The click of the hammer being cocked sounded unnaturally loud in the silence.
“That’s enough,” he said in a voice hoarse from the long period of inactivity, but firm.
The man stopped, his dark eyes fixed on her. He showed no fear, no surprise. He simply waited, his gaze unmoving. He was about twenty paces away from her, close enough for her to admire the intricate beading on his moccasins, but far enough away not to pose an immediate threat.
"I have nothing against you," Kora said, her voice growing firmer. "Say what you want and go away. The water is mine."
It was the usual reason strangers intruded on her property. The spring was an irresistible call in a parched land. The burly man didn't immediately respond. He looked past her, toward the sturdy cabin, the neatly stacked firewood, the small, lush garden. His gaze seemed to take in every detail of her solitary existence, every sign of her resilience.
Finally, his eyes met hers again. When he spoke, his voice was a low baritone, the English words carefully enunciated with a slight musical accent.
"We didn't come for water," he said in a calm, resonant voice. "We didn't come for war."
Kora continued to point the gun at his chest. "So, what did you come looking for?"
The Apache chief, named Gotchi Min, let the silence linger for a moment longer, allowing the weight of his next words to sink in.
The other six warriors remained on horseback, silent and imposing as statues, their eyes fixed on the exchange with a disturbing intensity. They were a wall of muscle and menace, a silent chorus accompanying their leader's solo voice. Gotchimin took another slow, determined step forward, ignoring the pistol aimed at his heart.
He looked straight into Kora's pale blue eyes, and for the first time, she saw something other than stoic resolve in his expression. It was a deep, unwavering seriousness, an ancient gravity that seemed to emanate from him.
"My name is Gimin," he said, his voice ringing clear in the still air. "I am the son of a great chief. These are my brothers and my most trusted warriors."
He paused, his gaze traveling from the frayed hem of her jeans to the unruly strands of sun-bleached hair that had escaped from her braid.
"We've traveled three days from the Sierra Madre. We've come to ask you to be my wife."
The words hit Kora with the force of a fist. The world seemed to tilt on its axis. The relentless sun, the silent mountains, the seven giants before her—everything blurred into an incomprehensible picture, her finger tight on the trigger. The cold steel of the gun, the only thing real in a moment of utter surreality.
Garbage. It was a word so foreign, so far removed from her reality, that it might as well have belonged to another language. For a woman who hadn't spoken to anyone in years, a marriage proposal from a seven-foot-tall Apache warrior she'd never seen before wasn't just unthinkable. It was madness.
The silence that followed Gimin's declaration was heavier and deeper than any silence Kora had ever known. It was a silence broken only by the buzzing of flies, the distant cry of a hawk, and the frantic, disbelieving pounding of her own heart.
The cult peacemaker she held in her hand suddenly felt incredibly heavy. She stared at the Apache chief, searching his granite face for any sign of mockery or deceit, but found only a relentless drowsiness.
