She held his face between her hands.
“Nothing in this world will stop me from trying.”
Martha lowered him into the tunnel.
Then disappeared after him.
Mercy closed the hatch.
Another gunshot cracked.
Dutch staggered backward.
Blood spread across his shirt.
Mercy screamed.
He had been hit near his ribs.
“Go!” he ordered.
She caught him.
“Not without you.”
“Mercy—”
“No!”
She dragged him toward the kitchen.
Outside, Pratt shouted.
“Burn it!”
A bottle shattered against the wall.
Flames climbed the curtains.
Smoke poured across the ceiling.
Dutch coughed.
Mercy pulled the trapdoor open.
“Down!”
He resisted.
“I can’t fit—”
“You will.”
She pushed him toward the opening.
A rifle shot splintered the doorframe.
Dutch fell into the tunnel.
Mercy followed.
Above them, the cabin began to burn.
They crawled through darkness.
The tunnel was narrow, freezing, and filled with roots.
Dutch’s breathing grew labored.
Mercy could hear the fire roaring overhead.
Then the passage opened into a shallow ravine behind the settlement.
Martha and Samuel waited beneath a stand of pines.
Mercy emerged first.
Dutch collapsed beside her.
His blood darkened the snow.
Martha knelt.
“We have to get him to a doctor.”
Dutch shook his head.
“Too far.”
Mercy pressed both hands against the wound.
“You’re not dying.”
He looked at her.
“Mercy—”
“Don’t.”
Her voice shook.
“You don’t get to bring my son back from the dead and then leave me.”
Dutch tried to smile.
“Bossy woman.”
She bent over him.
“Terrible choice of wife.”
His eyes softened.
“Best choice I ever made.”
Then his eyes closed.
Chapter Eleven: The Seventh Suitor
Mercy knew they could not outrun six armed men with a wounded man and a child.
She also knew Pratt would never stop hunting Samuel.
Not while the Oldgate claim remained valuable.
Not while the boy could someday inherit it.
She needed something stronger than a rifle.
She needed evidence.
And suddenly, she remembered Dutch’s cellar.
The documents.
The maps.
The mining records.
He had gathered enough proof to threaten Pratt.
But there was something else.
A question that had bothered her since the matching assembly.
Why had Pratt allowed her to leave with Dutch?
Why had he seemed frightened rather than angry?
Mercy searched Dutch’s coat.
Inside a hidden pocket, she found a folded letter.
The paper was worn from repeated handling.
On the outside was written:
To Mercy Oldgate, should I fail.
Her hands trembled.
She unfolded it.
The letter was dated three months earlier.
Dutch had written that he had located the original mining survey, Thomas’s deed, and sworn testimony from two men involved in the explosion.
He had intended to bring Mercy to Samuel, then take them both to a territorial judge.
But the final paragraph stopped her heart.
There is one truth I have not found the courage to tell you.
Thomas did not die in the collapse.
Mercy stared.
The words blurred.
She read them again.
I saw him alive afterward.
Her breath vanished.
Martha touched her shoulder.
“Mercy?”
She could not answer.
Below the paragraph, Dutch had written:
Pratt kept him alive because Thomas knew where the richest silver vein lay. When Thomas refused to cooperate, they moved him to the old Black Hollow workings.
I believed he died there.
Last month, I learned I was wrong.
Mercy’s knees buckled.
Thomas was alive.
Her first husband.
The father of her child.
The man she had mourned for two years.
Alive.
And Dutch had known.
She looked at the unconscious trapper.
Anger, disbelief, and grief crashed through her.
Then she noticed another sentence.
I was going to tell her before the wedding, but Pratt’s men were watching. I feared that if she knew, they would see it in her face and kill her before I could get her away.
Mercy closed the letter.
For a moment, she wanted to hate Dutch.
But she remembered his scars.
The bullet wounds.
Abigail’s death.
The years he had spent protecting Samuel.
He had carried terrible truths alone.
And perhaps he had made unforgivable choices.
But he had also brought her child home.
Mercy looked toward the burning settlement.
Then at her sleeping son.
Something hardened inside her.
She had spent two years letting other people decide what she was capable of surviving.
That time was over.
Chapter Twelve: Black Hollow
Dutch regained consciousness shortly before dawn.
