (historical context) • Runaway Heiress • Found Family Outlaws • Slow-Burn to Very Hot-Burn

(lmk if you want to be tagged)

Previous chapter

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Chapter two

The first sun-slice knifed the horizon as the coffle shambled past a warped cedar post proclaiming BROKEN YOKE, POP 172—the “1” paint-flaked to a ghostly suggestion. A split ox-yoke hung nailed beneath, weather-silvered and cracked straight through the bow, as if the town were bragging it understood the notion of things split apart and worked to death.

Red Beard rode ahead of the mule cart, reins loose, hat brim casting a triangular shadow over his grin. Behind him, the two other outlaws flanked their living cargo: five weary Black fugitives roped hand-to-hand and Eva Fairchild tied separately, a short lead fastened to Red Beard’s saddle horn like a dog leash. Dust, kicked by their own tired feet, rose in small ghosts then settled on sweat-shining backs and Eva’s tattered calico.

Broken Yoke was waking slow. A stray dog nosed an up-ended slop bucket, lifting its head only long enough to narrow eyes at the procession before resuming the more holy pursuit of bacon rinds. A stable boy, hair mussed and shirt half-buttoned, leaned against the livery’s split-rail corral, jaw cracked wide in a yawn big enough to swallow dawn. Beyond him, under the false-front awning of the town’s single mercantile, a drunk lay curled like a comma, hat over his face, last night’s bottle still balanced against his ribs.

Red Beard sucked his teeth. “Civilization,” he announced, as though he’d personally conjured the ragged Main Street from desert dust. Eva caught sight of an ordinary dawn: a woman in a gingham wrapper shaking crumbs from a flour cloth, a half-clothed child chasing a hoop, laundry already flapping on a sag-string line. She drank it in—mundane acts free folk performed without thought—and felt the rope tug her forward.

At the livery gate, Red Beard dismounted. The mule blew out a dusty breath, happy enough for a halt. From the office emerged Stub Pearsall, a wiry old buzzard in suspenders and no shirt, chewing sage like it might turn to tobacco if he worried it long enough.

Red Beard tipped his hat. “Morning, Stub. Got a quick store-keep for you.”

Stub’s eyes moved over the captives the way a rancher checks cattle ribs before an auction. “Them five?” He pointed with a split cigarillo. “Broker wagon rolls through Friday. I’m full up ’til then.”

Red Beard shoved the rope line forward. “They ain’t stayin’ in your bunkhouse. Chain ’em in the feed shed. Keep ’em watered and quiet. Twenty percent off the top once you weigh ’em.”

Stub spat sage pulp. “Feed shed’s for oats, not folks.”

“Oats don’t fetch fifty a head.” Red Beard smiled thin.

Stub shrugged—commerce trumping complaint. He beckoned Isaac, Ruth, Mercy, Jonah, and Eli toward the side yard where a paddock gate hung crooked. Two stable hands appeared with shackles, faces blank.

Eva’s pulse thundered. She opened her mouth, but Red Beard yanked her lead. “Not you, dove.” He leered. “Got special use for your kind.” He untied her wrists from the cart rail but left them bound before her. Even the small relief of circulation felt like sin.

As Stub led the others away, Eva locked eyes with Ruth. Rain-drenched memory flashed between them—the lullaby hum, the map hidden in Eva’s bodice. Ruth held the gaze one breath, then squared her shoulders and marched, Samuel sleeping against her chest. Jonah stumbled, head bandaged, but Isaac’s steady hand kept him upright. Eli said nothing, jaw set despite the sling at his shoulder.

Eva tried to memorize every detail: the way Mercy tucked a wool scrap under Samuel’s chin, the hitch in Jonah’s step, the bite of sun on Isaac’s gray temple. She feared she might never see them again.

“Move along, lace-stocking,” Red Beard growled.

He hauled her across the wagon ruts toward the center of town. The street tilted gently uphill, opening views between board-false façades: a narrow chapel in peeling white, a schoolhouse bell beginning to clang, its rope pulled by a sleepy girl whose braid reached her waist. The bell’s bright note struck Eva’s ribs, a sound so clean it hurt.

She tried to slow—just a heartbeat—to savor the ordinary ring. Red Beard jerked the rope; pain flared in her wrists. “Quit gawkin’. Madam Dove pays prime for fresh faces.”

They turned past a hitch rack where a black-dappled mare stamped and shivered flies from her flanks. Eva reached her bound hands, brushed the mare’s shoulder in passing—one breath of velvet hide, smelling of sun-warmed dust and hayloft darkness. Another ordinary miracle.

“Hands off merchandise,” Red Beard snapped, shoving her forward. Ahead loomed the tall front of The Cherished Dove Saloon & Social House—three stories of clapboard optimism with pink trim curling like icing around sulfured windows. A faded painting of a wing-spreading white bird arched above the door, its beak chipped away.

Music drifted—piano half-awake, a ragtime figure stumbling over its own heels—and with it floated the sweet-rot scent of stale gin and perfume too eager to hide sweat. Eva’s stomach knotted.

Inside, she knew, the next scene of her life was waiting: velvet wallpaper, counting rooms, laughter carved thin as bone. For a moment she pieced out a vision—grabbing a bottle, ramming glass into Red Beard’s eye, fleeing down some alley—but her wrists burned, her back throbbed, and the map pressed a hot ache against her breastbone. She couldn’t even outrun herself.

The saloon’s batwings creaked open. Red Beard nodded to the bouncer, big as a church door. “Tell Dove I caught a wild one,” he chortled. “White lace, southern tongue. She’ll pay double.”

Eva stepped over the threshold. Behind her a stray dog barked lazy disinterest, the school bell tolled its last note, and sun flared off a distant ridge of storm clouds gathering for the march. She felt the door slap shut on the morning—and on whatever small taste of freedom had brushed her fingers.

Inside, the air was thick with smoke and the sweeter stink of trouble. Eva straightened as best she could, lifted her chin.

Delilah, she thought, clutching the map through her torn bodice, keep that sky wide. I haven’t finished singing yet.

And she walked forward into the dim, where whiskey, music, and a busted chair-leg awaited their cue.

**

The sun hadn't yet cleared the clapboard ridge of Broken Yoke’s roofline when Red Beard hauled Eva around to the alley mouth. The smell hit first—rot-soft fruit peel and piss-slick brick, overlaid with the sweeter musk of rosewater trying too hard. Two cats clung to the fence post, locked in a slow-motion fight over a pigeon’s wing. A broken bottle winked green in the gutter. Behind the saloon, a narrow back door flapped twice in the wind before a woman appeared, waddling into the light like a great lavender riverboat sliding off a muddy dock.

Madame Dove, as legend claimed, wore silk even at sunrise. Today’s gown strained at the seams: lilac with seed-pearl buttons and a fox-fur collar that might’ve died of old age before being tanned. Her fan—lace-edged, chipped bone—snapped shut as she caught sight of Red Beard. Keys jingled at her hip like silver chains on a jailer’s belt.

“Well,” she drawled, voice like syrup left too long to burn, “look what the dust drug in.”

Red Beard tipped his hat, tugged Eva forward by her arm bindings. “Got a special delivery. Five for the broker’s pen, and one white dove just for you.”

Dove glanced past him toward the livery. “You keepin’ livestock over in Stub’s shed now? He’ll want his cut.”

“He’ll get it,” Red Beard said. “But this one’s a house bird. Virginal type. All lace and lullabies. Name’s Eva. Just needs polish.”

Eva jerked her arm from his grip, even as her wrists stayed bound. “I ain’t for sale.”

Dove looked her over slowly, from dirt-slicked bare feet to bruised temple to the ruined line of a once-pretty collar. Her eyes narrowed at the blood stain darkening the back of Eva’s calico. “Not polish,” she muttered. “Scrub and rouge.”

“She’s got spirit,” Red Beard offered. “Bit of wild in her. That’ll fetch a premium if you play it like innocence spoiled.”

Dove’s lip curled. “It’s a slow week. Miners all gone chasing ghost veins in Mesilla.” Her fan opened, fluttered against her chest. “Still… white girls are rare coin these days. What’s your ask?”

“Hundred,” Red Beard said, bold as brass. “No haggling.”

“Please,” Dove sneered. “She’s dirty, bleeding, and smells like pondweed. I’ll give you seventy.”

“Eighty-five. She tried to bite me on the road. Teeth still white. And take a look at that caboose. Folks’ll line up just to see that thing bounce.”

Eva turned sharply. “Go rot, you bastard.”

Dove’s fan flicked up to hide her smile. “Eighty-five,” she agreed. “Once she’s bathed and seen by the doctor, I’ll decide if she’s worth advertising. Keep her in the east washroom ‘til I count out the drawer.”

Red Beard shoved Eva toward the back step. “Mind her. She bites.”

“She better,” Dove muttered, unlocking the rear door. “That’s what sells. Some boys’ll pay double for a tigress.”

The washroom was little more than a cedar-floored cupboard with a chipped basin and a clouded mirror. Light spilled from a grated upper window, catching on old nail holes and a sagging towel hook. Eva’s reflection startled her—hair tangled in sweat-ropes, blood dried on her cheekbone like war paint.

“Stay put,” Dove ordered, then turned back to the alley. “Frankie!” she bellowed. “Count out eighty-five! And fetch the chair from the card table—this girl needs somewhere to sit besides the floor!”

A grunt answered. Eva caught the name—Frankie, the one with the scattergun and fish-hook teeth. She froze.

Moments later he appeared, breath heavy with onions and leftover whisky. He carried a three-legged chair and wore his usual smile—a leer with more gum than sense. “Where you want her, ma’am?”

“Just set it inside,” Dove called back. “And don’t touch.”

But Dove was already halfway down the alley, haggling over coin with Red Beard again, and Frankie’s eyes darted back to Eva with interest too familiar.

He set the chair, then didn’t move. “Don’t look like a dove to me,” he said, sidling closer. “More like a little hen with her feathers plucked.”

Eva stiffened. “Don’t touch me.”

“Oh I ain’t touchin’. Just lookin’.” He let the last syllable linger. His fingers trailed toward her arm anyway.

She didn’t give him the chance.

Knee to groin—sharp, fast, mean. He gasped like a fish jerked from water. She slammed her shoulder into him as he doubled, then snatched the broken-back chair by its leg. Wood creaked. Frankie cursed, tried to grab her again.

She yanked hard. One leg snapped off with a groan of old glue. She gripped it two-handed like a cudgel, brandishing the splintered end.

