The lead slug punched through the cedar wall, showering Elena and Silas in splintered wood and cold mountain air.

“Get down!” Silas roared, wrapping his mᴀssive arms around her and driving them both to the floorboards behind the stone foundation of the hearth.

Elena’s head spun as if struck by a mallet. Her ears rang from the deafening gunsH๏τ, but the violence outside was nothing compared to the seismic shock ripping through her soul.

She stared into the scarred, weathered face of the giant hovering over her. His broad chest heaved against hers, his breath hitching as gray eyes—eyes that bore the exact, striking shade of hazel-green as her own—glistened with tears of raw anguish.

“No…” Elena gasped, her voice trembling so violently her teeth chattered. “Henry Whitmore raised me in St. Louis. He told me my real father died in a cholera outbreak… he showed me the grave!”

“Henry Whitmore was my wife’s estranged half-brother!” Silas rasped, his deep voice cracking under nineteen years of buried agony. He levered a heavy .45-70 shell into his rifle with a vicious metallic clack. “He was a disgraced riverboat gambler buried in hundreds of dollars of blood debt to Bartholomew Graves! Graves didn’t just want money back then—he wanted the mineral rights to this entire valley. The deed belonged to your mother, Clara. When she refused to surrender her ancestral claim, Whitmore smuggled Graves’s men onto this mountain!”

“TELL HER ABOUT THE FIRE, BLACKTHORN!” Graves’s venomous voice bellowed through the shattered windowpane, rising above the roar of the wind. “Tell the girl why you’re hiding out in these rocks like a rabid dog! Tell her who pulled the trigger that ended her mother’s life!”

Elena’s heart slammed against her ribs. She looked at the long, puckered scar tearing across Silas’s left temple and cheek—the mark of a violent, close-range blast that had burned flesh and shattered bone.

“Silas…” Elena whispered, dread pooling in her stomach. “What happened that night?”

Silas closed his eyes for a split second, a shudder racking his seven-foot frame.

“They set fire to our first cabin while we slept,” Silas said, the memory carving lines of agony into his face. “Graves and Whitmore kicked down the door. Clara grabbed you and threw you into the root cellar before they breached the parlor. I fought three of their hired cutthroats with my bare hands, but Graves had a sawed-off scattergun. He fired point-blank at my face. The blast took half my skull and tossed me into the burning wreckage.”

Silas opened his eyes, burning with fierce, unyielding resolve.

“When I clawed my way out of the ashes hours later, half-blind and bleeding to death, the cellar door was wide open. You and Clara were gone. Two days later, a territorial marshal found Clara’s body dumped in the river gorge three miles downstream… sH๏τ through the lung with Graves’s ring still etched into the bruises on her neck. But you were nowhere to be found. Whitmore had already smuggled you down the mountain to Missouri, raising you under his own name so Graves could hold you as a future pawn!”

Elena touched the collar of the soft blue dress she had pulled from the wooden trunk an hour earlier.

The hem had fit her stature with uncanny perfection. The subtle embroidery along the collar matched the faint, fragmented memory she had carried since childhood—a lullaby about high mountain pines, hummed by a woman whose hands smelled of lavender and pine pitch.

“He kept me hidden in St. Louis until I turned eighteen,” Elena whispered, horror and fury blooming in her chest. “Then he began demanding I marry Graves to settle his debts. He told me I was born to save his life.”

“You were born to inherit this mountain, Elena,” Silas said softly, resting an enormous, calloused hand against her cheek with unimaginable tenderness. “You are my blood. You are a Blackthorn.”

“TIME’S UP, BEAST!”

Graves’s shout was accompanied by the sound of glᴀss breaking against the outer logs.

The sickly sweet smell of coal oil drifted through the cracks.

“Throw out the deed to Blackthorn Ridge and send the girl onto the porch!” Graves shouted. “Or I torch this cabin to the ground and bury you in the ash a second time! You couldn’t save Clara, Silas, and you sure as hell won’t save her daughter!”

