Author: ali4050284@gmail.com

Cole Merrick had been on his feet for three days and his leg burned like a branding iron when he finally pushed open the cabin

Elias Boon rode into Dry Creek expecting the usual cattle auction, but the crowd had circled something else. On a splintered platform stood a woman

I have taken seventeen lives. Fifteen wore gray, two wore nothing but fear. Each face still visits me when the room is too quiet. They

Caleb Brick had spent six winters perfecting the art of emptiness—empty bed, empty table, empty mornings that started with coffee and ended with silence. He

Wes Harding rode into the canyon chasing silence; what he found was a seventeen-year-old Apache girl pinned beneath stone, daring him to finish what gravity

Cole had spent years learning the shape of his own silence—how it fit between fence posts, how it answered every knock that never came. He

Takala had spent her life folding herself into smaller spaces—ducking through doorways, sitting so men wouldn’t feel dwarfed, speaking softly so her voice wouldn’t shake

Elias Ward had spent years teaching himself to feel nothing—no grief, no hope, no hunger for company—because feeling had once cost him everything. He rode

Ethan Cole had written ten letters to a woman he pictured in calico and quiet smiles—someone who would step down from a stagecoach, blink at

Ethan Cole had spent years perfecting the art of walking away—away from saloon girls with starlight in their eyes, from widows who spoke of second