Chapter 4: How it works
The room above the saloon was smaller than Cass had expected, and quieter than she liked. It held a narrow bed, a washstand with a chipped pitcher, and a window that looked out onto the alley. The walls were thin enough that she could hear the low thrum of the saloon below, a constant reminder of the world she was now tethered to. She’d spent the day checking her gear, cleaning her sidearm with a methodical rhythm, and thinking about the Fuller silver mine. About Ezra Shale running toward something, and Harlan Dusk’s men running toward him.
When the sun dipped below the rooftops, painting the alley in long, cold shadows, she went downstairs.
The Colt Saloon hummed with the low, smoky breath of another evening. The air was thick with the smell of fried meat, tobacco, and the sweet, burnt-sugar scent of spilled whiskey. Cass shouldered her way to the bar, getting a nod from the same barkeep who’d brushed her off days before. He slid a glass of amber whiskey toward her without a word. She paid, took a slow sip, and let her gaze travel the room.
It landed on Jess.
She was sitting at a small, round table in the corner, half-shrouded in the gloom between two wall sconces. She wore a different gown tonight, a deep plum color that seemed to drink the light. In her hands was a deck of cards, which she shuffled with an idle, practiced fluidity. But her eyes weren’t on the cards. They were fixed on a man standing at the far end of the bar.
He was big, with the slab-faced look of someone who solved problems with his shoulders. His clothes were trail-dusted, and he tapped the bar with a thick finger, his impatience a visible vibration.
“I’m tellin’ you, I got business,” the man said, his voice carving through the din. “I need to see Colt. Now.”
The barkeep, polishing a glass with a stained rag, didn’t look up. “Don’t know a Colt.”
“The hell you don’t. Everyone knows this is the place. Colt’s Saloon. I need information. I’m willin’ to pay.”
“You and everyone else,” the barkeep said, his tone flat as prairie land. “Drink or move on.”
Cass watched, fascinated. The ballet of it. The man’s frustration was a tangible heat, but the bartender was a stone. More interesting were the other patrons. A grizzled miner at a nearby table took a deliberate sip of his beer, his eyes sliding away. Two card players paused their game for a fraction of a second, sharing a look that wasn’t shared with the stranger. No one pointed. No one even glanced toward the corner where Jess sat, calmly shuffling her deck.
They know, Cass realized. Of course they knew. The regulars, the town’s lifers—they knew exactly who Colt was. Their silence wasn’t ignorance; it was a pact. A wall. It was why the myth of a scarred, unseen man persisted. It was the perfect cover, built not on lies, but on a community’s collective side-eye.
The big man’s face darkened. He leaned over the bar, getting into the bartender’s space. “Listen, you old fossil—”
“You’re spilling my peace,” the bartender said, finally looking at him. The old man’s eyes were like chips of flint. “The door’s that way. Your feet know how to use it.”
For a second, violence hung in the air, thick as the smoke. Cass’s hand rested loosely near her hip, calculating angles. But the big man just snarled, shoved himself back from the bar, and stalked toward the entrance. He threw the swinging doors open with a crash of wood against wood and vanished into the deepening twilight.
A normal, conversational murmur seeped back into the room. The miner called for another beer. The card players resumed their game. The bartender went back to his glasses.
And Jess’s eyes, cool and green, found Cass’s across the room. She didn’t smile. She simply gave the deck in her hands one final, crisp shuffle, cut it, and laid it neatly on the table. An invitation.
Cass finished her whiskey, the burn a familiar comfort, and wove through the tables. She pulled out the chair opposite Jess and sat, her back to the wall, her hat still on.
“Charming fellow,” Cass said, nodding toward the door. “He seemed like a real conversationalist.”
“They usually are, when they don’t get what they want,” Jess replied. Her voice was a low hum, barely audible over the saloon’s noise. “He’ll be back in an hour, or he’ll send a friend. They always do. The impatient ones are rarely the successful ones.”
"How many come through like that?"
Jess considered the question with the same unhurried patience she brought to everything. "Enough," she said. "Not all of them are looking for me. Some of them are looking for other things — other people, other information. The saloon has a reputation." A small pause. "Colt has a reputation. They're not quite the same reputation, but they point in the same direction."
"And they all leave empty-handed."
"Most of them."
Cass held her gaze. "Most."
Jess reached for her glass — that slow, deliberate reach, the drink lifted and set down again with the same quiet precision — and said nothing. Let the word sit there between them in the lamplight, doing its own work.
Cass watched the doors still swinging faintly in the man's wake. Then she looked back at Jess. "Should I be jealous?"
Jess blinked. Slowly. "I beg your pardon."
"My informant." Cass tilted her head toward the door. "Half the territory seems to want her. We've barely had an arrangement two days and already I'm sharing."
She said it flat, the way she said most things — dry enough that it could have been nothing at all, just an observation, just Cass being Cass. She'd half expected Jess to deflect it. To fold it back into business, into the cool transactional register she seemed to conduct most of her life in.
Instead, something happened to Jess's face.
It was subtle — it was always subtle with her, everything calibrated, nothing accidental — but it was there. A loosening, almost imperceptible, at the corners of her mouth. The particular quality of someone setting something down they'd been carrying for a while without realising it. Her head tilted, just slightly, and her green eyes moved over Cass with an attention that was different from the assessing look she'd worn all evening. Warmer. More deliberate.
"Jealous," she repeated. Tasting the word. Deciding what to do with it.
"Professionally," Cass said. "Obviously."
"Obviously." The word came back so dry it was almost dust. Jess reached for her glass and took a slow sip, her eyes never leaving Cass's face over the rim. When she set it down she said, with the composure of someone delivering a verdict: "You were watching me for ten minutes before you crossed the room."
Cass opened her mouth.
"Don't," Jess said pleasantly, "tell me you were watching the door."
A beat. Cass closed her mouth.
The corner of Jess's mouth curved — properly this time, not the barely-there suggestion of one but the real thing, slow and certain, like something rising to the surface it had been kept from. It changed her face entirely. Not softened it, exactly. Illuminated it. The kind of smile that knew precisely what it was doing and had decided to do it anyway.
"You have exactly one informant in this territory," she said. "She is, I'll grant you, rather difficult to replace." A pause, unhurried, timed with the ease of someone who had learned long ago that silence was its own kind of punctuation. "I think you'll manage the sharing."
Cass looked at her. At the smile, still there, still doing what it was doing to the room. At the green eyes bright with something that hadn't been in them yesterday — or maybe it had been, underneath everything, and Cass simply hadn't had the angle on it.
She felt the unfamiliar pull of being caught off guard by something she should have seen coming, and found she didn't entirely mind it. That was the second time in as many days she'd had that feeling at this table. She was starting to suspect it wouldn't be the last.
"Difficult to replace," Cass said. "That a warning or a sales pitch?"
"Mm." Jess lifted her glass again, considering. "Yes."
Cass laughed — a short, genuine thing, surprised out of her before she could think better of it. It landed in the space between them and Jess watched it happen with that warm, unhurried attention, the smile not growing but not leaving either, settled into her expression like it had always been there and had simply been waiting for the right moment to surface.