Chapter 1 Hunger makes you do terrible things. It strips away pride first, then hope, and finally the only thing you have left to love. Vera Cross tied the frayed rope to the hitching post. She turned her back. And if the broad-shouldered man in the bearskin coat hadn’t been watching from the shadows, that…
Chapter 1 The Wind River Range did not forgive, and it certainly did not forget. In the dead of January, the mountains of Wyoming Territory were a jagged expanse of blinding white and deadly blue ice. The locals down in the valley called it the Great Die-Up, a winter so vicious that cattle froze standing…
Chapter 1 The meeting had been going forty minutes before anyone thought to look at Evelyn Hart. That told her everything she needed to know. She was sitting in the third row of the old clapboard assembly hall, the one that used to be a feed store before Harlon Briggs converted it after the rail…
Chapter 1 The iron breathed hot steam a few inches from my stomach. Not touching me. Not yet. But close enough for my unborn daughter to kick. I stood pinned against the marble island in the kitchen of the Blackwood estate, one hand clamped around the counter’s edge so tightly my nails bent backward, the…
Chapter 1 The Wyoming wind cut through Elias Cole like a blade made of ice and memory. Four months. That was how long Margaret had been in the ground. Four months of waking to a silence so heavy it pressed the air from his lungs, of reaching across the bed in the dark and finding…
Chapter 1 The October wind howling through the Colorado Territory in 1878 carried the bitter promise of an early and merciless winter. In the booming mining town of Oak Haven, the streets were a churning river of frozen mud and horse manure, but the cold beneath Josephine Blackwood’s worn boots was nothing compared to the…
Chapter 1 She burned the letter before she let anyone see her cry. On a platform in the middle of nowhere, with the New Mexico wind pulling at her coat and dust scraping along the boards beneath her boots, Marta Voss held the paper until the last blackened corner gave way. Whatever her uncle Henrik…
Chapter 1 The town of Stonewater sat on a flat brown stretch of dirt where the river ran shallow and the wind never stopped. The kind of town that had a church, a bank, a saloon, and three streets. And one man who owned all of them. His name was Cornelius Crane. Fifty-four years old,…
Chapter 1 The chain snapped before Nora Estelle Reed understood what was happening. Ninety pounds of wolf dog crossed that Georgetown street like something fired from a cannon, and every person standing there scrambled backward, grabbed their children, pressed themselves against the nearest wall. The stagecoach driver shouted. A woman screamed. The animal didn’t touch…
Chapter 1 The wagon wheels left deep ruts in the frozen ground, and then the snow filled them, and then there was nothing. Nora Dawes stood on the ridge above the empty valley with a basket of dead wood in her arms and understood, in the space between one heartbeat and the next, that her…
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