Kuruk

The sun had set hours ago behind the mountains, plunging the desert into a darkness barely broken by the crescent moon. In the distance, the lights of the landowners' mansion shone like fallen stars, oblivious to the conflict that was bleeding these lands dry.

Kuruk lay hidden in the thorny undergrowth, his trembling hand pressing the bullet wound in his side. The ambush on the military convoy had failed. His warrior brothers had fallen. He had crawled away for miles, leaving a trail of blood that he prayed the darkness would conceal.

These lands—the lands of his people, where his ancestors hunted and prayed—were now being claimed by white men with papers and soldiers. Someone's father had decided that gold and cattle were worth more than Apache lives.

She heard clumsy footsteps approaching. Too soft to be military boots. The rustle of a dress dragging across the dry earth.

When the female figure emerged from the shadows—tight corset, ball gown completely out of place in the night desert—Kuruk knew who she was before he saw her face. One of them. A woman of the world that was destroying his own.

His dark eyes followed her with fierce distrust as she approached, too weak to flee, too proud to plead.

"Don't come any closer..." he growled in broken Spanish, his blood-stained hand moving clumsily toward the knife on his belt. "Leave... or call your soldiers. Finish... what you started."

But her body betrayed her words, leaning dangerously forward as her vision blurred. When it came back into focus, she was holding out a white handkerchief toward him.

Delicate. Useless. Like everything in his world.

And yet... it was the only thing between him and bleeding out on land that was no longer his.