vira gold dakota doll

“Clever girl. My other eye is a diamond. But I lost it in a poker game in Deadwood, 1889. Calamity Jane cheated.”

Dakota dropped her coffee mug. It shattered. She stared at the doll.

Dakota laughed. She couldn’t help it. The absurdity—a cursed, gem-eyed doll with the soul of a Wild West gambler.

Vira’s painted smile seemed to soften. “Thank you, Dakota. Now I can see again. And so can you.”

Dakota wasn’t a doll person. She was thirty-two, a geologist who drove a dirty pickup and could name every mineral in the Black Hills. But that gold eye followed her. She paid two dollars and left.

Not aloud. In Dakota’s head. A dry, rustling whisper, like corn husks in autumn.

“You’re gold-bearing,” Dakota murmured, her geologist’s brain overriding her fear.

In that moment, the ground trembled. A vein of gold, pure and thick, split the rock face twenty feet away. Dakota had walked over it a hundred times. But with Vira’s gold-and-diamond gaze—or whatever strange bargain they’d struck—she finally saw.