Untold Frontier Legends

The heavy leather whip cut through the freezing mountain air with a vicious crack before slamming mercilessly into human flesh. The surrounding men held their collective breath, waiting for the mountainside outlaw to finally shatter beneath the punishment. The crack of a whip echoed across Fort Blackwood’s courtyard, and every man standing there waited to see Ethan Boone break. They expected the fifth strike to tear open his already wounded back, and they expected the silent mountain of a man to finally fall. But no one expected Abigail Turner to step forward. The leather snapped through the air a second time and slammed against her back instead, drawing a gasp from the onlookers. A sickening silence swallowed the entire fort. For six years, Abigail had been nothing but a shadow at Fort Blackwood. She washed filthy clothes, carried heavy buckets beside the boiling vats, and …

The freezing darkness of the Greer Highlands bit deep into my lungs as the wind howled through the twisted metal skeleton of our crashed helicopter. We were already written off as dead by the brass back at Caswell, abandoned in the freezing snow while our commander worried more about his upcoming golf tournament than our pulse rates. Silence hung heavy inside the jagged metal tomb until the rhythmic crunch of boots on ice broke the night. They thought they had buried us in this frozen wilderness, but the dead do not stay quiet when they come back for receipts. The snow came down in heavy, blinding sheets that erased the difference between earth and sky. Thirty-six miles north of the heated command tents where Colonel Wade Pemberton sat with his morning coffee, the world had reduced itself to a bitter test of endurance. I knelt …

Blood seeped through the heavy wool of Ruth’s travel cloak, warm and slick against her ribs as the wagon lunged violently over another jagged rock. She bit back a groan, her fingers tightening desperately on the hem of her skirt to conceal the spreading crimson stain from the giant sitting beside her. If Callum Bre noticed her internal agony, he gave no sign, his massive hands resting easily on the reins as he steered the team toward the jagged maw of the Montana wilderness. People in the valley whispered that the mountains hid dangerous men, creatures who lived beyond civilization in lonely cabins where no one could hear you scream, but the greatest secret buried among those towering pines was something far more terrifying than a monster. It was a truth so monstrously disguised that five women had already fled in sheer, unadulterated terror before …

The cold metal of the muzzle pressed hard against the back of his neck, reminding Ethan Miller that a single false breath would scatter his brains across the sun-baked Arizona dirt. Around him, three dozen Apache warriors stood like statues carved from granite, their dark eyes reflecting the flickering crimson light of the evening fire. The Arizona Territory sun was a dying ember sinking below a jagged horizon in September of 1882, casting long, skeletal shadows across the encampment. Ethan had spent three agonizing days pushing his tired gelding, Luther, through forbidden Apache lands to save two weeks on the drive back to his failing Tucson ranch, and now that shortcut was demanding payment in blood. Every warrior in this tribe had refused the chief's daughter for reasons whispered in dark, terrified tones, yet here he stood, bound by a forced vow and staring into …