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Chapter 1 The cold had teeth that night. It came off the lake in sheets, turning Chicago’s gutters into brittle glass, and it sank into the marrow of anyone stupid enough to be out in it. A man like Dante Mercer had spent fifteen years making sure he was never stupid. He moved through the…

Chapter 1 The snow fell the way it only ever falls over Ridgemont Hills — without mercy, without pause, as though the sky had decided that this particular street had been forgiven too many winters already. And there he stood at the Black Iron Gate, a man so thin his coat seemed to be wearing…

Chapter 1 The fear was a cold stone in Martha Brennan’s belly, heavy and familiar. She had felt it twice before in her life — once when she was fifteen and her father’s wagon had gotten stuck in a Dakota riverbed as the ice broke upstream, and again in seventy-eight when the Donner Pass stage…

Chapter 1 The wind came off the Wind River Range that autumn like a blade drawn across a wound, and Lucien Hatcher stood at the edge of his dying ranch and felt the cold slide under his ribs where hope used to live. He had not eaten a real meal in weeks. Neither had his…

Chapter 1 The rope had eaten into her wrists long before he ever saw her face. From the ridge he could smell the dust and the fear, could hear the boy’s voice whipping through the wind, and something old and dead in Xavier Blackwood woke up snarling. He had watched men traded like cattle once,…

Chapter 1 The first thing Perdita noticed was that the wind had stopped howling. For three years the northern gale had been her only neighbor, screaming through the branch-ribbed pines until she could taste the loneliness in it. But on this autumn night, when the rain came down like a thousand needles and the thunder…

Chapter 1 The smell was the first thing that would haunt Clara for the rest of her life. Not the manure caked into the cattle yard, not the sweat dripping from two hundred unwashed bodies, not even the cheap whiskey that hung in the July air like a curse — but the smell of her…

Chapter 1 The auctioneer’s voice was a dull roar in her ears, but Kora Bell heard none of it. The afternoon sun beat down on Dead River’s dusty main square, and the smell of hay and horses hung thick in the October air. She stood at the edge of the crowd, her mother’s silver locket…

Chapter 1 The wind carried the sound of hooves long before I ever saw the riders, and even then, I knew. I had been in Wyoming for six weeks, hidden behind a marriage license and a lie, and I had let myself believe the miles would protect me. But the man with the scarred face…

Chapter 1 The stagecoach lurched to a stop, and Lydia Marsh felt her stomach drop in a way that had nothing to do with the three-week journey from Boston. She pressed her gloved hand to the frosted window, scraping away a circle of frost, and saw a man standing on the frozen street — tall,…