“Touch me again,” she snarled, “and I’ll stake your belly open like a gutted pig.”

Frankie backed up, hunched, spitting curses through clenched teeth. “Bitch—Dove’s gonna kill you!”

Eva didn’t lower the leg. Her breath came fast. Her wrists still ached, tied in front, but the weight of the improvised weapon grounded her. The fine point of the splinter gleamed like a tooth. Her heart banged against her ribs, but her hands didn’t shake.

From outside, Dove shouted, “What in hell’s all that racket?”

Frankie scrambled back through the doorway. “She’s crazy! Tryin’ to kill me!”

“I said don’t touch her, didn’t I?” Dove barked, voice furious but unsurprised. “Go cool your dick in the trough.”

Eva held the chair leg tighter. Her arms trembled now, not from fear, but fury. The weapon didn’t make her safe. It didn’t undo anything. But it was hers, and it had been his, and now it wasn’t.

A small victory. The only kind she could afford.

Behind her, the basin faucet dripped. The light shifted.

She waited, chair leg in hand, for whatever came next.

**

The hallway carpeting—a once-crimson runner bleached to garnet—swallowed the thud of boots as Eva was frog-marched past closed doors. From behind each panel seeped a world of muffled giggles or ragged snores, perfume tang, last night’s gin. Frankie kept his wary distance now, cursing softly at every step. The chair-leg cudgel remained gripped in Eva’s bound hands like a crooked scepter; splinters peppered her palms, but she let them bite.

At the end of the hall, a maid awaited—plump, gingham-aproned, reeking of rose water. She opened an ornate door and bobbed a curtsy to Frankie. “Bath’s ready, Mister Frank.”

“Get her scrubbed.” Frankie’s voice cracked as he spoke, tender regions clearly still complaining. “Madam says no bruises where customers see.”

Eva stepped through on her own power. Frankie slammed the door, lock clicking.

**

The room was the size of Rosemead’s pantry, but gaudy as a New Orleans bordello brochure: peach wallpaper streaked with gilt vines, a chandelier missing two arms, and in the center—a copper hip bath half-filled with steaming water. Against the far wall stood a full-length mirror framed in tarnished gold leaf, the glass foxed and spotted, but still grand enough to flatter sin.

Two other girls hovered, apprentices in Dove’s employ. One stirred rose-oil into the bath with a silver dipper; the other laid out corsets, silk stockings, a hairbrush missing half its bristles.

The maid clapped plump hands. “All right, pet. Dress off. Soap waits.”

Eva backed a step, raising the cudgel. “Touch these ropes and I break wrists.”

They blinked at the threat—half amused, half uncertain—but training proved strong. The older apprentice advanced anyway, fingers reaching for the knot at Eva’s bodice.

Her thumb grazed the lash wound. White lightning bolted through Eva’s nerves; pain sharpened to fury. Eva dropped her shoulder and slapped—crack of skin on skin. The girl yelped, stumbling into the copper tub, water sloshing onto her skirts.

Rose maid gasped. “You dare—”

“Dare and more,” Eva hissed, backing toward the mirror, chair leg lifted. “Bring your madam. Bring your dogs. I won’t sit like meat.”

Steam curled through lamplight; water dripped onto floorboards. The maid, cheeks blotched with outrage, decided bruises on her person mattered—she barked an order: “Fetch Dove.” The younger apprentice fled.

Left alone with the maid, Eva eased to the gilded mirror. Her reflection made her suck air through teeth: hair wild, temple bruised plum, lip split, throat streaked with mud, bodice torn and stuck to the seeping lash wound. Blood, dried now to rust, peaked at corset laces. Yet her eyes—the same ones Delilah had called storm flickers—blazed bright, unbroken.

She hunched, using the mirror to block view from the door, tugged at her bodice laces. Within the cotton lining, the crumpled map remained—damp, but intact. She smoothed it once, kissed the corner where Delilah’s thumbprint marred ink, then folded tight and tucked it beneath her chemise, over her heart.

Downstairs, boards creaked—a door slammed—voices rose. Eva stilled, listening. Madame Dove’s unmistakable drawl floated through the floorboards, booming with performance:

“White virgin, boys! Auction at miners’ day. First taste goes for fifty, second for thirty. Pure lace, southern peach!”

Laughter, coarse male, echoed back. Coins clinked. A piano struck a bawdy chord.

Eva’s stomach turned. She tore the remains of her sash, cinched it tight around her bound wrists, trapping a sliver of the chair-leg beneath so she could still wield the splintered tip. Then she shoved the copper tub with both shoulders. It screeched, skidded two feet, wedging against door and wall like a barricade. Bathwater slopped, steaming across floorboards.

The maid shrieked, brandishing a bath brush. “You’ll pay for that!”

Eva leveled the cudgel. “My body’s mine. Anyone tries layin’ claim, they leave less of themselves than they came with.” Her voice quavered only on the last word, steadied by a ragged inhale.

Below, Dove’s voice climbed louder, bragging about “silk-soft skin, lips like cream.” Each syllable was a nail hammered into Eva’s resolve.

She planted bare feet, pressed shoulder blades—one ringed with wet blood—against the gilded mirror, and waited. Chair leg poised like a spear.

“If dying’s the price,” she whispered to the empty peach room, “so be it. But I’ll not lie for coin. Delilah, keep me strong.”

Footsteps thundered on the stair. Door latch rattled, met the tub’s iron weight. Dove’s muffled outrage seeped through the panels.

Eva lifted the splintered wood, breath steady in her chest. Outside, thunder cracked—much closer now—as if the very sky consented to raise hell.

**

Dust rode the company harder than any foreman. It clung to Jesse Evans’s boots, frosted the black of Tom Folliard’s hat, and wormed under the kerchief at Billy Bonney’s throat until every swallow tasted like pulverized sandstone. The three outlaws clattered in from the east trace single-file—Jesse out front on his flashy paint, Tom whistling arpeggios on a lather-flecked bay, and Billy last, reins looped loose on a wind-skin chestnut who nickered every third step as though complaining about the miles.

Broken Yoke wasn’t much: six plank storefronts, two canvas tents, and The Cherished Dove Saloon towering like a painted dowager above them all. But the town sat just far enough from Mesilla law to feel friendly, and rumor said its water trough still ran sweet after summer flash floods. That was good enough.

As they reined in at Farnum’s Livery, Billy rolled his shoulders—the rope burn across his right palm still raw from that last misbegotten horse raid—then swung down, boots thumping in the chalky dust. Low thunder grumbled to the east; the sky there stacked blue-black anvils on the horizon, but here the sun still baked the street to biscuit crust.

Jesse slung a leg over the paint’s neck and landed cat-light despite the trail grime. “Sheriff keeps mail at the smithy,” he said, wiping off sweat from his mustache. “Might be a letter from Santa Fe lawyer about them lost wages.” He shot Billy a look equal parts warning and affection. “Try not to spend our whole stake before I’m back.”

Tom laughed, thumping his saddle for emphasis. “Save me a chair at the faro table, Kid. I got feelin’s about today.” He guided the bay toward the gambling hall without dismounting, humming that rag he liked—“Buffalo Gals,” off-key.

Billy offered a salute with two fingers. “Tell the dealer I’m comin’ for his teeth later.”

When they’d gone—Jesse pacing up the boardwalk toward the smithy, Tom disappearing into the saloon’s side door—Billy let his eyes settle on a sorrel gelding hitched alone under Farnum’s awning. Good withers, kind eye, legs clean. Saddleless and for sale if the hand-painted placard was to be trusted. Billy’s boots drifted that direction like metal filings to loadstone.

“Belongs to a rancher out of Ruidoso,” drawled Farnum himself, emerging from the stable shadows. Gray ponytail, chaw lumping one cheek. “Horse’ll cut a cow on a dime, but rancher’s ridin’ freight wagon now—bad back.” He spat juice, nodding at the sorrel. “Wants ninety.”

Billy clicked his tongue, studying the animal. He had eighty-five dollars even—part Jesse’s, part Tom’s, part his own. Wages from three sleepless weeks guarding a logger’s payroll through Apache country. They’d planned to divide it in the morning, after a night’s drink.

Eighty-five. The figure felt heavy, substantial—as much as he’d ever had in one purse. It could buy months of fresh cartridges, or one fine mount to outrun half the territory. But it was meant to pay Jesse down for grubfront loans and Tom’s terrible luck at cards.

He slid a hand along the sorrel’s neck; the gelding flicked an ear, accepting. A damn fine animal.

Thunder boomed again—closer, a bass drum behind the sky. Storm smell wafted over the street: crushed sage, distant ozone. Billy’s bad knuckles ached, as they always did when lightning prowled.

Decision pressed like a hand on his back. Not yet. He’d look again after a drink, when the sky figured its mind. He stepped away, dust swirling around bootheels as if reluctant to let him go.

Inside his jacket he counted the roll once more. Eight tens, a five, three singles. Enough for one prime bottle and still square the debt—if he resisted the urge for cards. He flexed rope-scabbed fingers, felt the stretch tighten skin. Just whiskey, he promised the storm. One shot to wash dust off my teeth before Jesse’s lecture.

Across the street The Cherished Dove flaunted a new coat of faded pink, sign creaking in the gathering wind. Piano notes staggered through batwing doors—somebody practicing runs too early for business. Billy hitched his shoulders, pushed beneath the sign, and let the saloon swallow him whole—

—only to halt when a raw, furious voice slashed the quiet.

“Touch me again and I’ll brain you!”

Wood splintered. A chair-leg clattered. Billy felt the prickle down his spine—same tingle he always got just ahead of trouble, lightning on a fence wire.

He sighed, tasting storm in that breath. So much for whiskey in peace.

Boots crunching grit, he stepped sideways toward the porch’s far edge, instincts already mapping angles, counting threats.

Dust still followed him like a loyal dog— and now, it seemed, so did the trouble.

**

Billy stopped dead. Two heartbeats later the batwings burst outward and a wiry slip of a girl in mud-stained calico staggered onto the porch. She clutched half a busted chair leg—oak splintered to a wicked point—and looked ready to swing for Hell’s gate itself. Sweat glued her dark hair to her cheeks; blood streaked her temple. Two house bruisers followed: one red-faced, mustache curled with grease, the other thick as a feed sack. Behind them waddled Madame Dove, robed in lilac silk, fan beating at the muggy air like a frantic hen.

