A Brother's Price

Unharmed and untouched, they said!”
    “So what do we do?” Bert asked.
    “Give them both to the bosses. Let them work it out,” Fen said.
    Jerin glanced around them. The other women on the landing looked on but made no move to interfere. Guns were already in the mix. From their faces, he realized that they still saw him as a whore having trouble with river trash. If he appealed to them as a man, once they rescued him, would they try to keep him?
    “Come quietly,” Fen said. “Or we will pop Miss High-and-mighty here and now.”
    He let himself be dragged to an alley where horses waited. Since none of his counteroffers had worked, he tried a new ploy. The Porters had left no witnesses behind them—surely they wouldn’t allow Fen and her women to live, knowing their darkest secrets.
    “The Hats are a noble family planning to marry me to claim the throne,” he told them. “You’ll know as soon as the marriage is announced which noble family is the Hats. You’re the only ones that can testify they’re one and the same. They’ve—”
    Fen cocked her hand in warning. “Hush your mouth, or I’ll knock you silly enough you can’t talk, and blame it on Miss High-and-mighty.”
    He wanted to stay conscious, so he kept his suspicions to himself.
     
    The side-wheeler Destiny sat waiting for them, tied off to massive oaks on a secluded bend in the river, its stage lowered to the desolate shore.
    Kij and her sisters came down to greet them in the woods, six-guns holstered on their hips. Kij smiled at Jerin, then noticed Cira and frowned. “So, you make an appearance, finally.”
    “Gods, your soul must be black,” Cira growled.
    Kij waved the insult away. “Faith is for the well-to-do. My grandmothers left us too destitute for that nonsense.”
    “But Keifer, and your Eldest, and your mothers?” Cira asked.
    “Our family doesn’t age well,” Kij said lightly, as if she were talking about spilling cheap wine and not her family’s blood. “Our mothers had long slipped into senility, and babbled family secrets right and left. They made a useful sacrifice—one last service to the family. Keifer, dearly as I loved him, was an idiot. He was to get himself to the first-floor bathroom. We picked that theater primarily for a place he could survive the blast. The walls reinforced by the plumbing would have protected him. He never showed. Eldest went to fetch him, but then— they weren’t supposed to be killed.”
    “Ahhh, too bad. So now a husband raid?” Cira asked.
    “Oh, we didn’t raid for a husband,” Kij cried, pressing her left hand to her chest, looking wounded. “The royal guard can testify without influence from us that not a single Porter sister took Jerin from the palace.”
    Kij’s right hand flashed downward, drawing her pistol.
    Jerin had been watching for the move; he stepped in front of Cira, shielding her. “Kij, no!”
    The Porters’ revolvers fired in thunderous rounds. Fen, Bert, little Dossy. and the others went down in a hail of bullets, the Porter sisters emptying their six-guns into the hapless river trash.
    Birds startled up out of the trees and winged away as the echoes returned from the far shore. Gun smoke wreathed them. The smell of blood grew as the river trash’s lives poured out into the dirt around them.
    “There’s an interesting law that applies here,” Kij calmly explained as she reloaded her pistol. “It’s similar to war plunder. It says that if an unmarried man is kidnapped by party A and rescued by party B, then he belongs to party B. Losers weepers, finders keepers.” She spun the chamber on her pistol. “Step out of the way, Jerin.”
    “No.” Jerin was pleased that he sounded more firm than he felt.
    “Sisters, please, get our new husband out of harm’s way.”
    “If I were you,” Cira called out to Kij from behind him, “I’d think long and hard before you walk down that road.”
    “It’s a road we’ve walked before.” Kij raised her revolver. “A few more miles, and Queensland is ours.”
    “Kill her and I will never be your husband!” Jerin growled. “You’ll have to keep me chained to a wall, because I’ll escape you every chance I get. I’ll tell anyone I see of the crimes you committed. You’ll have to rape me for my seed! You’ll have to raise our children alone.”
    “Jerin, hush.” Cira caught his shoulders and started to push him aside. “Don’t give them cause to hurt you.”
    Jerin dug in his heels, refusing