Part 1

They said the horse was cursed. Thirty men had tried to break him, and thirty men had failed. Some walked away with broken bones; some never walked again.

I stood at the edge of the corral, clutching a small, battered suitcase that didn’t belong to me.

The dust of the Montana plains coated my throat, but it was the fear that made it hard to swallow. Inside the fence stood Brimstone.

He was a nightmare carved from midnight shadows. His coat was black, his muscles tight as wire, and his eyes burned with a fury that dared the world to come closer.

He struck the dirt with his hooves, a warning that echoed in the silence of the vast ranch.

The owner, Reed Coulter, stood beside me. He was the richest rancher for miles, a man built from hard years and silence. He didn’t look at me.

He looked at the horse.

“He’s not for sale,” Reed said, his voice low and rough. “And neither is this ranch. If you think you can change things here, you’re wrong.”

I tightened my grip on the letter in my hand.

The letter addressed to Emma.

“I didn’t come to change things,” I whispered, my voice trembling just enough to be real. “I came to survive.”

Reed finally turned to look at me. He expected a bride.

He expected Emma, the woman who wrote to him promising to cook, clean, and stay out of his way.

But I wasn’t Emma. Emma was my sister. She d*ied in a cold room in Missouri two weeks ago.

I was the one left with nothing but her trunk, her letter, and a desperate need to escape a past that was hunting me down.

I had stepped off the train with a lie on my lips. I looked at Reed, this stranger I was supposed to marry, and saw the same wall around his heart that I had built around mine.

“You’re smaller than I thought,” Reed said, studying my worn dress and the exhaustion etched under my eyes.

“I’m stronger than I look,” I lied. Or maybe I hoped.

That first night, the silence of the ranch was deafening.

I lay in a spare room, listening to the wind howl. But then, I heard another sound. A high-pitched, terrified scream from the barn.

I ran out, barefoot in the dirt.

Brimstone had cornered a stable boy.

The horse was rearing, teeth snapping, hooves flashing like lightning. Men were shouting, throwing ropes, their faces twisted in anger.

“Put him down!” someone yelled. “He’s a devil!”