Traveler trilogy Book 2.
Five years after killing Levi Cornwall, Arthur Morgan is happy. He has a wife who loves him, an honest job he enjoys, and two beautiful children named Sadie and Hiram. All of it is turned on its head, however, when Francis S...
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A clattering of broken glass attracted Arthur's attention. He had been upstairs in the room in Smithfield's, working on fixing some flight feathers to the shafts of a few dozen arrows in preparation to hunt some antelope with Charles that afternoon. Hunting was quickly becoming the easiest way for Arthur to make money honestly now that they were back in 1899, and he lamented at the thought that in another life, a purer life without Dutch, he could have been a hell of a pelt trader.
But the loud sounds of clattering and raised voices downstairs awoke him from his thoughts, along with a loud, bellowing voice from the nearby stairwell saying, "What the hell is going on down here?!"
"What the fuck is that?" Tori asked, getting to her feet with fear in her eyes. She'd been sitting on their bed, sewing a hole in one of Arthur's socks.
Arthur, however, only sighed tiredly. "What day is it?"
"June fourteenth," Tori replied.
"It's me, then," he replied. "I got into a bar fight with Javier, Bill, and Charles downstairs. Bill started it; all I wanted to do was drink."
Tori took a step forward and walked toward the door to the room. "I'm going to see."
Now, it was Arthur's turn to be afraid. Not because he feared for Tori's safety, though. He knew she could take care of herself, and that she would be safe if she stayed upstairs. He was afraid because of what she might witness, which was himself as an angry, broken man. A man who had nearly killed someone that day. "No," he pleaded. "Please don't go down there. You may not like what you see."
After all, Tori had only known the Arthur that had redeemed himself towards the end of his old life. The first day she had met him, he'd been lying near death in a hospital bed in Saint Denis in the year 2021. But not long before that, he had been a creature of rage and anger and brokenheartedness, the kind of man who would have beat Tommy to death if a small, sick man named Thomas Downes hadn't stopped him.
Tori's memories of Arthur were pure ones, unspoiled by the awful things he'd done in his previous life. She knew about his deeds, yes, but they were so distant and far away to her that she could only read about them in boring, monotonous history books or hear about them as he told them to her in sadness late at night. She had never seen the glint of that old anger in his eyes or heard the unbridled rage and heartbreak in his voice as he tried his darnedest to kill Tommy that day in the mud.
But her mind was made up, and there was nothing Arthur could do about it. She was her own person, and moreover she was his wife. He wouldn't keep this side of himself from her if she wanted to see it. All he could do was plead with her not to go looking for things she might not like to see, things that might make her realize just what a bastard her husband really was. At his core, the man she'd married, the man whose children she'd happily born and the man whose baby she currently carried inside her, was a murderer. She knew, but until she saw him kill someone, there was no way for her to truly comprehend exactly what that meant. It was too foreign and far away from her.