“Little bitch broke a Louis the Fourteenth!” the madam screeched. “Forty dollars import!”

Billy measured the tremor in the girl’s knees, the white scars threading her knuckles, the furious spark in fawn-brown eyes set a shade too close for debutante beauty. Bravery? Desperation? Likely both—dangerous fuel either way.

“I said I ain’t for sale,” she spat, southern drawl sanded by rage. “And I ain’t spreadin’ for any of your drunk swine neither.”

Mustache Man lunged. She swung—chair leg swishing past his ear, slamming a post, showering splinters. He cursed, backhanded her. She reeled but held the weapon, fire still crackling in her stare.

Thunder—distant, east of town—grumbled like an impatient judge. Billy sighed. Whiskey would wait.

He put his boot on the bottom step, took the porch lazy, hands loose at his belt. Mustache Man turned, nostrils flaring. “Ain’t your business, mister.”

“Maybe,” Billy drawled, thumb hooking his gun belt. “But looks to me like you’re losin’ an argument to a girl half your size. Thought I’d officiate—make sure the fight stays fair.”

Red-Face sneered. “Payin’ customer? Then drink. Pick a girl. If not, haul your hide.”

“Depends.” Billy’s gaze slid to the girl. “You want outta this dove-cote, sweetheart?”

She swallowed. “Yes,” she rasped—small sound, all the louder for the iron in it.

Madame Dove rustled forward. “That chit is mine by bill of sale—one hundred dollars U.S. tender.”

The chair leg trembled in the girl’s grip. Billy clocked the flinch, the faded lash mark peeking above her ripped collar, the way desperation warred with pride in the set of her jaw.

“One hundred,” he echoed. He counted mental coin—nineteen bucks in his vest, sixty-odd in the saddle cantle. Horse money. Hell.

He sent a glance toward Mustache and Ham-hock. Storm smells drifted off the eastern flats; a brawl would bring deputies or worse. Money stayed quieter.

“Eighty,” he offered, drawing soft bills from inside coat. “Horse-seller’s price.”

“Ninety-five.” Dove’s fan snapped shut like a guillotine.

“Eighty-five, and I replace your damned chair.” He cocked a brow.

Lilac silk shivered—eyes bright with greed. “Done,” said Dove.

Mustache Man sputtered, but a sharp whack of Dove’s fan muted him. Billy counted eighty-five even, added a silver dollar that chimed tiny thunder against her palm. Transaction sealed, he stepped between bruisers and girl.

“Drop the splinter, darlin’,” he murmured.

Slowly she unclenched; the javelin of chair leg clattered boards. Shoulders sagged, fury drained to bone-tired relief. Billy produced a handkerchief, offered it. She dabbed bloody lip, eyes never leaving his.

“Name?” Billy asked low.

“Eva,” she breathed after a tremor’s pause.

“Just Eva?”

“I… can’t remember the rest.”

Amnesia? Maybe. Maybe lie. But terror carved truth deep around her mouth: she wasn’t going back anywhere. “Eva’s enough for me,” he said.

Before he could guide her down the steps, a familiar whistle cut through evening. Jesse Evans strolled out of the smithy across the street, envelope tucked in breast pocket, grin sharp.

“Billy!” he called. “Buying yourself problems again?”

Billy angled a shrug. “Horse money spent itself.”

Jesse’s smirk widened, boots crunching grit. “Least she prettier’n that dun gelding.” He tipped his hat to Eva, eyes twinkling mischief, then to Dove with mock flourish. “Ma’am.” With a lazy salute he sauntered on—letting Billy own whatever fallout followed.

Billy took Eva’s elbow; she flinched—memory of rough hands—but he gentled the grip. They stepped to the street while Dove crowed after coins. Billy felt thunder roll closer, humid wind lifting dust. “Lean on me,” he muttered. “You look set to drop.”

At the livery rail she halted. “I don’t know where to go.”

“Don’t fret that now.” He loosened the mare’s lead. “I’ll ride you till we find a town wants a schoolmarm or baker’s wife. Folks’ll treat you kind.”

She studied him—a look too old for her years. “And if I remember…?”

“I’ll see you home,” he promised, though he suspected no home was fit anymore. He swung her up first, vaulted behind. She sat stiff as dried rawhide.

“Lean back,” he said. “I don’t bite.”

Lightning spidered across the far horizon, painting the desert bones silver. Billy clicked tongue; the mare loped west down moon-washed track. Eva’s slight weight settled against his chest by slow degrees. He felt the tremor ease, felt something else kindle low in his gut—protective, unwelcome, undeniable.

He’d meant to buy a horse tonight. Instead he’d bought a storm in calico—a heart-shaped rump and eyes full of broken skies. A nuisance. He almost laughed.

“Couple days,” he told the wind—half to her, half to himself. “Just till I drop you safe.”

Behind them Broken Yoke’s lanterns dwindled, thunder broke like distant rifle fire, and ahead the trail stretched black and uncertain, smelling of wet dust and new mistakes.

Billy tightened one arm around Eva—whether that was her name or not—and rode on into the lightning’s restless grin.

🌹

Saddle up, folks. The fun is about to begin soon. They just need to get to know each other better. 👉👈

[howdyjourney]

when’s ur next chapter coming out for ur billy fic? im already obsessed

Wednesday!

happy you like it so far 🤍🥰

edit: actually, I’ll be updating daily for as long as I can, so 😏 get ready

[howdyjourney]

Sing Your Body Electric

- chapter 1 -

who: William H. Bonney x Original Female Character

genre: western romance longfic (multiple chapters)

tags/warnings: This fic is Explicit / 18+ only. Minors, please step off the porch.

(not exhaustive):
Oral Sex • Handjob • Face-Sitting (f)—“from behind” / bent-over hay bale • Rough Sex & Soft Sex in equal measure • Praise Kink • Body Worship • Protective Billy • Scar Kissing • Mild Restraint • Gunshot Injuries / Recovery • Period-Typical Violence & Racism (historical context) • Runaway Heiress • Found Family Outlaws • Slow-Burn to Very Hot-Burn

Ride at your own risk—the trail gets dusty, the thunder gets loud, and the smut gets downright electric.

(lmk if you want to be tagged)

Prologue

Next chapter

Chapter one

The veranda boards were warm beneath her bare feet, soaked through with sun from the day before, though dawn had barely begun to break. Eva Fairchild stepped out silent and slow as a shadow, letting the screen door creak behind her without latching it shut. The light hadn’t come up fully yet, just a faint gray smear over the cotton fields, thick with mist where the low ground dipped beyond the orchard. The air hung heavy—wet with honeysuckle and night sweat—and the magnolia branches over the porch hadn't stirred once, not even a rustle.

She stood there in her linen shift, arms crossed over her chest, watching the rows of cotton disappear into fog like a dream trying to forget itself. Her hair, dark and wavy, was still uncombed, and the hem of her shift brushed just above her ankles, catching a stray splinter when she leaned against the rail. She didn’t curse. She never cursed aloud, though she had a fondness for them, low in her throat. Learned from Delilah, mostly, and a few others who dared whisper in the kitchen yard when they thought she wasn’t listening.

She was always listening.

Her father’s voice came through the walls of the house like distant thunder—low, sharp, commanding. Major Warren Fairchild didn’t know how to speak gently, only how to issue orders as if every room were a battlefield and every servant a soldier.

“Tell Pike we double the pickin’ count this week. Don’t care if they drop in the rows, I want them wagons filled come Friday.”

A pause. Then glass clinked. Brandy, she guessed. He took it neat after sunrise.

Eva’s shoulders went tight, the way they always did when he barked. Some part of her—the dutiful daughter in silk slippers—wanted to shiver at the tone and obey. But a newer part, a sharper thing blooming slow beneath her skin, held still instead. She let her back rest against the wood post and stared into the morning haze with a face gone quiet and unreadable.

Beneath her linen, the faint seam of a scar itched between her shoulder blades. It was pale now—three months healed—but still tender in the rain. The welt had split her skin clean open the day Pike caught her handing a warm roll to a boy no older than twelve who’d collapsed in the field, too starved to lift his basket. She hadn't cried then, not even when her father made her kneel and thank the Lord for mercy before the switch came down. She’d just bit her tongue, swallowed blood, and learned.

Not how to obey. No. She learned to be careful.

A bullfrog croaked from the reed ditch beyond the field. Somewhere behind the sugar house, roosters began their ragged chorus. The wind hadn’t picked up, but already Eva could feel the press of another hot day bearing down, thick with sweat and obedience and the smell of boiled linens.

Her fingers curled against her upper arm. That scar would never fade entirely. It had been deep enough to leave a groove, like a thread pulled too tight in fine cotton. Sometimes, when she washed, she would run her thumb along it—not to pity herself, but to remind. Of what she didn’t yet have words for.

She wasn’t stupid. She knew the house she lived in was beautiful, at least in the way money made things beautiful. Marble steps. Parlor imported from France. Twelve-foot mirrors and bone china tea sets with roses hand-painted at their rims. There were girls in Vicksburg who would’ve sold their souls to sit at Eva’s supper table, wear her Paris lace, read her letters written in embossed gold.

But none of those girls had stood behind the sugar house and watched a boy whipped until his back split open like butcher’s canvas. None of them had seen their best friend hauled by her hair for laughing too loud when she shouldn’t. None of them had scars on their back for sharing bread.

They didn’t want her life. They simply didn’t know the cost of it.

A moth drifted toward the porch lantern. She didn’t shoo it. Instead, she watched it flutter against the glass, beating its wings in that slow, mindless panic all trapped things shared. Even in beauty. Especially in beauty.

A voice drifted from inside the house—her father again, demanding someone “get that girl dressed proper before breakfast.” Probably her aunt or Miss Bessy. She didn’t turn to go.

Eva tucked her hair behind one ear and stepped down off the porch, barefoot still, onto the dew-slick grass. She walked to the edge where the dirt met the cotton rows, the white bolls only just starting to fatten. In a month they’d be worth their weight in blood.

She wrapped her arms around herself, pressing her fingers to the scar she could barely reach. It wasn’t just a mark. It was a map. A line carved deep to show the way out—if she could just find the courage to follow it.

The sun hadn’t crested the trees yet, but the sky was warming from gray to gold. In a few minutes, the bells would ring, the overseers would holler, and the world would start spinning again in its same brutal rhythm. But for now, she stood still in the hush.

