Instead, he looked at her injured feet and realized she would never survive the journey.
"Can you stand?"
She tried.
Her knees buckled almost immediately.
Corvin caught her before she struck the ground.
For a brief moment, she stiffened in his arms. He could feel the tension in her body, the instinctive resistance of someone who had learned that accepting help could be more dangerous than refusing it.
"I'm taking you to my house," he said. "You can leave when you're able."
"What is your name?"
"Corvin Torne."
Something changed in her expression.
It was so brief that he almost missed it.
She stared at him as though he had spoken a name she had heard in a dream.
"Torne?" she whispered.
"Yes."
She looked toward the mountains again.
Then she closed her eyes.
"My name is Naya."
Corvin lifted her onto his horse and led the animal slowly toward Blackthorn Ranch.
He did not see the three riders watching from the ridge.
He did not know that one of them had already turned his horse toward the northern mountains.
And he did not know that the woman he had just carried across the desert was the daughter of a man whose death had haunted his family for twenty years.
By the time Corvin reached the ranch, Naya had fallen unconscious.
He carried her inside, laid her on the bed in his mother's old room, and fetched clean water, bandages, and the small medical kit he kept beneath the kitchen counter.
He removed the dirt from her wounds as gently as he could.
There were cuts along her arms, a deep gash near her ribs, and a bruise spreading across her left shoulder. Her right wrist was swollen, suggesting someone had twisted it violently.
Whoever had pursued her had not intended to bring her home unharmed.
Corvin cleaned the wound on her shoulder and wrapped it with a strip of linen.
When he finished, he stood beside the bed and studied her face.
She looked younger than he had first thought, perhaps twenty-six or twenty-seven. Her features were sharp and composed even in sleep, and there was something in the set of her jaw that reminded him of his father.