notes, and once told a dinner guest that Nora’s childhood had given her “interesting survival instincts.”
But murder was different.
Leaving a pregnant woman on a mountain in a blizzard was different.
“Margot!” Nora shouted. “Tell him to stop.”
The window lowered a few inches.
Warm air breathed out, carrying perfume and leather and the faint smell of the champagne served at the gala. Margot leaned forward. Her eyes moved from Nora’s torn dress to her swollen stomach, then back to her face.
“My dear,” she said, “a mother who embarrasses her husband cannot expect to raise a Vale heir.”
The window slid up again.
Nora’s mouth opened, but no words came. Julian turned away first. That was what she would remember later. Not the shove, not the ice, not the pain. She would remember the ease with which he turned his back.
He stepped into the SUV and shut the door.
“No,” Nora said.
The locks clicked.
She crawled one step. “Julian!”
The tires crunched backward over snow. For an instant, the headlights washed over her completely, trapping her in white light. Then the vehicle turned. The red taillights appeared, bright and neat, like two small wounds in the storm.
They grew smaller.
Then the mountain swallowed them.
Nora listened until the engine faded. Only then did the true sound of the storm return. Wind pushing through black pines. Snow hissing against the road. Far below, somewhere hidden by darkness, the frozen lake groaned under its own weight.
She was six months pregnant. She had no coat. Her phone was in the SUV because Julian had taken her clutch when she refused to sign the papers in the lodge office. Her ankle was injured. The private road to Marrow Lodge was closed to outside traffic during storms, and the nearest public turnout was miles downhill.
She understood all of that in one clean, terrible sweep.
He had not lost control.
He had chosen the place.
Nora pressed both hands to her stomach. The baby moved again, and that movement cut through the panic like a match in a dark room.
“All right,” she whispered. Her lips were already stiff. “All right, little one. We are going to think.”
Before she married Julian, before the Vale name opened doors and closed cages, Nora had worked for the county mapping office. Not glamorous work. Not gala conversation. She had walked trails with orange flags in her pockets, marked washed-out culverts, updated rescue maps after rockslides, and learned the cruel truth of mountains: they did not care who you were.
That knowledge steadied her.
The mountain would not spare her because she was pregnant. It would not kill her because she was poor. It would simply do what weather did.
So she had to do what survivors did.
Move.
She dragged herself toward the broken guardrail. The metal was half-buried, and her palm slipped over snow crusted with ice. Each movement sent pain up her ankle. Her breath came in short bursts that froze against her cheeks. The satin dress clung to her legs, heavy and useless, made for standing under warm chandeliers beside a man who wanted her gone.
A laugh rose in her throat and broke apart.
She thought of the first time Julian brought her to Marrow Lodge. He
