Page 23 of Tattooed Cowboy
Maveryk slides from his saddle first, boots crunching over frost. “Here,” he says, voice low, scanning the shadows. “We can’t stay in the open.”
I dismount clumsily, legs trembling, and stroke Sunshine’s neck to steady us both. The bracelet on my wrist gives one last weak shimmer before fading to silver. The air tastes of snow and iron.
“They stopped following?” I whisper.
He looks back toward the ridge, eyes narrowing. “For now.”
The way he says it makes me glance over my shoulder, too. The sky is empty, but the silence feels unnatural … like the pause between thunder and lightning strike.
He nods toward a narrow slit in the cliffside. “There’s shelter in there.”
We lead the horses through the gap, rock scraping the stirrups, every sound amplified by the hush. The air cools further, carrying the scent of iron and wet stone. My breath fogs in front of me. His doesn’t.
When the passage opens at last, I almost stumble forward. The cavern is small but luminous, a pocket of blue light spilling from a crack above. The walls glitter with frozen veins, like stars caught in ice.
“It’s beautiful,” I murmur. My voice trembles.
“Old mining tunnels,” he says, tethering the horses near a frozen pool. “The Sentinels can’t track resonance through this much ore. Least I don’t think so.” His mind is a swirl, dancing over forgotten family remembrances. Finding new weight and meaning in superstition and folk wisdom.
I kneel beside a deep-cut vein. It hums faintly beneath my palm, answering something deep in my chest. “It’s singing,” I whisper.
“Everything that hums is alive,” he says. His voice softens, almost reverent.
The glow from the pool touches his face—half light, half shadow—and for a heartbeat he looks unreal again, like something the stars forgot to reclaim. My throat tightens. “You knew this place was here.”
“My father called them the Silent Hollows,” he says, crouching beside me. “Said they were made when the mountain wept fire.”
The idea feels right somehow, grief carved into shelter. I press my hand to the minerals again, watching light travel outward from my fingers in soft ripples. “Maybe it remembers.”
He glances at me, something unreadable moving behind his eyes. “Maybe it does.”
Silence settles again, but it isn’t empty this time. It’s full … of breath, of shared warmth, of everything we haven’t dared to say.
He sits back, pulls me tightly into his arms, his warmth shrouding me. His hot breath warms the shell of my ear, and he murmurs, “Rest, Starlight. We’ll move north at dawn.”
“And if they find us?”
His gaze flicks upward, toward the dark crack in the ceiling letting stars through. Somewhere, the hum deepens like a sleeping heartbeat. “Then, the mountain won’t be the only thing waking.”
The words linger in the cold air—half promise, half omen—as the light flickers across the heat between us.
His skin vibrates low, a sound more inside me than out, like a lullaby urging me to sleep. I yawn, press my head to his chest, melting in his warmth. It feels like completeness, destiny, despite everything.
“Those things at the cabin…” A shiver slides down my spine, memory seizing me. They moved like machines built from memory. Too fluid, too human. The kind of precision no heart should manage.
“The Hollowed. Ironfolk. Forged Ones. The stuff of legends until now.”
“Like robots?”
“Like things that don’t dream. Don’t bleed, just hum the orders of ghosts. Don’t worry, Starlight. You’re safe now.”
I fight sleep, blinking against the pull of his frequency, wanting to memorize the sound of him before the dark takes me. “But Grandpa and Grandma…”
His big hand strokes my cheek. “They know you’re with me?” he asks, rugged and dark.
I nod, yawning again, unable to fight the frequency pulling me under. His jaw muscle ticks. “Then, they know I’ll protect you to my last breath.”
My hand finds the back of his neck, fingers tangling in his silky hair. He kisses the tip of my nose, and I chuckle softly, drifting far away.
