Chapter 2 - Blood and Consequence
The door didn't break on the third blow; instead, the latch tore clean out of the rotted jamb with a screech of bent iron.
Snow blew inward in a blinding white sheet, swirling around a tall, thick-set figure wrapped in a buffalo-hide coat. Silas Vance stood in the frame, his face blackened by frostbite and beard-stubble, a heavy Navy Colt revolver already raised in his mittened hand. His eyes scanned the dim interior, bloodshot and wild, passing over Rowan to land squarely on Mara.
"There you are, you ungrateful bitch," Silas snarled, taking a staggering step across the threshold.
He didn't see the iron poker coming until it caught him square across the forearm. The revolver discharged with a deafening crack that shattered the cabin window, the bullet burying itself harmlessly into the floorboards near Rowan’s boot.
Before Silas could level the weapon again, Rowan drove his shoulder into the man’s chest, slamming him backward off the porch and out into the churning snowbank.
The two men hit the drift with a muffled thud. Rowan didn't give him room to breathe. He rained heavy, brutal punches down onto the frozen ground, his grief, exhaustion, and three days of helpless terror channeling into every strike. Silas thrashed and clawed, but the cold had sapped his speed, and the sheer weight of Rowan’s fury pinned him down. Within seconds, Silas went limp, his head lolling sideways into the drift as blood trickled from his split lip.
Rowan stood up slowly, chest heaving, the bitter wind biting through his torn shirt. He dragged Silas’s unconscious body away from the door, hauled him into the small root cellar beneath the floor hatch in the pantry, and slammed the heavy wood down, dropping a sack of seed corn over the latch.
When he limped back into the main room, Mara was standing by the cradle. She was pale, swaying on her feet, but her expression was absolute.
"He'll wake up in an hour once the whiskey wears off," Rowan said, wiping a smear of blood from his knuckles. "We need to talk about what you said before he kicked the door in."
Mara looked down at Eli, whose breathing had grown terrifyingly shallow. Then she looked at her own daughter, sleeping soundly in the warmth of the hearth.
"Your boy needs milk," Mara said softly. "Real milk. Rich milk. My body is still producing it for my little girl, and she’s strong enough to take goat’s milk or mash if we have to transition her. But Eli... Eli won't survive another night on water and sugar."
Rowan stared at her, the reality of her words settling over him like the winter frost. "You're talking about nursing him."
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"I am," Mara said quietly, meeting his gaze without flinching. "It's the only way he lives. But you need to understand what that means, Mr. Blackthorne. In the eyes of the law out here, a woman who nurses another man's child is tied to that child—and that home—in ways the courts don't easily break. Silas knows that. It's why he chased me across the mountains."
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