Chapter One
Knox Carey was working late when the power went out, again.
He’d lost count of how many times it had gone out this week—and most of those times had been over the last few days when a nasty front moved in and squatted down over Paradise Valley.
The weather had eased up the slightest bit today, but he’d known better than to imagine it was done.
This was Montana in December. Storms were only to be expected.
It had been snowing on and off for days now, blanketing the hills and making everything look like the kind of Christmas cards his mother loved to send out. Knox had the one she’d hand-delivered the day after Thanksgiving on his refrigerator—the only decoration marring the sleek steel surface.
Because a wise man didn’t argue with his mother.
In fact, no one argued with Belinda Carey, because it was a lost cause.
He laughed at that. Then he rubbed his hands over his face and pushed back from the desk he’d been sitting at for far too long tonight.
Knox checked to make sure that his work was saved, something he’d always been paranoid about after growing up in this place of iffy power and capricious electricity.
It had only taken one lost homework assignment when he’d been in middle school to teach him that it always paid to be that kind of paranoid.
Tonight it paid off again. He hadn’t lost a thing.
He left his small, efficient office and roamed out into the main part of the house.
He was proud of this house, built the farthest away from the rest of his family, down near the bottom pasture along the drive that led up to the main house.
The rest of his brothers had their houses in a sort of line, though with a whole lot of space between them, on the western side of the drive.
They assumed Knox had chosen the eastern side, and the closest plot to the road that led into Cowboy Point, to make a statement.
Truth was, he liked the view—but he didn’t care if they assigned him all manner of darker motivations. He was the youngest of five bullheaded brothers. He liked to keep them guessing.
He’d built this house with the help of those bullheaded, mouthy, annoying brothers when he was eighteen, as was the family tradition. And he’d endured the usual complaints from them that his preferences (they’d called them demands) were too much.
Knox liked things the way he liked them. His only tragedy was that he’d been raised with four older brothers who truly felt that it was their sacred duty to comment on and usually heavily critique every last thing that Knox did.
There had only been two ways to go with that, growing up. One path would have been to become a neurotic people pleaser, forever scrabbling around for approval that was unlikely to come—but that wasn’t him. Knox might have been the youngest, but he was still a Carey.
He had taken the other route. The more his brothers teased him and reproached him and complained about him—usually good-naturedly, he liked to think, but still—the more set in his own opinions Knox became.
His oldest brother, Harlan, liked to call him stubborn as a mule. Knox was aware that jackass was the preferred term amongst the others.
But he didn’t care. He’d laughed along with them and built the house he wanted.
His brothers might have built themselves rustic cabins on the pieces of property to go along with their whole Montana cowboy thing.
All of them had gotten land when they were eighteen too, the better to give them their mountain men bona fides, and their cabins had reflected that.
Except Ryder, who hadn’t built because he’d taken off to ride bulls and live in an Airstream—a different sort of cowboy song.
Knox had always liked details. He’d always been one to slow down and see to them.
And he’d never cared for hand-me-downs or leftovers, guess why.
His house was where he’d experimented first. After building the basic structure with his brothers that first summer, he had spent years renovating the place on his own.
Trying out one thing and another to see what he liked better, experimenting with different sorts of projects until he figured out what he was good at.
This house was where he’d taught himself how to create properties that people wanted to live in, and better yet would pay to live in.
Thanks to this house, Knox felt confident that he could renovate anything. And he’d more than proved it.
These days he had houses he rented out in Missoula, Bigfork and Whitefish up by Flathead Lake, Bozeman, and Livingston. They all paid for themselves and made him money besides.
Something his brothers liked to laugh at around the Sunday dinner table, but every last one of them had asked him for details in private.
He could have turned on his generator to handle the dark and the cold, but when he got out into the living room he looked at the fireplace he’d made into the kind of vast hearth he’d always wanted and decided a fire would be better.
Besides, it was Christmas Eve.
His father had once told him that there were certain nights meant for contemplation, and Knox had always found that Christmas Eve was one of them.
Thinking about his father made him blow out a breath, because he was pretty sure that the past almost two whole years had been nothing more than his family fooling themselves and sinking deep into denial. A diagnosis was a diagnosis.
No matter how healthy Zeke looked—and the old man still looked as sturdy as a mountain—he wasn’t. It was a false spring hiding a killer storm. It couldn’t be true.
He hated thinking that, but it was reality.
Zeke was dying.
Though Knox had made himself a solemn promise when he’d heard the news at Easter that year.
He’d never intended to spend the rest of his life in Cowboy Point.
It was one of the reasons he’d gone all the way to Missoula for school.
He would have gone farther if it had been up to him.
Not right after college, because he’d agreed to spend his twenties pitching in on the ranch.
It was the least he could do, he’d thought and still thought now, because he respected what his family had built.
What his father and his brothers had dedicated their lives to.
He’d wanted to make sure he was a part of that too.
But he’d been ready to try something else when his father had made that fateful, terrible announcement.
And it was tempting, now, to think that it was a miracle that the year Zeke had been given to live was coming up on two. But if there was one thing Knox had figured out over the years, it was that miracles weren’t real.
Cancer didn’t magically disappear. People died.
This world the Careys lived in was going to change, and probably soon, whether his family liked it or not.
It didn’t exactly make him happy to think these things, but Knox had always considered himself a realist. Maybe it hit a little harder tonight, because it was Christmas Eve and he liked to think of the old man up the hill from him, still walking tall.
Still working with his hands, though these days that was more for the bespoke spurs and bits he’d started selling at the Farm & Craft Market.
Still here, he thought.
Knox built the fire, aware that almost everything he knew how to do with his own hands was a direct result of his father’s more weathered hands showing him the way.
It turned out he had to swallow at that, and hard.
He watched the fire as it grew and when he was satisfied, he moved away and ran through his options.
Was it a whiskey sort of a night? It felt like it, but the other side of that was the fact that it was Christmas tomorrow morning—and here it was close to midnight—and his mother was definitely going to expect an appearance even if he had to snowshoe the whole way up the side of the hill.
And if Belinda got the faintest hint of an idea that he’d indulged himself in too much whiskey or anything else tonight, she would inevitably turn to one of her time-honored traditions.
That being pounding pots and pans together to make the most noise possible, to teach her rowdy boys a lesson.
The lesson Knox had learned from watching her do such things to his brothers was to make sure she never saw him hungover.
The power flickered on again then, but Knox was happy he’d made the fire because he knew better than to trust that it would stay on tonight.
There was the blustering sound of wind slamming into the side of the house, and he moved over to the front door. He peered out through the window he’d built there for exactly this purpose, but there was only snow coming down in sheets on the far side of his porch, looking relentless.
It was also looking more like a blizzard than a storm to his eye, though sometimes it was hard to tell the difference this high in the mountains.
He turned away, thinking he’d head into the kitchen to find himself something to eat and maybe dream a little bit of far-off cities that never got cold and had beaches at the ready, but stopped.
Knox didn’t know why he’d stopped. But, suddenly, it was like every sense he had was on high alert.
Had he heard a sound? What sounds were there to hear out there? It wasn’t just wild weather, all that howling and driving snow. It wasn’t just cold and dangerous and dark, which was basically run of the mill for this part of the world at this time of year.
It was Christmas Eve. Most folks stayed home or had returned home from their merrymaking and churchgoing at this hour.
He shook it off, thinking he was imagining things—one more reason to start plotting his exit strategy again, though that was a whole lot less fun now that it was going to be predicated on a deep loss he wasn’t sure he was going to recover from—
But he stopped again, and this time, he was sure he heard something.