Chapter One
Girard, Kansas, late-July 1869
Sam Miller nodded to the young woman who silently placed a cup of coffee on the table and then let his gaze skim over the patrons of the small restaurant. Just the usual customers were in attendance—a few trail-worn cowboys, several of the local business owners, and one of the major rancher owners.
Coffee finally the correct sweetness and shade, Sam pulled the spoon out of the brew, set it to a side, and snapped open the weekly newspaper. A name he recognized caught his attention. Colonel Eugene Carr had won a decisive battle against the Cheyenne Dog Soldiers up near Summit Springs. Sam had ridden with the man nick-named the “black-bearded Cossack” during the War. It didn’t surprise him in the least the man emerged victorious. As he read further, not only had Carr defeated the Dog Soldiers, he’d also managed to rescue one of the two white women captives held by the natives. Maybe, he should send his former commanding officer a congratulatory note.
He flipped the page and scanned the columns. A small, boxed story caught his attention.
Growing town seeking full-time law enforcement official. Applicant must have some knowledge of the law, be above reproach, and of strong, moral character. Wages paid commensurate with experience. Prefer an applicant with previous law enforcement experience. Contact either Dr. D. Bauer or Mayor C. Denton, Redemption Bluff, Kansas.
Sam leaned back in his chair, then lifted the paper to reread the advertisement. Mayor Clay Denton. Clay had done well. He was genuinely happy for the former outlaw and for Josephine. Strangely enough, the heartache he expected when he read that last name didn’t materialize. Maybe, he was finally able to admit his heart was no longer held by one Charlotte Denton. When he left Redemption Bluff almost two years ago, he knew he had never held hers.
As he read the advertisement once more, a chuckle welled up. Clay Denton, a former outlaw, was looking for someone of strong, moral character and above reproach to uphold law and order in Redemption Bluff. His amusement faded. What if Mayor C. Denton wasn’t Clay, but Denton’s younger sister, Charlotte? Heck, he’d heard of stranger things. He heard tell of some little town deep in the Texas hill country placing advertisements for mail-order grooms.
For two more days, he was contractually bound to serve as a Pinkerton agent. He hadn’t signed on as a Pinkerton to do the things he knew some of the agents did. As with any organization that was spread out across the country without a lot of supervision, the temptation to abuse the authority that badge gave a man was too much for some.
Maybe his sister was right. Maybe it was time to stop wandering the country at Allen Pinkerton’s beck and command and set down some roots. Sam lifted his coffee cup, sipping the brew and letting his thoughts ramble. Redemption Bluff might just be the right place to stake a claim for something more permanent. With the transcontinental railroad completed, secondary lines and spurs would be sprouting up everywhere. Where the railroad lines went, money flowed with it. And, he could finally fulfill his promise and move Mary and her kids out of that rat-infested tenement flat in Brooklyn.
He set the cup down, folded the paper, and reached into his vest pocket. He dropped a dime onto the table, more than enough to cover the cost of the coffee. Sam stood, tucking the paper under his elbow, and left the restaurant.
Rain over night turned the main street into a quagmire of sucking, reddish-yellow mud. Slogging through the muck and dodging out of the way of a small herd of cattle moving down the main street reinforced his decision to leave the Pinkerton Agency. He would never be given the more comfortable investigations, not since he’d failed to bring Jordan Black to Allen Pinkerton alive. He would forever do penance for that disappointment, and no act of contrition would ever be atonement enough.
 The small bells over the door of the telegraph office jingled merrily when Sam entered. Roger Mayes, the telegraph operator, looked up from his pad of paper. “’Mornin’, Mr. Miller. No messages yet from the Agency.”
“Not expecting any, today.” Sam dropped the newspaper onto the counter. “I’m sending a message.”
Mayes adjusted his glasses, picked up his pencil and licked the nub. “To the Pinkerton Agency—”
“No.” Sam shook his head. He’d gotten lax and predictable. Become predictable, and the hunter became the hunted. Maybe, he should be thankful Pinkerton had banished him to the hinterlands. Too many agents had made his mistake of becoming complacent, and it had cost them their lives. “This one is going to Mayor C. Denton, Redemption Bluff, Kansas.”
Mayes scribbled as quickly as Sam spoke. The operator totaled up the cost and Sam dropped two bits onto the counter. “I do need one telegram sent to Pinkerton. Three words. ‘I quit. Miller.’”
Roger’s eyes widened behind his wire-rims, giving him a decidedly owlish appearance.
