Five Devils, One Broken Heart

Annika Stanridge can put a number on anything. She grades grain for a living, one bite of a kernel and she knows what is sound and what is hollow all the way through, and she has never met a man she could not read the same way. Then she takes over the failing country elevator in Yarrow Flats and walks straight into five of them. The Inferno Demon Riders wear their patches like a dare, they blame her family for a brother who died in an ambush two years gone, and they mean to run her out of town one cold shoulder and one wrecked scale at a time.

She does not run. She grades them right back. And the more she reads these five hard men, Doc the medic with the quiet hands, Old Saint who holds the club together, Slow Reaper who never says a word he has not weighed, Boone who leads with his fists, and Wild Flint who is too young to be this angry, the more she sees that not one of them is as hollow as he wants her to believe. The grudge that is supposed to keep them apart starts to bend. Five men who were sent to break her begin, one by one, to fall.

But somebody built that grudge on purpose. Somebody paid to have a good man's name buried under a lie, and one of the five has known the truth for weeks and said nothing, and there is a woman named Iona who has waited a long time to light the match. On the day the whole town gathers for the Memorial Run, the secret comes out in the worst possible way, shaped to make it look like Annika was always second to another woman. She grades the man who lied to her hollow, and she walks, chin up and her name still her own.

Now the five of them have to do the slow, costly, unglamorous work of earning back a woman who does not grovel and does not settle. And Annika has to decide whether a thing that broke can be graded true again, or whether some cuts run all the way to the end of the piece.