Holding something’s life in your hand like the warm weight of a gun was a terrible and awesome thing. To know that in just an instant it could be gone, snuffed out as a flame in the wind. And that it would be your doing in the end. You who caused this person, this living, breathing thing, to die.
Ba-dum. Ba-dum. Ba-dum. Ba-dum.
Four little hearts beat around her, bodies pressed against her sides and hands tangled in her hair, the sound of soft, quiet sleeping filling the air. Sometime near to midnight the door to her room had creaked open and, sleepless herself, Viktoria had risen to find her eldest daughter with tears on her cheeks. She had pulled her into the warm comfort of her quilts and sheets and soon after the others had followed, the twins snuffling and shuffling their feet, little Rosie crying “Ma” from her crib.
She knew she shouldn’t allow it, that it was a bad habit to start, but it helped her sore heart just as much as it did theirs. The bed always felt too empty without the warmth of her husband, without the rumble of his snore or the steady beat of his heart.
Ba-dum. Ba-dum. Ba-dum. Ba-dum.
She could remember the first night they had spent in the bed. How panic had sparked and then died as he’d laid his arm over her but then had done nothing more as snow fell and blew and the world outside had gone white as bone.
She could remember introducing him to their first child in this bed.
Could remember how they’d made the others.
A flush crawled up her neck but her chest felt hollow as a drum, like somehow when he’d gone her husband had taken everything within her with him. Like he had been all of the best of her and that all that had made her whole and happy had dried up and blown away in the wind.
But then that wasn’t quite true, either.
She had her babies and in each of them was a piece of him. Isabella with her wolf eyes, the boys with their red hair and courage. And there was little Rosie too, so unexpected and so different, but in each smile or laugh was her father.
Viktoria smiled sadly as she ran her fingers through William’s curls then made herself close her eyes, because tomorrow was another day to live, and to live for her children.
He never should have done what he did. It was a fool mistake fueled by anger and drink and stupidity. Now there was someone following him, someone determined, and he could feel his own death like a rope burned neck.
“Where would you hide out here,” Cristo asked, blinking out at their scorched surroundings. “Where would you go? When would you stop running?”
The woman slanted him a look, eyes narrowed against the driving sand. She had been thinking over those very questions for the past two miles. She wouldn’t stop, not if she didn’t have to, but if she did…
“I would stop when I knew someone was following.”
The woman in black’s shadow had grown longer by the length of a man and a horse and a dog, and getting used to it was not a thing that came easily. Seven years she had been alone and never once had she sought to change it. Yet there was the drifter with the sad brown eyes following along behind her, scowling at her back when he thought she wasn’t looking.
