by Amy Faye
“Missus Reede,” he said. He put the emphasis on the name. Reede.
I yelped. If there was a response from the stable boy, I didn’t hear it.
“You startled me,” I said. I forced a smile onto my face. That was easier than any other form of lying. Pretending to be happy to see him.
“You told me that you’d never heard that name before.”
The answer came to me in an inspired instant. I hoped to be able to play it right.
“I did tell you that.”
“Now you’re telling other people you’re his wife, is that right?”
“It’s complicated,” I said. The easiest way to lie is to tell the truth, but only parts of it.
“Oh? Tell me about it.”
“My mother, she didn’t approve.”
“Oh? And your father?”
“Gone,” I said vaguely. I shrugged and looked away.
He pursed his lips. “And so you ran off?”
“So I didn’t want to get him arrested because of my mother.”
The detective looked at me like he was weighing my words. Then he nodded. “Alright,” he said. “I get you.”
“So you’ll leave me be?”
“Your mother will get a very detailed report.”
“So…”
“I didn’t find you,” he said.
I let out a breath. He walked away. His hand touched his hip again. The cloth of his jacket moved as he swayed. It outlined something hard and metal and sitting right where his hand would reach. I shivered. Then the man behind led a bay mare out the door and said “Missus Reede?” and I turned to finish my business.
Eleven
The dust felt like an old friend, now. After another week on the road, there were three things were happening, and I wasn’t expecting any of them.
First, I was finally starting to feel at home on the back of a horse, which wasn’t something that I generally thought of.
Second, I was starting to get used to having dust in every crack and crevice of my body. It wasn’t supposed to feel like something that I could ultimately deal with given time. Sand was one of the worst things I’d experienced in my life, and it ought to have been that way for the rest of my life.
Somehow, those two things had been unexpected, but it made sense. Once someone deals with something long enough, they start to get used to it. It’s just reality. Christ was in the desert for forty days; I was only in it for ten before we found a new place to settle down.
At least, that was what I thought was going to happen. Which led to the third thing that surprised me. I’d thought that I would go crazy if things didn’t change with Baron Euler. If I didn’t either scratch the itch or get over it then I wasn’t sure how I was going to cope with it. And a week later, I wasn’t sure how I had coped with it.
But I had. The twisting feeling in my gut that told me that I wanted to do something very, very wrong, didn’t go away. It wasn’t going to, and I knew it. We both knew it, deep down in our bellies.
It didn’t make a difference, though, because just like the sand and the saddle between my thighs, I had just… gotten used to it. It was there, all the time. I would look over and I’d see him watching me with that predatory expression. And then I would feel something in my belly, a feeling that I knew to be desire in spite of how much I wanted not to be feeling it.
And then I would move on with it. Keep the horse moving, look away, and remind myself that I wasn’t going to be making the first move. Or the second move, for that matter. Or any move. I told myself that was what I wanted, for the whole thing to never go anywhere. Eventually, I would be more than used to it; it would be part of the background of my life and I could simply move on completely.
The ride was everything. I didn’t know where we were going, and Euler didn’t seem interested in telling me. He didn’t seem interested in telling me to leave, but it seemed to me that if I did leave, he wouldn’t be particularly upset.
More than anything I disliked that. If he needed me desperately, and then I had to give into him, I knew that I would be able to get over it. The sand had taught me that the simple reality is, you can get used to most things. I already understood that, deep down.
But if there was anything to him other than a spanking and smoldering looks, then he didn’t let me see it. And then we got to Perdition. The sign was mostly destroyed by time. Nothing like the last places that we’d stopped. It was like nothing I’d ever seen before, honestly.
I thought that it was a ghost town before he announced, still riding without a single change in tempo or pace, “We’re here.”
“Where is here?”
He turned and raised an eyebrow. I realized that the town wasn’t quite abandoned. There was a small population, and they looked tired and wrung-out. I’d seen plenty of people with that look. People with a hard life and no particular solution for making it any better.
“Home,” he said. “Back to base.”
I looked around a little more. There were unrealized depths to Perdition. I would learn about them later, though, through little stories that Baron would tell me. The long and short was that my read was closer to accurate than I’d realized at first.
It was a ghost town. Baron and his gang had found the place after it was abandoned. There was supposed to be a salt mine, but the hole had dried up almost immediately, and the town that had started to form itself around the mine spread out and went their separate ways.
The folks I did see were mostly men. Perhaps two men to every woman. The other thing that weighed on me as we pulled up the horses to a hitching post, was that there was some kind of mood in the air. People didn’t want to look at me. Or maybe it was Baron that they didn’t want to look at.
“Seems tense,” I said. “Is it always like this?”
He looked over at me with those sharp eyes of his. The gaze seemed to pierce my gut. I hated it because I couldn’t fight it.
“No,” he said finally. “It’s a quiet little place. But this feels a little different.”
I shivered. There was a look in his eyes that I didn’t like. It was a look that fit on his face all too well.
