Jess Wade a man carved from dust, dusk, and regret had spent the last few years trying to keep his name clean and his hands off a gun. Framed by his old gang for stealing a golden cannon from a sacred Mexican shrine, Jess finds himself hunted—by the law, by bounty seekers, and by his own guilt. Jess rode away to the Mexico border down to his birth place Tucson which gave him quiet. The kind of quiet that only a man who’d lived too loud could ever crave.

But peace never lasted for men like him.

He was riding near the border at dusk, just checking the terrain, keeping clear of trouble when he saw the silhouette. A lone rider, up on the ridge. The horse moved like it belonged to someone who knew how to ride no wasted movement, just command. He squinted into the sun’s dying light, brushing the brim of his hat back. That coat. That rifle slung over the shoulder. The tilt of your chin. Hell.

It was you.

You weren’t the girl he remembered the girl he’d left behind, years ago, thinking he was doing the right thing by vanishing without a word. You’d grown into something fierce. Something proud. A legend in your own right now a bounty hunter with your name on more lips than half the lawmen in Texas, You have become a legend.

You and Jess Wade grew up on the same dusty roads, just across the river from each other. You were the wild one with a sharp eye and quicker wit, and he was the boy always getting into trouble not because he was cruel, but because he didn’t know any other way to survive. His fists knew the weight of defense before his heart knew peace. But with you? He was gentler. Calmer. Like maybe he could be better, if only you believed he could.*

You rode horses together before you were tall enough to saddle them yourselves. You shared secrets in abandoned barns and stolen hours by the water’s edge. You both learned to shoot with rusty pistols and glass bottles, cheering each other on, bruised knuckles and breathless laughter filling the summer air.

It wasn’t just puppy love. It was something deeper. It grew slow, like roots. Strong like oak. You had your first kiss under a mesquite tree during a summer storm, the scent of rain thick in the air and lightning cracking somewhere over the hills. Jess had held your face like you were made of something rare, and he’d whispered, “Ain’t nothin’ in this world I want more than you.”

And he meant it.

But the world had other plans. As Jess got older, the shadows followed. People with bad intentions knew his name. Gunslingers started to recognize him. Trouble clung to him like smoke, and no matter how hard he tried to stay clean, it always found him. He started pushing you away softly at first, then coldly.

You didn’t know why.

He left without a word one morning, his saddle empty where you thought he’d be. He left behind the ring he used to carry in his coat pocket the one he never worked up the courage to give you.

What you didn’t know was this:

He thought loving you would get you killed. He thought that someday, someone would come looking for him and find you instead. That thought haunted him more than death ever could. So he left. Not because he stopped loving you but because he loved you too much to be the reason you’d bleed.

But damn if you didn’t look like you belonged in that saddle more than he ever had in his.

Jess didn’t ride forward. Not right away. He sat in that saddle like stone, watching you. Wondering if you’d even want to see him. Wondering if you’d pull your gun on him first. Because he left. Not because he stopped loving you—but because he thought you deserved better than a man with too much blood on his hands and too many ghosts on his trail.

But now?

Now you were the one with danger in your eyes, a pistol at your hip, and a story in your silence.

He nudged his horse forward slowly, his voice a low rasp like desert wind.

“Didn’t figure I’d see you again. Not here. Not lookin’ like you could outshoot the Devil himself.”

He paused.

“Didn’t think I’d ever see those eyes again You huntin’ me, or just passing?"