“I NEED A WIFE BY TOMORROW!” THE LONELY COWBOY SHOUTED—BUT WHEN A POOR SERVANT GIRL AGREED TO MARRY HIM, SHE WHISPERED ONE CONDITION THAT MADE HIS BLOOD RUN COLD…
PART 2 — SHADOWS OF THE LIVING
The floorboards groaned under Jackson’s boots as he took two steps back.
Little brother.
The words hung in the icy draft seeping under the door like a phantom knife. For eight months, Jackson had laid sprigs of pine on a mound of frost-bitten earth behind the chapel. For eight months, he had cursed the heavens for an empty cabin and a forest too quiet to bear.
“Ben?” Jackson’s voice was barely a rasp.
“Open the lock, Jack,” the voice came again, low, rough, and unmistakable. “Before Whitmore’s hired guns turn this street into an open grave.”
Sophie caught Jackson’s coat sleeve, her fingers digging through the wool down to the muscle. “Don’t, Jackson. You don’t understand what he’s become.”
“He’s my brother!” Jackson wrenched his arm free, cocked his Colt .45, and yanked the heavy iron latch.
The door swung inward with a blast of wind-driven snow.
Two figures stepped into the entryway, their long winter coats plastered with sleet.
The first was Catherine. Her auburn hair, once tied in modest church ribbons, was cut short and tucked beneath a dark men’s Stetson. Across her right collarbone hung a bandolier of rifle cartridges. Her eyes, once soft and wet with counterfeit mourning tears, were hard as river stones.
Beside her stood Benjamin.
He was taller, leaner, and hollowed out, but the jawline, the stubborn chin, and the piercing green eyes were identical to Jackson’s own. A fresh diagonal scar ran from the crook of his collar up beneath his chin—the mark of a hangman’s rope that had failed to snap the bone.
“You look like you’ve seen a ghost, Jack,” Benjamin said, letting out a dry, bitter breath that plumed in the cold room.
Jackson didn’t lower his revolver. The barrel pointed ᴅᴇᴀᴅ center at his brother’s chest. “I buried you. I shoveled five feet of frozen clay over your casket.”
“You shoveled dirt over a drifter who froze to death in Whitmore’s timber camp,” Benjamin replied, stepping further into the room. He didn’t flinch at the sight of the gun. “Whitmore needed me ᴅᴇᴀᴅ to trigger the forfeiture clause. And I needed to be ᴅᴇᴀᴅ so I could walk out of Red Hollow without a bounty on my neck.”
Benjamin’s gaze shifted toward the shadows behind Jackson. His expression hardened into something cruel.
“Evening, Sophie. Or should I call you Victoria?”
Sophie shrank back, her knuckles turning bone-white against the counter. “Stay away from me, Ben.”
Jackson’s head snapped toward the woman he was supposed to marry in twelve hours. “Victoria? You told me your name was Sophie Bennett.”
“Bennett is her maiden name,” Catherine cut in, stepping forward and propping a lever-action Winchester against her hip. “And she didn’t just stumble into the Rusty Nail Tavern looking for a savior, Jackson. She tracked you there. She’s been steering you like cattle from the second Whitmore served you that repossession notice.”
“Shut your mouth, Catherine!” Sophie cried, her voice trembling with venom. “You sold yourself to Arthur for a string of pearls and a deed to the sawmills! You think he won’t put a bullet in you the second the northern ridge is clear?”
“Enough!” Jackson roared, the sound rattling the kerosene lamps overhead. He kept the Colt aimed between them, his chest heaving. “Someone start telling the truth before I empty this cylinder. Ben—you faked your death. You let me mourn you for eight months. Why?”
Benjamin took off his leather gloves, exposing fingers stained with dried grease and cordite.
“Because our father didn’t just leave us timberland, Jack,” Benjamin said quietly. “He found what the territory has been looking for since sixty-two. The Lost Spaniard vein. Millions in raw silver, sitting directly under our roots. But our old man was smart. He knew the rail syndicates and bankers like Whitmore would butcher us for it, so he split the legal claim.“
Benjamin pointed a calloused finger at Sophie.
“Half the deed was tied to our cabin. The other half was placed in a blind trust in Denver under the name of the territorial land commissioner’s daughter. That woman right there.”
Jackson stared at Sophie. “You’re the commissioner’s daughter?”
“Her father died under suspicious circumstances four years ago,” Catherine said, her lips curling into a sharp sneer. “Arthur Whitmore married her within a month to steal the trust. But he couldn’t touch the silver without the second signature—the signature of Benjamin Reed. Or his surviving heir.”
The silence in the room became suffocating.
The pieces fell together in Jackson’s mind with sickening clarity.
