Josephine dropped her head into her hands, covering her face and weeping openly. “I know,” she sobbed, her voice cracking with absolute despair. “I know I’m hideous. I’m sorry, I’m so sorry…”
Cyrus did not move. He was not looking at her with disgust, nor was he looking at the ruined flesh of a burn victim or the mangled scars of a terrible accident. He was staring at her with wide, unblinking eyes, his gaze locked onto her features as though he were staring straight out of his own grave. He opened his mouth to speak, but no words came out; instead, a harsh, breathless whisper tore from his throat.
“Catherine,” he choked out.
Josephine froze. Her weeping stopped instantly, the silence in the cabin turning sharp and dangerous. She lowered her trembling hands from her face and looked up at him, her eyes no longer swimming in helpless tears, but burning with a cold, terrifying clarity.
Cyrus backed up another step until the small of his back struck the edge of the kitchen counter, his hand groping blindly behind him for the heavy skinning knife resting in its leather sheath. His heart hammered against his ribs like a trapped bird. The woman sitting on his stool did not have the face of a stranger. She possessed the exact, unmistakable features of his younger sister, Catherine—the sister he had buried beneath the frozen sod of a Nebraska homestead twelve long winters ago, after a raid that had left their family farm a smoking ruin and everyone inside it slaughtered.
“How?” Cyrus whispered, his voice trembling as his fingers closed around the bone handle of the knife. “How is this possible? I buried you.”
Josephine slowly unfolded her legs and stood up from the stool. The fragile, broken girl who had cowered under the burlap sack was gone, replaced by a cold, deliberate composure that sent a chill deeper than the Bitterroot winter straight down Cyrus’s spine. She reached up and casually brushed a stray lock of dark hair away from her temple, revealing an old, faded crescent scar just above her left ear—the exact scar Catherine had earned when she fell from the hayloft at age nine.
“You didn’t look very closely at the bodies, Cyrus,” Josephine—or Catherine—said softly, her voice devoid of warmth. “The fire was hot, the smoke was thick, and you were too busy trying to save your own skin to turn over every corpse in the root cellar.”
Cyrus stared at her, the room spinning wildly around him. All the survival instincts that had kept him alive through brutal winters, cougar attacks, and the lawless violence of the territories suddenly felt useless against the ghost standing in his kitchen. He remembered that terrible night in Nebraska with sickening clarity: the screaming, the acrid stench of burning timber, the charred remains pulled from the rubble, and his own desperate flight into the mountains, carrying the crushing guilt of a brother who had run away while his family burned.
“I thought you were dead,” Cyrus said, his grip on the knife loosening as a wave of overwhelming, disorienting grief crashed over him. “Every single day for twelve years, I carried your death on my shoulders. I built this cabin to hide from the memory of it.”
“And you did a wonderful job,” Catherine replied, stepping closer to him, her eyes gleaming with a bitter, unyielding resentment. “You carved out a nice, quiet life for yourself in the wilderness, hunting elk and trading furs, while I spent the last decade dragging myself through the worst hell men could invent. Do you have any idea what it’s like to survive a massacre only to be sold off like a broken horse in a mining town just to stay alive?”
Cyrus flinched as if he had been struck. The guilt he had carried for a decade morphed into something heavier, a suffocating weight that threatened to crush him entirely. He let go of the knife, letting it clatter harmlessly onto the wooden floorboards. He took a hesitant step toward her, his arms half-raised in a desperate plea for forgiveness.
“Catherine, I didn’t know,” he pleaded, his voice breaking. “If I had known you were alive, I would have torn the world apart to find you. I swear it.”
“Words are cheap, brother,” Catherine said coldly, stopping just an arm’s length away. She looked down at the discarded skinning knife on the floor, then back up into his tortured eyes. “Just like the fifty dollars you paid that greasy little worm in Orofino. You think a sack over my head and a handful of gold coins squares the debt for twelve years in the dark?”
Cyrus shook his head slowly, tears finally spilling over his weathered eyelashes and tracking through the deep scars on his cheeks. He had spent his whole life believing he was the sole survivor of a tragedy, a cursed man hiding from his past in the freezing heights of the mountains. But as he looked at the sister he had abandoned to the ashes, he realized the past had finally caught up with him, and there was nowhere left to run.
The wind outside howled against the cabin walls, rattling the glass in the small windowpane as the storm settled in for a long, brutal night. Catherine did not smile, nor did she soften; she simply stood her ground in the center of the warm room, watching him with the exact same unblinking stare that had haunted his nightmares for over a decade. Cyrus dropped his gaze to the floor, knowing that whatever came next—whether forgiveness or a knife in the dark—he deserved every bit of it.