“I’M NOT LEAVING YOU OR YOUR BABY!” THE LONELY MOUNTAIN MAN PROMISED A PREGNANT WOMAN IN A BLIZZARD—BUT WHEN HE SAW THE BABY, HE DISCOVERED A TERRIFYING SECRET…
PART 2
The wind howled through the cracked cabin timbers, carrying the sheriff’s venomous threat like a death sentence.
“Papa… no!” Rosemary sobbed, trying desperately to drag her exhausted body across the floor toward the window. “Daniel… what did he do to Daniel?!”
“Stay down!” Ethan roared, his mᴀssive hand catching her shoulder and forcing her behind the thick stone hearth.
With his other arm, Ethan cradled the newborn against his chest, tucking the tiny, fragile bundle inside the warm wool of his hunting coat. His gray eyes burned with a lethal fury he hadn’t felt in fifteen years.
Outside, the snow swirled around five mounted shadows.
Sheriff Harold Whitmore sat tall on his gray stallion, his tin star pinned over a heavy buffalo coat. He held Daniel’s bloody winter jacket in one gloved hand, letting the shredded cloth flutter in the biting gale. Dangling from the pocket on a leather cord was Daniel’s silver wedding band, smeared crimson.
“Hear me, Blackwood!” Whitmore’s voice bellowed over the blizzard. “Your brother was weak, just like your old man. Tried to slip over the Canadian pᴀss with things that don’t belong to him. He’s at the bottom of ᴅᴇᴀᴅ Man’s Gorge right now, feeding the crows.”
A strangled, agonizing shriek tore from Rosemary’s throat. She clawed at the floorboards, her tears freezing on her flushed, feverish cheeks. “You killed him… you killed my husband!”
“Quiet, girl!” Whitmore snapped from outside, his voice devoid of a father’s love. “You disgraced this family the day you let that Blackwood dog lay hands on you! Now Ethan—kick out the door and slide the brat onto the porch, and I’ll let you ride away back into your rat hole in the mountains.”
“Why do you want the child, Whitmore?” Ethan shouted back through the splintered shutter, his heavy Winchester rifle resting steady on the sill. “He’s an hour old! What could a newborn baby possibly threaten you with?”
Whitmore chuckled—a dry, rattling sound that made Ethan’s skin crawl.
“Daniel took more than my daughter when he fled town,” the sheriff called out, gesturing to the four masked deputies flanking him, their carbines cocked and aimed at the cabin’s timber walls. “He took the Blackwood land ledger. The original territorial charter signed twenty years ago. The one that proves your family never sold the valley floor to the railroad syndicate.”
Ethan’s pulse hammered in his ears.
Twenty years ago, when his father died, Sheriff Whitmore had produced a bill of sale claiming Ethan’s father had gambled away the entire Blackwood valley to pay off phantom debts, forcing Ethan into exile high in the bitter wilderness.
It had all been a lie.
“You murdered my father for dirt,” Ethan growled under his breath, his finger тιԍнтening on the rifle trigger.
“Read the rest of the letter, Ethan!” Rosemary choked out from beside the stove, clutching her stomach as post-birth tremors wracked her frame. Her voice was cracked with horror. “Daniel told me… he said if Papa ever came with a posse, it wasn’t about the land… there was another page folded behind the envelope!”
Ethan reached into his pocket, pulling out the crumpled paper Daniel had left beneath the floor.
Beneath the first sheet lay a second, smaller note, scribbled in frantic, blood-smeared haste:
Ethan,If Whitmore has Daniel’s ring, do not believe a word he says. Whitmore isn’t hunting this baby to bury a land dispute.The crescent birthmark isn’t just a Blackwood trait. It is a hereditary mark pᴀssed only through our mother’s royal bloodline from the eastern colonies.Rosemary was never Whitmore’s daughter. He abducted her as an infant the night he burned our mother’s homestead to the ground.Rosemary is our sister.
The cabin seemed to tilt violently beneath Ethan’s heavy boots.
The breath was knocked completely out of his lungs.
He stared at the paper in paralyzed, sickening disbelief. He looked down at Rosemary—her pale skin, her dark curling hair, the feverish hazel eyes that mirrored the portrait of the mother he had wept over as a boy.
No… dear God, no.
Rosemary noticed the sudden, horrific shift in Ethan’s face.
“Ethan?” she whispered, trembling violently. “What does it say? Who am I?”
Before Ethan could find the words—before he could even comprehend the monstrous nightmare Whitmore had orchestrated—the sheriff lost his patience.
“Time’s up, Blackwood!” Whitmore thundered from the yard. “Burn the cabin to the ground! Make sure nothing crawls out alive!”
Two flaming whiskey bottles arched through the blizzard, smashing through the front window and crashing against the dry spruce floorboards.
Flames erupted instantly, devouring the wool rugs and climbing the walls in a blinding roar of heat and smoke.
“Ethan!” Rosemary screamed, choking on the black fumes, reaching blindly for her child.
Ethan grabbed Rosemary by the collar, throwing her over his broad shoulder while clutching the wailing baby against his chest with his other arm. He lunged toward the rear cellar exit, kicking the reinforced back door off its frozen hinges with a deafening crack.
A gunsH๏τ echoed through the storm.
A bullet grazed Ethan’s shoulder, tearing through his coat, but he didn’t stop. He threw Rosemary and the baby into the hollow beneath the snowbound woodpile, raising his Winchester and firing three deafening rounds into the smoke, forcing Whitmore’s riders to scatter their horses in panic.
“Behind the cabin! He’s running for the gorge!” one of the deputies yelled.
Ethan knelt over Rosemary, his blood dripping onto the virgin snow. His heart tore in two as he looked into her terrified eyes.
“Listen to me,” Ethan rasped, his voice raw with agony. “We have to run. We have to reach the high ridge before the fire brings the whole roof down.”
“Daniel…” Rosemary wept, clutching the baby to her breast. “Daniel is ᴅᴇᴀᴅ… my father killed him…”
Ethan grabbed the locket from around his neck and pressed it into her shaking fingers.
“Harold Whitmore is not your father, Rosemary,” Ethan said, the awful truth finally spilling from his lips. “And Daniel knew it. That’s why he took you away.”
Rosemary stared at him, bewildered. “What are you saying?”
Ethan opened the silver locket, showing her the faded picture of their mother—a woman with Rosemary’s exact nose, Rosemary’s exact chin, and a crescent pendant resting over her chest.
“You’re not a Whitmore,” Ethan whispered, his eyes filling with tears. “You’re my sister. And this baby… this baby isn’t Daniel’s child.”
Rosemary recoiled as if struck, her eyes widening in sheer, unadulterated terror.
“What?” she breathed.
And from the darkness of the raging blizzard, barely ten yards behind them, the click of a cocked revolver froze them both in place.
A man stepped out of the white squall.
His face was wrapped in a bloody scarf. His arm hung limp at his side. But the pistol in his good hand was leveled directly at Ethan’s heart.
It was Daniel.
Alive.
And his voice was cold as the winter ice:
“Drop the child, Ethan. Before I put a bullet through you just like I did our father.”