She didn’t pray. How could she? But she did whisper under her breath, not a name, not a plea, just a wordless hum Delilah had once taught her—low and tremoring, like sorrow trying to lift itself.

Behind her, the door banged open. “Eva!” someone called—probably Miss Bessy again. “You’re to be dressed!”

She didn’t answer. The mist was lifting, and already, the weight in her chest was pressing toward unlikely mischief.

**

The heat had bloomed by midmorning, slick and syrupy, clinging to the back of Eva’s neck like a guilty hand. She slipped out of the house with a basket tucked tight against her hip, a white linen bonnet slung low over her brow, hoping to pass for a shadow. Her slippers made no sound over the brick path as she made her way around the east wing of the house, past the herb garden where sage hung heavy with dew and out toward the separate building that served as the kitchen.

Voices floated through the open shutters—low, rich, laughing voices, spiced with the clatter of tinware and the soft thud of kneading dough. The sounds of life, real life, not the parlor’s measured tedium with its brittle tea laughter and embroidered small talk. No one was watching. She slipped through the screen door without knocking.

The scent inside the kitchen was an intoxicating riot—yeast and garlic, cinnamon, sweat, ashwood smoke. A long wooden table ran the length of the room, its surface a battlefield of bowls, boards, biscuit tins, and one half-plucked chicken left to rest. Near the back, a fire roared in the brick hearth, flame licking up from beneath a blackened pot.

And perched like a queen on her usual stool, with her sleeves rolled and her skirts tied high, sat Delilah—seventeen, slight but wiry, her skin deep and smooth as polished pecan, and her hair wrapped in a vibrant green scarf that looked like it had been tied with a dare.

“Bringing me tributes again, Miss Highborn?” Delilah called without looking up, snapping the end from a green bean with a sound like bones breaking.

Eva grinned and held out the basket. “They’re apricots from the southern trees. Cook said the rest were going for jam but I snuck these when she weren’t lookin’.”

“Which cook?” Delilah’s smile curled sly. “The new one with the limp or that mean old crone who says your voice gives her headaches?”

“The crone,” Eva whispered like it was a scandal. “She was yellin’ about someone burnin’ her cornbread. Thought I might as well use the chaos for good.”

Delilah snorted, took the basket, and plucked one of the blushed orange fruits free, tossing it from hand to hand like a coin. “And what great and noble purpose shall this bounty serve?”

Eva perched herself on the opposite end of the table, legs swinging, the air already warmer here despite the cracked windows. “I thought you might be hungry. And I missed you.”

Delilah paused just long enough to let that softness land, then tossed the apricot to Eva instead. “You just want me to finish your chores again.”

“Only if they’re bean-related.”

They settled into rhythm. Delilah handed her a pile of green beans and a bowl, and the two of them snapped side by side, bean after bean, until the pile began to shrink. Their hands worked quietly, but their voices did not.

Eva told her about her father’s morning fury, about Miss Bessy’s attempt to lace her corset so tight her ribs clicked, and about Aunt Louisa’s little dog vomiting on the parlor carpet during a guest visit from Reverend Tibbets. Delilah cackled at that one, her laughter full-bodied and unrepentant.

“And what did your dear aunt say?” she asked, grinning.

Eva mimicked the shrill voice with theatrical agony: “‘Fetch the silver vinegar basin! Someone fetch the basin!’ Like the thing was sacred.”

Delilah wheezed. “Vinegar ain’t even good for dog sick! That woman’s dumb as a headless hen.”

“She has three canaries and they all hate her.”

“Wise birds.”

They fell quiet for a while, save for the rhythmic snap-snap-snap of beans. Sunlight slanted through the shutters in warm, golden strips. Sweat gathered along Eva’s spine, but she didn’t care. Here, in this kitchen, she wasn’t Miss Eva Fairchild of Rosemead. She was just a girl with raw fingers and a friend who made her laugh until her stomach hurt.

Delilah hummed low under her breath, a tune with no name but a rhythm that felt older than the house they sat in. Something low and aching, soft at first, but thick with memory. Eva stopped snapping. “That one again,” she whispered.

Delilah’s eyes didn’t open. “You always ask about this one.”

“Because it sounds like home. Not Rosemead. Real home.”

“It ain’t happy.”

“I don’t mind. Teach me?”

Delilah’s lashes fluttered. For a moment, something hard crept into her expression. “You sure?”

Eva nodded.

So Delilah sang, slow and low, the tune barely more than a murmur over the popping firewood. She taught Eva the notes, and Eva followed, hesitant at first, then stronger, letting her voice dip into minor keys her piano lessons never taught her. The melody curled around them like incense—grieving and proud, born from pain but not surrendered to it.

By the time they finished, the beans were nearly done, and Delilah leaned back, wiping her brow with the crook of her arm.

“You sound better when you ain’t trying so hard to sound proper,” she said. “You got a voice in there somewhere.”

“Think I could make it in the Jubilee choir?”

Delilah gave her a long, dry look. “You got more chance of surviving the hog pen come sloppin’ hour.”

They laughed together, heads bowed, cheeks flushed with heat and sweetness and something else—unspoken but shared between them, old and deep. A love that had no name, not the kind in books or sermons, but fierce and loyal all the same.

Then the kitchen door swung open with a slap.

Eva startled, but Delilah didn’t. She had already straightened, back stiff, hands vanishing into her lap.

It was Miss Alberta, the elderly cook who ran the kitchen like a general’s tent. She gave both girls a look that could peel paint. “Y’all best scatter. Overseer Pike’s makin’ his rounds, and he don’t fancy the sight of Miss Eva slumming it near the cook pots. Nor you, Delilah, laughin’ like you own the place.”

Delilah muttered, “Ain’t laughin’ now.”

Miss Alberta’s frown deepened. “Don’t sass me, girl. I mean it.”

Eva stood, the weight of the Fairchild name suddenly sagging back over her shoulders like a wool shawl in July. She took the last apricot from the basket, turned it in her hands. “I’ll come back later.”

“You always say that,” Delilah said softly.

“And I always do,” Eva replied, and pressed the fruit into her friend’s palm.

Delilah held it a moment, then nodded. “Go on, before he sees you.”

Eva ducked out the back door, bonnet sliding into place, eyes already scanning the yard for signs of Pike’s sharp figure. Behind her, the kitchen’s warmth disappeared like breath off glass. But the song clung to her lips, hummed low against the noise in her chest.

The day had turned cruel already—and the real heat hadn’t even begun.

**

The bell in the yard had just tolled twelve when Eva picked her way down the wagon track, skirts kilted in one hand and a wooden yoke balanced across her shoulders. Two tin canteens hung from each end, sloshing warm water that would taste of metal and well mud but still feel like salvation in this blistering noon. The sun had climbed straight overhead—patient as judgment—bathing everything in a glare so white it seemed to strip color from the world. Even the tallest magnolias at field’s edge offered only slivers of shadow that squirmed like dying things in the dust.

Cicadas sawed at the air, relentless. Eva’s linen bonnet stuck to her forehead, beads of sweat rolling down the nape of her neck to trace the faint ridge of her healing scar. She ignored the sting. Her eyes were fixed on the endless rows where cotton leaves wilted under heat and hands labored slow, bent into shapes pain had carved over years.

She reached the first picking gang—women in patched calico skirts, fingers raw as butcher’s twine. They paused only long enough for quick sips, murmuring their thanks without meeting her gaze. Not gratitude, just courtesy, the brittle etiquette of survival. Eva offered a smile she wasn’t sure anyone saw and moved along.

Farther in, she spotted a lone boy straggling behind the line. Couldn’t have been more than eleven. His sack, half-full, dragged like an anchor; every step looked heavier than the last. Suddenly a tall figure strode toward him—Overseer Travis Pike, boots slicing dust, rawhide whip coiled like a shimmering curse in his right hand.

Pike’s voice cracked across the rows: “Move, Jonah! Sun’s wastin’.”

The boy flinched, knuckled sweat from his eyes, tried to straighten. But weariness dragged at him. His next handful missed the sack entirely, cotton drifting to ground like torn clouds.

Pike’s jaw twitched. “You deaf, boy?”

Eva’s stomach knotted. She quickened her pace, canteens clinking, but stayed on the carriage path—protocol demanded it. She told herself water would help the boy. Water, she had. Authority, she did not.

Pike grabbed a handful of Jonah’s shirt, jerked him upright. The boy’s knees buckled. Pike shook him once, twice—head snapping like a rag doll. Eva heard herself gasp.

“Sir.” Her voice emerged thin, carried by a gust of sweat-scented air. Pike’s head turned, eyes narrowing beneath brimmed hat. Eva forced her feet closer, throat tight. “The boy looks about spent. Let him drink.”

Pike’s lip curled. “Afternoon, Miss Fairchild.” He tipped an imaginary hat with the hand still gripping Jonah’s collar. “Your daddy know you traipsin’ out here on your lonesome?”

“I’m delivering water.” She tried to keep tone polite, measured—delicate threads her father insisted she spin whenever she addressed “the help.” “Jonah’ll pick faster with a swallow.”

Pike released the boy with a shove. Jonah staggered, catching himself on the stalks. Eva knelt, easing a canteen to his lips; he gulped greedily, eyes bright with gratitude and something else—terror, maybe hope.

A shadow fell across her shoulder. Pike hadn’t moved away. He loomed there, whip idly tapping against his thigh. Eva felt each breath he took; smelled whiskey, sweat, and the iron tang of impatience.

“That’s enough,” he said when Jonah had taken three mouthfuls. He yanked the canteen out of Eva’s grasp so hard it splashed her sleeve. “Back to rows.”

Jonah obeyed, head ducked. Eva stood, wiping her hand, anger trembling beneath her ribs—but no words would come that might not cost someone skin.

Then movement flickered two rows over: Delilah abandoning her sack, weaving through cotton like a shadow. She crossed the dust strip between rows, dusting leaves from her skirt. When she reached Jonah, she placed her own half-filled sack on his shoulder and murmured, “We’ll share weight. Keep steady.” The boy’s eyes watered anew.

Pike saw. “Delilah!” He barked the name like it tasted foul. “That your quota you just dumped?”

Delilah’s chin rose, proud. “Sir, he’s near collapse. Can’t pick if he can’t stand.”

“Not your concern.” Pike stepped forward, whip sliding free with a hiss. “You worried about weight, you can haul double after supper.”

“That ain’t right.” The words left Delilah before caution could stop them. Even from yards away, Eva saw her friend’s shoulders stiffen at her own audacity.

