Choice. It was a strange word, unfamiliar as a song she’d never heard. Lila did not hesitate. She tore her arm from Bart’s grasp and stepped toward Rowan before fear could argue. Behind her, Amos laughed, the sound wet and bitter. “She can’t hear you! She’s broken!”
Rowan didn’t answer him. He didn’t explain. He simply guided Lila out into the blizzard, lifted her onto a mule waiting near the hitching post, and wrapped her in a heavy buffalo robe that smelled faintly of smoke and pine. His hands worked quickly, tying straps, checking knots, moving with the practical competence of a man who expected the world to try to kill him.
As the wind screamed around them, Rowan leaned close, mouth barely moving. “I know you can hear.”
Lila froze so hard she felt her own heartbeat stumble. For three years she had not spoken, not since the night she watched her father beat her mother to death and realized that sound could betray you. Her silence had been her shield, her lie her lock. No one had ever seen through it. Not Amos. Not the men who mocked her. Not the women who pitied her from a distance. But this stranger, this mountain man, had noticed something as small as an ear twitch.
Rowan straightened and began leading the mule up into the dark without waiting for her answer, as if he’d said something as ordinary as the weather. The climb lasted two brutal days. The trail narrowed into a ribbon carved into sheer rock, and the world below became a blur of white and black. Lila rode in silence, her body aching, her mind racing to keep pace with her fear.
Why had he saved her? Why had he paid gold for a girl he didn’t know? And why, if he knew her secret, had he chosen to protect it instead of exposing her in front of the saloon like a magician revealing a trick?
They camped the second night in a shallow cave that smelled of old animals and wet stone. Rowan built a fire with hands that didn’t fumble, roasted rabbit over the flame, and handed her a piece without ceremony. “Eat,” he said, as if hunger were not a question but a fact.
Lila ate fast, starved in more ways than one. The fire warmed her cheeks, but it didn’t thaw the knot in her chest. Rowan watched the cave mouth more than he watched her, listening to the wind like it carried messages only he could read.
“You’re wondering how I know,” he said at last, voice steady. “When Bart Vane cocked his pistol, your ear twitched. Fear makes people listen, even when they’re pretending not to.”
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