Chapter 1 - Frozen Footprints
My five-year-old niece appeared barefoot in a raging Washington blizzard, carrying two babies she refused to let die. But when I opened my door and saw what was clenched in her frozen hand, seven years of anger, guilt, and everything I believed about my sister began to collapse.
The first thing I saw was a little girl dying on my porch. Her blond hair was frozen around blue lips, and both arms were locked around two infants beneath a soaked blanket, as if the storm would have to break every finger before she surrendered them.
I’m Dr. Nathan Pierce, a cardiothoracic surgeon who has held beating hearts in my hands and watched seconds decide whether someone lived or died. Yet nothing prepared me for that child collapsing outside my glass mansion in Washington’s Cascade Mountains.
Then she opened her eyes.
Green. The same impossible green eyes my younger sister Sarah had, the eyes I’d spent seven years trying to forget.
“Uncle Nathan,” she whispered. “Mommy said... you’d help.”
Then she went limp.
I wouldn’t learn until later what Lily Carter had endured before reaching me. Hours earlier, she had been stumbling through the worst snowstorm Washington had seen all winter, carrying her baby brothers Owen and Ethan while wind erased the road around her.
Her mother had given her only a few directions. Find the big glass house on the mountain, look for the lights, find Uncle Nathan, and whatever happened, don’t look back.
But Lily had looked back once.
Through their open kitchen door, she saw Sarah lying on white tile, blood running from her temple. Marcus Kane, Lily’s father, stood over her holding a broken bottle.
“Baby, get your brothers,” Sarah whispered. “The paper is in your coat. Find Nathan. Go now.”
Lily obeyed because her mother sounded like she was saying goodbye. She climbed into the twins’ crib, wrapped Owen and Ethan in the only blanket she could reach, and ran into the storm.
She lost one shoe almost immediately. The other vanished into a snowdrift, but she kept walking barefoot because stopping meant her brothers might die.
“Don’t sleep,” she begged when Owen whimpered beneath the blanket. Ethan had already become terrifyingly quiet.
Eventually, a golden glow appeared through the storm. Lily found my iron gates and climbed the long driveway toward the house, falling twice and twisting her tiny body each time so the babies landed on her instead of the frozen ground.
At the steps, she couldn’t stand anymore.
So she crawled.
Inside, I was alone with a glass of whiskey and the silence I had built around myself. At forty-two, I had money, awards, a five-thousand-square-foot home, and more empty rooms than one man could ever need.
Seven years earlier, Sarah had stood in that same entryway after I discovered Marcus’s debts, criminal record, and reputation. I’d tried to protect her, but anger turned my fear into cruelty.
“If you marry him, don’t come back here.”
“You’re not Mom or Dad,” Sarah cried. “You’re my brother.”
“Then leave.”
Those were the last words I ever said to the little sister I’d once promised to protect.
Now she had sent her children to me.
“Rosa! Call 911!” I screamed, lifting Lily from the snow.
My housekeeper rushed in as I carried all three children toward the fireplace. Lily’s pulse was dangerously weak, and the twins were breathing so faintly I had to bend close just to make sure they were alive.
As I carefully unwrapped their soaked blanket, something silver slipped free.
I caught it before it hit the floor.
It was an old bracelet, scratched and ice-cold. My hands began trembling as I turned it over and read the engraving inside.
May you like
Property of Sarah Carter. 2018.
And suddenly, I knew that whatever had happened seven years ago, someone had been lying to me.
