Clara dropped the tweezers into the basin of boiling water.
The black thing writhed like a piece of night torn from a sin. Elias wasn’t looking at the animal. He was looking at the copper.
Outside, the knocking resumed.
Three knocks.
Sharp.
As if whoever was knocking wasn’t asking for permission, but claiming property.
“Barrett!” the voice shouted. “Open up, boy. I know you’re in there.”
Elias turned pale.
Clara recognized that voice.
Mr. Mason Aranda.
The owner of the local bank. The man who had smiled at the wedding while her father signed the debt paper. The same man who had tossed the fifty dollars onto the table as if buying a scrawny cow at the market.
Clara grabbed the small piece of copper with the cloth. It had an engraved mark: a cracked bell pierced by a thorn.
She had seen it before.
Not at church.
Not at the bank.
On Mason’s ring.
Elias tried to sit up, but the pain doubled him over. A trickle of blood ran down his neck. Even so, he took the notepad with trembling fingers and wrote a single word that Clara read without breathing.
“Him.”
The door creaked under a shove.
“I don’t have all night,” Mason said. “I came for my cattle. And for the girl, if she’s finally figured out she’s going to freeze to death out here.”
Clara felt the humiliation of the wedding rush back into her chest, but this time it didn’t come alone. It came with rage.
She grabbed the old rifle hanging above the fireplace.
She didn’t know how to shoot.
But Mason didn’t need to know that.
When she opened the door, the wind blew in, heavy with snow and pine ash. Mason stood wrapped in a dark, heavy coat, with two men behind him. One was Julian, the butcher who had called Elias a monster. The other was Bart, the foreman from the lower ranch.
Mason smiled when he saw the rifle.
“Well, look at that. The chubby girl has some fire in her.”
Clara aimed straight at his chest.
“Take one step and I’ll bury you under the snow.”
The men laughed, but they didn’t advance.
Mason narrowed his eyes. Then he saw the blood on Clara’s sleeve, the steaming basin on the table, and the discarded tweezers.
His smile vanished.
“What did you do?”
Clara didn’t answer.
Elias, from the floor, raised his hand and pointed directly at Mason’s ring.
The banker hid his hand inside his coat.
