PART 2 — THE GRAVE BENEATH THE HEARTH… AND A DYING FATHER’S RECKONING!
PART 2 — THE GRAVE BENEATH THE HEARTH… AND A DYING FATHER’S RECKONING!
The hallway spun before Emily’s eyes.
Looking at the girl standing in the doorway was like staring into a shattered mirror. The trembling mouth, the dark auburn curls, the identical line of the jaw—it was unmistakable.
“Elizabeth…?” Emily whispered, her hand clutching the brᴀss doorframe to keep from fainting. “If you’re my sister… why was I raised alone in Boise? Why did Father never speak your name?!”
“Because our father didn’t raise you out of love, Emily—he hid you out of fear!” Elizabeth wept, clutching a torn wool blanket around her frail shoulders. She pointed a trembling finger straight at Nathaniel’s chest. “Ask him! Ask the ‘Iron Wolf’ why he kept me locked behind that bolt for three months while our father lay dying in town!”
Nathaniel didn’t draw a weapon. He stood utterly still under the lantern light, his towering frame slumped as though an invisible mountain had crushed his shoulders.
“Step back, Emily,” Nathaniel said, his deep baritone cracking with suppressed agony. “Your sister doesn’t know the whole story. She only knows what your father fed her before he abandoned her on my porch with a bullet in her shoulder.”
“Lies!” Elizabeth screamed. “Father came to this valley twenty-two years ago with Nathaniel’s father! They struck the mother lode on Blackwood Ridge—millions in raw silver! But when greed took over, Nathaniel’s family wiped out my mother’s bloodline to claim the entire patent! Father fled into the mountains with you in his arms, while I was left behind with our mother’s kin. Father only sent you back here with that letter so you could reclaim our half of the deed!”
Emily felt a suffocating chill wash over her. She looked down at the simple gold wedding band Nathaniel had slid onto her finger only hours earlier.
“Is it true, Nathaniel?” Emily’s voice broke into a desperate sob. “Did you marry me just to extinguish my legal claim to this land? Is that why you said ‘marry me’ the moment I showed you the letter?!”
Nathaniel slowly reached into the inside pocket of his sheepskin vest.
With shaking hands, he pulled out the folded letter Emily had carried to his cabin that morning. He unfolded the bottom half—the section he had deliberately concealed before their trip to the courthouse.
“Read the last three lines, Emily,” Nathaniel whispered, his gray eyes shining with unspilled tears. “In your father’s own handwriting.”
Trembling violently, Emily took the yellowed paper into her hands.
Beneath the ink she had read a hundred times, three freshly dried sentences stood out:
“…The girl who calls herself Elizabeth is not my daughter. She was taken by the Vance Syndicate twelve years ago and trained to hunt down my true heir. If she finds the deed hidden beneath the cellar hearth, she will kill Emily without mercy. Nathaniel, marry my Emily under territory law before sunset. Make her a Blackwood, so no contract signed by blood or forged paper can ever strip her of her protection.”
Emily gasped, the paper slipping from her numb fingers.
She snapped her head around toward the girl with her face.
The tears on Elizabeth’s cheeks were suddenly gone.
The trembling, fragile sister had vanished in an instant. A cold, mocking smirk spread across the woman’s lips, and from beneath the fold of the wool blanket, she leveled a snub-nosed Colt .45 straight at Emily’s forehead.
“Old Bennett always was too sharp for his own good,” the woman purred, her voice hardening into pure venom. “You really think an identical face means identical blood, little sister? Plastic surgery in San Francisco cost the syndicate a small fortune, but it was worth every penny to get inside the Iron Wolf’s fortress.”
“Drop the gun, Sarah,” Nathaniel warned, his hand moving toward his holster with blinding speed.
“Touch that leather and her brains paint your hallway, Blackwood!” she snarled, cocking the hammer with a sharp, heavy CLACK.
Outside, the eerie silence of the mountain night was suddenly shattered by the thunderous boom of dynamite echoing from beneath the ranch.
The floorboards buckled violently beneath their boots.
Smoke and the stench of sulfur surged through the air vents as the heavy iron trapdoor leading to the cellar blew upward in a hail of burning splinters.
Masked riders with torches swarmed through the shattered cellar entrance into the great room, their rifles cocked.
And stepping over the burning rubble was a man Emily would recognize anywhere in the world.
He was dressed in fine wool, holding a burning torch in one hand and the deed to the silver mine in the other.
The man she had buried in a cemetery three weeks ago.
Her father.
He looked at Emily, his face completely devoid of warmth, and sneered:
“Thank you for opening the front door, daughter… Now hand over the Blackwood seal, or your wedding night ends in an open grave.”
TO BE CONTINUED…
