This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is coincidental.

Copyright © 2020 by Rebecca Yarros. All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce, distribute, or transmit in any form or by any means. For information regarding subsidiary rights, please contact the Publisher.

Excerpt(s) from EAST OF EDEN by John Steinbeck, copyright © 1952 by John Steinbeck; copyright renewed © 1980 by Elaine Steinbeck, Thom Steinbeck, and John Steinbeck IV. Used by permission of Viking Books, an imprint of Penguin Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House LLC. All rights reserved.

Entangled Publishing, LLC

10940 S Parker Rd

Suite 327

Parker, CO 80134

[email protected]

Amara is an imprint of Entangled Publishing, LLC.

Edited by Liz Pelletier

Cover design by Bree Archer

Cover images by Anatoli Styf/Shutterstock

Anthony Berenyi/ Shutterstock

Michael Lane/Gettyimages

Interior images by DeCe_X/Gettyimages

ISBN 978-1-64063-817-4

Manufactured in the United States of America

First Edition February 2020

Dedication

To my father, whose hands never let me fall.

I love you, Daddy.

Chapter One

Chapter One

Camden

My lungs burned as I drew a deep breath, seeking oxygen that wasn’t there, and my fingers itched to hold the cigarette I’d thrown away six years ago. Altitude did that to me every time—at least the breathing part.

The craving for a smoke? That was courtesy of Alba, Colorado, population 649. Or so the sign I’d passed about a mile back proclaimed. Then again, I wasn’t about to trust a sign that hadn’t been updated since before I’d been born—which was par for the course in my hometown.

Nothing about it had changed since I’d left, which was pretty much the point of the whole town. Just past the paved roads, Alba was the best-preserved ghost town in Colorado, and the tourists who flooded her streets in the summer kept the tiny town alive all winter long.

The total on the gas pump climbed as I stretched my hands toward the late-afternoon sun and the snowcapped peaks above me, willing life back into muscles I’d kept cramped for far too long during the drive from North Carolina. The bite in the March breeze cut through my exhaustion, and I welcomed its icy fingers on my exposed skin. It definitely wasn’t T-shirt weather up here at ten thousand feet.

A gasp caught my attention, and I turned toward the minivan that had pulled up behind my Jeep a minute ago. A blonde wearing sunglasses too big for her face and a puffy winter coat gawked with one foot on the concrete and one inside her vehicle, as if someone had pushed pause during her exit.

I lowered my arms, and my shirt slid back into place, covering the inked strip of stomach she’d no doubt gotten an eyeful of.