“I don’t need a response, either. Keep the change.”
****
Vanessa Larrison quelled her instinctive flinch when Charlotte Denton shoved away from the large, highly polished desk dominating her office space. The thick Oriental rug absorbed Charlotte’s angry strides from one side of the room to the other. Even the swishing of the rich, heavy satin fabric Charlotte wore hissed a warning. Like a rattlesnake in the seconds before striking. That mental image caused a shudder to cascade over Vanessa. She twisted her wrists in a futile effort to loosen the coarse rope binding them behind her.
“I’ve never once lied to any one of you about what you’d be doing here.” Charlotte’s snarl crossed the room.
Her throat tightened and her stomach looped. Vanessa risked a sidelong glance at Deb English, Charlotte’s most trusted and well-paid madam. No quarter there, either. Deb steadfastly refused to look anywhere other than at Charlotte’s furious form.
“I put a stop to a lot of what my step-brother did.” The tone changed, grew colder. Silhouetted in the large windows on one side of the room, bathed in sunlight, Charlotte was a black, menacing shadow. “I stopped the brandings. I put rules in place to keep the ones who liked to use their fists from buying time with any of you. I got rid of Junior’s rule that you whores only ate if you worked. I even allowed all of you to keep a percentage of what you were paid in cash, rather than in fairly useless Purgatory Points.”
Charlotte spun on her heel and crossed the room as quickly as the rattler Vanessa imagined. Charlotte grabbed the arms of the chair Vanessa was bound in, leaning in closer until her face was mere inches away. “And, how did you repay me?”
Vanessa swallowed, trying to force her tongue off the roof of her mouth. She tried to meet Charlotte’s gaze, but the towering rage from the other woman forced her to drop her sight.
“You ran away.” Charlotte’s voice dropped to a thin, knife-edge sharp whisper. “I could forgive that. What I can’t forgive is a thief.”
“My sister—”
“Is none of my concern.” Purgatory’s iron-fisted monarch leaned even closer to Vanessa. “If you were so worried about her, you should have brought her with you. I could have found a place for her.”
As a whore, like she had been forced to become? Or worse?
“I don’t want this for Cassandra.” She wasn’t even sure where she dragged up the courage to spit those words at Charlotte, but it crossed a line.
Charlotte straightened, though her narrowed, frigid gaze didn’t leave Vanessa. “Not good enough for you, I suppose, is it?”
“I…I didn’t say that.” Forcing air into her lungs past her constricted throat seemed impossible. The icy rage in Charlotte’s expression settled deep into Vanessa’s stomach, and she couldn’t suppress a deep shudder.
The impact of the back-handed slap snapped her head to a side. Another blow jerked her head to the other side. And then, Charlotte’s face was inches from hers again. Vanessa winced when Charlotte’s long nails dug into her scalp, pulling her head over the back of the chair. The muscles in her neck twinged.
“You haven’t said a lot of things, Nessie. But you will. Starting with begging to let you come back to the crib I’ve let you have.” Charlotte released her, the disdain on her face adding to the deep chill in Vanessa’s stomach.
The queen of Purgatory forced out a short, huffing breath and turned to Deb. “Is he here?”
Deb finally spoke. “Which he?”
A snort of what could have been a laugh broke from Charlotte. “I suppose I wasn’t clear. We’ll start with the telegram that came into Redemption a week ago. Is that ‘he’ in Redemption, now?”
Deb shook her head. “I haven’t heard anything yet. As soon as I know, you’ll know.”
The lines of Charlotte’s face tightened, narrowing her dark eyes further. “He’s got a set, I’ll give him that, especially after I told him to never come back here.”
Charlotte settled her gaze on Vanessa. She was dead. She was certain of that.
“And the other ‘he’?”
“In the saloon, waiting for your orders.” Deb picked at the cuticle of her thumb. “He brought some help.”
Ice freezing over a lake held more warmth than the smile creeping along Charlotte’s mouth. “Tell him to come to my office after dark. Tell him he’ll need the branding iron, too.”
****
“You’ve certainly let yourself go. It’s only been two days.”
It had been a lifetime…Vanessa pressed her forehead against her knees and curled more tightly into herself, wishing she could stop shuddering. Tears slipped out from her closed eyes, the droplets hot and scalding against her tender skin. She had promised herself she wouldn’t cry—no matter what they did. Hearing that voice shattered her oath.