Pike’s eyes glinted. He coiled the whip slow, deliberate, like a man savoring a cigar. “Report to the post after sundown, girl. I’ll set your rights straight.”

The row fell silent. Even the cicadas seemed to hush. Delilah’s jaw worked once, but she said nothing further, only nodded—short, sharp—then turned back to her row. Jonah watched her, mouth trembling, before bending once more to his own cotton.

Eva’s pulse thundered. She wanted to shout, to throw the water in Pike’s face, to smash the whip beneath her heel. Instead, she forced her legs to carry her the remaining length of the path, doling out the rest of the canteens like a ghost.

When her basket was empty she returned up the track, Pike’s figure shrinking behind her, whip glinting now and again like a sunlit serpent. Each step away felt like a betrayal. The bonnet’s ties cut into her throat as if reminding her who she was, what she was allowed to be.

At the field gate she stopped, pressing a hand to the scar beneath her shift. The lash-line throbbed, phantom pain echoing Delilah’s coming punishment. She tasted bile and dust. Not again, she thought. Never again.

She looked east, toward the kitchen yard hidden behind the gin house roofs, and west, toward the smokehouse where Pike kept the post and the cat-o’-nine. The sky was a bleached, pitiless blue.

Her father’s voice rattled in memory—Softness will ruin you. Maybe softness would ruin her. Maybe refusing softness, letting that whip fall, would ruin her more.

Eva Fairchild turned back toward the big house, canteens clanking empty, and somewhere in her chest a decision settled sharp and cold as a freshly ground blade.

Tonight, she vowed, Delilah would not face that post alone. Not while Eva still had breath in her body.

**

The light had turned gold and heavy by the time Eva slipped through the door of her bedroom, pressing it shut behind her with a slow, purposeful hand. A distant bell was tolling second supper for the field hands—six sharp clangs that rang flat against the porch columns—and the house had fallen into its usual quiet hour, that odd hush between day’s labor and night’s rituals.

Inside her room, the air was still. Still and scented—rose powder, rosewater, starch. A ribbon of dust hung in the slant of window light, and her lace curtains stirred faintly in a wind that barely reached the floorboards. It was a beautiful room. Always had been. Every bit of it curated like a story told to distant guests: the cherrywood bed carved with garlands and lyres; the velvet fainting couch no one ever used; the bookshelf with unread volumes arranged by height.

Eva stood a moment, arms folded across her middle, staring not at any of it but at the tall armoire in the corner. Her mother’s. Ivory-washed mahogany, floral scrollwork at the corners. She hadn’t opened it in over two years—not since the funeral.

Her fingers trembled as she reached for the handle.

The hinges groaned like a waking ghost. Inside, the scent of cedar leapt up, bitter and faintly sweet. Her mother’s gowns still hung in a row—faded silks and southern taffetas, their sleeves limp with disuse. Between them hung a wide-brimmed mourning hat with a crumpled veil, the kind ladies wore to show their grief without letting it show them.

Eva parted the dresses. At the back of the armoire, behind a stack of hatboxes and an old music folio, sat a shallow velvet drawer—hidden, unless you knew it was there. She had watched her mother open it a hundred times, searching for pins or scent sachets or the tiny flask she thought no one knew about.

It slid open with a sigh.

Inside lay a handful of trinkets: a pearl comb with three teeth missing, a dried corsage from some long-dead ball, two hairpins wrapped in black ribbon. And tucked at the corner—almost forgotten—was a small linen pouch, drawstring long gone. Eva took it carefully, feeling the weight shift in her palm.

She opened it and tipped the contents into her hand. Eight coins. Gold and silver both. Enough, maybe, to bribe a guard or buy a map. Enough to begin.

Underneath the pouch, wrapped in oil cloth, lay a harder object. A clasp-knife, no longer than her palm. Plain bone handle, dulled from age, but the blade still snapped open with a sharp little whisper.

Eva stared at it a moment. Not even with awe. Just a slow-burning certainty, as though the steel had always been waiting for her fingers.

She slid the knife into the pocket hidden in her petticoat seam, re-tied the coin pouch, and slipped it down her bodice. It rested just above her ribs, warm already from the heat of her skin. The place her heart lived.

The mirror across the room caught her reflection like a trap.

She turned slowly to face it.

What stared back looked like a girl anyone might mistake for harmless—a young woman of leisure, skin unweathered, lips soft and parted as if she were about to ask someone for a dance. Her hair, dark and thick, had been combed out that morning and still bore the soft, domesticated waves her aunt liked to enforce with hot tongs and sighs. Her dress was pale blue with ivory trim, clean and pressed, no dust at the hem yet.

But she saw what they didn’t.

She saw the scar, just visible over her left shoulder where the fabric dipped. A curved, pale welt like a question mark carved into flesh. She touched it, slowly, two fingers pressing until the skin beneath remembered pain.

She saw her eyes—not her mother’s soft hazel but something flintier, closer set, darker. Eyes that watched too closely. Eyes that didn’t know how to look away anymore.

“I am not his daughter,” she whispered to the mirror.

Not anymore. Not the Major’s sweet girl. Not the obedient shadow of Rosemead. Not a name scrawled in cursive on a dance card or a prayer list or a headstone.

Something inside her had broken open in that field when she saw Pike name Delilah for punishment. Something had cracked, and it wasn’t just anger. It was grief. And something older than both. A raw, pulsing thing that wanted to defy—not for sport, not for attention—but for mercy. For love. For justice.

If she didn’t act now, if she let that whip fall again tonight… she’d never look in this mirror again without tasting ash.

Eva stepped back from the glass. Crossed the room. Reached beneath her bed for the canvas bag she used when they went traveling. Into it, she packed three handkerchiefs, a jar of honey, a tin box with lye soap, and a coil of rawhide twine. Nothing loud. Nothing pretty. Just tools. Just truths.

By the time the shadows outside had stretched long and the crickets began their song, she was dressed in a plain muslin dress with an old cloak folded under her arm. Her boots were scuffed, her braid tight, her resolve set like a nail driven deep.

She would be there at sundown. Not to plead, not to beg.

To stop it.

**

Rain began as a hush, almost kind—pinpricks tapping the corrugated roof of the gin house, darkening the dirt in small, hesitant constellations. Heat still lay thick over the plantation, and each droplet lifted a ghost of steam from packed earth, filling the air with the smell of wet clay and old blood. Thunder rumbled a warning somewhere out beyond the cypress brake.

Rows of field hands stood in enforced silence, backs bowed, pick sacks empty now but shoulders still aching from the day. They’d been herded here under Overseer Pike’s bark, told to watch. Eyes—tired, wary—moved from the looming whipping post to the sky, as though weighing which fury might crack first.

Delilah was already tied—wrists high, cotton rope digging into dark skin that glistened under the first sheen of rain. Her green head scarf was gone; Eva had no idea where, but without it Delilah looked smaller, younger. Her dress clung damp to her spine. She held her chin high, though Eva could see the pulse hammering at her throat.

Pike paced in front of her, whip coiled in his left hand—a cat-o’-nine with knots like teeth. Water beaded on the lacquered handle. He looked pleased. The kind of pleased that made Eva’s stomach curdle.

Eva pressed herself against the far corner of the gin house wall, hidden by shadow. The knife—her mother’s—rested cold in her bodice. Her palm itched to hold it, but she waited. Lightning spidered distant across a bruised sky, and the field hands shuffled, some murmuring a prayer under breath. Others stared flatly ahead, the way people do when they’ve seen too many horrors to cry at one more.

Pike turned to the crowd. “Let this be lesson,” he drawled. “Slow hands cost coin. Back talk costs hide.” His gaze fell on Jonah—the boy Eva had watered—standing shake-kneed between two older women. Jonah stared at the mud.

Then Pike lifted the whip. Rain fell harder—thick drops, warm as bathwater. The moment stretched thin.

Eva’s heart slammed once, twice. Then she moved.

She stepped from shadow into the half-circle of watchers, cloak flaring like a storm bird’s wing. Mud sucked at her shoes. Someone gasped—she didn’t know who.

“Stop.” Her voice cracked on the first try; she cleared her throat and tried again. “Stop.”

Pike’s head snapped around. Surprise flickered, then annoyance. “Miss Fairchild.” He dragged the syllables slow, oily. “Best go on back to your supper.”

She kept walking until she stood between him and Delilah. She could feel Delilah’s breath behind her—shallow, fast. Eva pulled the knife from her bodice, blade catching a sliver of lightning, and leveled it at Pike’s chest. Rain seethed on the steel.

“You won’t touch her.”

A ripple of shocked whispers rustled through the crowd. Pike’s eyes narrowed. Rain drummed louder on the tin roof; thunder rolled nearer, a deep-throated growl that vibrated the ground.

Pike took one step, whip dangling loose. “Put that toy away. This ain’t a parlor tiff.”

Eva tightened her grip until the ivory handle bit her skin. “My mother’s,” she said, the words trembling but steady enough. “It will do.”

He laughed—short, nothing warm in it. Then his hand snapped out, faster than she’d expected, and caught her wrist. Bones ground together. Pain lanced up her arm; her fingers loosened. The knife tumbled, skittered across wet dirt, landing near a pair of rough boots. Gasps rose, then hush.

Before she could find breath, Pike’s free hand struck—backhand across her cheek. Stars burst behind her eyes. She reeled, mud splashing her hem, taste of iron flooding her mouth. The lash-line on her back screamed phantom pain.

“Stay down,” Pike hissed.

She didn’t. She caught herself, shoulders squaring. A fine trickle of blood slid from her split lip. Rain washed it down her chin, tasted of copper and hard feelings.

Pike lifted the whip again.

“Hold!” A new voice—sharp as rifle crack. Every head turned.

Major Warren Fairchild strode into the yard, hatless, greatcoat snapping in the storm wind. Candle-glow from the house windows haloed him in harsh yellow, making his silver hair gleam like a blade. Two household guards trailed him, rifles cradled.

Major Fairchild’s gaze swept the scene—the gathered workers, rain-sodden, eyes wide; his daughter, mud-splattered, bleeding; the overseer with whip raised—and settled on Eva with a glare that might have turned steel.

“Explain,” he barked.

Pike straightened, whip lowering in salute. “Your girl’s interference, sir. Thought to stop discipline.”

