Salvatore Capone stood on the ridge and counted what the badlands owed him. Below, his stronghold rose from the pale dirt, half-built and waiting for the supplies that never arrived. He had ruled these trails for years. He would not lose his monument to a pack of scavengers picking off his wagons. The wreck of his last run still smoked in the flats. A coach lay tipped on its side, frame blackened, wheels warped by fire. Crates gone. Drivers gone. Salvatore walked the perimeter once and said nothing. A carved marker leaned nearby, his symbol burned into the wood — a sign that should have meant safe passage. They had spat on it. He rode back to the squat checkpoint bunker where the next run waited. Sand-packed walls. Narrow slots. A heavy metal gate. Tony Gambino was already inside, leaning against the wall, arms crossed. "They'll hit the next wagon too," Tony said. "That's not a guess. That's just the truth." Salvatore set his palms flat on the table. "Then we don't send a wagon. We send bait. Load the coach with rocks and three of my best under the canvas. Drive it slow past the burned one. When they come down off the rise, we close the trail behind them." He looked up. "You ride point." The gang took the bait at dusk. Salvatore's men rose from under the tarp and cut them down in the wash. Two ran. Tony brought them back across his saddle by morning. Salvatore had their heads set on posts along the trail, beside a fresh-carved marker. The trails were his again. But standing in the bunker afterward, watching Tony wipe blood from his hands without a word, Salvatore felt a new weight settle. He had just handed a stranger the keys to his roads — and the man hadn't asked for anything yet.

By dawn, Salvatore knew the heads on the posts had drawn more than flies. A rider came in hard from the south ridge and said the dead men had kin, and the kin were walking the trail in twos and threes, checking every print. Salvatore stood over his half-built walls and felt the soft ground shift under his boot. He had hours, not days. He set every man he had to work above the foundation pit. They stacked a squat stone watchtower against the rise, rough courses, slit windows, a single low door. It would not be pretty. It would shoot. Down the only trail wide enough for a horse, Salvatore had them dig. A long jagged cut in the dirt, lined with sharpened stakes, deep enough to swallow a man and his animal both. Past it, where the path bent blind, he planted a lashed wall of bone-tipped posts across the throat of the pass. Anyone walking up would see the white tips first and read the message clean. They came at dusk, the way he guessed they would. The lead pair hit the staked cut before they saw it. A horse screamed and went down. The rest pulled up at the bone wall and stood there, arguing in low voices about whether to climb it or turn. Salvatore's rifles answered from the slit windows of the new tower. Three fell on the stakes. The others ran. He walked the trail himself after, counting bodies, kicking dirt over the blood. The trap had held. The trail was shut. But when he climbed back to the stronghold, a man was waiting at his table who should not have gotten past any of it. A tan coat. A badge on the belt. A folded letter set neatly under one hand. "Agent Peter Burke," the man said, flat. "I walked in from the north. No one saw me. That should worry you more than the bodies." He tapped the letter. "I wrote this before I came. In case I didn't leave. You should read it. Then we should talk about who in my bureau already knows your ground won't hold."