Chapter 1: Dust and Shadow The sun hung low over Deadwood like a bruise that wouldn’t heal. Heat shimmered off the packed earth of Main Street, warping the shapes of...
PART ONE: THE WEIGHT OF INK The pen was cold. Not just cold like metal kept in a government building’s air conditioning—but cold like the end of a fever. I,...
Part 1: The Thin Ice My hand trembled as it touched the pale pink hair tie—Lily’s favorite color, the color of cotton candy at the fair, the color of her...
PART ONE: THE AUCTION OF SHAME The rain knew something I didn’t. It fell in sheets across the marble steps of the DeMarco estate, the kind of rain that soaked...
By the time the auctioneer reached her name, the dust had turned the afternoon mean. Men who would bid on a horse, a saddle, even a broken mule would not...
I had the fireplace poker in both hands when the dog lowered his ruined head. My little son stood behind the glass in dinosaur pajamas, smiling as if death had...
Part I — The Price of Silence The night they tried to trade Vivien Miller like a sack of flour, the whole Iron Horse Saloon smelled of whiskey, wet wool,...
At 5:03 in the morning, someone started pounding on my front door hard enough to shake the brass mail slot. By the time I reached the hallway in my bare...
The first thing Declan Ali noticed was that the woman stepping down from the stage looked too light to survive a Montana winter. The second was that she watched every...
Part I: The Man by the Ditch By the time I saw the dog’s eyes, I had already decided I was going to die. They were low to the ground,...