PART 2

The rifle sh*t slammed into Sarah’s shoulder, spinning her into the freezing snow with a choked scream.

“SARAH!” Ethan roared.

The six-foot-seven giant moved with terrifying speed. In a single sweep of his mᴀssive arm, he hauled his wounded sister behind the heavy wooden wheel of the wagon, using his own broad back as an iron wall between the women and the darkened tree line.

Two more bullets tore into the oak wagon box, showering Hannah with splintered wood and ice.

Hannah fell to her knees in the crimson-stained snow, pressing both hands against Sarah’s collarbone to stem the pulsing bld. Her mind was screaming in chaos—Sister? Stolen child? The ledger?—but the sight of the dying woman in front of her shattered the paralysis.

“Hold the cloth!” Hannah shouted over the wind. “Ethan, we can’t stay here! She’s bleeding out!”

Ethan didn’t duck. He shouldered his Winchester rifle, his dark eyes locked on the pine ridge where powder smoke drifted into the storm. Through the trees, a muzzle flashed again.

Ethan squeezed the trigger.

A high-caliber sh*t ripped through the blizzard. A man’s strangled cry echoed across the rocks, followed by the heavy thud of a body tumbling down the frozen ravine.

“Get in the wagon bed!” Ethan commanded, his voice shaking with a rage so deep the horses stopped their panicked dancing. He scooped Sarah into the timber bed like she weighed nothing, threw a heavy buffalo robe over her, and lifted Hannah after her.

Leaping onto the driver’s bench, Ethan cracked the leather reins with a sound like lightning.

The two draft stallions surged forward, plunging through the waist-deep drifts as more gunfire splintered the forest behind them. Mallory’s men were shouting in the blizzard, but in the blinding squall, no flatlander could match Ethan Blackwell’s knowledge of the mountain trails.

Twenty agonizing minutes later, the wagon tore through the timber gate of Raven Creek Ranch.

Ethan leapt down, carried Sarah through the front door, and kicked it shut. He slammed the three-inch oak crossbar into place and dropped the iron ᴅᴇᴀᴅbolts.

“Towels! Boiling water! The whiskey on the mantel!” Ethan barked, his face pale as chalk beneath his rugged beard as he laid Sarah on the long wooden kitchen table.

Hannah was already moving. Her factory years had taught her to act under brutal pressure. She threw off her coat, rolled up her sleeves, and brought the steaming pot from the hearth.

“Ethan… look at me,” Sarah gasped through gritted teeth, her lips turning blue as Hannah carefully cut away the bloodstained wool from the bullet wound.

“Save your breath, Sarah,” Ethan whispered, his enormous hands trembling as he pressed a clean linen pad to her shoulder. “The bullet pᴀssed through. It missed the lung. You’re going to live.”

“No… listen to me!” Sarah wept, reaching out with her uninjured hand to grab Ethan’s flannel shirt. “You and Hannah… you didn’t let me finish out there!“

Hannah froze, the suture needle shaking between her fingers. Her heart hammered against her ribs until she felt sick.

“Ethan and I…” Hannah whispered, her voice cracking. “Are we… bld?”

“NO!” Sarah choked out.

Ethan stared down at his sister, his breath catching in his throat. “Sarah, you said she was our sister. You showed us the pH๏τograph of Father!”

“Because she is Father’s child!” Sarah gasped, tears streaming down her face. “But Ethan… you were never his by bld!”

The room went ᴅᴇᴀᴅ silent, save for the howling wind rattling the heavy glᴀss panes.

Ethan stood frozen, looking like he had taken a bullet straight through the heart. “What are you talking about?”

“Our father took you in when you were ten years old after your parents burned in the trading post fire,” Sarah revealed, her voice ragged. “He raised you as his own, gave you the Blackwell name, and made you the protector of this valley. But Hannah… Hannah was born from Father’s secret affair.”

Hannah dropped the linen cloth. “An affair?”

“With Evelyn Vance,” Sarah whispered, looking directly into Hannah’s eyes. “The wife of the wealthiest railroad magnate in Chicago. Father worked for her husband thirty years ago. They fell in love. When Evelyn became pregnant, she hid the child, knowing her husband would k*ll them both. But Vance found out. He took you away the night you turned six, threw our father into the wilderness, and gave you to a textile workhouse under a false name so you would never claim your true inheritance!”

“And Mallory?” Hannah breathed, remembering the greasy foreman who had hunted her.

“Mallory wasn’t just a factory foreman,” Sarah said, coughing up dark bld. “He was Evelyn Vance’s secret lover after our father left! He spent ten years sleeping with the tycoon’s wife, slowly poisoning the old man to seize the textile empire! But by law, the entire family trust reverts to Evelyn’s only surviving bld child on her twenty-sixth birthday.”

Sarah’s trembling hand pointed at Hannah.

“That’s you, Hannah. That was yesterday. Mallory didn’t come to Wyoming to collect stolen ledger pages. He came to make sure you never lived to sign the claim papers!”

The truth crashed down upon Hannah like a mountain slide.

She wasn’t a nameless, worthless orphan. Her entire life of poverty, hunger, and abuse had been engineered by the ruthless man who had stolen her mother’s bed and fortune.

Ethan stepped closer, his dark eyes ablaze with an overwhelming mixture of grief and fierce protection. He looked down at Hannah’s pale, trembling face.

“You aren’t my sister,” Ethan whispered, his deep voice thick with emotion. “You never were.”

“And the woman?” Hannah asked, remembering the haunting confession Ethan had made in their bedroom just hours earlier. “Ethan… you said the last woman who was afraid of you disappeared.”

Ethan closed his eyes, his mᴀssive shoulders slumping.

“Her name was Clara,” Ethan rasped. “Two years ago, Mallory sent her here posing as a mail-order bride. I didn’t know who she was. But the night she arrived, she discovered that Mallory was planning to burn my ranch to the ground. When she tried to confess to me, she was so terrified of what I might do that she ran into the woods during a winter storm.”

A tear slipped through Ethan’s scarred cheek.

“I found her frozen by the creek three days later. Mallory told the entire territory I mrdered her. He used her dath to turn the town against me, waiting for the day he could corner this ranch for good.”

Before Hannah could speak, the glᴀss in the front bay window shattered into a thousand jagged crystals.

A fiery bottle of kerosene exploded across the wooden floorboards, sending a roaring wall of flame licking up the living room curtains.

“BLACKWELL!”

Mallory’s gloved voice roared through the blizzard outside.

Through the broken window, torches flickered in the whiteout. At least a dozen mounted men surrounded the ranch house, carbines cocked and aimed.

Beside Mallory’s black horse stood a trembling woman tied to a wooden wagon wheel, a rope looped тιԍнтly around her bruised neck.

Ethan peered through the smoke, and his jaw dropped in utter, paralyzing disbelief.

The woman tied to the wheel, alive, shivering in rags under the torchlight…

WAS CLARA.

The bride Ethan had supposedly buried two years ago.

Mallory raised a sawed-off sH๏τgun, pressing the cold twin barrels under Clara’s chin, and shouted into the smoke-filled cabin:

“Send the girl out with the deed, Blackwell! Or I blow the head off the woman you thought you buried—and burn you all alive inside that cage!”

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