Eva drew a breath. “Father—”

“Silence.” The Major’s voice bore no tremor. Rain pelted his shoulders, but he did not seem to feel it. He eyed the knife glinting in mud. “You bring a blade to my yard, daughter?”

Eva lifted her chin, though her knees shook. “I won’t let you flog her.”

A muscle ticked in his jaw. “That girl belongs to this plantation. Your sentimentality does not override order.” He turned to Pike. “Finish it. And if she gets in the way again…” his gaze sliced back to Eva, “you finish both if need be.”

A collective gasp rippled. Thunder crashed overhead, rolling like a cannon. Pike nodded once, lips thinning. He stepped forward, whip uncoiling.

Time slowed, as if the storm itself held breath.

Eva stood rooted, eyes locked on Delilah’s—glinting beneath rain, wide with terror and plea. Pike’s arm drew back, whip tips rattling.

She tasted lightning on her tongue.

And then—

**

The cat-o’-nine snapped forward—rainwater flinging from its knots like silver seeds—and time cracked open with it. Eva moved without thinking, a wordless surge of body over thought, stepping sideways to cover Delilah, arms flung wide—

—too slow.

The braided tails hissed past her shoulder and bit deep across her back, diagonal from left nape to right hip, eight separate teeth in one burning kiss. Sound vanished. Only white fire filled her skull, bright enough to blind. Then, dragged behind the pain, came sound: a wet thwack, the gasp torn raw from her own throat, the answering roar of thunder rolling over the house roofs.

She didn’t fall. Her knees buckled, but the post was there; she caught herself against it, breath jagged, copper flooding her mouth. Rain struck the fresh wound, each drop a needle. She heard Delilah cry her name—“Eva!”—hoarse, disbelieving.

Pike’s shadow loomed again.

But Delilah wrenched her wrists, rope scraping wood; some miracle slackened and she slipped one hand free. She spun, shoved Eva aside with more strength than panic should grant. Eva stumbled, vision star-spotted, hands slick with her own blood. She turned just in time to see the whip fall a second time—this one square across Delilah’s shoulders.

Crack.

Delilah flinched but didn’t scream. A third lash followed, then a fourth, each report syncopated with thunder’s distant roll. Red bloomed on calico, rain spreading it into dark blossoms. Workers wailed, a woman’s high, keening moan slicing the downpour.

“Stop it!” Eva’s voice shredded on the words. She lurched forward.

An old man—a house butler named Isaac, gray hair plastered to his brow—moved faster. He caught Pike’s raised arm with both hands, fingers digging into the overseer’s slick sleeve. “Enough, sir,” he rasped. “She’ll die.”

Pike snarled like a dog and backhanded Isaac with the whip handle. Bone met bone; Isaac went sprawling, cheek split, mud splashing up his spotless livery. The overseer turned back, readying for another strike.

Eva lunged. Her vision tunneled, but she reached Delilah, threw herself against her friend’s frame, arms shielding already-torn flesh. “No more,” she begged, voice ragged, “please—no—”

A fist closed in her hair. Not Pike’s—her father’s.

Major Fairchild yanked her bodily away, iron grip at her scalp. Pain flared anew along the fresh welt, knees skidding through mud. “You damn fool girl,” he hissed, breath whiskey-hot in her ear. “See what softness brings?”

“Mercy isn’t softness,” she sobbed, clawing at his wrist. Rain mixed with blood, streaking her vision. “It’s—”

He shook her once, hard enough to rattle teeth. “Mercy ruins order.” He shoved her toward a guard. “Get her inside and cleaned. Pike—finish your lesson.”

But Delilah was finished already. The ropes had slipped free entirely; she slumped forward, eyes glazed, lips moving around a prayer too quiet to hear. Her knees folded, body hitting the mud with a soft, awful sound—like wet cloth dropped on a floor.

For a heartbeat the world went still. Even the rain seemed to hesitate, every droplet caught between sky and earth.

Eva stared, helpless, as two crimson streams braided down Delilah’s spine. “Delilah?” Her voice cracked. No answer. Something inside her—something final—split wider than the lash had split skin.

She lunged again, but the guard pinned her arms. “Miss, don’t—”

“Let me go! She’s—” The mud blurred; she couldn’t tell rain from tears from blood.

From somewhere far off came the muffled rush of boots—servants, maybe field hands breaking rank despite the guns. Pike’s whip hung limp now, its knots dripping red into the puddled earth. Even he looked shaken, as if the storm’s roar reminded him how small a man is beside lightning.

Major Fairchild’s fingers dug into Eva’s upper arm. “Look at her,” he growled in her ear, forcing her gaze to Delilah’s crumpled form. “Remember this when your bleeding heart itches to meddle again.”

“I will remember,” Eva said, voice low and scorched. “Every time I look at you.”

His grip tightened, then released. A spark—maybe shame, maybe fury—crossed his weathered face before rain washed it clean. He turned, barking orders for a doctor, for stablehands to carry “the girl” to the quarter infirmary, for Pike to stand down.

Eva sagged in the guard’s hold, strength sluicing away with the stormwater. Her back burned, nerves aflame, but the pain was a small thing compared to the hollow blooming under her ribs.

Delilah lay motionless, lashes spidered with rain, lips parted as though still singing that half-remembered spiritual—soft, minor-key, unfinished.

Thunder shuddered again, closer now, echoing in Eva’s bones. She knew, in that rattling moment, the scar on her back would never heal right. Not because of flesh, but because of what had broken beneath it.

And she knew, too, that tonight’s lash would not be the last traded for mercy on this land—unless she learned to wield something sharper than pity.

Major Fairchild strode toward the house. The guard half-dragged Eva in his wake. Behind them, Pike knelt over Delilah, pressing fingers to a pulse, calling for someone—anyone—to bring rags, for God’s sake hurry.

Lightning forked the horizon, throwing everything into stark silver: the whip abandoned in mud, the overseer’s pale face, Delilah’s blood shining like spilled ink.

Eva’s vision tilted. Before darkness closed in, she whispered the only promise her lips could shape:

“I will not be your daughter anymore.”

Then the world went black and the storm swallowed the yard whole.

**

The rain had broken into a fitful drizzle by the time Eva slipped from the shadow of the smokehouse and skirted the lantern-lit corner of the big house. Her cloak clung to her back, damp and stinging over fresh bandages, but she paid the pain little mind. Two guards dozed on nail kegs outside the carriage shed, rifles across their knees, hats tipped to keep mist from their faces. A half-empty bottle of corn liquor loitered between their boots—courtesy of the kitchen, she’d heard. Bribery had its uses.

She moved silent as smoke, barefoot, each step a whisper over puddled gravel. The shed doors stood ajar, lantern glow pooling across the threshold. She slid through the gap and eased it back until only a sliver of night peered in after her.

Inside smelled of iodine, hay mulch, and the copper tang of drying blood. A single oil lamp hung from a harness peg, its flame low and trembling. Two cots had been unfolded beside the carriage wall. One lay empty save a folded blanket. The other held Delilah.

Eva’s breath hitched.

Delilah looked smaller than she remembered—diminished, as if the lash had stolen inches as well as blood. She lay on her side, back bandaged with torn muslin, skin gray beneath fever sheen. A kerosene stove sputtered at her feet, failing to warm the drafty space. Cicadas hummed in the trees outside, and every so often a raindrop popped against the tin roof like musket fire.

Eva knelt beside the cot. “Lilah,” she whispered, using the childhood shortening she’d rarely dared in daylight. No response. She reached, brushing damp curls from Delilah’s forehead—curls already dull without the bright green scarf.

At the touch, Delilah’s eyes fluttered open—brown gone watery but still sharp enough to know. “Eva,” she rasped, voice paper-thin, yet relieved. “They said you near bled from that cut.”

“It’s nothing.” The lie tasted raw. “Don’t fret me.”

A faint smile curved Delilah’s cracked lips. “Still bossy.”

Eva’s throat burned. She dipped a rag into the water basin, dabbed Delilah’s brow. The lantern threw their shadows large against the carriage’s lacquered flank—two girls huddled in half-light, fugitives from every comfort in the house a stone’s throw away.

“Why’d you step between?” Delilah asked after a silence. Each syllable cost a breath.

“Because mercy’s not softness,” Eva answered, echoing her own vow. “Because I couldn’t bear it one more time.”

Delilah studied her, lashes heavy. “You gonna run, ain’t you?”

Eva swallowed. “Yes.”

A spark of relief crossed Delilah’s face. “Good.” Her gaze drifted to the wall, where an old bridle hung unused. “Help Jonah… and Mercy. The others. They ready.”

“I’ll get them north,” Eva promised, though the words shook with weight.

Delilah’s hand crept beneath the blanket, emerged clutching a crumpled scrap of parchment—stiff with sweat and maybe a little blood. She pressed it into Eva’s palm. “Map,” she breathed. “Eli drew it from talk he heard… safe route through the Cypress, station marks after.”

Eva unfolded it with shaking fingers. Rough charcoal lines—river bends, a swamp cut, three X’s like breadcrumbs. At the edge, a crooked star marked “Ol’ Quaker Widow.” Hope etched in haste.

“I can’t read his chicken scratch,” Eva tried to joke, but tears blurred her vision.

“Follow the creek… keep moss on your right.” Delilah coughed, pain lancing her voice. “Carry them north… sing low for me.”

Thunder grumbled—farther now, rolling toward some distant parish. Eva realized she was humming—the minor-key tune Delilah taught her—soft as breath. The melody filled the shed, settled against rafters, curled around them like smoke.

Delilah’s eyes fluttered. “That’s it…” Her gaze softened, unfocused, as if looking past the rafters to some cleaner sky. “Tell the wind I’m comin’, jus’ takin’ the long way.”

Eva clasped her hand—not the demure grasp taught at finishing lessons, but fists entwined, desperate. Rain tapped the roof like a ticking clock.

Delilah’s last breath slipped out on the tail of a sigh—so gentle that for a beat Eva thought it was only sleep. She waited, counted one, two… nothing.

The lamp guttered. A gust rattled the rafters, and the flame steadied again, but Delilah’s chest did not rise.

Eva bowed her head to their joined hands, a silent wail swelling in her chest but refusing to breach her lips. Tears slid, hot on her cheeks, salt on her tongue. She kissed Delilah’s knuckles once, then rose on trembling legs.

She moved about the shed with a ritual’s gravity—closed Delilah’s eyes, tugged the blanket to her chin, placed the green scarf, found earlier in a wash bowl, across folded hands like a flag. Then she slipped the crumpled map into her own bodice, alongside the knife and coins, where it fluttered against the raw welt on her back. A compass made of paper and pain.

