Chapter 1 - Where the Trees End
Elias Vance found the woman where the pines stopped growing.
Beyond the tree line, the land opened into a white emptiness so wide it looked like the mountains had swallowed the world. Wind raced across the frozen plain, lifting curtains of powder from the ground and throwing them against Elias’s legs as he made his way home before dark.
He almost passed her.
At first she looked like a torn piece of cloth trapped beneath the snow.
Then he saw dark hair.
Elias stopped.
The horse behind him snorted nervously.
He walked closer.
A young woman lay half buried in the drift, dressed in a torn dusty-rose dress that had no business being outside in weather like this. Snow had collected across her shoulders and tangled in her hair.
She wasn’t moving.
Elias had spent enough winters alone to recognize death.
He had dug graves from frozen soil.
He had carried men down from avalanche slopes.
He had watched people disappear during storms because somebody had decided they could make it another mile.
But something about this woman made him kneel.
Then he saw what she was protecting.
A bundle shifted beneath her arm.
A second bundle lay pressed against the first.
Elias pulled away the edge of the woman’s shawl.
Two tiny faces appeared.
Newborns.
Twins.
Girls.
Their skin had gone dangerously pale from the cold, and the mother had wrapped almost every scrap of warmth around them while leaving her own back exposed to the wind.
“God Almighty.”
It was the first thing Elias had said aloud all day.
One infant gave a weak twitch.
That was enough.
Elias tore open his heavy shearling coat and tucked the babies inside against his chest.
They weighed almost nothing.
One made a sound so faint he barely heard it over the wind.
“Stay with me,” Elias muttered.
He didn’t know whether he was speaking to the babies, their mother, or himself.
Then he slid his arms beneath the woman.
When he lifted her, her head fell against his shoulder.
Too light.
Far too light.
Behind them, wind erased his footprints almost as soon as he made them.
His cabin was less than two miles away.
It felt like twenty.
The babies were hidden beneath his coat, pressed against his warmth. Their mother remained unconscious in his arms while the storm strengthened around them.
Elias’s legs burned.
Snow reached his knees.
He could have put her down.
He could have returned with the sled.
He could have told himself that carrying three people through a storm was foolish.
Instead, he tightened his grip.
Years earlier, when Elias had first moved into the mountains, he had believed solitude would make life simpler.
People lied.
Weather didn’t.
People betrayed.
Mountains merely killed you honestly.
He trusted that distinction.
But now he was carrying a stranger through a storm, and every time his strength started failing, he felt one of the tiny bodies beneath his coat.
So he kept walking.
By the time his cabin appeared through the snowfall, dusk had covered the valley.
Warm orange light glowed faintly behind the windows.
Elias kicked open the door.
Cold air followed him inside.
He placed the woman near the stone hearth and immediately turned to the babies.
For one terrifying second, both were silent.
Then the smaller one cried.
It was barely more than a squeak.
Elias closed his eyes.
“Good.”
He had never imagined himself saying that about a screaming child.
“Make all the noise you want.”
He wrapped them in wool and placed them side by side in a wooden crate lined with blankets.
Then he looked back at their mother.
That was when he saw the marks across her back.
His expression hardened.
They were not injuries caused by the wilderness.
Someone had done this.
Deliberately.
Elias heated water.
He cleaned what he could without waking her, then covered her beneath several blankets.
Outside, darkness swallowed the mountains.
Inside, his cabin had changed.
For six years, the place had known only Elias’s footsteps.
Tonight there were four heartbeats beneath its roof.
His.
The woman’s.
And two tiny ones.
Hours passed.
Elias sat beside the fire with a cup of coffee going cold in his hands.
One twin stirred.
He lifted her awkwardly.
“You and I need to establish something,” he whispered.
The baby blinked.
“I don’t know what I’m doing.”
She began crying.
“Yes. That makes two of us.”
Somewhere near midnight, the woman moved.
Her eyelids fluttered.
Elias leaned forward.
Her eyes opened only halfway.
They were brown.
Fearful.
Disoriented.
Then she remembered something.
Her gaze darted around the room.
Her breathing accelerated.
“Girls?”
Elias understood immediately.
He pointed toward the wooden cradle he had improvised.
“Both.”
Her face changed.
Relief crossed it so powerfully that tears filled her eyes.
She tried to sit.
Pain stopped her.
“Don’t.”
Elias put a hand out without touching her.
“You’re safe.”
She stared at him.
People had probably told her that before.
Elias could see that she didn’t believe words easily.
Neither did he.
So he said nothing else.
She looked toward the babies.
“They were alive?”
“When I found you.”
Her lower lip trembled.
“Still are.”
She closed her eyes.
Two tears slipped down her cheeks.
Elias stood to add wood to the fire.
Behind him came a whisper.
“They’ll come.”
His hand froze over the firewood.
He turned.
The woman was staring at the door.
“Who?”
For several seconds she said nothing.
Then another gust struck the cabin walls.
Her voice became barely audible.
“The men from Red Hollow.”
Elias knew the name.
Everyone within a hundred miles knew Red Hollow.
He also knew enough about that town to avoid it.
“What do they want?”
The woman looked at the twins.
Then at Elias.
“They want us dead.”
May you like
And somewhere outside, far beyond the cabin windows, a wolf began to howl.
---
