Chapter 9: Midnight Negotiation
The tackle drove the air from Ezra’s lungs in a pained whoosh. They hit the warped floorboards together, a tangle of limbs and momentum. Cass’s hat spun away into the shadows near the wall where the bullet hole marred the wallpaper. Her split lip stung, the coppery taste of blood sharp on her tongue.
Ezra’s knife hand flashed. Not a stab, but a desperate slash aimed at her face.
She caught his wrist an inch from her eye, her fingers clamping down like a vice. The bones ground together under her grip. He winced, but his dark eyes held that infuriating glint of humor, even now.
“Dusk wants you breathing,” Cass snarled, driving her knee harder into his ribs. She wrenched his wrist back toward his shoulder. “But he didn’t say shit about intact.”
A pop sounded in the joint. Ezra sucked a breath through his teeth, the smile not quite leaving his eyes. “Cassidy Vane,” he rasped. “Should’ve known. He’d send the best.”
“Shut up.”
“Or what? You’ll break the other one? Not very conversational.” He went limp under her, a sudden surrender that was more strategy than defeat. “You got a poster on you? Let me see what I’m worth these days. I’m betting it’s gone up.”
Cass didn’t loosen her hold. She could feel the frantic rabbit-beat of his pulse under her thumb. The hallway was quiet except for their ragged breathing and the muffled, tinny sound of a piano from a room below. Lavender and gunpowder. Her eyes scanned the dim corridor. No doors opened. The brothel knew better.
“Twenty thousand,” she said.
Ezra whistled, low and appreciative. “He’s pissed. That’s ‘alive only’ money, darlin’. Means you’ve got to be careful with me.”
“It means I get a bigger bonus if you can walk onto the train.” She adjusted her weight, finally pulling his knife free from his slackening fingers. It was a nice piece—bone handle, sharpened to a wicked edge. She tossed it behind her. It skittered across the oak and vanished into a dark room with a half-open door.
"You're not one of Dusk's," he said. His voice was steadier than it had any right to be for a man with a knee in his ribs. Slightly hoarse. A voice that was used to talking its way through things and was currently deciding if that option was still available.
"No," Cass said.
"Then who—" He stopped. Something shifted in his expression. A recalibration, quick and private. "Colt sent you."
Cass said nothing. Let the silence do the work.
He laughed. It came out half as a wince from the pressure on his ribs, but genuine underneath it — the laugh of someone who had just found the situation darkly funny. "Of course she did," he said, more to the ceiling than to Cass. "Of course. I send her a note asking for silence, and she sends me a bounty hunter." A pause. "Actually, that's very her."
“Jess,” he repeated, softer. A smile touched his lips, but it was different now—softer, edged with a memory. “She still wear those ridiculous lace gloves in the saloon? Like she’s handling precious artifacts instead of whiskey glasses?”
“Don’t.” The word came out flat and final.
“Don’t what? Remember her?” Ezra’s gaze was penetrating. “She remember me?”
Cass ignored the question. She took a short length of rawhide cord from her pocket. “Hands out. Wrists together.”
He obeyed, still watching her. “He’ll kill me, you know. Dusk. The second he has what he wants. A train ride with you is just a delayed execution with better scenery.”
“Not my problem.” She looped the cord with efficient knots.
“It could be.” His voice was a murmur now, for her alone. “The ledger isn’t what he says it is. It’s not just land deals and bribes. It’s names. Judges. Mayors. The new railroad commissioner. It’s a permission slip. He doesn’t want it back to cover his tracks—he wants it back so he can keep laying new ones.”
Cass paused for a fraction of a second, the knot half-tied. She saw it then—a flicker of genuine fear beneath the charm.
It was gone as quickly as it appeared, replaced by a wry twist of his mouth.
“Sounds like his problem,” Cass said, and finished tying the knot with a hard, deliberate yank. The rawhide bit into his skin. “And yours. Not mine.” She stood up, hauling him to his feet by his bound wrists. He stumbled, then found his balance, facing her.
