Silver on the Road (The Devil's West Book 1) Read Online Free PDF Page A

fight; the boss said he hadn’t been born so much as forged out of iron and stone, and there were some who claimed that wasn’t a joke.
    But when she looked down at the tray, a stick of sugar candy was tucked between the glassware, tied with a scrap of pink ribbon. Birthdays weren’t generally fussed over, but that Iktan had remembered this one, specifically, made Izzy’s eyes itch. She blinked back the tears, and slipped the candy into her pocket for later.
    Time slipped by, drinks to be served, reports to pass along to the boss. The gaming tables were all full and the noise level had risenconsiderably when Peggy, Molly, and William finally came down, dressed in their working best, to join the others already on the floor.
    “Eat something,” Will said as he passed her then, his stern tone at odds with his boyish face and the welcoming smile he cast at a customer. “You look like half a shadow.”
    Part of her rebelled at being scolded like a child, but that thought triggered the realization that their arrival meant it was past eight o’clock. Her breath caught; how could she have missed that?
    Izzy looked around the room, catching a nod from the boss. Released, she ignored the supper waiting for her and fled up the stairs to her room, closing the door carefully behind her.
    She had lived in this room for nearly four years, since she earned a space of her own rather than a cot in the room the younger girls shared. It was small, but there was a window that looked out over the front porch, directly into the top floor of the mercantile across the street, a narrow bed that squeaked when she turned at night, a chestnut dresser and a washbasin that had come all the way from the East, its bowl painted with green vines and tiny yellow flowers, and a wood-framed mirror set against the wall. She lit the oil lamp by her bed and stood in front of the mirror now. The last tracings of sunlight were gone, the oil lamp casting more shadows than light.
    Sundown had come. She was free.
    Izzy took a deep breath, watching the dim shape in the mirror do the same. She looked the same as she ever had: dark hair and eyes, the ruddy tones of her skin washed pale by shadows. Her teeth were good, and Molly had said once that her eyes were her best feature, round and wide-set. But she was nothing remarkable.
    Yet the stranger had seen something in her. Handsome. Strong.
    “A young girl with wits and looks could do well beyond Flood.”
    Izzy made a face at her reflection. The cardsharp man—no, Gabriel his name had been, Gabriel Kasun—had thought she was unhappy here, that she wanted something more. She wasn’t . . . and she did. All the thinking she’d been doing, all the sorting and watching, andthe threads of her thoughts had finally come clean and smooth, without her even noticing.
    You trained me well.
    The boss had taken her in, barely walking, and indentured her, the work of her hands and back at his command. Clothed her, fed her, trained her, to be . . . what? What did she want?
    “Your cards, your call. All I can do is wait and see how they’re played.”
    One thing she knew like her own breath: it was the devil’s game, life in the Territory, but he ran it honest. Mister Kasun had the right of that. The boss would wait to see what she chose; for the first time in her life, the decision was solely her own. She could do whatever she wanted.
    Mister Kasun would ride out tomorrow morning. She could be there. And maybe, in the greater Territory or beyond, she would find what suited her.
    Or she could stay. And be what?
    Not a saloon girl, nor a shopgirl. She had considered both, off and again, and rejected them. She didn’t like the kitchen; she wasn’t much for the stables, nor being a shopkeep girl. She wanted more.
    Riding with a mentor gave her options she hadn’t considered, hadn’t even thought to consider. Riders—“road vagrants,” Marie called them, not always kindly—had freedom, could go wherever they