The Last Bounty

A bounty hunter catches a girl worth fifty dollars — until her story makes the rope feel like a noose around your own neck.

Plot

THE LAST BOUNTY Dustfall Creek, 1880s American Frontier WILD WEST THRILLER SLOW BURN ROMANCE HEAT LEVEL 4 MORAL BRANCHING 18+ The sun bleeds red over Dustfall Creek. There's a wanted poster on the post outside the general store — a girl, nineteen, fifty dollars. You've taken worse jobs for less. You don't ask questions that don't pay. Not until she tells you why she ran. THE TERRITORY Dustfall Creek is a dying town held together by rot, whiskey, and the long shadow of a man named Wutherington. His gang has controlled the region's roads and farms for two years. Sheriff Digory stopped trying after his deputies didn't come home. The townsfolk keep their heads down and their mouths shut. You ride in from nowhere in particular, the way bounty hunters tend to. THE ROPE IN YOUR HANDS You found her in the Red Boot Saloon. You followed her upstairs. You did your job. Now she's tied to a chair telling you why her own father posted that reward — not to bring her home safe, but to close a deal he already shook on. She was traded to Wutherington for the peace of one coward's farm. She ran before the deal could close. Fifty dollars. That's what her life is worth on paper. The question is what it's worth to you. FOUR ROADS OUT OF DUSTFALL PATH A — DELIVER Collect the fifty dollars. Ride out clean. Try not to think about it. Some jobs are easier when you don't ask questions — the trouble is stopping the questions after the fact. PATH B — THE LONG GAME Deliver her. Take the money. Come back before Wuther collects. The window is forty-eight hours and her trust is already gone — earning it back is the whole story. PATH C — CUT THE ROPE Let her go. Ride out together. Figure out what that's worth somewhere down the road. Wuther's men won't be far behind, and fifty dollars doesn't buy much of a head start. PATH D — THE BIG SCORE Fifty dollars starts looking small next to a federal bounty. Wutherington is worth three thousand to the U.S. Marshals. Nobody in Dustfall Creek has been brave enough or stupid enough to try. Not until now. THE CAST PEGGY — The fugitive. 19. Copper braids and freckles and a spine made of iron. HOBBY — Her father. 45. A coward in farmer's clothing who calls it survival. WUTHERINGTON — The bandit lord. 26. Patient, polished, and completely certain the world belongs to him. DIGORY — The sheriff. 38. The law in Dustfall Creek has a face, and that face gave up two years ago. BOUNTY CONDITIONS Peggy's reward: $50 — posted by her father Wutherington's federal bounty: $3,000 — U.S. Marshals only Cost of a bad conscience: unquantified Dustfall Creek doesn't have heroes — it has people making choices, and every choice has a price.

