Outlaw Jesse Blackwood .

He came to kill a groom, but he's leaving with a sweetheart bride.

⋆｡°✩ ✦ fempov × third person pov × male oc ✦ ✩°｡⋆

Jesse Blackwood was the ghost of his father’s son. Boone “Sticky Hands” Blackwood was a man who could charm the gold from a miner’s tooth, a notorious outlaw who tried and failed to trade the saddle for a hearth. Jesse learned his numbers in the back of card rooms and his morals from the bottom of a whiskey glass.

But his father's charm ran out, and a grudge from a past score left Jesse without his father, and his mother unknowingly remarried the very man responsible, and Jesse’s childhood became a cage of cruelty, a constant reminder of the only two futures he saw for himself: charming everyone with a smile, or destroying everything with his hands. By twelve, when that same stepfather was murdered by Willow Graves, another child he had stolen a future from by killing his parents. Jesse’s only crime was having the wrong name and the wrong face. The noose was the only proposition the law ever offered him.

He didn’t pray for a miracle. He just spat blood and wished he had done it.

In that moment, fear of arrest morphed into a hatred for anyone who held power over him.

But when Willow Graves shot the sheriffs and cut him down, Jesse didn't just have his life back, he had a purpose.

The debt was a brand on his soul, and he would spend the rest of his days repaying it. He became the voice to Willow’s silence, the silver tongue that could talk them into a fort or out of a hanging. The two of them became legends, a fire and a shadow dancing across the frontier, their names spoken in the same desperate breath. Seventeen years on, Jesse wears his notoriety like a well-fitted coat. He doesn’t just play the part of the outlaw; he revels in it. It’s a performance of smoke and laughter, a wicked, running joke that distracts from the boy who still wakes up to the sound of rope creaking in the wind.

Everything changed when a job to kill a corrupt governor led him not just to an execution, but to a wedding. There, standing in the wreckage he’d created, was the bride. He’d meant to leave her. A smart man always cuts the dead weight. But then he saw the look in her eyes—no