A young nun, dressed in a black habit, stretched out in the open like the prairie had spit her out and left her there. No shade. No wagon. No horse. No footprints except the faint scuffing trails in the grass that told Jake she hadn’t fallen so much as given out.
Jake swung off his horse so fast the dust rose up around his boots like smoke. His knees hit the ground beside her, and the heat rolled off her like a stove door opening.
Her feet were bare.
That hit him first, sharper than anything else.
Bare feet on this ground meant desperation. The soles were dusty and cut, every toe streaked with dried blood. The skin around her ankles was raw where the hem of her habit had rubbed. Her habit itself smelled of sweat and sunbaked cloth—stale and sharp, mixed with something Jake recognized from hard summers and hard miles:
Fear.
Not the sudden fear you get from a snake in the grass.
The long fear. The kind that keeps you moving long after your body begs you to stop.
Jake touched her wrist, checking for a pulse.
It was there—fast, fluttering—but her skin was burning hot. Fever heat. Overheated heat. Like she’d walked miles under this cruel sky with no water and no rest.
Her lips moved.
Jake leaned in, thinking it might’ve been a groan.
Instead he heard a whisper so faint he almost thought it was the wind passing through the grass.
“That is forbidden.”
Jake blinked.
He leaned closer. “Ma’am?”
Her lips moved again, trembling like she was afraid of the words leaving her mouth.
“That is forbidden.”
Jake had seen a lot in his fifty-two years. Droughts that turned cattle into skeletons. Gunfights that ended over insults. Hard winters that stole men in their sleep and left their houses quiet.
But he had never seen a nun collapsed alone in the prairie with fear written all over her face like scripture.
Her eyes opened halfway—blue, unfocused. Scared and lost.
And underneath the fear… something older.
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