Soft silk brushed against her hands and the fabric rustled. Without opening her eyes, she knew Charlotte stood over her. Long-nailed fingers seized her scalp, pulling her head back. She’d been wrong, again. Purgatory’s queen knelt on one knee in front of her. The “tut-tutting” of concern was as false as any hope Vanessa held onto of surviving.
“What do you want with me?” She had nothing left to lose. If Charlotte killed her now or left her to be slowly destroyed, it didn’t matter. Either way, she was dead, and she was free of this pain. She closed her eyes against the bright light of the lantern on the stone floor next to her.
Charlotte’s painful grip on her scalp eased. “I want you to come back to work for me, though I’m afraid the way you look right now, you’re going to have a hard time earning your next meal.”
“You…you what?” The painful splits in her lips broke open and she carefully wiped her mouth. “I’d rather die.”
“I can arrange that. Quite easily, as a matter of fact.” Charlotte let go and rose to her feet, the rustle of silks and satins so out of place in this dark prison. “I would prefer not to have to make those arrangements, Nessie.”
“You don’t care. You enjoy hurting others.” If she goaded her, maybe, just maybe, Charlotte would point that revolver she wore on her hip and shoot her. She dropped her sight to the heavy gun, willing Charlotte to draw it and end this. “I might have sold my body for money, but you sold your soul for it.”
“Is this really where you want to spend your last few hours? Forced to perform every depraved act those three can imagine until they finally kill you?” The queen of Purgatory crossed the small room and ran her hand the length of the small table. In the flickering lantern light, her dark eyes appeared as dead as a well long gone dry. “I’ve kept them on a very short leash—no broken bones, no teeth knocked out, nothing that won’t heal within a week or two. If I walk out of here, I take the leash off.”
The three of them…One of them only watched with unblinking eyes, cool and utterly detached, as if he were examining some strange insect he had impaled on a long hat pin. That had been more humiliating than anything the other two did.
“They kill me, or you do. Either way, I’m dead and free of you.”
Charlotte turned her back, as if the two mismatched plates on the small mantel held her undivided attention. Vanessa refused to break the deepening, oppressive silence. She would not beg, either for her life or for the end. Charlotte’s dramatic sigh intruded into the room.
“I really don’t want to have you killed, Vanessa.” Charlotte’s shoulders rounded before she pulled in another long breath. “You never met Jordan Black. My step-brother kept him around because he was useful, for the same reason that I keep Jarrod around. People said Jordan was as cold-blooded as they come. He was positively molten compared to his brother, Jarrod.”
She might not have met Jordan Black, but she had heard the horror stories the other girls told. The chill settling in her depths had nothing to do with the limestone slab floor leeching the warmth from her.
“Jarrod once killed a man for accidentally spilling a shot of whiskey on his new frock coat. Found him outside a saloon, beat him senseless, dragged him out on the prairie, and staked him out, exposed to the sun and the insects.” Charlotte’s hand dropped onto the small table again, brushing over the surface as if caressing it. “He then started taking that man’s hide off, one small inch at a time. Like Jordan, he prefers knives to a gun. I was told he kept that man alive for almost a week before he tied two small cages to his body and put a dozen rats in the cages. They ate him alive, through the wires.”
“Dead is dead.” Vanessa fought to keep her voice level, without shaking. “Doesn’t matter how I get there.”
“I suppose.” Charlotte continued to stroke the small table. “She’s about twelve now, isn’t she? Big, pretty blue eyes. They’re so striking with that blonde hair. She’s got a sweet smile, too.”
A whimpering moan broke from Vanessa. Charlotte described Cassandra.
“She told me she’s never slept in a deep feather bed like she has now at the V Bar D.” Charlotte tilted her head over her shoulder. “Dead is dead, though. It doesn’t matter how a body gets there.”
Fury lanced through Vanessa. She flung herself to her feet and lunged for Charlotte, only to be pulled up far short by the chain locked around her neck. “I’ll kill you if you’ve hurt her.”
Charlotte’s deep chuckle belonged to Lucifer himself. “For the moment, she’s perfectly safe. Whether she remains that way is entirely up to you.”
She promised herself she wouldn’t beg. For Cassandra, she would break that oath. She would give up her very soul for her little sister. Vanessa’s knees buckled and she crumbled. “Don’t hurt her, please. I’ll come back to the Crimson…or go to the Jaded Doll. Please, just don’t hurt her.”
Charlotte turned and leaned back against the table. She folded her hands across her lower body. “I don’t want you at either place. I have another manner that I intend to use your talents.”