“You didn’t think I’d let you bury me like the others, did you, Callum?” Ruth’s voice, when it finally broke the heavy silence, was no longer the rich, resonant alto of the Iowa woman who had written the letter, but a harsh, grating whisper that scraped against his raw nerves like jagged glass.
Callum took an involuntary step backward, his massive boots crushing the dry twigs beneath his feet as his mind raced to piece together the nightmare unfolding around him. “What are you talking about?” he demanded, his voice a low, rumbling growl born of sheer panic. “Who are you? If Sarah’s trunk is here—if you know about Sarah—”
“I know all about Sarah,” Ruth interrupted, a dark, humorless smile twisting the corners of her thin lips into a cruel slash. “Just as I know all about Helen, and Margaret, and Dorothy, and poor, fragile Catherine. I know every single word they whispered to you in the dark before you grew tired of their complaining and decided the mountain needed a little more fertilizer.”
The accusation hung in the freezing air between them, sharp and suffocating, wrapping around Callum’s throat like a garrote made of piano wire. A roaring filled his ears, drowning out the ambient sounds of the forest, as the dark history of the mountain rose up to consume him. For years, the valley folk had whispered their dark legends about the lonely giant who lured innocent mail-order brides to his remote fortress, only for them to vanish without a trace into the unforgiving wilderness, leaving behind nothing but abandoned trunks and weeping relatives. But Callum had always believed those whispers to be the cruel gossip of small-minded people who couldn’t comprehend a solitary man seeking companionship in the wild. He had genuinely loved Helen, had genuinely mourned when Margaret packed her bags, had truly believed that the harsh isolation simply broke their city-softened spirits and drove them back down the trail of their own accord. Hadn’t he? A sickening wave of vertigo washed over him as the horrifying possibility clawed at the edges of his consciousness, threatening to tear down the very foundation of his sanity. Had his own hands, driven by some dark, subconscious fury in the dead of winter’s endless nights, committed atrocities that his conscious mind refused to acknowledge? Had the monster the valley whispered about not been some nameless creature lurking in the pines, but the man he saw staring back at him in the mirror every single morning?
“No,” Callum whispered, the word tearing itself raw from his throat as he shook his head violently, backing away another step until the back of his knees hit the wooden rail of the wagon bed. “No, that’s a lie. I let them go. I paid the drivers. I watched them leave!”
“Did you?” Ruth asked softly, stepping closer, closing the distance between them with a predatory grace that belied her heavy frame. She reached up with hands that were suddenly terrifyingly steady, unfastening the heavy brass clasp of her cloak and letting the dark wool garment fall unheeded to the damp earth. Beneath it, she wore not a travel dress suited for a lady of the frontier, but a heavy leather belt cinched tight around her waist, from which hung a formidable array of skinning knives, a heavy iron-headed hatchet, and a small, leather-bound journal with a stained, water-damaged cover.
Callum’s eyes dropped to the journal, and his breath hitched violently in his chest, a low, animalistic whimper escaping his lips. He recognized that journal instantly; it was the diary he had kept locked in the bottom drawer of his cedar desk, a detailed, obsessive record of every single bride, every failure, every perceived betrayal, and every frantic, midnight burial in the rocky soil behind the root cellar.
“How do you have that?” Callum breathed, his voice trembling as the icy grip of terror paralyzed his massive limbs. “I burned it. I burned every page in the fireplace three weeks ago.”
“You thought you did,” Ruth replied, her eyes flashing with a cold, triumphant light as she patted the leather cover affectionately. “Men like you, Callum—men who live too long with their own dark secrets and the ghosts of their own making—often forget what they do in the deep, freezing dark when the winter madness takes hold. You wrote it all down, page by agonizing page, confessing every bitter disappointment, every moment your patience snapped when a delicate little city girl dared to cry for her mother, and every frantic, sobbing hour you spent digging shallow graves in the frozen mud while the wind howled through the pines.”
“That’s not true,” Callum choked out, tears of absolute horror finally spilling over his scarred lashes and cutting tracks through the dust on his cheeks. “I wanted them to stay! I swear to God, I wanted someone to love me!”
“You wanted a reflection of your own misery, Callum, not a wife,” Ruth said, her voice dropping to a harsh, venomous hiss as she drew the heavy iron hatchet smoothly from her belt, the dull gray metal catching the pale morning light. “And when they inevitably recoiled from the savage living in this cabin, your precious little heart broke, didn’t it? And in your grief, that gentle, hopeful giant transformed into something quite different, didn’t he? Something that couldn’t bear the thought of them leaving you behind in the dark.”
The horrifying truth descended upon Callum like an avalanche, crushing the last remaining defenses of his fractured mind. The blackouts. The terrifying, dreamlike gaps in his memory that always seemed to follow the departure of a bride. The inexplicable bloodstains on the floorboards that he could never quite scrub out, no matter how much lye soap and boiling water he used. He wasn’t the victim of a cruel, lonely fate; he was the executioner, a fractured soul harboring a monster so dark and violent that his waking mind had constructed an elaborate, beautiful fantasy of rejection to shield him from his own horrific deeds. Five women hadn’t fled down the mountain; five women had tried to escape his wrath, and five women had been brutally dragged back to feed the dark obsession of a lonely heart that refused to be abandoned.
“And you?” Callum whispered, staring at the woman standing before him with eyes wide with a mixture of horror and profound, sickening understanding. “If you know all of this—if you read my journal—why did you come up here? Why walk straight into the den of a beast?”
Ruth stopped moving just inches from him, her gaze piercing straight through the terror into the very depths of his ruined soul. A strange, bitter smile touched her lips, devoid of warmth, yet filled with a terrifying, righteous purpose that made Callum’s blood run cold.
“Because I am Helen’s older sister,” Ruth whispered, her voice dropping into the freezing air like a falling stone. “And I didn’t come here to be your bride, Callum. I came here to collect a debt.”
Before Callum could draw another breath, before the towering giant could summon the massive strength that had felled a thousand pine trees, Ruth’s arm swept upward in a blur of motion, the heavy iron hatchet whistling through the crisp mountain air as the final, long-overdue shadow fell across the cabin door.