Ash and Antler

She poaches elk on federal land to keep her sisters alive. He's the warden who was supposed to arrest her.

Nola June Parish hasn't slept through the night in eighteen months. Since her mother's overdose and her father's disappearance, she has become the sole guardian of her two younger sisters in a crumbling cabin at the base of Sapphire Ridge, Montana. No income. No support. No safety net. Just a dead grandfather's rifle, a chest freezer she can barely afford to power, and the brutal arithmetic of rationing food, firewood, and her twelve-year-old sister's inhaler puffs through the worst winter Granite County has seen in forty years.

She knows someone is watching her.

Rhett Caldwell has been tracking her from the ridgeline since October. A game warden with the Helena-Lewis and Clark National Forest, he knows her boot size, her kill pattern, her sisters' names, and her mother's cause of death. He has built a case file. He has not filed it. Instead, he placed a salt lick in her meadow to draw the elk closer to her range — an act of sabotage against his own badge that he cannot explain, even to himself.

When a chimney fire destroys Nola's cabin during a seven-day blizzard, Rhett makes a choice that crosses every line he has sworn to hold. He brings her into his warden station. Nine hundred square feet of stone and silence. A federal officer and the woman he should be arresting, locked inside by a storm that buries the roads and erases every footprint.

Seven days. No radio call. No report filed. No one coming.

Inside the station, the rules are his. Outside, the mountain doesn't care about jurisdiction. And the thing building between them — slow, tense, dangerous — is not something either of them can ration or control. Rhett watches. Nola calculates. The silence between them fills with everything they are not saying: the surveillance he calls duty, the gratitude she refuses to name, the want that neither of them can afford and neither of them can stop.

But storms break. Roads open. And the lies Rhett told to protect her have a shelf life measured in boot prints and salt lick residue and the methodical patience of a federal investigation that does not care about love, or hunger, or the distance between the law and justice.

When the truth comes for them — and it will — Rhett must decide what he is willing to lose: his badge, his freedom, or the woman who made him forget he was supposed to be the one enforcing the rules.

And Nola must decide something harder: whether the man who saved her is the same man who baited the trap.