Part 1

Every night, when the desert wind howled like a wounded wolf against the beams of the shack, I crossed the yard, my rebozo held tight across my chest, my heart beating like a war drum.

This was the pact.

Don Elías’s ranch was at the edge of the world, a place where the earth split into cracked, dry fissures and the coyotes sang their lonely, half-mad songs to the moon.

No one here knew my real name. I didn’t have one, not one I was willing to claim. They called me la niña del río Seco—the girl from the dry river. I had arrived like a ghost, floating on a broken canoe I’d stolen, my dress soaked and my eyes—as they always said—greener than old mezcal.

I wasn’t a victim of a flood. I was a refugee of a fire. I had run from a life that was worse than this, a life in a dusty border town cantina where men didn’t even bother to learn your name before they unbuckled their belts. I had run until my feet bled, and then I had floated, until the canoe splintered on the rocks at the edge of his property.

Don Elías, a widower since the fever took his wife and two sons years ago, had found me. He’d picked me up the way a man picks up a lost, dangerous knife—with both fear and desire.

He was a mountain of a man, his hands calloused and scarred from years of branding steers and pounding fence posts. His face was a roadmap of sun and sorrow. He didn’t ask questions. He didn’t have to. He saw my green eyes, my torn dress, and the hard, unblinking stare that said I had nothing left to lose.

He pointed to the shack.

“I have food. I have a roof.”

I understood the unspoken part.

The first night, I shivered under the raw wool blanket. The shack was one room. One cot. He didn’t say a word, just dropped his hat on the table and knelt by my side. His hands, those rough, scarred things, touched my skin. He wasn’t mapping me. He was appraising me.

I closed my eyes. I let the heat of this strange, lonely man envelop me, because the cold of the Sierra was worse than any shame. When he took me, it was with the brute, unthinking urgency of a man who has been dying of thirst.

I did not scream. I did not cry.

I arched my back and dug my fingernails into his wide shoulders. I raked them down, hard, until I felt the hot, sudden welling of his blood under my hands.

He grunted, a sound of pained surprise, and his rhythm broke. He pulled back, staring at me in the dark. He couldn’t see my eyes, but he could feel his own blood.

And so the pact was sealed. Not with words, but with blood. My body, in exchange for a roof and a plate of beans. His hunger, in exchange for my survival.

The days were a long, sun-bleached purgatory. I worked. I milked the goats at dawn, my hands aching in the cold. I ground the corn until my shoulders screamed. I scrubbed his clothes on a stone pilón until my own hands were raw and bleeding, just as scarred as his.

Don Elías would leave at sunrise, his rifle over his shoulder, and return at dusk, caked in the red dust of the high desert. We never spoke of “us.” We never spoke of love, or the future, or the ghosts of his dead family that still filled the corners of the shack.

We talked about the drought. We talked about the price of cattle. We talked about the bandits who roamed the border.

But when the tallow lamp was snuffed out, the world shrank to the size of the cot, and the silence was broken by the sound of his breathing. He would seek me in the dark with that same, relentless hunger.

I learned him. I learned his body the way I learned the treacherous paths of the arroyo. I learned to anticipate his needs, his moods.

I knew when he arrived drunk from the cantina in San Isidro; those nights were fast, sloppy, and mercifully brief. I knew when he smelled of gunpowder, having shot a rattlesnake or a coyote; those nights he was rough, his anger at the world bleeding into me.

And I knew the nights his hands trembled, the nights he had dreamed of his dead children. Those were the worst. He would be gentle. He would hold me. He would sometimes, in the blackest part of the night, whisper a name that wasn’t mine.

I would lie awake, his heavy arm across my stomach, and I would plan. I had a loose floorboard. Under it, I had a tin box. In the box, I had five dried-out tortillas, a small knife, and three silver pesos I had stolen from his pocket, one at a time, over six months.

I was surviving. But I was always planning to leave.

Part 2

The change began one night, six months into my… tenure.

It was a full moon. He came back early, not at dusk, but while the sun was still bleeding orange and purple over the mountains. He was… happy.

It was the most terrifying thing I had ever seen.

He was carrying a half-empty bottle of mezcal, and he had a smile that didn’t fit his face.

“Tomorrow,” he boomed, slamming the bottle on the table.

“The buyer comes from Sonora.”

I served him his coffee, my hand steady.

“The cattle?”

“The steers, yes!” he laughed.

“He will bring gold for the steers. We will be rich, muchacha. Rich!”

