He is wrong. Jonah said. Millie looked at him. Is he? She asked.
Look at us. Jonah. We are hiding in a shack. We're dirty. We are nothing to them.
Jonah took her face in his hands. He ran his thumb over the scar on her cheekbone. You are not nothing," he said. "You are the only clean thing in this whole damn valley. " He looked into her eyes. "I have done terrible things, Millie.
I have killed men. I have led thieves to water. I thought I thought for a long time that I was broken, that I didn't deserve a soft place to land. " He leaned his forehead against hers. "But you make me want to be good. You make me want to be the man Etienne thought I was. " Millie dropped the sewing.
She held his face. She touched the jagged scar that ran down his jaw, tracing it like a map. "It is just skin. " "Jonah," she whispered. "It is just history," she kissed him. It was a slow, deliberate kiss.
It was a seal on a pact. When they broke apart, the decision was made. It hung in the air between them, sharp and clear. "We can't wait for spring. " Jonah said, "No. " Millie agreed. "We have to go to Durango. " Jonah said it is a 4-day ride through the high pass.
It will be brutal. The snow is deep. We have snowshoes. Millie said, "We have horses. We have the evidence.
If we stay, we die. " Jonah said, "If we go, we might die. " Millie counted. "But at least we will die trying to burn him down. " They looked at the tin box on the table, the ledger, the stained papers, the fire. Preparing to leave felt like stepping off a ledge into the dark. It felt like stepping into fire, but the cabin was cold and the fire was the only way out. "We leave at dawn," Jonah said.
He stood up and blew out the lamp. In the darkness, he held her hand. His grip was iron. They were two outcasts holding a match, waiting for the sun to rise so they could light the fuse. The descent from Black Pine Ridge was not a journey.
It was a controlled fall. The late winter sun offered no warmth, only a glaring, indifferent light that bounced off the icy trail. Jonah Crow rode in front, his bay geling picking its way down the switchbacks with trembling legs behind him. Millie Laroo rode the packor wrapped in the buffalo coat, her face hidden against the biting wind. They moved through a world that was trying to kill them.
Halfway down, the sky turned a bruised purple, and the mountain exhaled a cloud of blinding white powder. The whiteout hit with the force of a physical blow, erasing the trail, the trees, and the drop-off to their left. Jonah tied a lead rope from his saddle to Millie's horse, shouting over the roar of the wind, though his words were snatched away before they reached her. For an hour they existed only as two dark shapes tethered together in a void, navigating by the instinct of the horses and the desperate prayer that the ground would not simply vanish beneath them. When they finally broke through the cloud layer, the town of Silverton lay below them, sprawling and ugly, coughing coal smoke into the pristine valley.