“You’re safe here,” he told her. “Sit by the fire.” She obeyed, huddled in the warmth like someone who hadn’t felt safe in a long time. She reached up to take off her jacket, but her hands were shaking so much that water spilled onto the ground.
“Okay,” Elias said, crossing his arms. “Skinner’s gone. Nobody’s watching. Take that off.”
She froze. Elias took a step toward her. “Girl, I’m not going to have a guest I can’t look in the eye. Take it off.”
She shook her head once, then again, more forcefully.
Elias softened his voice. “I don’t care what you look like.”
Even so, she didn’t move. Then he pulled out his knife. “I’m going to cut it. Stay still.”
She made a small sound, a thin, frightened whimper, but she didn’t run away. She stood there trembling as he slid the blade under the knot. One cut and the knot was gone. He lifted the sack. Elias braced himself for scars, deformities, anything.
But what he saw was something entirely different. Her face wasn’t ugly. It was delicate, refined, with high cheekbones and storm-gray eyes that seemed far more intelligent than life had allowed her to be. Her hair, tangled and dirty, still reflected the firelight like copper.
Elias could not speak.
She swallowed her voice after days of silence. “My name is Victoria,” she whispered. “And if they find out I’m here, they’ll kill us both.”
Elias felt his heart slow down and then pound harder. This wasn’t the broken woman he thought he’d bought for a dollar. This was a storm, and what she carried with her was about to sweep the mountains away.
The fire crackled in the small cabin, casting warm light through the wooden walls. But Elias felt the temperature drop when Victoria spoke those words. Her voice held fear, strength, and something else: a warning.
“Who is trying to kill you?” Elias asked.
Victoria adjusted her buffalo blanket and fixed her eyes on the flames. “The men who murdered my father. They didn’t want to kill me at first. They wanted what I know.”
Elias crouched down by the fire, eager to listen. “What do you know?”
She hesitated, as if deciding whether she could trust him. Then she looked up, her gray eyes steady. “My father was Attekus Sterling.”
Elias let out a low whistle. The federal surveyor thought he had died in an accident. She shook her head.
“It wasn’t an accident. They killed him. He found evidence that the railroad was stealing land. Not just from the settlers, but from the government itself. He had heard stories about powerful men moving railroad lines to line their pockets. Men like Cornelius Vance, the richest and most ruthless man in the territory.”
Elias felt the fire growing inside him, but not from the warmth of the cabin. “What does that have to do with Skinner selling you like merchandise?” he asked.
Victoria’s voice dropped to a whisper.
“My father kept a record. Every illegal railroad line, every stolen deed, every bribe. And I’m the only one who knows how to read his code. When his assassins realized they couldn’t break me, they handed me over to Skinner to break my spirit.”
Elias clenched his jaw. The thought of what they had done to that woman enraged him. She wasn’t a broken victim. She was someone who carried such great danger within her that she had crossed mountains to escape.
“Now you’re safe,” Elias said. “Nobody climbs this mountain.”
But even as he said it, he knew it wasn’t true. Skinner was a drunk and a braggart. By the time the sun went down, half of Deadwood would know that Elias Thorne had bought a woman with a sack over her head for a dollar. And if Vance’s men were around, they’d come looking for her.
As if reading their thoughts, Victoria whispered, “They will find us.”
Elias stood up, grabbed his rifle from the doorway, and checked the camera.
“Let them try.”