“Enough!”

Everyone froze.

Jud stood twenty feet away.

Blood ran from his shoulder.

Pike held Catherine before him.

“Drop it.”

Jud lowered his rifle.

“Jud, don’t.”

“Drop it!”

The rifle landed in the snow.

Pike smiled.

Then Catherine heard a voice behind the jail bars.

A voice she had not heard in eleven months.

“Catherine?”

She stopped breathing.

“Thomas?”

A face appeared behind the barred window.

Thin.

Bearded.

Older.

But Thomas.

Alive.

“Catherine!”

She began sobbing.

“I have it!”

“What?”

“The proof!”

Pike laughed.

He held up the ledger.

“Had it.”

He dragged Catherine toward a lantern.

Jud’s face went still.

“Don’t.”

Pike opened the ledger.

“You people have caused me six years of irritation.”

He touched the book to the flame.

Catherine screamed.

Fire climbed the leather.

Pike dropped it into the snow.

Pages curled.

Ink blackened.

Six years of hope burned in seconds.

Catherine stared.

“No.”

She fell to her knees.

“No…”

Pike laughed.

“Now tomorrow morning your brother hangs exactly as ordered.”

Thomas gripped the bars.

Catherine could not breathe.

Everything she had done.

Every mile.

Every lie.

Every frozen step.

Gone.

Pike looked at Jud.

“And you.”

Jud slowly raised his head.

Pike’s smile vanished.

“You should’ve stayed dead, Mercer.”

Silence struck the street.

Catherine looked at Jud.

Mercer.

Her mind refused the word.

Pike realized what he had said.

Too late.

Jud reached beneath his shirt.

He pulled out the metal object Catherine had seen earlier.

An old tarnished badge.

He wiped blood from its surface.

Then he faced her.

His voice was almost gentle.

“My name isn’t Jud Harrison.”

Catherine stared.

“My mother was a Harrison.”

He turned the badge toward the lantern.

Stamped across its face were the words:

UNITED STATES DEPUTY MARSHAL

And beneath them, scratched into the metal:

ELIAS J. MERCER.

Catherine could not move.

Thomas made a strangled sound behind the bars.

Jud—Elias—looked toward the gallows.

Then at Sheriff Pike.

“Thomas Prescott was convicted of murdering me.”

No one spoke.

Snow drifted through the lantern light.

Catherine’s entire world rearranged itself.

The burned corpse.

The badge beneath Thomas’s floorboards.

The bribed coroner.

The false identification.

Pike whispering you’re dead.

Jud’s reaction to the ledger.

His hatred of Judge Vale.

His ruined home.

Six years.

Catherine stood slowly.

“You’re Elias Mercer?”

“Yes.”

“My brother is going to hang for killing a man who’s standing right here?”

Jud looked at her.

“That appears to be the problem.”

Thomas suddenly began laughing.

It was broken, exhausted laughter.

Pike raised his pistol.

“Doesn’t matter.”

Jud turned.

“It matters considerably.”

“You’re a mountain lunatic wearing a stolen badge.”

“Then prove it.”

Pike’s gun trembled.

“Dead men don’t testify.”

Jud’s gaze hardened.

“No.”

Pike aimed.

“Which means I only have to make you dead again.”

The gunshot came.

But Pike did not fire it.

He jerked.

His revolver dropped.

Blood spread across his hand.

Every head turned.

An elderly man stood at the end of the street holding a smoking rifle.

Dr. Benjamin Sloan.

The coroner.

Pike stared at him.

“You?”

Sloan lowered the gun.

His face was gray.

“I’ve spent six years waking up to his face.”

He looked at Jud.

“At the real one.”

People were emerging from buildings now.

Miners.

Shopkeepers.

Women wrapped in blankets.

Men carrying lanterns.

Sloan approached Jud with tears in his eyes.

“I signed the death certificate.”