I nodded, stirring the beans. But something was wrong. His eyes. He wouldn’t look at me. His fingers drummed on the table, a nervous, staccato rhythm, like he was counting down the seconds to something.

That night, when he reached for me, it was different.

It wasn’t the urgency of hunger. It wasn’t the anger of a long day. It was… slow. Careful. He washed his face first. He stroked my hair. He was gentle, but it wasn’t the gentleness of his sad dreams.

It was the calculating, careful touch of a man stroking a prize horse. The horse he is about to sell at market.

I felt a chill that had nothing to do with the wind.

The next few days were a blur of bizarreness. Don Elías, a man who hadn’t bought so much as a new pair of laces in six months, rode to town. He came back with… gifts.

He brought new fabric. He brought a dress. A red dress, with black lace at the collar. It was the kind of dress a cantina girl would wear. It was a costume. I folded it and put it away, my stomach churning.

He bought paint. He painted the door of the shack. He fixed the broken slat in the corral.

And he bought a mirror. A small, hand-held thing with a silver-plated handle.

“So you can see yourself pretty,” he said, his voice thick.

I looked into the glass. I didn’t see “pretty.” I saw my green, haunted eyes. I saw the dark, sunken circles under them. And I saw something else.

I saw the lie.

The ranch didn’t smell like dust and goats anymore. It smelled like fresh paint and promises I didn’t understand.

A week passed. The “buyer” hadn’t come. But the dread remained.

One afternoon, while I was scrubbing the floor—his one, true joy, having me on my knees—my hand brushed against a loose board under his cot. Not my loose board. His.

Curious, I pulled it up. Underneath was a small, wooden box. It wasn’t locked.

Inside, there was a stack of papers. And a letter. The handwriting was fine, delicate. A woman’s hand.

Querido Elías,

El niño ya camina. He is strong, like his father. We await you in Chihuahua with open arms. Do not delay any longer. Your son needs you. We need you.

The paper trembled in my hands. El niño. The baby.

Elías had never spoken of another child. A living child.

That night, I was waiting. I wasn’t scrubbing. I wasn’t cooking. I was sitting on the bench, my rebozo on, my small bag at my feet. The letter was on the table.

He walked in, saw the bag, and his face hardened.

“You’re leaving?” he asked, dropping his rifle.

“I am not your wife,” I said, my voice, for the first time, firm. He laughed, a short, bitter sound.

“No. You’re not.”

“I am your debt,” I said, standing up.

He stepped toward me, his boots crunching on the adobe floor.

“You knew the arrangement from the beginning. Your body… for this roof.”

“Yes,” I said.

“I knew that. But I didn’t know you had another roof waiting for you in Chihuahua. With a real wife. And a real son.”

I pointed to the letter.

His face went dark.

“That letter… it’s not what you think.”

“I am not thinking,” I said.

“I know. Tomorrow, the buyer from Sonora. Or is it… your family from Chihuahua?”

Don Elías stood perfectly still, the shadow from his hat obscuring his eyes.

“It’s my brother-in-law,” he said, his voice flat. My heart stopped.

“He’s bringing the money for the ranch,” he continued.

“And… we are leaving. All three of us.”

“All three?”

He took a step closer, and his eyes, for the first time, did not look at my face, or my chest. He looked at my stomach.

“You’re carrying my blood, muchacha,” he whispered, a sick, proprietary pride in his voice.

“You can’t leave. You’re carrying my son.”

The world stopped.

I hadn’t… I hadn’t wanted to recognize it. The sickness in the mornings. The two missed moons. I had told myself it was the dust, the bad water.

I brought my hand to my belly. The belly that was just, barely, beginning to swell under my dress.

His child.

The child of a man who had bought me like a brood mare. The child he was now planning to take to his real family.

That night, there was no shared cot. I slept in the corral, with the goats. I had my kitchen knife hidden in my boot. I did not sleep.

At dawn, as the sun barely kissed the mountains, I heard them. Hoofbeats.

Three riders, coming up the dusty path.

The first was a man so fat his chaleco was straining. The other two were armed vaqueros, their faces hard and blank.

This was not a brother-in-law.

Don Elías stepped out of the shack, forcing a smile that didn’t reach his eyes.

“Gordo,” he said, nodding.

“You made it.”

“Everything is ready?” the fat man wheezed, heaving himself off his horse.

“The ranch. The cattle.” He looked past Elías, his small, pig-like eyes scanning the yard. They landed on me, hiding behind the well.

“And the girl,” he finished.

