Aiden looks to me, an understanding passing between us before I stand slowly, grab my father’s gun from the table by the door, and walk outside, whistling a familiar tune as I take the final ten paces that leave me standing over another face I already know.
“Please,” Zeke says as he looks up at me. “You have to help me.”
Judging by the state of him, Aiden shot him in the stomach after he’d shot him in the arm. A slower, more painful wound than the one he’d granted the bounty hunter, but a death sentence all the same.
“Please,” Zeke says again. “Please help.”
“You seem to be quite outside your jurisdiction, Deputy,” Isay to him, and when he only blinks up at me, I continue on. “But since you’re here, perhaps you can finally answer some questions for me. Let’s start with…did you arrange to have my father killed?”
He doesn’t answer. Not until I press my boot to the wound on his arm. He screams but he starts talking.
“Yes, yes, I did. I had to. You don’t understand—”
“Oh, I think I do.” I press harder with my heel, but let up so he can answer after I ask, “Did you know they were going to come to the stable?”
“Wasn’t—wasn’t supposed to be… Was only supposed to be Elliot—supposed to frighten you so…so you’d decide to leave.”
“You wanted me gone bad enough that you sent Elliot toscareme. Because I wouldn’t give up?”
“You—you were—said you were still going to the farm and…you couldn’t be there. When the… Needed you to be gone when the new owners came. They—they wanted me to kill you.”
God, Aiden was right. He was right about all of it. “Who arethey?”
“The men that…sold the land to your family. They’re dangerous people. Criminals.”
“So if they wanted you to kill me, then why didn’t you?”
He actually has the nerve to look insulted. “Kill a woman? I’m—I’m not a monster.”
I stare at him, long enough to still see the prince of Preston I’d known before. “You look like one to me. How many people? How many lives have you ruined to line your own pockets, Zeke?”
“You don’t—you don’t understand how it is…out here. There’s no stopping it.”
“I’ll bet you didn’t try that hard.”
“You have to…Please, help me. I tried to help you.”
“You had my father killed. You sent men to attack me. You tried to take one of the people that I love from me. How exactlywere you trying to help me?”
“He took—he’s a thief. He took money from me. Money I owed them. They’ll kill me—”
“What was that you said about my father, Zeke? That he should have understood therisks?”
“No, I—you don’t understand. I was…I was only trying to get you to go home. You don’t belong out here.”
“I know exactly where I belong,” I tell him. “When did you get to the stable that night? Did you get there in time to see what your men did to me? What they weregoingto do? Did you know when you put us on your poster?”
He’s silent. And that’s answer enough as I raise the gun and he flinches away.
“Don’t—don’t do this,” he begs me. “It was only supposed to be—Jake wasn’t supposed to… He was supposed to go after the thief. But when I left the saloon, I saw him heading there and I—”
“And you hid like a coward while I was attacked, didn’t you? You hid while your friends were killed.”
“I—there was nothing.” He raises his hand toward me, sees it painted in his own blood. “Please. Your father…I knew him. Before he died. I’m sorry for what happened to him. He was a good man. He wouldn’t want this for you. He wouldn’t have wanted you to…to end up with them.”
“Unfortunately for you, it’s not his choice. Or yours. It’s mine.”
I look back at Aiden and Cypress, see them watching me as I remember another question I’d asked that day we arrived at the cabin. About why Aiden would be the one to kill, why he wouldn’t let Cypress do it if he believed it would damn him. I’ve never gotten the chance to ask him myself.