Silas’s jaw hardened into cold granite. The tenderness vanished, replaced by the terrifying aura of the man the territory called the Scarred Beast.

“Elena, behind the woodbox,” Silas commanded in a low, lethal murmur. “There’s an iron ring in the floorboards. It leads to the natural cavern beneath the ridge. Crawl east until you hit the creek.”

“I am not leaving you,” Elena said, her eyes flashing with the same iron defiance as his own. She grabbed the heavy iron fire iron from the hearth, gripping it with white knuckles. “You lost me for nineteen years, and I spent nineteen years trapped in a cage. I’m not running from that monster anymore.”

A faint, proud smile broke through Silas’s dark beard. “Just like your mother.”

Before Silas could move toward the front window, the rear kitchen door burst open with a splintering crash.

Two masked gunmen lunged through the threshold, carbines raised.

Silas pivoted with terrifying speed. Without raising the rifle to his shoulder, he fired from the hip. The thunderous roar of the heavy buffalo gun shook the cabin to its foundations. The first gunman flew backward into the snow, killed instantly by the devastating blast.

The second rider lunged forward, leveling a revolver at Silas’s unprotected side.

Elena screamed, stepping out from the hearth and swinging the iron fire poker with every ounce of strength she possessed. The heavy iron struck the man across the temple with a sickening crack, dropping him senseless across the kitchen table.

Silas levered another shell into the chamber, grabbing Elena’s arm and pulling her toward the kitchen doorway.

“Move!” he barked.

They burst out into the swirling whiteout behind the cabin, but as they rounded the timber wall toward the horse corrals, a sudden blast of sH๏τgun fire tore through the snow.

Silas stumbled, a guttural groan ripping from his throat as heavy bucksH๏τ ripped across his left shoulder.

“SILAS!” Elena cried, dropping to her knees beside him in the drifts.

Through the dense curtain of falling snow, Bartholomew Graves stepped forward, a smoking double-barrel sH๏τgun resting in his gloved hands. Behind him stood the remaining four riders, their revolvers drawn and leveled directly at Elena.

Graves stepped onto the packed snow, a cruel, triumphant sneer curling his lips.

“How touching,” Graves mocked, racking the sH๏τgun’s second hammer back. “A father and daughter reunited just in time for an early grave.”

Graves raised the barrel until the black hole pointed squarely between Silas’s eyes.

“Drop your rifle, Blackthorn, or I blow the girl’s spine out first.”

Silas froze, his hand trembling as he slowly released his grip on the Winchester, letting the rifle sink into the deep snow.

Graves chuckled, stepping within five paces of the wounded giant. He reached into his coat and pulled out a rolled sheet of parchment bearing the official wax seal of the Wyoming Territorial Land Office.

“The deed transfers to me upon your death, Silas,” Graves sneered. “And as for your pretty little girl… she’s coming with me to Denver to sign the probate release. Then she’ll join her mother at the bottom of the gorge.”

Elena clenched her fists, ready to throw herself between the sH๏τgun and Silas.

At that exact moment, the sharp, unmistakable sound of a lever-action Winchester cocked from the ridge above them.

Then came a voice that made Bartholomew Graves freeze ᴅᴇᴀᴅ in his tracks.

“Drop the scattergun, Bartholomew,” a cold, woman’s voice rang out through the howling blizzard.

Elena and Graves both snapped their heads toward the high rock ledge overlooking the corral.

Standing on the limestone outcrop, cloaked in heavy wolf-skin furs, was a tall, gray-haired woman holding a scoped hunting rifle aimed directly at Graves’s chest. Half of the woman’s neck was covered in old, puckered fire scars—and around her neck gleamed the silver ring with the black stone.

The woman who had supposedly drowned in the river nineteen years ago looked down through the sights of her rifle.

Clara Blackthorn was alive.