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CHAPTER 1

Genesis

Blood on Aldin's shirt and pants hardened under the heat of the sun. He scratched at the spot where his tacky shirt stuck to the few new hairs on his chest, driving the pasty goo under his nails and renewing the smelted copper stench of blood.

Next to Aldin, Pa shifted and huffed an impatient sigh. After sixteen years of staying vigilant to Pa's ever-shifting moods, Aldin could guess his father's thoughts. Abruptly ordered away from butchering a slaughtered cow too old to produce milk, his father feared the meat would spoil before this foolishness ran its course. No doubt that blame would fall at Pa's feet.

"What's the old dog waiting for?" Pa muttered to himself.

Aldin peered discreetly at the men around them near the front of the crowd in the sandy patch called "the front yard." None of them appeared to have heard Pa.

For his part, Aldin was in no hurry. He dreaded whatever revelation this unexpected assembly would bring. He scanned the hundred-plus workers who'd interrupted their day to gather here. Ma stood in the back of the crowd with a group of women, rolled-up sleeves and shorts drying in the midmorning heat. Aldin's older brother stood by her side, cut green hay stuck to his shirt and pants.

His eyes flitted over Claire, not giving anything away, but even when his eyes left her, his awareness never did. She stood behind Aldin in the middle of the kitchen workers, with her arms crossed over her chest. About an inch taller than Aldin, she always seemed cleaner than he, her clothes fresher. Whenever he had the opportunity, his gaze sought out her fair skin, long neck, and striking eyes. Weeks ago, he'd noticed changes to her willowy body. Changes he feared everyone, including Balder, had detected by now.

They all stood in front of the Balder house. Once a year, Mrs. Balder insisted on waterproofing the monumental two-story building to preserve the elaborate trim under the eaves and along the porch rails, which she called "gingerbread architecture." The whitewash made the home stand out like a beacon against the sand and sage of the rest of the valley—reinforcing the difference between the Balders and the rest of the ranch, who lived in barns and sun-bleached clapboard shanties.

Two of Balder's foremen burst out of the front door, snatching Aldin's attention away from Claire, Pa, the heat, and the itch of drying blood.

Old Man Balder exited the house behind his foremen and stomped to the porch rail. In silence, he scowled out at his laborers huddled around his front door. Hair, more salt than pepper, puffed up in the breeze—a white crown emphasizing the deep-rutted anger worn permanently into his face.

Balder's fair-haired, fair-skinned wife and ten-year-old daughter emerged but remained in the porch's shadow near the house. Wayne, Balder's son and Aldin's childhood playmate, trudged out the front door and plopped down on the porch swing.

Balder nodded at the longest-serving of his foremen. His foremen trotted across the stoop and down the steps, the sound of their boots on the boards reminiscent of cattle running through a chute.

Aldin held his breath, but his heart raced away.

Not now. Oh, please not today.

They pushed into the assembled ranch hands.

Aldin said a silent prayer.

Not Claire. Oh, please not Claire.

The two men plucked her from the crowd, and Aldin stilled his face into a mask while his insides drained out of his belly and into the ground.

Balder's men marched Claire up the three steps that separated the Balder family from their workers. She wrested her elbows away and planted her feet on the sagging boards to face Old Man Balder. Left with no action to take but to stand at her side, one of the foremen's cheeks flushed while he avoided eye contact with anyone on the porch. The other foreman shifted his weight from one foot to the other while he examined his calloused hands.

A breeze pressed homespun cotton against Claire's skin, profiling her swollen breasts. And her belly protruding above her partially unbuttoned blue jeans, worn white with work.

She made no attempt to conceal the changes in her body. Instead, she raised her chin to level eyes as hard and green as jade at an old man, bent and gnarled by a sun as unrelenting to the wealthy as the poor.

Hands at her sides clenched into fists.

No tears. No pleading.

Defiant.

They might condemn her, but she'd go to her death unyielding.

Glorious.

Balder leaned on his polished ironwood cane and glowered, not at Claire, but out over Aldin's head, at his laborers. "I provide for each and every one of you. You have a roof and meat and water because my family gives it to you." The old man's pot-holed voice fought the wind to reach the back of the crowd. "But every ranch has a limit. The land can only sustain so many head. I can only give so much before it's my own family—and yours—who suffer. So, I ask but one thing from you: not to make my burden any harder than it already is."

