Chapter 1 The sound of laughter echoing through the canyon was the last thing Jack Brennan expected to hear that blistering afternoon in July of 1876. But there it was — wild and genuine, cutting through the stillness of the Arizona territory like music he had forgotten existed. Jack had been trailing his horse Whiskey…
Chapter 1 The smoke had been visible for hours before Olivia Langston realized she was running for her life. She had been gathering wild sage along the canyon ridges outside Lahonta, Colorado, her canvas bag nearly full when the wind shifted and brought with it the acrid smell of burning pine and the unmistakable roar…
Chapter 1 The bullet came out of nowhere, the way trouble always did in 1883, and it knocked the drifter clean off his horse at the gate of Alma Fletcher’s property before she even had a chance to set down her lantern. Alma had been standing on her porch watching the last amber light die…
Chapter 1 Ethan Miller stood on the frosted platform of Sagebrush Station with his hands buried deep in his coat pockets. He told himself the trembling came from the cold, but he knew it came from the fear sitting heavy in his chest. The train from the east was slowing to a stop, steel wheels…
Chapter 1 Nobody in Harland’s Crossing could explain it afterward. Not the sheriff, not the preacher, not the women who had spent three days pressing their good dresses and rehearsing polite smiles. They would talk about that Tuesday morning for years, standing in doorways, lowering their voices, trying to make sense of what Everett Cobb…
Chapter 1 Boon hadn’t come down the mountain for a rescue mission. He came for coffee beans and rifle cartridges. But there she was — a heap of freezing blue wool, stubbornly refusing to die on the platform. Snow crunched like broken glass beneath his boots. The wind stripped the heat from his face in…
Part 1 I heard him before I saw him. The sound of a key in the front door at seven-fifteen on a Thursday night — when he was supposed to be in New York until tomorrow — and suddenly the red dress felt like the most reckless decision I had made in two years. I…
Raina Castillo was not looking for anything extraordinary that morning. She was twenty-six, up before sunrise the way she always was, moving through the stretch of forest she had walked since she was a kid trailing her grandmother between these same trees with a worn canvas bag and patient hands. The woven bag over her…
Chapter 1 Dust packed Eliza Mercer’s mouth so tightly she could barely breathe. Every inhale scraped like sandpaper. Every exhale tasted of blood. She lay crumpled in the red rocks below Kenosha Pass, one cheek pressed into the dirt, one eye swollen shut, her left hand bent at an angle that made her stomach heave…
Chapter 1 By the time the men realized Martha Ellery was not planting a garden, the first row of saplings already stood in the ground like a line of thin green soldiers. Willow and cottonwood shoots, most no thicker than a man’s wrist, their flexible stems trembling in the early spring wind that came screaming…
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