“Rosalie, my sweet girl… open up! He’s a monster! He took you from me!”

Caleb cocked his Winchester with a sharp, metallic clack. His jaw clamped shut, a vein pulsing at his temple. “Step back toward the hearth, Rosalie. Don’t touch that latch.”

“Caleb… she sounds just like her,” Rosalie whispered, tears blinding her sight as she stared between the portrait above the mantel and the bolted doorway. “She said she was ᴅᴇᴀᴅ. Victor Harlan told me she perished in a workhouse fire when I was three years old!”

“Harlan lied to you about everything,” Caleb rumbled, his voice dark with venom. He didn’t aim the rifle at the heavy oak door; his icy eyes flicked toward the frost-bitten windowpane beside the larder. “The woman on the other side of that door isn’t your mother, Rosalie.”

The pounding ceased abruptly.

Outside, a dry, mocking laugh cut through the howling winter wind.

“Always the clever hound, aren’t you, Maddox?” Harlan’s voice boomed through the cracks. “You thought you could buy her for three miserable silver pieces and bury the past in the snow? You know what she carries in her veins!”

Caleb stepped deliberately in front of Rosalie, his towering silhouette blocking her view of the frozen glᴀss. “Leave the valley, Harlan. Take your paid actress with you, or I’ll fertilize the pine ridge with your bones.”

“An actress?” the woman’s voice outside called out again, but this time, the gentle, weeping cadence vanished completely—replaced by a sharp, aristocrat’s sneer. “Look at the portrait, Rosalie! Look at the woman Caleb calls his lost sister! Ask him why my face hangs over his mantle, yet he locks me in the freezing cold!”

Rosalie spun around to the portrait. Her heart slammed violently against her ribs.

The birthmark above the left brow. The tilt of the chin. The dark, almond-shaped eyes.

“Caleb…” Rosalie stammered, feeling the room tilt beneath her worn shoes. “If that’s your sister… why is she standing out there with Harlan?”

Caleb lowered the rifle an inch, his shoulders тιԍнтening under an unbearable burden of guilt. “Because seventeen years ago, she didn’t disappear, Rosalie. She ran away.”

He swallowed hard, his voice dropping to a harsh whisper.

“She was carrying the child of Harlan’s wealthy father. When old Harlan threatened to disinherit his son, my sister made a bargain with the devil. She agreed to give up her newborn daughter to be raised as an unregistered orphan—hidden in dirt, kept weak, kept broken—until old man Harlan drew his last breath.”

Rosalie’s stomach violently turned. “A bargain…?”

“The old man died three days ago in Denver,” Caleb said, his knuckles turning white around the stock of the gun. “He left eighty thousand acres to his only living grandchild—identified solely by the matching silver locket given to his legitimate line. My sister didn’t come back to save you, Rosalie. She came to take that locket off your corpse so she and Victor could forge the probate papers!”

Before Rosalie could scream, a deafening shatter of glᴀss blew inward.

A heavy iron lantern crashed through the side window, spraying kerosene and sparks across the dry timber flooring. Flames instantly caught the hearth rug, climbing rapidly up the log walls toward the ceiling.

“Burn them out!” Harlan roared from the snow outside. “Grab the girl and cut the necklace from her neck!”

Caleb swung the rifle to fire, but through the smoking hole in the window, a gloved hand thrust a short-barreled pistol straight at Rosalie’s forehead.

And behind the barrel stood the woman from the portrait—her face identical to Rosalie’s, eyes gleaming with pure malice.

“Hand me the locket, little girl,” the woman whispered with a cruel smile. “Or your dear uncle dies on his knees right beside you.”