Jessie's War (Civil War Steam) Read Online Free

United States.
    It was a bloodbath.
    Unbeknownst to the Union, the
Confederacy possessed a weapon capable of shelling from miles away, from what
ought to have been out of range. The Mathew Brady photographs in the papers
showed the horror. Shells of burned airships, blackened fields, the stacked
bodies of men who had died in Bear Creek, the husk of the Capitol after
Washington had fallen to Confederate artillery.
    The only weapon her father
ever created in his long years as an inventor had broken the back of the Union.
It hadn’t mattered that his plans had been stolen by Confederate agents, or
that he’d never intended for the device to fall into Confederate hands. It only
mattered that he’d created the technology that killed thousands, including his
son.
    When Luke stopped writing
after Gideon’s death, they had believed his body lay somewhere on that same
field of battle. But she’d been unable to voice her grief, unable to dance
either of their spirits to the other side. Her father’s anguish had been so
overwhelming, so consuming, she had swallowed hers. One of them needed to go to
market or go into town for the post.
    Because her father had been
unable to do so, she’d faced the wrath of the town alone. What they’d done in
their anger was yet another thing she had forced herself to swallow, and
eventually, their rage settled into quiet disdain.
    Well. She had survived it.
    Now Luke’s ghost had returned
to life and lay on the other side of the wall, taunting her with his presence.
Mocking her with the life she’d thought he’d lost.
    She rubbed her palm against
her chest to alleviate the ache, and felt the ring he’d once given her against
her palm. Pulling the silver chain from beneath her clothing, her fingers
curled around the cheap piece of silver. Luke gave her this ring the night
before he’d left, when he’d asked her to wait for him. She had waited for
years—and continued to wait long after she had given him up for dead.
    She would have waited
forever.
    The ring went into the box.
As she closed the lid, she felt the imprint of that silver ring against her
skin still, her body aching for the comfortable familiarity of it.
    Tears gathered in her eyes,
and Jessie, for the first time in a long time, allowed them to fall.
    She missed her mother and her
brother. She missed her father, who’d died that day as surely as Gideon had,
though he’d continued to wake each morning for another two years.
    “Oh, Gideon.” She clutched
the box to her chest.
    Luke , her heart whispered.
    No , she told herself sternly. Never again.
    She closed her eyes,
banishing the image of him from her mind. Exhausted, she rested her cheek
against the cold metal and wept.

Chapter Two

 
    The sound of soft-soled shoes
against the wooden floor told Luke that Jessie was finally awake.
    He’d heard her through the
thin walls the night before. Long after he’d extinguished the lantern beside
the bed, he’d listened to the sounds of her moving about in her room and
quietly weeping.
    When he turned in her
direction, he found her standing framed in the doorway of the kitchen, dressed
in a simple buckskin dress and trousers. Beaded earrings of hollowed, polished
bone brushed against her shoulders, an identical choker around her throat. The
bone pipe choker and earrings stood out, pale against her golden skin. Her
waist-length black hair was braided into two plaits, through which she had
woven a leather cord. The pale brown fabric bound the ends of her hair, and
matched the beaded dress.
    She was even prettier than he
remembered. His chest tightened at the sight of her.
    Then their gazes collided.
Her face was ashen, and judging by her swollen, red-rimmed eyes, she’d been
crying again. He knew he had hurt her when he’d let her go. It wasn’t his fault
she hadn’t understood that, as long as there was war, he couldn’t come home.
    Wasn’t
hers, either , his
conscience chided. It had been silent for so long he’d almost