Angelina’s face burned, but she did not lower her eyes. She whispered to her children, words of reassurance no one else could hear.
Virgil shouted for the auctioneer to press harder. Netti’s laugh cut sharp as glass.
Then heavy boots struck the dirt with deliberate weight.
A man stepped forward from the edge of the gathering.
Jonas Hail was thirty-four, a rancher whose land lay beyond Willow Creek at the base of the foothills. Nearly a decade earlier, he had buried both wife and newborn child. Since then, he had lived alone. People described him as steady but distant—a man who wore solitude like armor.
His gaze did not linger on spectacle. It moved instead to Eli’s strained arms, to Sam’s fury, to the way Angelina refused to bow.
Something tightened in his jaw.
He raised his hand.
