Her hand shook so violently that she missed his grasp twice. On the third frantic try, her cold, delicate fingers finally settled into his rough palm.
“Come on,” Cyrus murmured, his tone softening just a fraction. “Let’s get you out of this wind.”
The grueling trek into the Bitterroots took five agonizing hours as the late-November storm broke in earnest, burying the switchback trails in knee-deep powder. Josephine rode Cyrus’s weary packhorse, bundled tightly in heavy woolen blankets, while Cyrus walked on foot beside the animal, maintaining a steady, exhausting rhythm as he broke a trail through the mounting drifts.
Throughout the long, silent journey, she never once reached for the knot holding the scratchy burlap sack closed. Every time Cyrus glanced back over his shoulder through the driving whiteout, her fingers were instead clawing desperately at the twine, gripping the rough cloth as though it were the only fragile barrier keeping the rest of the cruel world from destroying her completely.
By the time nightfall swallowed the steep canyons, they reached the relative safety of Cyrus’s cabin.
It was a stout structure of hand-hewn pine logs, smelling of woodsmoke, dried herbs, and tallow. A roaring fire blazed in the stone hearth, casting a warm, amber glow across clean furs and a heavy wooden table where a pot of venison stew simmered gently. Cyrus bustled about, pouring steaming coffee into a tin cup and setting a steaming bowl of meat and root vegetables before her, before taking the heavy chair on the opposite side of the table.
“Listen to me, Josephine,” Cyrus said, leaning forward and resting his forearms on the scarred wood. “I didn’t buy you to own you. I bought you because no living creature deserves to be treated like something people throw away in the dirt.”
She went entirely rigid across the table, the spoon slipping from her fingers to clatter against the wood.
“You’re safe here,” Cyrus continued, his gaze steady and unwavering. “Nobody is ever going to hurt you or mock you in this house again.”
Slowly, almost mechanically, her hands rose from her lap, trembling violently as they drifted upward toward the knotted twine at the back of her neck.
“I’ve seen a grizzly tear a man’s chest open,” Cyrus said softly, wanting to reassure her, wanting to bridge the terrifying gulf between them. “I’ve looked at my own shredded face in a mirror every morning for ten years. Whatever is under that sack… it won’t make me turn you out into the snow. You have my word.”
Her fingers grazed the knot, but her hands were shaking too violently to untie the tight, stubborn weave.
Cyrus stood up slowly, deliberately telegraphing every movement so as not to startle her, and walked around the tabletop until he stood directly behind her chair.
“May I?” he asked, his breath warm in the chill air of the room.
Josephine closed her eyes behind the burlap mask. After a long, agonizing pause where the only sound was the crackling of the hearth fire, she gave the smallest, most defeated nod of her head.
Cyrus raised both hands and gently reached for the knot at the back of her neck.
His rough fingers worked the hemp free, and the heavy burlap sack slipped away from her head like a falling curtain.
Cyrus drew in a sharp breath, his hands freezing inches from her shoulders.
The firelight danced across her face, and the terrible truth struck him with the force of a falling pine.
There were no scars. There was no hideous disfigurement, no birthmark, no twisted bone or melted skin. Josephine possessed a striking, classical beauty—delicate cheekbones, wide, expressive dark eyes, and a soft, symmetrical mouth that looked as though it belonged in an eastern portrait gallery rather than a frontier mining camp.
She was breathtakingly, undeniably whole.
And yet, Cyrus knew instantly why Jeremiah Higgins had nearly lost his lunch.
Etched deeply into the soft skin of her forehead, branded in stark, raw, clinical ink by a federal penman in the St. Louis asylum records, was a single, undeniable administrative mark: *PROPERTY OF THE MISSOURI STATE PENITENTIARY.* Below it, hidden just along the hairline where the sack had rested, was the unmistakable brand of a convicted federal assassin.
Josephine opened her dark eyes, looking up at him not with the timidity of a frightened bride, but with the chilling, calculating stillness of a predator who had just evaluated her new keeper.
“They told you I was a disfigured monster,” she whispered, her voice losing every trace of the fragile tremor she had worn in the town square. A slow, terrifying smile curved her lips. “They had to make sure nobody looked too closely at my face, Mr. Creed. Because if a marshal from St. Louis ever saw me walking down an Idaho street, they wouldn’t have thrown mud at me. They would have placed a noose around my neck before sundown.”
Cyrus’s hand instinctively drifted toward the heavy skinning knife sheathed at his belt, but before his fingers could close around the horn handle, Josephine’s hand shot out with blinding, unnatural speed.
The heavy, forged-iron fireplace poker was already in her grip, the heavy end resting lightly against the hollow of his throat before he could draw breath.
“I don’t think you’ll be throwing me out into the snow tonight, Cyrus,” she murmured, her eyes gleaming with a dangerous, triumphant light in the firelight. “After all… we have a long winter ahead of us, don’t we?”