Corvin reached into his saddlebag, pulled out a clean strip of cotton rag, and soaked it with cold water from his canteen. "I can clean that out. If you let it fester in this heat, you'll be dead by tomorrow night."

She stiffened immediately, her back flattening against the cedar fence post.

"I’ll show you what I'm doing first," he said. He pointed to his own left shoulder, dabbing the wet cloth gently against his shirt to demonstrate. "Just washing the dirt out."

The woman watched his eyes for five long seconds, searching for deceit. Finding none, she slowly inclined her head and pulled the torn leather back from her shoulder.

The bullet had plowed a shallow trench through the muscular meat of her upper arm without shattering the bone beneath. Lucky. A quarter-inch to the right and her arm would have been rendered useless; a quarter-inch to the left and it would have torn through her lung.

Corvin reached over the wire and carefully cleaned the trail of dried blood, grit, and sweat from the raw flesh. She never cried out. She didn't even wince, though he could feel the muscles in her neck tighten like iron cables beneath his fingers.

When he finished tying the cotton cloth securely around her arm, she placed one large, calloused hand against the fence rail and pushed herself up.

Corvin had to tilt his head upward to meet her gaze.

"Good Lord," he breathed softly.

She stood taller than he did. Corvin was a full six feet, broad in the chest, but this woman had him by at least three or four inches. Despite her dehydration, her blood loss, and her obvious exhaustion, there was something undeniably regal in the way she straightened her spine and squared her broad shoulders against the wide sky.

Then she stared at him.

She didn't look at his revolver. She didn't look at his stone ranch house, his well, or his horses in the corral. She stared directly into his face.

She looked at him for so long that Corvin felt a prickle of discomfort crawl up the back of his neck.

"What?" he asked, shifting his stance.

Her gaze drifted downward, dropping to his left hand resting on the fence rail. A stark, jagged white scar crossed his palm, running from the base of his thumb down to his wrist—the reminder of a knife fight in a dusty border saloon twenty years ago.

Corvin closed his fingers into a loose fist, hiding the scar from view. "Old injury."

The woman looked back up, her dark eyes locking onto his face with an intensity that made his breath catch.

"Do I know you?" Corvin asked, frowning.

Nothing. Not a word.

Corvin let out a long, slow sigh. "You ought to rest in the shade of the barn for an hour or two. You won't make five miles in this sun."

She turned her head and looked toward the jagged northern ridges that walled off the upper end of the basin.

"That’s thirty miles of bad country up there," Corvin warned, pointing toward the red rocks. "No water holes until you cross the dry fork of the Salt River."

She didn't answer. She took a step away from the fence, her moccasins making no sound against the parched dirt.

"Wait."

The woman stopped, her back to him.

Corvin unbuckled his heavy leather canteen from his belt and held it over the top rail. "At least take this. It's full."

She turned slowly, considered the canteen, and then stepped back to the fence to accept it.

As she took the strap, her long fingers brushed against his palm.

Something shifted instantly in her expression. It was not gratitude. It was not relief. It was a sudden, sharp jolt of raw recognition.

Corvin felt a strange, cold chill run through his chest, despite the ninety-degree heat baking his shoulders. "What is it? What's your name?"

She said nothing. She slung the canteen strap over her good shoulder, turned on her heel, and began walking toward the northern hills with a long, rhythmic stride.

Corvin stood by the fence and watched her until the shimmering waves of heat rising from the valley floor swallowed her tall shape whole.

"Well," he muttered to the empty air, picking up his empty wooden bucket. "That’s that."

He walked back toward his solitary house, telling himself he would never see her again.

He had never been more wrong in his life.

Corvin’s ranch sat in a natural basin wedged between two high stone ridges and an ancient, dry creek bed. It was located nearly two full days of hard riding from the nearest legal settlement at Fort Apache.

Isolation had been the primary reason he stayed here.

He had inherited the land, the modest three-room stone house, and the pine barn from Abram Torne—the only father Corvin had ever truly known. Abram had been a hard-faced man with rough, calloused hands, a surprisingly gentle voice, and an almost religious devotion to keeping written records.

Every single evening without fail, after the horses were grain-fed and the oil lamps were trimmed, Abram had sat at the small pine table in the corner of the kitchen and written in a thick, leather-bound ranch ledger. He recorded everything: daily rainfall, broken fence wire, cattle births, stray horses, visitors, passing strangers, and even arguments with town merchants.

"A man who doesn't keep track of his past," Abram used to say in his low, gravelly rasp, "is just a leaf blowing around in a dust storm, waiting to be buried."

When Abram died nine years earlier from a sudden inflammation of the lungs, Corvin had buried the old man on the rise behind the barn and quietly continued the habit.

At exactly 7:42 that evening, Corvin sat down at the pine table beneath the warm yellow glow of an oil lamp. He unclasped the leather strap of the ledger, dipped his steel-nibbed pen into a small well of black ink, and opened the book to the current date.

In his precise, angular handwriting, he wrote:

July 14, 1881. Heat extreme. Well holding steady. Apache woman found at west fence line. Injured left shoulder from bullet graze. Severe thirst. Cleaned wound, gave water and canteen. Left on foot toward northern ridges.