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Mr. Vance goes to the window. He takes off his knit cap as he looks out, crushing it between his hands. The front door opens. Closes. Toenails click. Duchess pads into view. She sniffs at me, giving me a curious, concerned look, and then goes to sit next to Vance.

“Why are you doing this?” I ask him.

He looks down at his hands, wringing that gray hat between them. “The Daltons, they’re good people. I don’t want you thinking they’re not. I told you I traveled a bit when I was younger. Got into a bit of trouble. A lot of it, really. Magnus, he was the only person who really believed I was worth anything after that. Gave me a chance to start over. I owe him my life, not that it’s ever been of much value. Still. You owe a debt like that, it doesn’t get repaid easy.”

He turns those sorrowful eyes on me and I want to gouge them out.

I start to speak, but I cough, my mouth still dried out from the drugs and the horrible rag. Mr. Vance makes a sound like tsch and comes over, hauling me upright by the elbow and helping me scoot over to lean my back against the bed. He takes a flask from his pocket and puts it to my lips. It’s warm from his body and tastes of turpentine, and I cough again, but I can talk.

“They’re going to kill me.”

He looks at me sadly. He already knows. “It was supposed to be quick. So you wouldn’t know,” he says.

“You were going to shoot me. After you told me all those things about my mother,” I say. “About how much you liked her.”

“Mr. Dalton did his best. He tried to protect you. Told you to leave,” Mr. Vance says.

“So I’ve heard.”

“That night you came over, that’s when I saw it. I worked out who you were and I told him—about the questions you were asking. You shouldn’t have asked, is the thing. And I shouldn’t have told you, but I didn’t—you’re all grown up. I didn’t recognize you properly, I didn’t know. It’s not my fault.”

Funny, how none of this is anyone’s fault.

He scratches the side of his neck with blunt fingernails. “I’m the one who figured out you weren’t dead, you know. Back then. Heard you making this little noise, all whimpery. Like a little puppy. I bundled you up, got you warm. Snuck you back to my cabin. Don’t know what I was thinking I was going to do after that, only couldn’t stand to have anything else happen to you, poor little thing.”

He doesn’t seem to realize how much this contradicts his rosy view of the Daltons. The only reason he’d need to keep me secret, sneak around, is if they were a danger to me. To a five-year-old child.

“Magnus found me out, of course,” he says. “He came up with the plan. A place for you to go. Didn’t tell me where.”

“And my mother?” I ask. Blue scarf—she smiles, wraps me up in her arms. Red scarf—she tells me to run.

“We buried her,” he says. “Off in the woods. I made sure to find a nice spot. A really nice spot. There are wildflowers in the summer. Mallory would have liked that.”

“Are you going to bury me in the same place, Mr. Vance?” I whisper, and I don’t try to hide the fear snaking through the words.

“That’s not my call,” Vance says, but he looks uncomfortable. “You can’t blame them, Miss Scott. You can’t blame them wanting to protect their own. She was angry. She wasn’t thinking straight.”

My brow furrows in confusion. Everything still a bit sloshy from the drugs, and for a moment I think I’ve missed something. “She? She who?” I say. Louise?

“She just meant to talk to Mallory. The gun was for show, that’s all,” Vance says.

I can imagine Louise angry easily enough, but threatening someone with a rifle is harder. Louise is the kind of person who lets someone else hold the gun.

But Rose—

Rose is the one who gave me the tea. All that talk was just to draw out what I knew. Rose found out that her husband was cheating on her—or so she thought. She found out where he was stashing them.

She went to confront them.

I had assumed it was Nick. Nick in a rage, storming up here to do god knows what and Liam—Liam, I know now, was protecting me. Protecting us. But I was wrong about who he was protecting me from.

The gun was only for show. But something went wrong. Accident or anger? Does it matter? A pull of the trigger. My mother with her hand on her throat and blood gushing between her fingers, and all of a sudden an affair wasn’t what the Daltons needed to cover up.

Mr. Vance sighs. “I better go downstairs. Keep an eye out and all that.” He grabs the rag.

“No—” I start, but he jams the rag in, then pulls the cord back up. I make a muffled sound of protest, but it’s no use.

“You just wait here,” he says, as if I have any other choice.

Duchess stays. She stands, ambles over to me, and sniffs at me once again, nose prodding against my sides. She circles back around and I freeze, heart thudding, waiting for her to bare her teeth. But then she gives a sigh and settles down beside me. She lays her head over my thigh, her eyes dark and wary, ears pricked toward the doorway.

Her breaths are steady. Her body is warm. And with her head nestled in my lap, I shut my eyes and allow myself to weep.

I don’t know how long it is before my tears are spent. I train my attention on the steady rise and fall of Duchess’s side, calming my own breath to match it.

I have to think—to wrench my mind out of memory and out of the blind panic of my situation and try to imagine a way out of this mess. I have the knife. And I might have a minute or two before Vance comes back.

The knife is easy. It’s still in the pocket of my coat, blessedly overlooked in Nick’s haste to get me out of there. His urgency suggests there are people on this mountain who aren’t part of this. Louise, Vance, Magnus, Rose, Nick—all of them are threats. But there might still be help here.

I have to hope.

I wriggle the knife from my pocket, awkward with my hands tied together, and manage to open it. I contort my hands to get it under the plastic zip tie and saw, but I’m not getting anywhere. Instead I twist, wedging the blade of the knife between the floorboards, and finally there’s enough pressure against the tie and it snaps, my hands springing apart. I scrabble at my cheeks, pulling the cord free and spitting out the gag. As I sit up, Duchess hauls herself upward with a slightly annoyed huff, irritated at having her headrest taken away.

“Hush,” I say under my breath. “Settle, girl.”

She blinks at me. Gives a long stretch. Stands there, as if waiting to see what I’ll do next. Warily, I get my legs under me and rise. I wait for her to growl, to bark. Instead her tail fans slightly and she paces forward to fit her blocky head under my hand. I scratch between her ears, and she pants.

“Good girl,” I whisper. Now to get out of here.

There’s a window next to the bed. We’re on the second story—a longer drop than I’d like, but the snow looks soft. I have to hope it will cushion a fall. I unlatch the window, moving with painful slowness, and start to ease open the window.

Two inches up, it sticks. I bite my lip to stop myself from swearing. I wrap my fingers around the bottom of the window. Haul upward—

It gives all at once, scraping another four inches up before thumping as it sticks again.

“What are you doing up there?” Mr. Vance calls.

“Shit,” I hiss, and tug at it again, but it won’t give. It’s far too narrow for me to fit through. Vance’s footsteps thunder up the stairs. I strain. Crouching down, I shove my shoulder against the bottom of the window, and it wiggles but won’t give.

“Stop it,” Mr. Vance orders, and rough hands grab hold of me, pulling me back and spinning me around. I barely have time to flinch as he backhands me, hand cracking against my cheek.

Duchess snarls. She’s a blur: black fur, white teeth, pink gums bared as she snaps the air as she launches not at me but at Mr. Vance. He stumbles back in surprise, losing his grip, and I rear back away from him.

“Duchess, down!” he hollers, but she stands between us, hackles bristling and her teeth bared. “What the hell has gotten into you?” he demands. He starts toward me. She half lunges again, teeth snapping a warning, and he skitters back.

I bolt. Past Duchess. Down the stairs. As I dash for the door, my eyes catch on a pale spot above the door—the ghost of a trophy mount, its outline permanently marked by the fading of the wood around it.

The air hits me cold and razor-sharp, and like I did so long ago, I run.