“Stay close to me,” He muttered. “And let me do the talking, will you?”
“I always do,” I answered. Which was true, if you ignored times that he shouldn’t have known about in the first place.
“Make sure you do.”
Then he pushed open the door to the bar that we stood outside of. I stepped in behind him. The doors swung shut on their own.
The eyes around the room were tense, too. Like they weren’t sure how they were supposed to react to the new development.
“I’m back,” Baron said. Like it was a challenge.
“Welcome home, boss,” said one. Another looked at him. There was a careful lack of anything in that expression. But it meant something. I could guess what it was: something was going on, and it was something that they didn’t want to let Euler in on. I guessed that it was something that they couldn’t afford to let him in on.
Which I guessed meant one thing:
Mutiny.
Twelve
“How are things?”
“Going well.”
“Yeah? Any rumors?”
I watched the whole conversation like there was something about to happen. In my gut, I was afraid of finding out that I was right. That there was something about to happen. And I was far, far too close to the action for comfort. I tried to push myself further behind Baron. His bulk managed to cover most of my body.
“Nope,” said the second guy. The first one, the one who had called Euler boss, was silent. I guessed that had been the first and biggest of the meanings of what the man had said. “Just the wind blowing through.”
From behind, I couldn’t see Baron’s face. His posture remained unchanged.
“I’m going up to my room, then,” he said. “I’ll be down in time for supper.”
He started moving. I didn’t know if I was supposed to f
ollow. His room, he’d said. Not our room. Not that it would have been mine before I got there. I didn’t want to assume anything, and I didn’t want to embarrass myself by asking. There was a empty feeling in my gut that things would go even worse if I let them think too hard about my presence there.
He opened a door at the top of the steps, and stepped inside without waiting for me. Without even mentioning whether or not he noticed me following him. I stepped inside after.
It wasn’t until the door was closed that things started happening, and then they started happening fast.
His hands caught around my cheeks and pulled me in tight, his lips pressed against mine. For a moment I was transfixed. Was this really happening? Why? How? And why wasn’t I thinking about stopping it?
If there was a chance to stop him, to tell him that I wasn’t interested, then it was coming on fast. And then it was gone, because I kissed him back, and the Lord damn me for it, but I wanted to.
His hands found my sides, pulled my body in close to his. My arms wrapped around his neck, pulled his lips harder into mine. His teeth bit on my lip and pulled. His body was hard against mine, every part of it, from top to bottom. I let out a hiss of arousal as his lips dropped from my lips to my jaw, and then further still. The kiss he pressed against my throat was a startling shock of pleasure.
He didn’t ask me how far I was prepared to take this. If I wanted to stop him, then it was going to be my responsibility to try and do it. I knew it, and I didn’t much care.
He pulled away from me and started working the buttons on my dress. Each button revealed another inch of flesh, until he was uncovering my underclothes. I worked to help him remove the clothes, faster if possible. Our fingers tangled up and made the whole process slower, but there was no denying ourselves. His fingers found their way inside my garment and pulled. The remaining three buttons at the bottom popped off and scrabbled across the floor.
I should have cared. But I didn’t. He pulled at my slip, freeing my breasts. He didn’t seem to pay any attention at all to the fact that it ripped; he pulled my nipple between his lips, and suddenly I didn’t much care, either.
His stiffness pressed against my hip. I replaced my hips with my hands, testing the length of it in my hand. It felt good, made me want more of it. I pulled at the belt around his hips. It thumped to the ground with a heavy metallic sound, and then I worked the second belt. It didn’t fall away, stuck through the belt loops. But it loosened his trousers enough to start trying to work one-handed on getting the fly open.
I managed it in the same time that it took him to push the rest of my clothes off. They made a pool of fabric on the floor around my ankles. I wrapped my hand around his manhood, and he pushed me back until I stumbled onto a hard mattress. He took my legs up in his arms, and entered me.
It was a new sensation. A little uncomfortable,which wasn’t entirely canceled by the pleasure that shot through me at the same time. He took me roughly and silently, except for the sound of flesh on flesh and ragged breathing.
I bit my lip hard. I wasn’t going to let out my voice. Couldn’t. I wasn’t that kind of woman. At least, I thought so at the time. And I wasn’t going to be dissuaded. At least, not then. At least not that time.
When he finally stiffened between my legs and spilled himself inside, I tried to tell myself that I was glad that it was over.
In a sense I was, though not for the reasons that I wanted.
I was glad because it meant that I could do it all over again.
Thirteen
He was right, in a way. It was unusual to see Perdition so quiet. The time that passed taught me that. It taught me names of the men there. And the women, too. There was a man, Mercer, who drank too much and thought far, far too little. There was a woman who ran the kitchens. She was a whip-thin woman and had a severe face, but she was a sweetheart.
Most things that I didn’t learn, though, were the problems that became most apparent.
