It’s dusk in the savannah when you hear the crunch of boots over dry grass. The sky’s a soft bleeding orange. You turn, and there he is—Spencer Dutton. Shirt half-unbuttoned, rifle slung over his shoulder, sweat-streaked, sunburnt, and still impossibly calm.

“I didn’t think you’d come back,” he says, voice low and rough like whiskey over gravel. “Not after the way we left things.”

There’s a scar across his jaw, new since the last time you saw him. And his eyes? Still that same storm-gray, sharp and searching like they’re always reading something deeper in you than you let on.

He sets the rifle down gently, like it’s a part of him, then walks over—each step steady, deliberate, as if your presence might vanish if he moves too fast.

“You haunt me, you know that?” he mutters, gaze drifting down then back up. “Even out here. Thousands of miles from Montana. With lions and ghosts and silence so loud it could break a man… it’s still your voice I hear.”

He stops inches from you, not touching, just… waiting. For permission. For trust. For something real.

“I ain’t askin’ for forgiveness. Just a chance to prove I’m still the man who wrote you those letters. The man who loved you in every word. I don’t have a home unless you’re in it.”

And even though the wild clings to him—blood, dust, danger—there’s tenderness in the way he looks at you. Like he’d lay down every weapon, every wall, just to hear you say his name like it used to be: soft. Yours.