**Part Two**

The horse nickered once more, closer this time, then went still.

Eliza pressed herself flat against the mattress, good eye fixed on the door. The paper with the other name lay on the table like a live coal. She could hear her own pulse in the swollen side of her face. Outside, snow had begun—fine, dry flakes that made no sound when they hit the roof. The kind of snow that hid tracks and muffled voices and turned every shadow into a man.

Rowan did not come back at once.

She counted. Ten breaths. Twenty. The fire settled. A log broke and sent a spray of sparks up the chimney. Still he did not return.

Then she heard it: the soft, deliberate scrape of a boot on frozen ground, not Rowan. Rowan moved like a man who belonged to the dark. This step was heavier. Careless in the way of someone who believed the cabin was empty, or who no longer cared if it was not.

Eliza reached for the only weapon within reach—a short iron poker leaning against the hearth. Her broken hand screamed when she closed her fingers around it. She ignored the scream.

The door latch lifted.

It was not Rowan.

Caleb filled the doorway as if he had been poured into it. Whiskey and wet wool and the sour smell of a man who had ridden hard for days. Snow melted on the shoulders of his coat. In his right hand he held a revolver, already cocked. In his left, a length of rope.

He saw her.

For a moment neither of them moved. The fire painted his face in ugly planes. The cut above his eye—her last gift to him, from the skillet—had scabbed black.

“Well,” he said, almost fond. “Ain’t you a hard thing to kill.”

Eliza did not speak. Speaking had never helped.

Caleb stepped inside and kicked the door shut behind him. The sound was final.

“I followed the blood,” he said. “Then I followed the horse that didn’t belong on that trail. Mountain man. I should’ve known. You always did find somebody to hide behind.”

He glanced at the table. The paper was still there. His mouth flattened.

“You kept it.” He laughed once, short. “Even after I tore the lining. Even after I left you for the crows. You kept the one thing that can still hang you.”

He started toward the bed.

Eliza raised the poker.

Caleb stopped, then smiled.

“You going to hit me with that, Eliza? Or whoever you are tonight?”

The door opened again without a sound.

Rowan Creed stood in the threshold with the Henry rifle already at his shoulder. Snow clung to his hat and the dark line of his beard. He did not look at Eliza. He looked only at Caleb, the way a man looks at a snake he has already decided to kill.

“You walk out now,” Rowan said, “and you keep walking until the pass. You come one step closer to her and I put the first round through your belt.”

Caleb’s revolver swung toward the new voice.

Two guns. One cabin. One woman who could barely stand.

Caleb’s eyes flicked from Rowan to Eliza and back.

“This ain’t your concern, old man.”

“You made it mine when you left her in my rocks.”

“She’s mine.”

Rowan’s voice did not rise. “She ain’t.”

For a heartbeat the only sound was the fire and the thin hiss of snow against the window.

Then Caleb moved.

He did not shoot first. He was not that foolish. He lunged sideways, grabbed the edge of the table, and flung it. The paper, the cup, the basin—everything crashed. Rowan fired. The round took Caleb high in the left shoulder instead of center mass and spun him into the wall. The revolver went off anyway, wild, punching a hole in the roof beams. Dust and pine needles rained down.

Eliza rolled off the bed.

Pain tore through her ribs like a second beating. She hit the floor on her good side and dragged herself toward the overturned table because the paper had fluttered there, white against the dark boards, and if Caleb got that paper he would have more than a name—he would have proof.

Caleb was already moving again, roaring, blood darkening his coat. He came at Rowan like a bull. Rowan met him with the rifle used as a club. Wood cracked against bone. They went down together, rolling into the hearth. A burning log spilled. Embers scattered across the puncheon floor.

Eliza reached the paper.

Her fingers closed on it just as Caleb’s boot found Rowan’s ribs. Rowan grunted. The rifle skittered away. Caleb’s hands found Rowan’s throat.

Eliza did not think.

She drove the poker into the back of Caleb’s knee.

He screamed and twisted. The grip on Rowan’s throat broke. Rowan drove an elbow into Caleb’s ruined shoulder and they separated, gasping, both on their knees in the spreading firelight.

Caleb’s eyes found Eliza on the floor, the paper in her fist, the poker still in her other hand.

“You stupid—”

Rowan hit him.

Not with the rifle. With his fist, once, clean, the way a man who has split wood for twelve winters hits. Caleb’s head snapped back. He went over the bench and did not immediately rise.

Rowan snatched the rifle, worked the lever, and put the muzzle on Caleb’s chest.

“Get up,” Rowan said. “Get on your horse. If I see you on this ridge again I will not aim for the shoulder.”

Caleb spat blood. He looked at Eliza.

“Tell him,” he said. “Tell your mountain man what that paper is. Tell him who’ll come when they find out where you ran. Tell him you ain’t some beaten wife. You’re a thief and a liar and there are men in Denver who’ll pay more for you breathing than I ever would.”

Eliza’s mouth was dry.

Rowan did not look away from Caleb.