For example, nobody explicitly talked about who was subordinate to who. Every group I’ve ever seen in my life has some people who dominate the conversation, and some people who didn’t. The meek may inherit the Earth, but the reality is that in the meantime, there were people ready to take advantage of anyone who wanted to go along to get along.
That was true of Perdition, too, of course. It was a unique place, where most things didn’t get paid for with money. It was run more like a family than home. There was an unspoken trust there. I didn’t know at the time that it was something you could only build up when you were a bunch of killers, and you’d been through Hell together.
So in some ways, it was an extraordinary town. There was a lot to learn there, and many things that were completely different from the rest of the world. But they weren’t that different. Not really. They were still human. Their quirks were just a little quirkier than most places.
All of that was, of course, a closely-held secret. Not the sort of thing that was discussed by Good and Proper Folk. And, of course, there was the fact that they weren’t Good and Proper Folk meant that they discussed even less. When things finally did happen, then there was plenty of time for discussion.
But not before. Nobody discussed anything unless it was going to profit them, and nobody was sure that talking to Baron was going to profit anybody. Baron, for his part, told me nothing. And everyone figured that if I learned something, I would immediately go straight to Baron myself and tell him. Anything said to me might as well have been said directly to Euler himself.
Which was a fair assessment. It made good sense. But it meant that I didn’t know the name Franklin Durham until I had already seen him around a dozen times. I’d never seen the name before on any Wanted posters; I’d never seen a picture of him.
All I knew was that there were a few people who seemed to always be the center of attention during supper; Baron was one of them, and the other was a tall, bulky guy with straw-colored hair that he wore close-cropped on top of his head.
He was a grim sort of man. If he ever smiled, he might have been good-looking. Of course, I wasn’t shopping around for men, either, so I put him out of my mind. There was nothing to be thought of him except that he was there, regardless of what I thought of him.
I was sitting at the bar, sipping on well-water that tasted a little bit sour to me. Some of the women drank whiskey with the men. I wasn’t one of them. Libations weren’t something that I’d ever been given to taking, and my mother had been clear about the dangers of alcohol.
But there was nothing else to be done with my days but sit in the common room and wait for something to happen. Which was why I was there when the sandy-haired man slid onto a stool beside me.
“You’re Baron’s woman, that right?”
I filled my mouth with water and ignored the question. I guess that partly, I was being a little petulant. I wanted to deny it, not because I hated Baron, but because I was angry. He hadn’t promised me a thing, and I knew it. But I had imagined something different, and I wanted things to go different. It wasn’t fair. The door was right there, though, and nobody would stop me going out of it. Not Baron; I was sure of that.
“Strong silent type, huh?”
I kept my peace a little longer. Swallowed my water. It went down smoothly, at least. Something about the water here had it catching in my throat a little more often.
“You know, I like that in a woman.”
“I don’t much care what you like.”
“Franklin,” he said. “I don’t believe we were properly introduced.”
“I don’t know that we needed to be,” I said sourly. I turned and slipped down from the stool.
“You’re not being very friendly,” he said.
“No, I suppose I’m not.”
“You’re a pretty lady,” he growled. There was an unspoken threat in it. “But you need to learn you some manners.”
I stepped around the bar. Leanne would be starting up supper in a few minutes, and I figured that she woul
d want some help.
“I’ve got half a mind to turn you over my knee,” said Franklin.
I realized dimly that the entire room had gone as silent as the grave. There was something going on here, and I was at the center of it. I chose my next words carefully. I wasn’t looking for a paddling, but I was pretty sure that there was more in store for me if things went badly enough.
“I don’t think you ought to talk that way to Baron’s woman.”
Franklin pinched his lips together like he was trying to avoid saying something.
“We’ll see,” he said. I glared at him, turned, and stepped into the kitchen. And just about bowled over Leanne, who certainly hadn’t been eavesdropping. Because that would be improper.
Fourteen
I took my food in the kitchen. Not knowing when Baron was going to be back, nor certain whether or not I could rely on him when he did come back, I wasn’t exactly keen on going back into the common room. Nobody batted an eyelash. Sometimes the girls did whatever they had to do.
Things got overwhelming, with all those men around. Most of them were of a type, and nobody ever wondered why it was that someone might be a little upset. And of course, I knew that they had been watching me, as well. That was an unspoken addition. The result was that nobody asked me why I cloistered myself up.
Someone eventually came to get me. It wasn’t Baron himself, of course. There was a lot of political stuff going on and even I knew that much. So he sent someone else to fetch me. I don’t know who the message was intended for. Maybe he wanted me to know that I was distant and expendable. Maybe he wanted the other men to see that he could still command obedience. I didn’t know and I didn’t care.
Either way, I followed in silence up the stairs. The guy didn’t knock, because that would have been too civilized. He called in loudly that he’d brought me like Baron asked. I noticed that he didn’t say ‘boss’ at the end. He carefully didn’t call Euler anything at all.