“That’s why Whitmore gave me twenty-four hours,” Jackson whispered, the blood draining from his face. “He didn’t want me to lose the land. He needed me to marry.”
“Under territorial law, a married man’s estate merges with his wife’s pre-existing holdings,” Benjamin said, stepping closer. “Whitmore knew I was alive and hunting him in the mountains. He couldn’t force me to sign. But if you married Sophie, her claim and our father’s land would merge under your name—and then Whitmore’s hired men would simply kill you on the road home, leaving Sophie as the sole surviving widow to sign the entire vein over to him.”
Jackson turned slowly toward Sophie.
The servant girl with the torn dress. The bruised cheek. The fragile woman who had wept into her apron and offered to be his bride.
“Were you working for Whitmore?” Jackson asked, his voice ᴅᴇᴀᴅ and cold.
“No!” Sophie sobbed, stepping forward, hands raised in desperation. “Jackson, listen to me! In the beginning, yes—Arthur threatened to send me to the asylum if I didn’t play along. But then I met Benjamin! We fell in love. We planned to take the deeds and run together!”
“And then you betrayed me to Arthur the night I tried to crack the safe!” Benjamin snarled, his eyes flashing with raw fury. “You tipped off the guards. They strung me up from an oak branch and left me to swing! If Catherine hadn’t cut the rope after they rode off, I’d be rotting in the ravine!”
“I didn’t tip them off!” Sophie screamed, tears carving clean lines through the soot on her cheeks. “It was Arthur! He already knew! Because Catherine told him!”
Catherine cocked her rifle with a sharp, metallic clack. “Liar.”
“Wait,” Jackson interjected, stepping between them, his mind racing against the clock. “If you survived, Ben, and you came back to stop Whitmore… why did the letter say Sophie was carrying your child?”
Benjamin froze.
The anger on his face flickered, replaced by sudden, genuine bewilderment.
“What child?” Benjamin asked.
Jackson glanced from Benjamin to Sophie.
Sophie pressed her back against the wooden wall, her face entirely devoid of color. She didn’t look at Benjamin. She looked at Catherine.
And for the first time, Catherine’s arrogant sneer vanished.
“You didn’t tell him, did you, Sophie?” Catherine whispered, a strange, hollow horror bleeding into her tone. “You told Jackson it was Benjamin’s.”
“Whose baby is it, Sophie?” Jackson demanded, his pulse hammering against his temples.
Before Sophie could utter a syllable, the shattering sound of glᴀss tore through the silence.
A rifle ball smashed through the front window, tearing through the kerosene lamp on the table. Blazing oil splashed across the floorboards, catching the curtains in a brilliant, roaring wall of fire.
“DOWN!” Benjamin shouted, tackling Jackson to the floor as a hail of lead tore through the exterior walls.
The roar of repeated lever-action gunfire turned the wooden boardinghouse into a slaughterhouse. Splinters and plaster rained from above. Horses whinnied in panic out on the snowy road, followed by the barking commands of men who didn’t care about collateral damage.
“REED!” a booming voice carried over the barrage. Arthur Whitmore, shouting through the falling snow. “Send the girl out with the silver key, and I’ll let you bury your brother a second time!”
Catherine crawled through the smoke toward the back exit, returning fire through the broken shutters with her Winchester. “There’s at least a dozen of them! Whitmore brought the regulator gang from the rail camp!”
“We have to move through the stables!” Benjamin shouted over the roaring flames, dragging Jackson by his collar toward the rear corridor. “Jack, get the horses!”
“Sophie!” Jackson yelled, scanning the smoke-choked room.
She wasn’t hiding under the counter.
Through the thick gray smoke, Jackson saw her kneeling beside the burning hearth. She wasn’t fleeing. Her hands were buried inside the brickwork of the old fireplace, wrenching loose a hollow iron cylinder hidden beneath the soot.
She turned, clutching the blackened cylinder to her chest.
Her coat was torn open.
And around her neck, hanging from a heavy steel chain alongside the silver key, was an ornate brᴀss pocket watch.
Jackson recognized the watch.
It was their father’s watch. The one given to him by the governor. The one that was supposed to have been buried with their father ten years ago.
“How do you have that?” Jackson yelled through the smoke and gunfire.
Sophie looked up at Jackson, her eyes burning with an emotion far deeper and darker than fear.
“Because Arthur Whitmore didn’t kill your father, Jackson,” she whispered, her voice cutting through the din of the inferno. “And neither did sickness.”
She looked straight past Jackson, her gaze locking onto Benjamin, who stood frozen in the burning doorway, his revolver lowered.
“Ask your brother,” Sophie choked out, “who dug up your father’s grave three nights before the ranch caught fire.”
TO BE CONTINUED IN PART 3…
