PROLOGUE

The tribal administrative building was dark and empty, the only sound the low hum of electricity buzzing from beneath the door of Chief Raymond Tallbear’s office. A single desk lamp glowed inside, casting a thin line of light across the carpeted hallway.

Naomi Tallbear had always loved this building at night.

Located in the center of the reservation it felt important and sacred. Like the heart of something larger than any one man.

As a child, she and her brother used to play on this very carpet while their father handled tribal business behind closed doors. They would lie on their backs and stare at the ceiling tiles, whispering about the future — about what Silver Basin would look like when they were grown and all the ways they would make things easier and better for their people.

Now she lay on that same carpet, cheek pressed into it, her head throbbing.

Something warm and wet clung to her hair. She lifted a shaking hand and felt the thick, sticky mass at the base of her skull.

Blood.

Her breath came shallow. The overhead lights blurred. She needed to move.

She had to get out.

She had to find him.

Rolling onto her side, she tried to push herself upright. The room tilted violently. The hallway seemed farther away than she remembered. The exit sign glowed faintly in the dark, impossibly distant.

“Why?” she whispered, voice breaking. “Why would you do this?”

Footsteps.

Close.

Measured.

She tried to crawl.

A hand seized her ankle.

She cried out as she was dragged backward across the carpet, her nails scraping uselessly against the fibers she had once traced as a child. The world spun as she was flipped onto her back.

A shadow fell over her.

She tried to focus on the face above her, but her vision swam — light shone behind it, the features of the man blurred, both familiar and unrecognizable all at once.

Hands closed around her throat.

She fought. She clawed. She tried to speak.

The laughter of two children echoed in her memory — hers and her brother’s — bouncing off these same walls so many years ago.

The pressure tightened.

Her lungs burned.

Her vision darkened.

The office door burst open.

“What have you done!”

Her father’s voice tore through the hallway — utterly stripped of authority, stripped of control.

For a split second, the hands at her throat loosened.

Air scraped into her lungs in a thin, useless breath. Her vision swam, the face above her nothing more than a dark shape against the light spilling from the office doorway.

She tried to focus.

Tried to understand.

Tried to make sense of how something that felt like love her whole life could feel like this.

The carpet beneath her cheek was rough. Familiar. The same place she and her brother had once sprawled out, whispering about who they would become when they grew up.

I was going to leave. I was going to leave with him.

The pressure tightened again.

The ceiling blurred into shadow. The humming of electricity stretched into a long, distant tone.

She understood then — with a clarity that felt almost gentle — that she would not make it to the door. That she would not see the desert at dawn again. That she would not find him.

And beneath the fading edge of pain, beneath the panic, one final certainty settled over her.

This wasn’t supposed to happen here. Not with us.

Darkness moved in, complete and final.