The gaslight caught the sheen of sweat on his temple. His eyes tracked past her shoulder, down the hall. Looking for an exit that wasn’t there, or for someone who wasn’t coming. “Twenty thousand is a lot of money,” he conceded. “But what’s it worth if handing me over starts a war? Dusk gets that ledger, he owns this territory. You think the peace holds then?”
“I think I get paid before the war starts.” She retrieved her hat from the shadowed corner, dusted it off, and settled it back on her head. The felt was warm, familiar. A piece of her own armor clicked back into place.
She gave his bindings a final, testing pull. Secure. He was a talker, a charmer, a liar. Dusk’s warning about the ledger being more than money echoed, but it was just static. A distraction. The weight in her pocket was the advance from Colt’s agent, solid and real.
“Let’s move.” She prodded him forward with the barrel of her drawn revolver, pressed low against his spine. “Nice and quiet. We’re going out the back.”
“People saw me come in,” he muttered, but he started walking, his boots scuffing the polished wood. “They’ll have seen you follow.”
“Then we’ll be gone before they decide to do anything about it.” The hallway seemed longer now, each groaning floorboard a potential alarm. A door cracked open a sliver ahead, a single curious eye in the dimness. Cass met the gaze, her own flat and warning. The door clicked shut.
They reached the narrow servants’ staircase at the rear. The air turned cooler, smelling of stale tobacco and damp linen. Cass kept the revolver steady, her other hand on his shoulder, guiding him down each steep, uneven step. His body was tense, a coiled spring waiting for a miscalculation.
He provided it on the last turn. He buckled, pretending to trip, his full weight suddenly dropping and twisting into her. It was an old trick, clumsy from the bound wrists, but it knocked her off balance for one critical second. His elbow came up hard for her throat.
She saw it in the slant of his shoulder, a fractional telegraph. She jerked her head back, the blow grazing her chin instead. Pain bloomed bright and sharp. Her response was instinct, brutal, and without hesitation. She didn’t shoot him. She pistol-whipped him across the temple with the revolver’s heavy grip.
The crack was sickeningly loud in the cramped stairwell. Ezra crumpled, slumping against the wall, his eyes rolling back for a second before focusing with dazed effort. A slow trickle of blood welled from his hairline.
Cass pressed the now-warm barrel of the gun under his jaw, forcing his head up. “Try that again,” she said, her voice a low scrape. “I will kneecap you and drag you to the station. Dusk didn’t specify your legs had to work.”
He blinked, wetting his lips. The charming liar was gone. In his place was just a man cornered, breathing hard, tasting his own blood. “Understood,” he rasped.
She hauled him up again, ignoring the new stickiness on her hand. The back door was just a heavy, unpainted slab of oak barred from the inside. She slid the bolt, kicked it open onto a moonlit alley littered with crates and the sour stench of a nearby outhouse.
The night air was a cold slap. Cass scanned the shadows, every sense pricked. A cat yowled from a rooftop. A bottle shattered in the distance. No immediate threat. Just the normal, sleeping filth of Rose Creek.
She pushed him out ahead of her. He stumbled into the alley, catching himself against a rain barrel. The water inside sloshed, a loud disturbance in the quiet.
“We walk to the livery,” she said, holstering her gun and taking a firm grip on the rawhide between his wrists. “You make a sound, you so much as cough wrong, our deal changes. You’ll be breathing, but you’ll wish you weren’t.”
He looked at her then, really looked, and she saw the calculation finally settle into something like resignation. She wasn’t Dusk’s dog. She was something else—a force of nature with a price tag. And he was the price.
“Colt always did have a taste for efficiency,” he said quietly, turning to face the dark mouth of the alley.
Cass didn’t answer. She just started walking, pulling him along behind her into the deeper darkness between the buildings, toward the horses and the train and the money that waited at the end of the line. The ledger, the war, the history with Jess—none of it mattered. It was still not her problem.