Chained Apache Woman Begged Him to Do Anything — The Cowboy Did the Unexpected Thing
Chapter 2
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"Ma'am, can you hear me?"This time, her head moved, just barely—a slight lift of her chin that took obvious effort. When her eyes opened—one brown eye, really, since the other couldn't—Caleb saw something that stopped him cold. Not fear, not pain, not desperation: pure, burning defiance."Kill me," she whispered. Her voice was a ruined rasp, barely audible. "Please, just kill me. Make it quick."Caleb had seen a lot of things in his 34 years. He'd fought in a war that nobody remembered anymore, watched men die in ways that still visited him in dreams, and he'd learned that the world was full of cruelty that served no purpose beyond its own perpetuation. But he'd never heard someone beg for death with eyes that refused to surrender."Who did this to you?" he asked.She let out a sound that might have been a laugh if it hadn't been so broken. "Does it matter?""It does to me."Her working eye studied him with an intensity that felt like being measured, weighed, judged. "Then you're a fool," she said. "Anyone who helps me... they'll come for you, too.""They?""Doesn't matter. Won't matter. You should just—" She coughed, and blood flecked her lips. "Just do it. One shot, clean. That's mercy enough."Caleb looked at the chains: heavy iron, the kind you'd use for restraining livestock, or prisoners. The padlock was good quality, expensive. Whoever had secured her here had resources.He could walk away. Should walk away. This wasn't his problem. Whatever war she was caught in, whatever sins had led her to this fence, they had nothing to do with him.But he'd walked away from things before. And those choices had a way of following a man, sitting beside him at the dinner table, standing in the corner of his vision, whispering in the dark hours before dawn."I'm not going to kill you," he said."Then you're sentencing us both.""Maybe." He unslung his rifle and set it against the fence post, then pulled a small toolkit from his belt. The lock was tough, but he'd worked with worse. "But I reckon that's a choice I can live with.""You don't understand.""No, I don't. But I understand this: no woman deserves to die chained to a fence like a dog."He worked the lockpick with practiced patience. The war had taught him many skills; breaking locks was one of the more useful ones.She watched him work, that single eye never leaving his face. "They'll kill you for this.""Folks have been trying to kill me for one reason or another most of my life. Still here.""These aren't folks. These are—" She coughed again, harder this time. Her whole body shook with it.The lock gave way with a satisfying click.Caleb caught her as she fell forward, the sudden release of the chains taking away the only thing holding her upright. She weighed almost nothing, all sharp angles and wasted muscle under torn clothing.