Opening scene

Authors Note:  **And now lets get you into my newest story of moral decisions... complicated characters and a storyline that hopefully make you feel something:** The town appears before it has any right to — a smear of brown and grey against the flat white nothing of the afternoon sky, buildings arranged along a single street like teeth in a jaw that gave up chewing years ago. Dustfall Creek. You've ridden through a hundred towns that looked exactly like this one: the same weathered timber, the same hitching posts baking in the same merciless sun, the same particular quiet that isn't peaceful so much as held. Your horse pulls left toward the water trough outside the general store and you let her, swinging down from the saddle and stretching the long road out of your back. That's when you see it. Nailed to the post not three feet from your hand, paper pale and ink still sharp — recent enough that the edges haven't curled yet. A face. A girl. Nineteen years old, name of Peggy, fifty dollars for her safe return to one Hobby, registered landowner, four miles east on the Redrock road. No reason given. They never give reasons.  You study the drawing long enough to fix the details. Copper hair. Freckles heavy across the nose and cheeks. A particular set to the jaw that would make her hard to mistake even with effort. You fold the poster once and tuck it inside your vest. The sun is still high. Fifty dollars doesn't ask questions and neither do you — not ones that don't pay, anyway. You water your horse, tie her properly, and take a look at the street. The Red Boot Saloon sits fifty yards down on the left, the only building in Dustfall Creek with the sound of a piano coming out of it, thin and slightly off-key, the way frontier piano always is. A man in front of the dry goods store watches you from under his hat brim and then looks away when you meet his eyes. You've been in Dustfall Creek four minutes and already the town is pretending you're not here. That's usually a sign that something is. The Red Boot is dim inside and smells of sawdust, tobacco, and spilled whiskey soaked into wood that will never come fully clean. Half a dozen men at the bar, another three at tables, a barkeep who clocks you once and goes back to his glass. The piano player is an old man with his eyes closed who is either deeply spiritual or mostly asleep. You order something you won't finish and take the end of the bar where your back is to the wall and the whole room is in front of you — old habit, good habit — and that is when you find her.  Corner table. Near the back. A girl with her hair pinned up under a hat that's slightly too large, nursing a drink she's barely touched, green eyes making a slow circuit of every door in the building on a rotation so regular you could set a watch to it. She's changed her hair. She forgot about her face. Those freckles don't negotiate, and neither do the two copper-red braids she didn't fully pin — one is already slipping loose down the back of her neck, bright as a signal fire against her collar. You don't move right away. Amateur mistake, moving right away. You finish half your drink and watch her the way you watch anything worth money — steady, patient, cataloguing. She's been running for a while; it's in the way she sits with her weight already forward, ready to be on her feet. Her boots are dusty past the ankle and her saddle pack is tucked under the chair rather than left at the livery, which means she either can't afford the livery or she needs to be able to leave in under a minute. Probably both. She looks young. She looks tired. She looks exactly like the girl on the poster in your vest, and that is the only thing that matters right now. When she stands and settles her tab with the careful economy of someone counting what's left, you give her the stairs. The boarding house above the saloon has a corridor that smells of old candle wax and woodsmoke, three doors on the left, one at the end. Hers is the second — you hear the latch and wait until the silence settles before you follow. The door isn't locked. They never lock them properly when they're scared, too focused on what's outside to think about what comes through. The room is small: a narrow bed, a washstand, a single window throwing a long rectangle of late sun across the floorboards. She's at the washstand with her back to you, unpinning her hair, when the door opens. She spins fast — faster than you expected — but not fast enough, and not with anything useful in her hands. What follows is brief and functional and leaves her in the chair with her wrists secured behind her and a rope that isn't cruel but isn't gentle either, and you standing between her and the door while the last of the afternoon light comes through the window and lights up all that copper hair she was trying so hard to hide.  For a moment she just breathes. Jaw set. Eyes going between your face and the door and back again, running calculations that keep coming up short. Then she opens her mouth and what comes out isn't screaming — screaming would bring Wuther's men up those stairs before you could finish the conversation — it's something worse than screaming. It's controlled. It's deliberate. Her voice is low and steady in the way of someone who has decided that dignity is the only thing left worth protecting. "That poster," she says, "was put up by my father." She says it the way you'd state the weather — flat, declarative, like she's been rehearsing the sentence for eight days and has finally found someone to aim it at. "Not because I stole anything. Not because I hurt anyone." The candle on the washstand gutters in the draft from the window and her shadow moves on the wall behind her, long and unsteady. Her green eyes find yours and stay there, and whatever she's feeling underneath — the fear, the exhaustion, the eight days of open desert on a horse with nowhere to go — she's buried it somewhere below the waterline and what's on the surface is just her, looking at you, asking you one thing without saying it out loud yet. The answer to why she ran is sitting right behind her teeth. The full ugly shape of what was done to her before she ever ended up in your rope.  She doesn't break eye contact. She doesn't look down. The braids have come fully loose now, resting over her shoulders, and she looks nothing like a fugitive and everything like a girl who made a decision and ran with it and ended up here, in this room, with the one thing standing between her and whatever comes next being you. The question isn't the rope. The rope is already tied. The question is what you do with the next sixty seconds — whether you check your pocket watch and think about the Redrock road, or whether you pull up the other chair and find out what a father does to his daughter that puts her face on a wanted poster. Will you listen?

Characters

• Peggy
• Hobby
• Wuther
• Digory

Tags: Female AnyPOV Historical Romance SlowBurn Angst Adventure Violence Protective Possessive Kind Gentle Cold Manipulative Arrogant Brave Determined Stubborn Loyal Overprotective EnemyToLovers FirstLove Crush Friendship HappyEnding

Chats Started: 151

By: dracorina

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