“I don’t care what she is.”

“You will.”

Caleb smiled with broken teeth. Then he did something Rowan did not expect. He threw the last of the burning log.

Flame and ash exploded between them. In the confusion Caleb rolled, snatched his revolver from the floor, and fired twice as he scrambled for the door. One ball tore a groove in the doorframe. The other took Rowan high in the left arm, spinning him half around.

Caleb was gone into the snow.

Rowan stayed on his feet. Blood ran down his sleeve and dripped from his fingers. He kicked the door shut, dropped the bar, and leaned against it for a single breath.

Then he looked at Eliza.

“You hurt worse?”

She shook her head. It was a lie. Everything hurt worse.

“Good,” he said. “Because we have to move the fire before the floor goes, and I can’t do it with one hand.”

—

They saved the cabin.

Eliza crawled. Rowan kicked embers back into the hearth with his boot and stamped what he could not kick. Smoke filled the low room. When it was done they sat on the floor with their backs to opposite walls, breathing like drowned things.

Rowan’s arm was a mess. The ball had gone through the meat above the elbow and out the other side. Clean, he said. Lucky. He told her how to pack it with the same moss and cloth he had used on her ribs. Her hands shook so hard she could barely tear the strips.

“He’ll come back,” she said.

“Not tonight. Shoulder and knee and a hole in him. He’ll find a hole to crawl into until morning.”

“He won’t come alone next time.”

Rowan nodded once. That was all.

Eliza still held the paper. The edge was charred now. She looked at it for a long time.

Then she spoke the name aloud for the first time in two years.

“Catherine Hale.”

The words sounded foreign in the smoky cabin, too fine for the rough walls.

Rowan waited.

“My father owned ships,” she said. “Boston to Charleston to Havana. When he died, the will named me. My stepfather had other ideas. He had papers drawn. He had men who would swear I was of unsound mind. He had a marriage arranged that would have put every hull in his name by Christmas.”

She swallowed.

“I took the only proof that mattered—the original will, signed and witnessed—and I ran. I paid a woman in St. Louis for a dead girl’s papers. Eliza Mercer had died of fever the month before. Same age. Same coloring, if you didn’t look close. I became her. I thought the mountains would be far enough.”

Rowan’s pale eyes stayed on her face.

“Caleb found the lining because I was a fool. I should have burned it. I couldn’t. It was the last true thing I owned.”

Silence.

Then Rowan said, “Men in Denver.”

“Lawyers. Pinkertons, if the money is good enough. My stepfather does not like to lose. And Caleb—” her voice frayed—“Caleb knows what the paper is worth now. He won’t just want me back. He’ll want to sell me.”

Rowan looked at his bleeding arm, then at the barred door, then at her.

“Then we don’t stay here.”

“You don’t have to—”

“I already did.” He stood, swaying only a little. “There’s a line shack two ridges west, higher, harder to see. We leave before first light. You can ride in front of me. The horse will take us both if we go slow.”

Eliza stared at him.

“Why?”

Rowan Creed, who had lived twelve years with no one and asked for nothing, looked at the woman who had given him a name that could bring hired guns to his door.

“Because you asked me to help you in that ravine,” he said. “I ain’t finished yet.”

—

They left in the blue hour before dawn.

Snow had covered Caleb’s tracks and their own. The world was muffled and white. Eliza sat in front of Rowan on the big bay, her back against his chest, his wounded arm bound tight across her middle to keep her from sliding. Every step of the horse sent fire through her ribs. She bit the inside of her cheek and did not make a sound.

Rowan spoke only to the horse.

The line shack was a low thing of logs and sod, half buried in the shoulder of the mountain. No chimney smoke. No path. A man would have to know it was there.

Inside it was colder than the cabin had been, but it was hidden.

Rowan got a fire going with his good hand. Eliza sat wrapped in the one blanket they had brought and watched him work until the shaking in his fingers stopped.

When the flames took, he sat down across from her.

“If they come,” he said, “you take the horse and go north. There’s a creek. Follow it until you hit the old Ute trail. Don’t look back.”

“And you?”

“I’ll be behind you or I won’t.”

Eliza looked at the charred paper she had carried in her dress. She held it out.

“Burn it.”

Rowan did not take it.

“That’s your proof. That’s the only thing that makes you Catherine Hale instead of a woman who can be sold.”

“If they find it on me, they find me. If they find it on you—”

“Then they find a man who already decided.”

He took the paper at last, not to burn it, but to fold it smaller and slide it inside his own coat, against the skin over his heart.

Eliza’s throat closed.

Outside, the snow thickened. The mountain closed its fist around the little shack.

They sat in the new firelight, two wounded people who had not yet decided what they were to each other, only what they would not let the world do.

Far down the mountain, too far to be certain, a second horse moved through the trees.

Rowan heard it first.

He reached for the Henry rifle with his good hand.

Eliza reached for the poker she had brought from the cabin.

The high country held its breath.

And the men who wanted Catherine Hale began to climb.