The wind had teeth.

It worried at his coat, gnawed through wool and skin like it meant to take something personal. Snow came sideways, not falling so much as hunting. Arthur could barely tell where the sky ended and the ground began anymore, just a white blur swallowing up everything he knew how to trust.

He had lost the others somewhere back in the storm. How long ago, he couldn’t say. Time did not behave right out here. One moment there had been Dutch’s voice cutting sharp through the wind, Hosea swearing close by, then gunfire, shouting, horses screaming, and after that nothing but white and the sound of his own breathing tearing in and out of his chest.

The O’Driscolls had chased hard. Too hard. They always did, like dogs that didn’t know when a meal was already dead.

Arthur stumbled and nearly went down, pain blooming hot and vicious through his leg. He hissed and caught himself on a fence post half buried in snow, the wood slick and frozen beneath his glove. When he looked down, the white around his boot was pinking up, slow and ugly.

“Well,” he muttered through clenched teeth. “Ain’t that just perfect.”

The bullet had clipped him clean enough to let him keep moving, cruel enough to make him feel every step. His horse was gone, bolted in the chaos or swallowed by the storm. Either way, he was alone now, limping through country that didn’t care whether he lived or died.

The road appeared like a half remembered thought, a dark ribbon cut into the white. Arthur followed it because it was something, because it had to lead somewhere that wasn’t just more snow and more wind. His breath smoked thick in front of his face, each pull of air burning his lungs raw.

It wasn’t long before his leg gave out for good.

There was no drama to it. No final stand. Just a quiet failure of muscle and bone. One moment he was upright, the next his knee folded and he dropped into the drift beside the road, snow swallowing him up to the thigh.

He stayed there a moment, forehead pressed into his sleeve, waiting for the pain to settle into something he could manage. His fingers were numb. His thoughts felt slow, like they had to fight their way through mud to get anywhere useful.

Arthur dragged himself back until his shoulders hit the embankment. The snow was deep enough there to cut the wind a little, though the cold still found every crack in him. He packed snow against his leg without thinking too hard about it, instinct more than sense, just trying to slow the bleeding.

The O’Driscolls could still be out there. Maybe they were circling, waiting for him to freeze stiff enough to make it easy. His hand stayed on his revolver as he listened, but all he heard was the storm and the low, distant groan of trees bending under ice.

For the first time in a long while, a real ugly thought crept in.

This could be it.

Not loud. Not heroic. Just bleeding into the snow on a forgotten road, name scattered to the wind like everything else he’d ever touched.

A rough breath left him, almost a laugh. Figures.

Arthur tipped his head back and stared at the sky, or what passed for it. White on white. Endless. His eyelids felt heavy now, the cold creeping closer the longer he stayed still. He knew better than to rest. Knew all the stories about men who sat down “just for a minute” and never stood back up.

Still, his body argued otherwise.

“Come on,” he murmured, voice thin in the wind. He wasn’t sure who he was asking. God, maybe. Fate. Anyone listening. “Just… someone.”

The road stretched empty in both directions. No wagons. No riders. Just snow piling up, soft and relentless, trying to tuck him in for good.

Then he heard it.

A sound that didn’t belong to the storm. A crunch, steady and deliberate, coming from down the road. Arthur lifted his head, heart thudding hard enough to hurt, eyes squinting through the snowfall.

A shape moved in the white.

Someone was coming down the road.