By dawn, the frost had turned the inside of the cabin windows into white fern leaves.
The air was so cold my breath plumed white in the dim morning light as I pulled on my boots—the same cracked, dust-caked shoes he had untied in the barn, though he had spent some of the night cleaning the mud from the welts with a stiff brush. They felt different on my feet now. Not comfortable, exactly, but no longer instruments of my humiliation.
He was already up, stoking the fire with dry pine knots that sent a shower of golden sparks up the blackened chimney. A pot of black coffee was bubbling on the iron grate, filling the room with a sharp, bitter aroma that chased away the damp chill of the night.
“Eat,” he said, tossing a hard biscuit onto the table. “We leave before the sun clears the ridge.”
“Where are we going?” I demanded, standing my ground near the cot, folding my arms across my chest. I was done being dragged through the dust like a sack of grain. If he was taking me north to sell me off in a mining camp or hand me over to someone else, he would have to drag every inch of me. “You bought me for three dollars, mister. That doesn’t make me your shadow. I want answers.”
He stopped with the poker in his hand. He slowly turned around, his dark eyes fixing on mine with a weight that made the air feel thin. For a terrifying second, I thought he might strike out—thought the quiet man was just a mask for the violence that lived underneath every door in this God-forsaken territory.
Instead, a slow, humorless smile touched the corners of his mouth.
“You think I bought you?” he asked softly.
“I saw the coins. The auctioneer took them.”
“The auctioneer took his fee for clearing the platform,” he said, setting the poker down against the stone hearth with a dull clank. He reached into his coat pocket and pulled out a folded piece of heavy parchment, yellowed at the folds and stamped with the heavy red seal of the territorial court. He tossed it across the table. It landed near my hand, light as a dry leaf.
I looked down at the paper, my heart hammering against my ribs like a trapped bird. With trembling fingers, I unfolded the document.
The ink was faded, written in the spidery, elegant hand of a clerk who had clearly been drinking when he penned it. But the names leaped out at me from the page, stark and impossible.
*Warrant of Apprehension.*
*Subject: Annabeth Thorne.*
*Charges: Accessory to Grand Larceny and Arson.*
*Bounty: Three Hundred Dollars, Dead or Alive.*
My breath caught in my throat, a cold wave of panic washing over me so violently I had to grab the edge of the table to keep from collapsing. The room tilted. The stove, the walls, the window—all of it blurred into a gray smear.
“That’s—that’s a lie,” I choked out, my voice rising in panic. “I was twelve years old when the bank burned down! My mother—she said we were just leaving town!”
“Your mother didn’t leave town,” he said, stepping closer, his boots heavy on the floorboards. “She took the strongbox from the floorboards of the bank in Julesburg while your father held the gun on the teller. When the place went up in flames, they split. They left you behind because a kid slows down a horse. But they made sure you knew where the ledger was buried.”
“No,” I whispered, backing away until my spine hit the cold logs of the cabin wall. “No, you’re lying. I didn’t know anything about a bank. I was just a kid—”
“You were nineteen yesterday,” he interrupted, his voice dropping to a harsh, steady register that brooked no argument. “You’ve been nineteen for the last four years, Annabeth, drifting from one trail town to the next, working the lowest dens, waiting for the bounty hunters to connect the faded bonnet and the red birthmark on your wrist to the girl who watched her parents hang in a Wyoming clearing.”
I stared down at my wrist. The sleeve of his coat had slipped back, exposing the jagged, pale crescent moon of a scar just above my thumb. I had forgotten how I got it. I had spent years telling myself it was a branding iron, an accident with a kettle, anything to keep the memory from surfacing.
“The marshal in Julesburg put out that auction flyer three months ago,” he continued, his eyes never leaving mine. “He knew bounty hunters wouldn’t go sniffing around respectable boarding houses for a girl like you. But a mock auction in a desperate livery? That’s where scum goes to look for cheap labor and easier targets. He figured if you were cornered, your old habits would show. He figured you’d run, or fight, or pull that knife you’ve been hiding in your skirt since dawn.”
I looked down at my hand. My fingers were still curled around the pocket knife I had slipped from the shelf. The cold steel pressed against my palm like a brand.
“Why didn’t you turn me in?” I whispered, the fight draining out of me leaving behind a hollow, shivering shell. “Three hundred dollars is a lot of money. You could have walked into the marshal’s office in town yesterday and collected.”
He walked slowly toward the window, looking out at the endless expanse of gray pine and frost-kissed hills stretching toward the northern horizon. The morning light caught the gray at his temples, turning his hair the color of old iron.
“Because the marshal in Julesburg is the same man who burned that bank down to cover his own ledger books,” he said, his voice dropping so low I had to strain to hear it over the crackle of the fire. “And he didn’t want the girl found because of the money. He wanted her found because she’s the only one left who knows where the remaining gold is buried.”
The silence in the cabin grew heavy, suffocating, pressing down on my chest until I couldn’t draw a full breath. Every memory I thought I had buried—the smell of burning cedar, the sound of horses screaming in the night, the heavy iron box my father had shoved into my arms before he pushed me out the door into the freezing rain—rushed back all at once, sharp and clear as broken glass.
“You’re not a bounty hunter,” I said, the realization dawning like a cold sunrise.
He turned back from the window, reaching up to unbuckle the heavy gun belt from his hips and laying it carefully on the table, out of my reach, but within sight.
“No,” he said quietly. “I’m the man they sent to clean up the mess the marshal left behind.”
I stared at him, my mind spinning through the wreckage of everything I thought I knew. The auction. The three silver dollars. The way he had knelt in the dirt of that filthy barn, not out of submission, but to slip a set of skeleton keys into the hem of my skirt while the crowd was still laughing at my humiliation.
I looked down at the heavy wool coat draped over my shoulders. Hidden in the deep inner lining, right where my trembling fingers had brushed against a hard leather seam during the night, was the heavy weight of a spare cylinder and a box of unspent ammunition.
“The horses are saddled,” he said, walking toward the heavy oak door and sliding the iron bar back with a sharp, echoing snap. He didn’t look back as he pulled the door open, letting a rush of freezing mountain air sweep into the stale room. “We ride in five minutes. If you want to run, the woods are thick and the snow is coming.”
I stood by the hearth for a long moment, watching the gray smoke curl up the chimney and vanish into the cold morning sky. My hands were no longer shaking. I reached down, pulled the small pocket knife from my skirt, and snapped the blade shut with a satisfying click.
Then I stepped out of the cabin and into the wind.