When the railroads carved their way through the wild country, Zed Li was one of the thousands who swung the hammers and laid the ties-an ex-soldier, an exile, and a man trying to forget. But peace is a hard thing to earn in the West. Now, years after he's traded the clang of iron for the hush of open skies, Zed finds himself caught between two worlds: the frontier that scorns him and the quiet homestead of a widow whose courage outshines her fear. Together, they fight to hold their small piece of land against a ruthless rancher with ambitions as wide as Texas-and against the ghosts that refuse to stay buried. When word comes of missing Chinese laborers, Zed is forced to face the past he left behind. What begins as a search for lost men becomes a reckoning with the railroad, with greed, and with the violence that built a nation on broken backs. Armed only with his bare hands, his honor, and the memory of a woman worth fighting for, Zed Li rides again-not for glory, but for grace. In a land scarred by storms and silence, he will learn that sometimes a man's truest strength is not in how he fights... but in what he refuses to surrender.