My blood turned to ice.

I hid behind the stone well, my heart hammering in my throat. The men went inside the shack. I heard voices. Laughter. The clink of coins.

Then, a shout. A crash. And a scream. It was the scream of Don Elías.

I ran.

I burst into the shack. Elías was on his knees, his hands tied behind his back. The fat man, Gordo, was holding a revolver to his temple.

“I told you not to play games with me, Elías,” Gordo hissed.

“You signed the paper. The ranch is mine. The girl is mine.” He licked his lips.

“And the baby… well. Babies can always be sold. They fetch a good price in Santa Fe.”

“She… she won’t go with you,” Elías choked out, his eyes wide with terror, blood from his head dripping onto the floor.

Gordo laughed, a wet, wheezing sound. “Of course she will. She’s part of the deal. You signed her over. Livestock.”

Livestock.

I stepped out of the shadow of the doorway. The knife was in my hand.

“Nobody,” I whispered, “sells me.”

The two vaqueros turned, their hands flying to their pistols. But I was a girl from the río Seco. I was faster than a rattlesnake.

I didn’t throw the knife. I lunged.

I drove the blade up and under the ribs of the closest vaquero. He gasped, his gun firing into the ceiling.

Elías, seeing his chance, threw himself backwards, breaking the chair, and lunged for his rifle on the wall.

The second vaquero fired at me. The bullet tore through the fabric of my sleeve, stinging my arm.

Pop. Pop.

Two shots, deafening in the small room. Not from the vaquero. From Elías. The second vaquero crumpled to the floor, a hole in his chest.

Now it was just us. Me, Elías, and Gordo.

Gordo, his face purple, grabbed me, pulling me in front of him, the cold barrel of his revolver jamming into my temple.

“Drop it, Elías!” he screamed.

“Drop the rifle, or I’ll blow her head off! She’s no good to me dead!”

Elías stood, panting, the rifle in his hands. He looked at me. He looked at my green eyes, my torn sleeve, the blood of the vaquero on my dress.

“She’s… she’s carrying my son,” he pleaded.

“I’ll make more!” Gordo laughed.

“Drop it!”

I did the only thing I could. I bit him.

I sank my teeth into the fleshy, sweaty hand that held the gun. He screamed, a high-pitched shriek, and his hand recoiled.

It was all the time Elías needed.

The rifle exploded. The shot was a thunderclap. Gordo’s head snapped back, and he fell, taking me with him.

The shack was suddenly silent, filled with smoke and the smell of gunpowder.

I pushed the fat man’s body off me. I stood up. Three bodies on the floor.

I walked over to Don Elías. He was shaking, leaning against the wall, the rifle dangling from his hand.

“The… the baby,” he stammered.

“The baby,” I said, my voice cold, “is mine. The ranch… is mine.”

I picked up the kitchen knife from the vaquero’s chest. I walked to Elías. He flinched.

“You,” I said, “can go to your family in Chihuahua.”

He looked at me, his eyes full of something I couldn’t name. Love? Fear?

“I have no family,” he whispered, tears mixing with the dust on his face.

“The letter… it was a lie. I… I wrote it myself. I… I wanted you to stay. I wanted… I wanted you to be jealous. To… to care.”

“Why?” I asked, the knife blade steady.

“Because,” he choked out, sliding down the wall to sit on the floor.

“Because you are the only thing I have. The only thing… that’s left.”

I looked at him for a long time. The man who had bought me, bred me, and then tried to sell me. The man who had, in the end, chosen me.

I knelt beside him. Then, with a quick, fluid motion, I turned the knife and cut the ropes that still bound his wrists.

“Then stay,” I said.

He looked up, hope in his eyes.

“But the pact changes.”

I stood up, the owner of the blood, the smoke, and the silence.

“This ranch is mine. The child is mine. And every night,” I said, my voice a whisper of the desert wind, “you will give me your body. In exchange for a roof, and a plate of beans.”

He stared, his mouth open.

“Until the baby is born. Until the earth runs dry. Until the desert claims us both.”

Don Elías, the man who was once master of all this, nodded. He was weeping.

Outside, the coyotes howled at the rising sun, and the wind brought the smell of blood and freedom.

And so, every night, when the desert wind howls like a wounded wolf, he crosses the yard, his heart beating like a war drum.

I wait for him on the cot. I am wearing the red dress.

He kneels.

He is the one who is cold. He is the one who is grateful for the warmth.

He is the man who gives his body to the girl from the dry river.

…Until one day.