Your bridegroom is six feet under in the frozen timber, Clara, and crying won't buy your fare back to Missouri.
The world went silent. The roaring winds, the groaning house, the screams—all replaced by a deafening void.
I lay amidst the rubble, shards of splintered wood and chunks of plaster digging into my skin. My arm, where Thomas’s wrist had snapped, throbbed with a dull, excruciating pain. But the physical hurt was nothing compared to the emptiness that had opened within me.
Thomas was gone.
I couldn’t breathe. My chest felt hollowed out, as if the entity had taken a piece of me along with him.
Bleeding and covered in mud and ash, I pushed myself up, crawling blindly over the debris. The parlor was a ruin, a gaping maw where a home once stood. The air was frigid, filled with the metallic tang of blood and the damp scent of disturbed earth.
I scrambled on hands and knees towards the shattered wall, the very wall Elijah had nailed shutters onto. Now it was just a gaping hole, torn open by the violent collapse.
I dragged myself through the breach, out into the freezing snowstorm. The wind howled around me, whipping icy flakes into my face, but I barely felt it.
My eyes, unfocused, scanned the desolate, snow-covered ground. Then I saw it. Thomas’s dropped wool coat, lying half-buried in a drift.
I stumbled towards it, falling to my knees in the snow. I clutched the rough wool to my chest, burying my face in its worn fabric. It smelled faintly of him. Of hay and woodsmoke and fear.
Sobs tore from my throat, raw and uncontrolled. Great, heaving sobs that seemed to come from a place deeper than my lungs.
I was completely alone in the wilderness. The Delaney homestead groaned one last, final time. With a terrible, sucking sound, the remaining timbers and stone tilted, then collapsed entirely into the sunken earth, swallowed by the mud.
It was gone. Taking Elijah, Silas, and Thomas beneath the frozen soil.
The wind howled around me, a cold, indifferent witness. I was a survivor, but I was broken. The legal victory, the exposure of the murder, the unraveled plot—it meant nothing. I had fought. I had risked everything. And I had failed the one person I had sought to protect.
The night was endless.
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