Chapter 6: Unspoken Reasons
The doorway held her up. Cass leaned into the frame, the wood grain pressing against her shoulder blade through her shirt. She kept her eyes on the opposite wall, on a faded lithograph of a riverboat that had never sailed these waters. Anything but the woman by the window.
Jess stood with her back to the room, to Cass, facing the gray light seeping through the silk-draped glass. The corset was a complicated thing of cream linen and leather lacing, hanging open from her shoulders to the dip of her spine. It revealed a topography Cass hadn’t expected. Not softness, but history.
Scars. A latticework of them, pale and raised, crisscrossing her shoulders and lower back. Some were thin and precise, the work of a blade. Others were wider, rougher, the kind left by a whip or a fall onto something mean. They mapped a life lived long before silk gowns and saloon ownership, a story written in old pain. The morning light caught every ridge, turning them silver.
Cass’s throat tightened. She looked away, back to the riverboat. The room still smelled of them—of sweat and lavender, of whiskey on warm skin. The bed was a tangle of sheets. The memory of the last few hours was a physical weight in her muscles, a quiet hum in her blood. It had been a collision, wordless and urgent, a deal sealed in a language far older than the one they’d used over the velvet-covered table.
“I ride at first light,” Cass said. Her voice came out rougher than she intended, scraped raw from disuse. She cleared it, thumb worrying the folded edge of Ezra’s note in her pants pocket. The paper was soft now, warmed by her body.
Jess didn’t turn. Her fingers worked the laces of the corset, pulling them taut with a practised, deliberate rhythm. Each tug was a small, firm sound in the quiet.
“I know you do,” she said. Her tone was unchanged—that same unhurried calm, the one that had whispered secrets into the dark. But it was different now. Cass could hear the difference. It was no longer the voice of Colt, the informant. It was just Jess. And that was infinitely more dangerous.
“I’ll be back,” Cass said. The promise felt too big for the room. “With your cut. You have my word.”
At that, Jess half-turned. The corset was still loose, gaping at her front. Her hair was a mess of honey waves against her skin. She looked like a painting someone had left out in the rain, all the careful lines blurred. Her green eyes found Cass’s, and they held no artifice, no saloon-owner’s calculation. Just a stark, unnerving clarity.
“My cut,” she repeated, a ghost of a smile touching her lips. It wasn’t happy. “That’s the transaction, isn’t it?”
Cass said nothing. What was there to say? The note in her pocket was a transaction. The money would be a transaction. Last night… that had been something else. A line crossed without either of them drawing it first.
Jess finished with the laces, tied them off, and reached for a shirt draped over a chair. She pulled it on, covering the scars, the skin, the evidence. As the fabric settled, the saloon keeper seemed to reassemble herself within it. The ethereal rawness receded, tucked away behind a buttoned cuff.
“Dusk won’t have sent just one,” Jess said, her voice all business again, though her eyes hadn’t quite hardened. “The paper on Ezra is open. That means every mercenary, debt-collector, and desperate soul between here and Redrock is scanning the horizon. They’ll be watching the known trails. The water holes.”
“I don’t use the known trails,” Cass replied. She pushed off the doorframe, adjusting her hat. The motion felt like putting on a helmet. “And I find my own water.”
“Ezra will be at the old assay office in Copper Ridge. It’s a ruin. He thinks it’s clever. He’s wrong.” Jess fastened the last button on her shirt. “It’s the first place any half-competent hunter would look. Which means he’s either stupid, or he’s setting a trap.”
“Or he’s got no other options,” Cass finished. She’d come to the same conclusion hours ago, lying awake in the dark, feeling the rise and fall of Jess’s breathing beside her. A man on the run made mistakes. A desperate man made worse ones.
Jess walked to her, stopping close enough that Cass could see the flecks of amber in her green eyes, smell the faint jasmine on her skin from the oil she’d rubbed on her wrists last night. She reached out, not touching Cass, but straightening the lay of her vest collar. A useless, intimate gesture.
“The ledger he mentioned,” Jess said quietly, her fingers now brushing the leather near Cass’s throat. “The names. If it’s real… it’s worth more than any bounty on Ezra’s head. It’s worth more than this whole town.”
“I know what it’s worth.”
“Do you?” Jess’s gaze was penetrating. “It’s not just paper. It’s a target. On you. On me. On anyone who touches it. You bring that back here, you’re not just closing a job. You’re lighting a fuse.”
Cass caught her wrist. Not hard, but firm. The skin was warm, the pulse beneath it steady. “You gave me the note. You knew what it was.”
“I did.” Jess didn’t pull away. “I also know what you are. Reckless bravery and sharp sarcasm.” She said it like a quote, a profile she’d memorized. “Just don’t let the bravery get in the way of the win. I’d hate to have to find a new bounty hunter.”
A real smile, then, cracked across Cass’s face. It felt strange. “Jealous?”
“Practical,” Jess countered, but a corner of her mouth lifted in answer.
Cass released her wrist. The connection broke, and the morning chill rushed into the space between them. She turned for the door, her boots sounding too loud on the floorboards. Her hand was on the knob when Jess spoke again, her voice now coming from by the window.
“Cass.”
She stopped. Didn’t look back.
“The sheriff up in Redrock,” Jess said. The words were careful, measured. “If he’s on Dusk’s ledger… he isn’t just dirty. He’s vicious. He has deputies. They’re not lawmen. They’re a private militia. They disappear people who ask the wrong questions.”
Cass absorbed the information. Nodded once. “Noted.”
"Tweenty percent," Jess said.
The corner of Cass's mouth pulled up. Just barely. Just for a second. "Tweenty percent," she agreed.
She pushed off the doorframe. Started down the hall. Her boots were quiet on the floorboards, unhurried, and Jess stood in the doorway of her room and watched her go the way she'd watched her cross the saloon floor the night before — with the same attention, the same stillness, the same private acknowledgement of something she wasn't going to name yet.
At the top of the stairs Cass paused. Didn't turn around.
"Take care of yourself," she said. "While I'm gone."
Then she went down the stairs, and the saloon swallowed the sound of her, and Jess stood in the doorway for a moment longer than she needed to.
She went back to the window. Watched the street below begin its slow morning arrangements — the light coming in low and gold, the dust not yet risen, everything briefly clean before the day got its hands on it.
After a while she saw Cass emerge from the building below, saddlebag over one shoulder, hat pulled low, moving toward the stable with the purposeful ease of someone who had a direction and intended to follow it.
Jess watched until she was out of sight.
Then she turned back to her room, and her desk, and the ledger she kept in the locked drawer, and the ordinary work of being Colt. She had a saloon to run. She had information to keep and routes to maintain and a name to protect.
She had thirty percent coming.
She told herself that was what she was waiting for.