The moment Elias Redford reached for his revolver, Abby Whittaker understood that one of them was going to fall.

Their horses thundered side by side across the smoke-blackened Kansas prairie, hooves pounding baked earth hard enough to shake her teeth. Behind them, Caleb Boone’s ranch burned beneath a copper-colored sky. Flames raced through brittle grass, cattle bawled somewhere inside the smoke, and every breath Abby dragged into her lungs tasted of ash.

Her wounded arm had soaked through its bandage.

Her wedding dress—once ivory, once beautiful, once chosen with foolish hope—was gray with dust and blackened at the hem.

And clutched between her bleeding fingers was the leather strap crossing Elias Redford’s chest.

The satchel attached to it contained enough evidence to hang him.

Elias twisted in his saddle.

His face, handsome enough that morning to fool a church full of people, had become something animal.

“LET GO!”

Abby tightened her grip.

That morning, the man had called her a prize sow in lace.

Now he was afraid of her.

His hand closed around the revolver.

Abby saw the weapon begin to rise.

And for one strange heartbeat, with death less than an arm’s length away, she remembered exactly how the day had begun.

With wedding bells.

Kansas, summer of 1873.

The little white chapel outside Bellweather stood beneath a sky so bright it seemed merciless.

Twenty-seven-year-old Abby Whittaker waited at the altar with sweat gathering beneath the collar of her wedding dress and tried not to notice how badly her hands trembled.

She was a large woman.

She always had been.

Broad through the hips and shoulders, soft through the waist, strong in the arms from years of hauling flour sacks and splitting kindling when her father refused to hire help, Abby had long ago learned that strangers often noticed her body before they noticed her face.

Her mother used to tell her that her eyes were the color of honey held to sunlight.

No one said things like that anymore.

Her mother had been dead seven years.

Abby’s father stood in the first pew, staring at the floor.

Elias Redford stood opposite her.

He had courted her by letter for five months.

His letters had been polished and tender.

He had written that a man who lived alone appreciated kindness more than beauty.

He had written that he wanted a wife who could make a home feel warm.

He had written that a good heart outlasted a pretty face.

Abby had believed him.

That was her mistake.

The preacher opened his book.

“Dearly beloved—”

Elias lifted one hand.

“Wait.”

The preacher stopped.

Abby looked at him.

Something in Elias’s expression had changed.

There had been impatience in his eyes when she entered the chapel.

Now there was disgust.

Not private disgust.

Not the kind a decent man might try to conceal.

He wanted the congregation to see it.

Elias turned toward the pews.