The cicadas droned. Outside, the guards shifted in their sleep, oblivious.

Eva stepped to the door, looked back one last time at the girl who had been laughter, song, sister. “I’ll sing low,” she promised the stillness, voice hoarse. “All the way north. I swear it.”

She slipped into the night. The door sagged closed. And behind her, the lamp continued its lonely glow over the carriage wheels and the quiet body beneath the blanket—testament to a friendship and the debt now written across Eva Fairchild’s heart.

Rain began again, slow and steady, washing the blood from the shed threshold as if trying—futilely—to make the world clean.

**

The slave quarters squatted in a horseshoe of lean-to cabins beyond the smokehouse, lamps doused hours ago to avoid the overseer’s eye. Moonlight bruised the clouds, but beneath the eaves only a single stub of tallow candle glowed, its flame smothered beneath an upturned tin mug with a hole punched in one side—just wide enough for a sliver of light.

Eva slipped through the back door of cabin three, closing it with a breath of air. Inside, seven faces swiveled toward her: worry, grief, resolve all braided into one silence. The candle’s pinprick beam sketched hollows under cheekbones and turned sweat to glass on foreheads.

Isaac—the old butler, cheek swollen and patched with rag—sat in a ladder-back chair, spine straight despite pain. Ruth, broad-shouldered and calm-eyed, rocked baby Samuel against her chest, the infant’s soft hiccups filling pauses between thunder grumbles. Mercy, her younger sister, dabbed Samuel’s nose with a scrap of muslin. Jonah huddled by the hearth, arms hugging his knees, eyes huge. Lanky Eli—Delilah’s cousin and map-maker—stood near the door, one hand hidden in his coat.

All talk stilled when Eva stepped fully into the dim. Mud streaked her skirts; blood, dried now, freckled her collar; her back burned beneath the cloak, but she didn’t shake. She carried Delilah’s map, her mother’s clasp-knife, and a small linen pouch heavier than fear.

Isaac cleared his throat, voice hushed. “Miss Eva—word’s out ’bout Delilah.”

Eva set the pouch and map on the crude table. “She’s gone,” she confirmed, throat raw. “And they’ll do the same to one of you next. We leave tonight.”

Murmurs—half prayer, half shock. Ruth’s eyes brimmed but she held them wide, rocking Samuel. Eli stepped forward, candle-slit catching the determined line of his jaw. “You sure ’bout this, Miss?” He unfolded his hidden arm—cradling a battered Colt revolver. Only two cartridges rattled in the cylinder. “Ain’t no turning back once we bolt that gate.”

“I was sure the moment Pike’s whip fell,” she said. She flattened the map between calloused palms. Charcoal rivers smudged her fingertips. “Eli, you guide, I steer. Forty miles west through Cypress Run. There’s a Quaker widow with a lantern on her porch and a cellar that opens north.”

Jonah swallowed. “That swamp full o’ cottonmouths.”

“Cottonmouths don’t hunt at night if we keep to the high ridge,” Eli replied, voice steadier than his hands. “Moss stay on the right.”

Eva untied the linen pouch, poured eight glittering coins onto the wood. “This buys food when we reach the widow. Guns if we make Vicksburg. Until then we live on what we can carry.” She turned to Ruth and Mercy. “Cornmeal, lard, dried apples—quiet as shadows.”

Ruth rose, baby balanced expertly on hip. “Already hid some in the wash kettle.” Her voice was low forgiveness, though her eyes never left Eva’s face.

Isaac lifted his bandaged hand. “I’ll fetch the mule cart. Old Sorrel’s slow but sure. We lay Samuel in a cotton bin—cover him right with that blanket.”

Mercy produced a vial of laudanum from her apron. “For his cough,” she whispered. “Just a drop. Keep him sleeping.”

Eva nodded gratitude, then knelt by Jonah. “You still got heart to run?”

The boy chewed his lip, gaze flicking to her bloody collar, then to Eli’s pistol. At last, he nodded once, fierce and fast. “For Delilah,” he said.

“For Delilah,” Eva echoed.

Thunder pounded closer, rattling the plank walls. Rain rekindled, drumming steady, cloaking sound—merciful curtain. Eva reached into her bodice, drew the clasp-knife, set it beside the coins. “Steel for anyone who corners us.”

Eli peeled his coat, revealed a burlap sack of extra cartridges stolen from the rifle shed—only a handful, but worth more than gold. He slid them next to the knife. “Bullets for the rest.”

They stood in a circle around the feeble candle, faces carved in amber—runaways and one planter’s daughter, their worlds stitched together by blood and rainwater. Eva swallowed the ache in her chest.

“Swear it,” Isaac said, voice gravel but unbowed. “Each one hold to the others. Live or die together.”

They linked hands—Ruth’s warm, Mercy’s trembling, Jonah’s small and cold, Isaac’s calloused, Eli’s shaking but steadying, Eva’s slick with sweat but determined. Baby Samuel murmured in his mother’s kerchief, little fist finding Ruth’s thumb.

Thunder rolled again—closer, like a drum roll before curtain rise.

“For Delilah,” Eva whispered first.

“For Delilah,” the others answered, six voices and one newborn breath mixing with candle smoke.

They broke apart. Ruth handed Samuel to Mercy, dove for the hidden meal sack. Isaac slipped out the back to fetch the cart. Eli wrapped the pistol in oilcloth, tucked it in his waistband. Jonah gathered bed linens, ripping them into strips for bandages.

A montage in hush: corn cakes wrapped in clean rags; bacon fat scraped into a tin; Eva wiping blood from her neckline with a damp cloth; Mercy cutting a cedar branch to brush tracks behind the cart; Eli blowing out the candle and plunging them into watery darkness save the moonlit crack beneath the door.

Outside, guards laughed at some joke about lightning and cheap liquor—voices slurred, attention drifting. Rain thickened, turning yard mud to syrup—good for covering footprints.

Eva retied her cloak, felt the map flutter against her broken skin like a heartbeat.

Forty miles. One swamp. Six souls and a baby.

Insanity.

She cracked the door. Night pressed cool against her face. She drew a breath deep enough to hurt and stepped into storm, the others falling in behind—coins jingling soft, a newborn’s sigh, and somewhere above, thunder still singing Delilah’s name like a drumbeat to march them north.

**

Night had thinned to a bruise-blue membrane by the time the mule cart nosed into Cypress Run, wheels sucking at the churned mud. Torchless, they moved beneath a vault of moss-draped giants—cypress knees jutting like drowned gravestones, their reflections quivering in black water. The air felt closer here, thick as boiled molasses, and every exhale came back damp against the skin.

Eva walked at the mule’s head, one hand on the rope halter, the other pressed—almost unconsciously—over the fresh welt that cut diagonally along her back. Damp linen stuck to the wound; every step pulled the scab, set a lattice of fire crawling beneath her shoulder blade. She bit the inside of her cheek and kept on.

Behind her, Isaac guided the cart’s tail, boots sinking ankle-deep. Ruth and Mercy trudged flank-side, Samuel nestled in a cotton bin padded with blankets and hush-songs. Jonah carried the makeshift cedar switch, sweeping prints from the softer ruts as Eli scouted ten paces ahead, revolver hidden beneath burlap and faith.

Thunder grumbled far away—muffled now by swamp and distance but still enough to raise gooseflesh. Spanish moss swayed overhead like tattered veils in a chapel no god claimed.

“Log root,” Eli called, voice barely a breath. His hand flashed a signal: stop.

They did, the mule snorting softly. Eva lifted her lantern—shuttered tight so only a knifepoint of light stabbed downward. Mud rippled, then parted around a ridge of bark submerged just beneath the inky water. She shifted the halter; the mule planted careful hooves, climbing over the obstacle with a splash that sounded cannon-loud in the hush.

Eva followed, the sudden cold leaping up her calves and slapping the lash wound. Stars burst behind her eyes. She swallowed a cry, steadying herself on the bridle. Sedge brushed her thighs; unseen things moved in the water—maybe perch, maybe worse. Cottonmouths, Jonah had said. She told herself they were only rumors. Told herself none of them hunted courage.

Samuel gurgled—a baby’s half-dreamed protest. Isaac reached in, stroked his cheek with work-scarred fingers, whispering, “Hush now, little man.” The infant quieted, though Eva could feel the tremor in Isaac’s voice—a man unafraid of pain but terrified of noise the swamp might carry.

Wind rose, tugging moss strands; lightning pulsed beyond dense tree walls, turning the water’s skin momentarily white. Fireflies answered, sparking green gold along the bank, their brief lanterns bobbing like souls seeking exit.

Eli slipped back to them, boots dripping. “High ridge yonder,” he murmured, pointing to a faint rise crowned by palmetto. “Dry ground. We rest a blink, then push.”

Eva nodded, teeth clenched. She led the mule up a gradual slope where roots tangled for footing. The cart lurched but held. At the crest, the earth firmed enough for them to breathe easier.

Ruth dipped a ladle into a canteen, wetting Samuel’s lips. Mercy checked the food bundle, counting biscuits by feel. Jonah sagged to one knee, shoulders quaking with fatigue he tried to hide. Eva wiped sweat from her brow, gaze sweeping the trees behind them—expecting eyes in the dark.

She didn’t see eyes. But she heard them.

A distant baying—dogs.

Three short barks, one long, then silence.

Every heart in the circle tripped.

Jonah dropped the cedar branch. “Bloodhounds.”

Isaac’s jaw flexed. “They took the old skins from the smokehouse, no doubt. Keepin’ our scent fresh.”

Eva’s pulse hammered so hard her wound throbbed in time. She turned to Eli. “How far to the river cut?”

“Two miles,” he answered. “Water’s swift—might break the trail.”

Ruth tightened the blanket around Samuel. “Then we run.”

Eva stepped to the mule, stroking its neck, whispering gratitude for its quiet stoicism. She felt blood—warm, slick—slide beneath her bodice. No time for pain. She tugged the halter, urging forward.

They plunged off the ridge, deeper into the swamp. Bulrushes slapped ankles; frogs chirruped alarm; lightning stitched the sky, each flash carving grotesque shadows of cypress knees and Spanish moss. The air smelled of rot and life intertwined, thick as gospel.

