Her voice was steady, but Elias caught the infinitesimal flinch in her shoulders. The cruelty of it struck him harder than any bullet from Caleb’s men. He knew what it was to be hated, but to be discarded by one’s own blood—that was a different kind of winter.
“Your brother is a fool,” Elias said, the words slipping out before he could catch them.
Lara paused, glancing over her shoulder. A faint, sad smile touched her lips. “Everyone in Boston agreed with him, Mr. Montgomery. You don’t have to pretend otherwise.”
“I don’t pretend,” Elias replied, standing up and walking slowly toward the hearth. He stopped just a foot away from her, towering over her, yet his posture was entirely devoid of threat. “And I don’t lie. Thomas Higgins threw away something he was too blind to understand.”
Before Lara could process the weight of his words, a sharp, metallic sound shattered the quiet of the night.
*Clang.*
It wasn’t the wind. It was the distinct sound of a horseshoe striking the iron ring outside the front gate.
Elias went rigid in a fraction of a second. The warmth in his eyes vanished, replaced instantly by the lethal alertness of a cornered wolf. He drew the heavy revolver from his holster with practiced smoothness, checking the cylinder without looking down.
“Stay by the hearth,” he ordered in a low, dangerous hiss.
“What is it?” Lara whispered, her heart hammering against her ribs.
“Caleb’s men,” Elias said, his gaze fixed on the heavy oak front door. “They didn’t just want to drop you on my doorstep as a joke. They wanted to see if I would turn you out into the blizzard. When I brought you inside instead, they realized their game failed. Now they’ve come back to finish what the cold started.”
Panic flared in Lara’s chest, hot and sharp. She looked at the door, then down at the boiling pot of stew, and finally at Elias. The man who had been painted as a monster by the entire territory stood between her and the darkness, weapon drawn, ready to die for a stranger dropped into his life by a malicious prank.
“Elias,” she said, using his Christian name for the first time.
He didn’t look back. “Keep your head down, Lara. If they breach this door, crawl through the root cellar beneath the floorboards. There are supplies enough for a month.”
“I’m not running,” she said, stepping forward with a quiet resolve that made him turn his head in stunned disbelief.
“This isn’t a Boston drawing room, Lara. These men are killers.”
“And I am the family boulder,” she replied, her hazel eyes flashing with a fierce, cold fire that matched his own. “You survived their sieges by yourself, Elias. But you’ve never had anyone watching your blind spot.”
Before he could argue, a deafening explosion ripped through the front of the cabin. The heavy wooden door splintered inward, sending shards of timber flying across the room like shrapnel. Through the swirling snow of the broken entrance, dark silhouettes poured into the cabin, rifles raised and primed for murder.
The first man through the door shouted an oath, sweeping his revolver toward the hearth where Elias stood. But before the intruder could squeeze the trigger, a heavy iron skillet—wielded with the full, desperate strength of three hundred pounds of pent-up fury and heartbreak—caught him squarely across the side of the head with a sickening crunch. The man dropped like a felled pine tree, unconscious before he hit the floorboards.
Chaos erupted. Elias fired twice, the deafening cracks of his revolver drowning out the howling wind as two more attackers scrambled backward out the shattered doorway into the snow. Smoke filled the cabin, stinging their eyes and tasting of sulfur and copper.
Elias kicked the remaining heavy table upright to serve as a barricade, breathing heavily as he scanned the darkness outside. He looked sideways at Lara. She stood beside him, clutching a heavy iron poker in one hand, her chest rising and falling, her face smeared with soot, but her stance unwavering.
“You’ve got a hell of a swing, Miss Higgins,” Elias murmured, a dangerous, grim smirk finally breaking across his scarred face.
“Boston tea parties were terribly dull,” she replied, her voice steady despite the adrenaline roaring in her veins. “I had to find a way to pass the time.”
Outside, the retreating men scrambled onto their mounts, cursing into the wind as they realized Whispering Pines was not an easy kill. The thunder of hooves faded rapidly into the howling white expanse of the Dakota prairie, swallowed entirely by the relentless storm.
Silence descended upon the cabin once more, broken only by the crackling of the hearth fire and their own ragged breathing. Elias lowered his revolver, slowly sliding it back into its holster. He turned to look at Lara, really look at her, seeing past the malicious rumors of the town, past the cruel nicknames of her brother, past the forged contract that had brought her to his door.
“They’ll be back,” Elias said softly, the harsh edge gone from his voice, replaced by something deep and steady.
“Let them,” Lara replied, stepping closer to the warmth of the fire—and closer to him. “We have plenty of firewood. And dinner is almost ready.”
For the first time in five bitter years, the Iron Wolf of Dakota smiled. And as the blizzard raged outside, burying the lies and malice of Deadwood deep beneath the snow, Elias knew that the cruelest joke Caleb Ryland had ever played was the greatest gift he would ever receive.