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Blood dribbled out of his nostrils.

“I want to know who it was. Who wanted to split Étienne and I up that badly? Your mother? Faustine?”

“You better answer,” Hugo warned as he tightened the rope brutally tight again for several long seconds, then let it loose.

“Fine,” Mano wheezed. “It wasn’t my idea.”

I knew it.

“You planted the condom wrapper there to make me look bad.”

Hugo elbowed Mano viciously in the head.

“I did plant that condom.”

“Who put you up to it?” Hugo growled. “I know you’re too spineless to have planned something like this yourself.”

“I can’t tell,” Mano rasped. “He’ll kill me if I do.”

“I’ll fucking kill you now, fucker.”

“He?” I asked sharply. “He who?”

“Étienne. Who else has any power in these mountains? My brother is the one who forced me to do it. He orchestrated the whole thing.”

CHAPTER 9

Étienne

Istrode into the tavern room at the Distant Whistler, trying to put the disquieting encounter with my wife out of my head.

This was the closest a meeting-place could get to neutral ground between the Bastides and the Pinoteaux, a lone outpost on a craggy ridge right on the border between our lands, open to the elements on both sides to make sure no one could get trapped here.

It was still dangerous.

But I was sick of wondering who was plotting against me. Sick of waiting for them to strike.

And if Réjean and Léonie’s father Yves had intended this to be a trap, they would find I’d had men scattered about the few houses here on the ridge since last night.

2, 4, 6 of their trucks. Exactly the number we had agreed on.

But that didn’t mean they would play fair, and I knew it.

My fingers tightened on the vial around my neck. It had everything in it that had fueled my vengeance for years.

A few drops of my grandfather’s blood. Saved as he bled to death on the mountains he loved. Killed by a Pinoteaux.

I was only 16 but I could still remember every sensation of that day. The sick, agonizing feeling of helplessness. The way he had gripped my hand wordlessly, how he had told me to leave him. In case there were others around who would hurt me too.

The way I hadn’t left. Had fought and raged and roared against every moment as he slipped away from me.

They said it was Léonie’s grandfather who did it. And he was dying anyway.

So when I killed him.

It was a death for a death.

The feud should have stopped there. That should have been the end of it. My Da had agreed.