The lash wound tore wider; she felt the trickle curve under her ribs. Still, she kept pace at the mule’s head. Each breath summoned Delilah’s last words—Carry them north… sing low for me. So she sang, under her breath, the minor-key hum threading through the splash of water and the chuff of the mule. Soft. Low. Almost lost beneath thunder.

Ahead, Eli raised his arm—the fork where swamp water narrowed to a creek, silver in starlight. Beyond that, a ribbon of higher earth and, past the next bend, the river that might wash their scent clean.

Behind them, the hounds bayed again—closer now, the sound rolling like drums over black water.

Eva pressed her hand to the map beneath her dress, felt its damp crumple, and willed her legs to move. For Delilah. For Jonah, Mercy, Isaac. For baby Samuel’s first taste of sky unsalted by overseer’s wrath.

The night swallowed their shapes, fireflies bearing witness, while thunder spoke judgment far overhead—and the swamp road uncoiled before them like a dark promise that freedom, like pain, could bleed across skin and still beat on inside the heart.

**

Dawn bled pale over Pine Ridge, turning mist into peach-colored gauze that clung to the treetops. Eva squinted through it, guiding the mule onto higher ground at last. Behind them the swamp receded into a shimmer of black water and dangling moss. Ahead, a narrow dirt track ribboned west between pines, still wet from night rain but blessedly solid.

They were near spent. Eva’s lash wound had soaked a hand-sized blot into her shift; Jonah’s jaw fluttered with each breath; Ruth’s arms trembled round the baby. But the river lay behind, and with it—Eva hoped—the hounds.

Eli scouted twenty paces ahead, revolver tucked in his waistband, map folded in his fist. Sunlight broke through a gap, glinting off the pistol’s cylinder—a single bright wink.

It was that gleam that drew trouble.

A crack of brush, then three shapes stepped from behind a deadfall oak: scarecrow men in sweat-stained hats, coats a patchwork of army blue and buffalo hide. Each carried iron—one a scattergun sawed to the nubs, one a Spencer carbine, the last a revolver with halves of pearl set crooked in the handle. The tallest—red beard, trench coat—spat a rope of tobacco juice into the mud.

“Well, well,” he drawled, eyes sweeping the ragged party. “Morning harvest come early.”

Eli froze mid-step, hand drifting for the revolver. The man with the carbine shook his head, lazy smile. “I’d think twice, boy. Trigger’s half-cocked already.”

Eva tightened her grip on the mule’s halter. Isaac hissed under his breath, shifting to shield the wagon bed where Samuel slept. Jonah clung to the cedar switch, but his gaze darted like a cornered rabbit.

Red Beard sauntered closer, clicking his tongue. “Runaways, looks like—worth ten, twenty a head if you’re healthy. And what’s this?” His gaze fell on Eva, traveling from her mud-spattered bonnet to her worn boots. “A lily trapped among weeds.”

“Let us pass,” she said, voice steadier than she felt. “We have nothing you need.”

“Oh, I beg to differ.” He drew a folded broadside from his coat—poster ink smeared but readable even in dawn’s half-light: $25 per runaway brought alive to Vicksburg Market. Red Beard tapped the page. “Math adds up sweet. And you, sugar?” He leaned in; she smelled whiskey sweat and stale lard. “A little dove like you fetches a different price.”

Eli moved then—quick draw, hammer cocked—fired. Shot went wide, puffing red dirt at the scattergun man’s boots. Carbine roared answer-fire; Eli jerked, a red bloom opening on his shoulder. He went down hard, pistol skidding into pine needles.

Chaos burst.

Jonah dove for the revolver. The scattergun boomed, shredding bark inches from Mercy’s head. Isaac hurled a feed bucket, clanging off Red Beard’s hip. Eva saw a fallen pine limb thick as her wrist; she grabbed it two-handed.

Jonah cocked the revolver—click—jammed. Wet grit clogged the cylinder. Red Beard snarled, backhanded Jonah with his pistol barrel; the boy crumpled, blood spattering pine straw.

Eva swung the branch. It connected with scattergun man’s forearm; the gun thumped into mud, firing a useless blast. She swung again—crack against his temple. He staggered, cursing. She raised for a third strike but a fist—huge, meaty—caught her side. Pain punched through wounded flesh; her breath fled.

The brute—earless, with a neck like a bull—wrenched the branch away, tossed it. Another jerk of his arm and Eva’s knife flew from her belt, landing point-down in the track. He slammed her to her knees. Lightning flashed behind her eyes; warm wetness spread down her shoulder blade.

Nearby, Ruth screamed as carbine muzzle leveled at Samuel’s blanket. She froze, hands up.

Red Beard spat again, brushing dust from his coat. “Enough.” He kicked Eli’s pistol into the brush. “Tie ’em.”

Rope appeared—from saddle packs, from bedroll straps—like conjured snakes. Hands were wrenched behind backs, wrists bound until blood darkened hemp. Isaac’s lip bled anew; Jonah wheezed shallow, knot rising under his eye. Eli clutched his shoulder, teeth buried in his sleeve to dam the groans.

Eva fought until the earless brute wrapped a forearm round her throat and squeezed just shy of blackout. Rope bit her wrists. Pain fired down her spine where lash and fist converged. She tasted dirt, blood, failure.

Red Beard inspected the captives like cattle. “Six head for Vicksburg,” he tallied. “Baby’ll fetch extra on account of he’s young.” He paused before Eva, fingers lifting her chin. “But you, blossom, too fine for the pens. Broken Yoke’s got a dove-house run by a madam pays top coin for fresh white lace.”

Ruth lunged, screaming wordless wrath—but the scattergun man, now steady, clipped her with the butt stock. She fell, still shielding Samuel in her arms.

Red Beard returned to Eva, voice silk-rough. “Count yourself lucky, darlin’. You’ll sleep on feather mattresses, not straw.”

She met his gaze, hatred solid as iron. “I’d rather die on straw.”

He shrugged. “Your choice to make—after she buys you.”

Lightning spidered along the sunrise horizon—quiet, relentless. No thunder, just the silent threat of it.

Ropes lashed captives into a coffle behind the mule cart; reins changed hands. Red Beard mounted a sway-back mare, turned west toward Broken Yoke. Eva stumbled as the line jerked forward, lash wound tearing anew. She looked back once—map still pressed to her breast but useless now, knife abandoned, pine limb splintered. Cypress Run lay behind like a dark promise broken.

She squared her shoulders. Delilah’s song haunted her lips, but she did not sing. Not while chains still rattled. The road ahead smelled of dust, cruelty, and some fate she could not name—only resist.

Morning sun climbed, indifferent, as Pine Ridge swallowed them—and the path to Billy Bonney’s uncertain mercy began.

**

The sun climbed toward its cruel throne, bleaching every color from the world except the red-raw pulse of heat. Dust plumed under the mule cart’s wheels, drifted back over the captives, settled in open wounds and the cracks of chapped lips. Eva trudged at the end of the rope line, wrists lashed to a wagon rail by a length of hemp that rasped skin raw each time the cart lurched over a rut.

Her dress—once pale blue—hung in ribbons, dark with sweat, darker still where the lash wound seeped fresh through linen. Each step tugged the cut; each breath grazed broken ribs. Still she kept pace, chin lifted enough to deny the slump Red Beard wanted to see.

The map lay warm and damp against her chest, hidden in the hollow between stays. She could feel its edges softening with blood and rainwater, ink likely smearing. But it was there. Proof of a road not yet closed. Proof Delilah’s last gift still mattered.

Ahead, Jonah limped beside Ruth and Mercy—women flanking baby Samuel like shields of flesh. Isaac walked nearest the cart shaft, one hand steadying Eli, whose shirtfront crusted with dried shoulder blood. The old butler’s other hand clutched Jonah’s elbow in wordless support. None spoke. Breath was too dear.

The outlaws rode at angles around the procession—scattergun man nursing a bandaged ear, carbine man scanning the horizon, and Red Beard out front, reins slack in one hand, revolver across his thigh. They muttered about water holes, about brokers in Vicksburg versus those in Broken Yoke, about “premium flesh” and “paying extra for quiet ones.” Every so often they glanced back to be sure the coffle still moved, like cowhands checking calves.

They would stop soon, Red Beard had said, at a creek near the state line where cottonwoods leaned over alkaline water. There they’d water the mule, gag the baby if he cried, and push on through the night. No fires. No songs.

Eva licked dust from cracked lips. Her tongue tasted of iron and grit. Behind her teeth, a hum stirred—quiet as first wind through oats. The minor-key tune Delilah had coaxed from her days before. She let it rise, the melody slipping into the rasp of her breath, low enough that only the woman ahead—Mercy—could catch it. Mercy’s shoulders twitched. After a beat, she answered with the second line, under her breath.

Together they stitched the tune between them, a thread of sound too thin for the outlaws to notice but strong enough to keep feet moving. Jonah heard next; his small voice joined on the hum, vibratoed by exhaustion.

Eva closed her eyes for half a heartbeat—saw Delilah’s smile, saw the whip descend—and opened them to the road stretching blank into noon glare. She tasted tears but did not let them fall. If she let them fall, she feared she would never stop.

She fixed her gaze on the far western horizon where cloud towers bruised the blue—thunderheads marching slow, promising rain and maybe lightning’s sharp justice. The rumble reached them, muted by distance, but enough to lift dust from the road in nervous little spirals. The same storm, perhaps, that had watched Delilah die.

“I will never see Rosemead again,” she whispered, shaping words so small they dissolved before reaching Red Beard’s ears. “Not alive, not dead. My grave’ll be farther than my father’s hands can reach.”

No one answered. She didn’t need them to. The vow filled her chest—hotter than fever, steadier than pain. Each step after felt like a nail driven into that promise: north, away, onward.

A vulture circled overhead, black wings carving lazy figure eights beneath the sun. It croaked once, the sound echoing like laughter over empty land. Eva tipped her head, met its shadowed stare, and hummed louder into the thick air.

Storm clouds stacked higher. Lightning echoed silent in their bellies, bright veins against charcoal. Somewhere beyond those clouds lay Broken Yoke, and a saloon called The Cherished Dove—and a man with thunder in his blue eyes who would, in a matter of hours, trade his horse money for a girl with blood on her hem and rebellion in her pocket.

But for now there was only the road, the rope, and the song threading between bruised lungs.

Eva’s voice—cracked and dust-raw—held to the final note, let it tremble, let it live. Thunder answered distantly, a base-note promise that the sky, at least, had heard her oath.

And the coffle marched on, westward, into the waiting storm.