The old man turned and inspected Claire, his eyes sliding down the length of her.

Aldin's teeth scraped against each other. Unlike the foremen, Aldin couldn't take his eyes off Balder, could barely blink.

She stretched her shoulders back, an impenetrable fortress facing down an army laying siege.

The brass knob of Balder's walking stick winked in the sun between his palsied fingers. "Your lust brings another mouth into our midst to feed. That takes food and water out of all our mouths." He stabbed a finger at his ranch hands.

"I. Will. Not. Have. It." He pounded the cane on the porch, underlining each word with the hollow ring of the old boards.

Balder scowled at Claire. "You're to go out in the desert and find your own way; feed yourself and your spawn—if you're able."

Aldin exhaled hard, as though he'd been punched in the gut, and closed his eyes for one long blink.

Balder took an uneven step toward Claire. "But you shouldn't go alone. The man who did this to you should share your fate. Tell us who he is."

Behind Balder, his wife averted her frail blue eyes. She wrapped a shawl-clad arm around the shoulders of their ten-year-old daughter. The old man's son, Wayne, squirmed on the porch swing and turned his face away from his father, mirroring Aldin's agony. Aldin would rather slaughter and dress the whole herd than be forced to witness Claire coerced into unarmed combat.

Aldin wedged his shoulder between two workers to inch closer and get a better view of Claire, angling his head to focus on her with his good eye.

She stood fast. Her auburn braid hung stiff and unwavering down her back, an exclamation point to her rigid stance. She said nothing.

Uncompromising.

Better than all of us. Unwilling to live the empty existence of a slave.

Glorious.

With a flash of movement, Balder's hand thunder-clapped against Claire's cheek, splitting her lip and bringing Aldin to the balls of his feet. His teeth smashed together, and his hands coiled into fists.

She staggered to the side. A foreman reacted in time to catch her before she stumbled off the porch. He steadied her, but she threw him off with a violent shrug. The foreman ducked his head and took half a step back. She wiped blood from her mouth and flicked the droplets on the planks.

Balder's wife shuddered, regarded the blood on her fresh-painted stoop, and shielded her daughter's blue eyes. Wayne curled his shoulders inward, away from his father's unholy prosecution. His ghostly blue eyes locked on Aldin. Nearly empty of color, the brightness of fear made the young man's eyes even more spooky. Then, his gaze shifted away, eyes hidden behind a veil of coal-black hair.

Aldin's feet shuffled forward to the sand in front of the steps up to the porch.

The senior Balder huffed and growled through clenched teeth, "Tell me."

Claire pressed her lips into a thin line and raised her chin.

The old man slapped her other cheek, but she'd braced for this blow and shuffled just enough to catch her footing. She lurched forward and held out an accusing finger. "You know—"

Balder stumbled back as though her touch were poisonous. He thrust his cane high in the air, his lips contorted in a feral snarl.

Aldin's hand shot up.

His arm trembled with the effort of blocking the cane in the air as neither man backed down.

The brass knob of Balder's walking stick flared in the sun.

The crowd hushed into a shocked silence.

Clueless as to how he'd landed on the porch in time to stop the savage arc of Balder's cane, Aldin froze under the old man's ruthless glare, sure he'd committed the sin that would end his life in this moment.

The entire scene petrified, the stillness broken only by the ever-present wind.

Then, the corner of Balder's mouth twitched.

Ma cried out from behind Aldin, "No!"

Pa barked a disgusted grunt.

Claire whipped her head toward Aldin with wide-eyed surprise. "No," she whispered, a faint echo of Aldin's mother.

The old man lowered his cane, nodded to Aldin, and relaxed his face into a self-satisfied grin.

"Why?" Claire asked Aldin, her voice cracked under the strain.

He couldn't answer her. It'd all happened so fast.

"No!" Claire shook her head at Balder, disavowing Aldin again. "He's not—" she yelled at her accusers.

But Aldin's parents and friends converged on the edge of the porch, drowning her out with their shouted disbelief or praise for his bravery.

Ma shrieked denials. Fumes from moonshine wafted out with each screamed No.

Pa grabbed him by the elbow and spun him around to shout in his face. Worthless. The only word Aldin could make out over the chaos—worthless.

All the while, Claire's hands shoved Aldin away while she bellowed her denial.

No one paid her objections any mind. He'd stepped up on the porch of his own accord. He was the father. That's the one thing everyone knew for sure.