Page 88 of The Widow and the Wanted

No. Not again. Not this time.

Chapter 24

Okee

Snow blinds me the moment I hit the yard. Smoke settles low along the cabin wall. Stinging the back of my throat, the blue-white tendrils curl against the morning glare.

Somewhere off to my left, Boone is shouting, “Get down here and face me like a man, you son of a bitch!”

Another shot cracks from the trees and bites splinters from the wood near the door.

“That’s it,” Boone grunts, then leaps into a run, boots pounding the earth toward the trees.

The fire has already climbed halfway up the window frame. Smoke rolls along the wall. Lula is still inside.

I drag in one slow breath and listen. Footsteps. I barely have time to sort one sound from the next before a man bursts through the smoke at the corner of the house.

He hits me like a charging bull.

We go down in a tangle of limbs and snow and breath. Frozen ground slams my back. My rifle flies from my hands. A knee drives into my ribs hard enough to burst the air from my lungs. Then his face is over mine—wild-eyed, teeth bared—as he drags a knife from his belt.

I catch his wrist with both hands.

Steel flashes.

The blade touches my throat.

“Knew you’d be trouble,” he pants.

That is when I know him. The guard from the hiring line.

God.

I have just enough time to think what a hateful end this is. Then the pressure vanishes.

A shot cracks—smaller than the rifles, sharper, close as a whipcrack in my ear—and the man lurches forward. His eyes go wide and empty. He topples sideways into the snow, blood steaming black-red against the white.

For a heartbeat I cannot move.

Then I see her.

Lula stands in the doorway with both hands locked around the pistol I taught her to shoot. Her face is white as linen, her eyes bright with shock. Smoke curls from the barrel.

I lurch to my feet and reach her in three strides.

“Mother of God,” I say, catching her around the waist and dragging her back behind a barrel for cover. “That was madness. Are you all right?”

She breathes fast, staring past me at the body in the snow. “The cabin’s burning.”

Boone shouts something from the far side of the yard. I cannot make out the words over the ringing in my ears. Then he comes through the smoke at a run, one sleeve blackened, rifle in hand, eyes searching us both.

“You hit?” he barks.

“No,” I say. “Are you?”

He twists his arm, coat blackened with blood. “Ain’t mine. Little general?”

Lula shakes her head once, still gripping the pistol.