“There’s a dozen guns on you right now,” Cole said. “If you kill Elizabeth you’ll die very quickly. But it won’t be the kind of death you want. You’ll never know if you could beat me. And you and I both know that’s all this is about. It’s always been a game to you, Riley.”
“Of course it’s always been a game,” Riley mocked, and Elizabeth could hear the bitterness that had festered for decades, turning whatever brotherly bond they’d once shared into poison. “How many times growing up was I just a little too slow? Or not quite as perfect as you were. Do you even remember, Cole? Do you remember how many times I came in second? Every. Single. Time.”
His voice rose on the last words, losing some of that mocking edge and revealing the raw wound beneath. “You think I couldn’t see it in his eyes? Our father—the great James O’Hara—looking at you like you hung the moon, and looking at me like I was just…there. Taking up space. Wasting resources. I was five minutes younger, but I might as well have been five years for all the difference it made.”
Elizabeth could feel the tension in his body, the way his muscles were coiled tight with decades of resentment. She’d thought Cole’s childhood had been hard, but she was beginning to understand that Riley’s had been something else entirely—living in the shadow of your own face, watching someone who looked exactly like you receive everything you’d been denied.
“The best thing I did was get out on my own and away from your shadow,” Riley continued, and this time his voice had steadied, gone cold and certain. “At least out there, I could be my own man. Make my own reputation. Nobody compared me to the great Cole O’Hara because nobody knew I had a twin.”
“Those are your own insecurities talking,” Cole said, and Elizabeth could hear the weariness in his voice, the grief for what his brother had become. “You could’ve been different. The slaughter of the innocent was your choice. You didn’t have to become this, Riley. You chose to make it into a game. To put the blame on me instead of taking responsibility for your own failures.”
“It doesn’t matter now,” Riley said, and she could feel him shrug, feel the casual dismissal of fifty-eight lives, of families destroyed, of a trail of blood that stretched across three territories. “We went our separate ways. And I worked until I was as good as you were. And I worked some more until I was better. And now here we are—exactly where we were always meant to end up. Two sides of the same coin, and only one can land faceup.
“We always were more alike than you wanted to admit,” he sneered, and Elizabeth could see the clouds from his breath misting in the cold air as he spoke directly into her ear, his voice so eerily similar to Cole’s it made her skin crawl. “You’ve got a dark side, Cole. I saw that firsthand during the war. The things you did when you thought no one was watching. The men you killed who’d already surrendered. I wonder, did you ever feel me tracking you like the Sioux taught you to track? Did you ever sense me watching while you buried your sins in unmarked graves?”
“I knew you were following me,” Cole said. “You could’ve tried to kill me then.”
“Wrong time, wrong place. The Sioux were rather protective of you. Besides, I had things to do before I could come back for you, brother.”
“What things?” Cole asked.
“I’m a very wealthy man.”
“There’s a lot of blood on that money.”
“There’s a price for everything,” Riley said. “But like you said, this is between you and me. Call your men off. Because once I kill you I’m going to borrow your wife as insurance until I get to where I’m going. I don’t want her dying too soon because one of them got trigger happy.”
“It’s not my men you’ll have to worry about if you kill me,” Cole said.
Elizabeth could see the half smile on his lips and found herself wondering why he’d pick now to taunt his brother. But then she saw the subtle movement of his hand, and a frisson of fear skittered down her spine.
He couldn’t be serious. She shook her head to tell him no, but Riley squeezed his arm tighter around her neck. Cole made the movement with his hand again, and she realized he was dead serious. The smile left his face and he stood squared off against his brother. And then she realized what he was trying to tell her. She felt the movement to Riley’s right side, where he pushed his coat back so he could get to his pistol.
Riley had no intention of letting her go. He planned to draw on Cole while he was holding her captive, in hopes that Cole wouldn’t draw on him in fear of hitting her. Riley had no honor, and if she didn’t do as Cole asked and give him a fighting chance, then they’d both end up dead. All she could do was trust Cole. With her life.
“I’m warning you, Riley,” Cole said. “Let her go. You’ll never know if you can beat me unless we face off. Nothing between us but our guns.”
“Yeah,” Riley said, and she could feel his body tense as he shifted his weight slightly. The lying, cheating scoundrel. She’d be darned if she let him get away with this. She didn’t care if she had to throw her body in front of his gun.
She kept her eyes on Cole’s hands, waiting for the signal. Just the slightest twitch of his fingers and she went limp. Two guns fired and she was jerked backward. She waited for the searing pain of a bullet wound to bring life to her numb body, but she felt nothing but the cold as she hit the ground.
“Cole,” she tried to scream, but her voice was hoarse, nothing more than a rasp that barely carried past her own lips. She’d heard two shots—two distinct cracks that echoed off the barn and the house and seemed to reverberate in her chest. And she’d felt Riley draw, had felt the shift of his body as he pulled his gun and fired. He’d shot at Cole. Which meant?—
No. No, no, no.
Elizabeth rolled to her hands and knees and tried to scramble to her feet, but her legs had turned to jelly, boneless and useless. The snow was deep here where it had drifted against the barn, and she floundered in it like a drowning woman, her hands sinking to her elbows, her knees finding no solid ground. She couldn’t see Cole through the swirling snow and the smoke from the burning barn. She couldn’t catch her breath, her lungs burning with cold and fear and the iron tang of her own blood where she’d bitten her tongue when she fell.
And she couldn’t imagine a life without her husband in it. Couldn’t conceive of waking up tomorrow in their bed alone, of running the ranch without him, of growing old without his hand in hers. The thought was so huge, so terrible, that her mind simply rejected it. He couldn’t be dead. He couldn’t be.
Tears clouded her vision, hot against her frozen cheeks, and she was completely blind as she felt her way through the snow like a wounded animal searching for its den. Her gloves were soaked through and her hands were going numb, but she kept crawling, kept searching. She touched a leg—solid, real—and worked her way up the prone body that was already cooling in the frigid air, and her hands shook so badly she could barely wipe her eyes clear enough to see.
She leaned closer, and a sob tore from her throat—raw and animal and broken—as she saw her husband’s face. The same strong jaw. The same straight nose. The same dark hair matted with snow and blood.
But then she realized the man she was staring at—the man whose skin was as ashen as the sooty snow that swirled around them—wasn’t her husband after all.
She’d never seen Riley O’Hara in person, other than the likeness Cole had shown her in those wanted posters. Their similarities were remarkable, almost supernatural in their completeness. But there were slight differences when you looked closely enough. A small scar above the left eyebrow that Cole didn’t have. A hardness around the mouth that came from years of cruelty. And the eyes—even in death, even staring sightless at the sky—were different. Colder. Emptier.
This man was not her husband. But her husband could still be as dead as Riley.
