He set three plates down.
The beans hissed as he stirred them back to warmth. The eggs popped in the skillet. He sliced the bread thick and shaved the cheddar with his pocketknife, putting the largest pieces on their plates without comment.
They ate in careful silence.
Elowen held her bread with both hands, taking small bites as if afraid the meal might disappear if she showed hunger too plainly. Briony ate like a woman determined not to seem desperate, though Rowan saw the way her fingers tightened around the fork.
He leaned against the counter and watched them despite himself.
Their faces were different, but bound by blood in ways that tugged painfully at him. Elowen was softer, with grief pooled close beneath the skin. Briony was guarded, all sharp eyes and locked jaw, carrying anger the way some women carried a knife.
Seraphine’s daughters, he thought.
Then he crushed the thought before it could draw breath.
After supper, Briony stood and gathered the plates.
“You don’t have to,” Rowan said.
“I know.”
She washed them anyway.
The pump groaned. Water splashed into the basin. She scrubbed each plate with unnecessary focus, as if she could make herself useful enough to earn shelter without asking for it.
Elowen remained at the table, rubbing the seam of her cloth bag between finger and thumb. Over and over. The motion had worn the fabric pale.
“What’s in there?” Rowan asked.
She startled, shoulders tightening.
Briony turned from the basin at once. “Nothing.”
Elowen swallowed. “Mama’s things.”
Mama.
The word hit him in a place the letter had already wounded.
Rowan nodded once. “Keep them close.”
Both women looked surprised.
Suspicion, they had expected. Demands. Maybe a search.
Respect had caught them unprepared.
Night came hard over the ranch.
There was no gentle dimming, no soft blue pause. One moment the windows held the last ash-colored light; the next, the world outside had gone black. The temperature dropped quickly, crawling under the door and through the cracks with long, cold fingers.
Rowan gave them the bed.
Briony argued.
Rowan ignored her.
Elowen thanked him in a voice so small it made him uncomfortable.
He shook out a blanket near the stove and banked the fire low. The room filled with the smell of warm iron and old wood. Shadows leaned against the walls.
Before he lay down, Briony spoke from the corner.
“Mr. Kade?”
He paused, one hand on the blanket.
“If you decide tomorrow that we can’t stay,” she said, “we’ll go.”
Rowan looked at her through the darkness.
“Where?”
She did not answer.
That silence told him everything.
Rowan lay awake long after the sisters’ breathing settled into sleep.
He stared at the ceiling beams, at the dark knots in the wood, and listened to the house expand and contract in the cold. The old place creaked like a thing with bones. Outside, the wind dragged dust against the walls.
Seraphine had been alive all these years.
Alive somewhere beyond his reach.
Alive with two daughters.
Maybe his.
No.
The word came again, immediate and hard. Protective.
The doctor had said fatherhood was not something he ought to count on.
The town had said worse.
He had made himself believe it because believing otherwise would have required him to wonder. And wondering would have broken him.
But Elowen had known about the scar.
The one beneath his ribs.
The one no one in Widow’s Reach had ever seen.
The one Seraphine could only have known if she had seen it before she left town.
The one Rowan himself did not understand.
Near dawn, sleep finally took him.
And with sleep came fire.
In the dream, Milo Voss was screaming from inside the barn.
“Rowan!”
The sound ripped through smoke and flame, raw with terror.
Rowan ran toward him.
The barn doors yawned open, breathing heat. Smoke clawed down Rowan’s throat. Flames twisted along the rafters in bright, hungry ropes. A horse kicked through a stall door, wild-eyed, its mane singed, one flank burning orange in the dark.
Rowan grabbed a wet saddle blanket from the trough and plunged forward.
Boards cracked overhead.
The air was alive with sparks.
“Milo!” he shouted.
Then something slammed into his ribs.
Not a beam.
Not falling tack.
A man.
The impact drove the breath from his lungs and sent him crashing sideways into the dirt and straw. Through the smoke, something flashed — silver, bright, quick as a fish in water.
A belt buckle.
A hand caught his shirt and shoved him down hard.
A voice hissed close to his ear.
“Stay down, Kade, unless you want her next.”
Rowan woke with a gasp.
His hand was pressed against his side.
The room was dim with the first weak light before sunrise. The stove had gone low. His shirt clung damp to his back.
Across the room, Briony was already awake.
She sat upright in the bed, one arm curled around Elowen as if she had been guarding her even in sleep. Her loose hair fell over her shoulders. Her eyes, wide and unblinking, looked too much like Seraphine’s.
“You dreamed it,” she said.
Rowan’s voice came out rough. “Dreamed what?”