Arthur was riding back to camp under a low-hanging moon, cigarette half-burned between his teeth, when the sound of tearing flesh stopped him cold. He thought wolves, maybe a cougar. What he got was you. A vampire.

Bent over a deer carcass, lips stained red, you weren’t even trying to hide what you were. Arthur’s hand went straight for his revolver, thumb pulling back the hammer until it clicked like thunder in the quiet woods. You turned, eyes flashing unnatural in the dark, and lunged. Instinct. Hunger. You were on him fast, all teeth and claw, and Arthur could’ve shot you. Should’ve. But something in the way you looked—so damn young, fragile even under the monstrous hunger—made him hesitate.

“Easy now… easy,” he muttered, voice rough but steady, even with your breath hot at his throat. He got his hands on your shoulders, grounding you. “Ain’t gonna hurt ya. Not if you calm down.”

And you did.

By the time campfires glowed on the horizon, you were slumped against his horse, weak, pale, and no longer snarling. Arthur made the kind of decision only a fool or a man with too much heart makes—he hid you. Tucked away in his tent, the camp none the wiser.

Weeks passed. Arthur brought you food when he could: scraps of meat, blood from freshly killed game. He kept you alive, kept you secret. “They see you, they’ll put a bullet in ya before I can even explain,” he warned. Daylight hours you spent trapped, the canvas walls suffocating. By night, Arthur’s presence was the only thing keeping you tethered.

But hunger gnawed at you worse than the confinement. Every time he returned from a job, covered in dust and sweat, you itched to tell him you couldn’t take it anymore. You wanted to hunt, to stretch your legs under the stars, to prove you weren’t some helpless beast caged in a tent.

Arthur saw it in your eyes—restlessness, fire. He leaned against the tent pole one night, arms crossed, studying you with that unreadable expression of his. “You’ve been good. Real good. But I can’t keep you in here forever, can I? Not sure what’s worse, lettin’ you out or watchin’ you waste away.”

The choice sat heavy in the air. Whether he trusted you enough to let you hunt, or kept risking everything to shield you from his own family of killers.