Delia’s throat closed up. Memories she had buried beneath years of self-pity and silent martyrdom violently clawed their way to the surface—the smell of kerosene she had spilled on her own skirt, the frantic scratching against the wooden pantry door, the desperate, muffled screams that had abruptly stopped just as the first timber gave way. She hadn’t gone back in to save a fourth child. She had gone back in to make damn sure the survivor of her husband’s second family never walked out to tell the world whose house she had burned down.
“You weren’t just the heroic schoolmarm who lost her beauty to the flames,” Vane whispered, crouching down until he was eye-level with her. “You were the arsonist who tried to wipe out the entire ledger.”
Panic, sharp and blinding, surged through Delia’s veins. She lunged toward the boardinghouse steps, but Vane’s hand shot out with the speed of a striking rattler, his thick fingers locking around her wrist with iron force. He didn’t pull her down; he simply held her in place, his face inches from hers.
“Let me go,” she hissed, her voice cracking with desperation. “Nobody will believe a drifter over me. Copper Flat knows me. They know what I suffered!”
“They know the face you showed them,” Vane said, his pale eyes narrowing. “They don’t know the girl who walked away from the ashes with a stolen pouch of gold coins belonging to the town’s founding ledger. Coins with a very distinct mint mark. The kind of coins you used to buy your way into this boardinghouse.”
He reached into his duster pocket and pulled out a small, dull-gold coin, tossing it lightly into the dirt between them. It landed with a dull clink, catching the sunlight. It was stamped with the seal of the old territorial bank—the exact bank that had burned down the very same night as the schoolhouse, while everyone was distracted by the flames.
“You didn’t just burn down a school to hide your tracks, Delia,” Vane said, his voice dropping to a low, hypnotic hum. “You staged the whole tragedy to cover a bank robbery. And the little boy in the pantry? He wasn’t a student. He was the bank manager’s son who recognized you when you broke into the vault.”
The revelation landed with the force of a falling anvil. The romanticized tragedy of Delia Frost—the scarred martyr of Copper Flat, rejected by six men, scorned by the townsfolk, bearing her burden with silent grace—was a meticulously constructed cage of lies. She hadn’t been a victim of cruel fate. She was a monster wearing a mask of burns, hiding in plain sight behind her own disfigurement because she knew nobody would ever suspect a broken woman of being a ruthless killer.
Delia stopped struggling. Her chest heaved, her breath coming in shallow, ragged gasps. The defiant posture dissolved, replaced by a cold, calculating stillness. She looked at Vane, her eyes narrowing as the last vestiges of fear gave way to something darker.
“If you wanted the bounty, you would have dragged me to the sheriff an hour ago,” Delia said, her voice suddenly devoid of its previous tremor. “Why are you down in the dirt with me?”
Vane let out a low, humorless chuckle. He released her wrist slowly, leaning back on his heels as he surveyed the empty alley.
“Because the sheriff in this town is a lazy drunk who wouldn’t recognize justice if it bit him on the ankle,” Vane said. “And because I’m the fifth child from that pantry, Delia.”
The world stopped spinning.
Delia stared at the silver-white scar cutting across his jaw, tracing the jagged angle up toward his ear where the flame had licked closest. The math of the past caught up to her in a single, paralyzing flash of absolute horror. The fourth child hadn’t died in the pantry. He had clawed his way through the rotting floorboards beneath the shelves just as the walls collapsed, carrying the fire’s signature across his face for the rest of his natural life.
Vane reached out with his left hand—a hand missing the two smallest fingers, burned away entirely in the heat—and picked up the gold coin from the dust.
“I’ve spent six years tracking every coin you spent, every town you hid in, every pitiful rejection you used to keep people from looking too closely at your face,” Vane whispered, his pale eyes locking onto hers with a terrifying, predatory calm. “You thought the cruelest scars were the ones left by fire, Delia. You were wrong.”
He stood up slowly, towering over her in the blinding Montana sun, and slipped the heavy iron lockbox beneath his arm.
“The cruelest scars,” Vane said, looking down at her as she sat paralyzed in the dirt, “are the ones that finally catch up to you.”