Running too late would put him beneath their boots. He needed distance. A voice split the night. “Elias.” William, drunk, slurred, furious. “Come out, you bastard. Come out and face me.” Elias slipped deeper into the shadows of the trees. The men burst into the clearing, six of them armed with whips, ropes, knives, and fire. Their torches cast wild shapes on the ground, monstrous silhouettes dancing in the grass.
William stood at the center, red-faced, sweaty, eyes glassy with whiskey and rage. His left hand clutched a whip. His right hand held a gun, an old flintlock, but deadly enough. “Where is he?” William spat. “Where’s the hero? Where’s the man who thinks he’s too good to bow?” The others laughed. Elias crouched behind a fallen tree trunk, heartbeat steady, breath controlled.
He scanned the group. Two of the men were seasoned riders, quick on their feet. Three were plantation drifters who took any excuse to spill blood. And William, William was unpredictable. One of the men, Josiah, broad-shouldered and stumbling, kicked open Elias’s cabin door. “He’s gone!” he shouted. William’s face twisted. “Find him! Drag him out! I want his knees in the dirt.”
The men fanned out, torches cutting orange slashes through the dark. Elias moved as they moved, keeping their backs turned, sliding through the brush with the quiet of a fox. His mind calculated paths, distances, shadows. He mapped where each man stepped, how far their torches reached, how much noise they made. He could avoid them. He could escape clean.
But then something happened that changed everything. A small cry broke from the cabin nearest the woods, Sarah’s cabin. Elias’s head snapped toward the sound. One of the drifters had wandered too close. He yanked open the door and grabbed Sarah’s mother by the hair, dragging her toward the yard. Sarah ran after her, screaming, clutching her mother’s dress.
Elias’s muscles tightened. This wasn’t part of the plan. The man raised his hand, ready to strike the woman. Elias moved before thought could catch him. He burst from the shadows, silent as a predator, fast as a breaking storm. The drifter turned too late. Elias’s hand clamped around the man’s wrist, twisting until bone cracked like dry kindling. The scream tore through the night.
Torches whipped around. “There he is. Get him.” Elias shoved the man aside and grabbed Sarah, lifting her away from danger. Her mother pulled her into her arms, sobbing. Elias met her eyes, held her gaze for one heartbeat, silently asking forgiveness for what was coming, for what he would unleash. Then he ran, not toward the woods, toward the men.
Torches swung, ropes snapped through the air. William raised his gun. Elias rolled behind a tree as the gunshot fractured the night, sparks bursting from the trunk. “Don’t let him get away!” William shrieked. The riders charged. Elias sprinted through the underbrush, dodging roots and branches, heart hammering. Behind him came the thunder of boots, the roar of torches, the shouts of men hungry for blood.
A whip cracked behind him, slicing the air where his back had been seconds before. Elias leapt over a fallen log. The woods swallowed him, moonlight flickering through the leaves like signals from an unseen hand. He reached the ravine, the steep drop that marked the edge of the plantation. He didn’t slow. He jumped. He crashed down through brush and rock, rolling hard, pain exploding through his ribs, but he didn’t stop.
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