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Chapter One

Bix Carpenter knew how to do two things well. Survive and make moonshine. In her experience, one was often linked to the other. And especially now that she was officially out of the family business, it was good that she had the knowledge to carry on herself.

Well. The family business itself had been dissolved when her father had been sent to prison. Her half-siblings—younger and older—were either strangers to her or didn’t want anything to do with her. Which was fair, because she didn’t want anything to do with them either.

But she still had her contacts in the liquor world, and she knew what she was doing.

It could be worse. It could be meth.

She told herself that a lot.

Though, she had to be honest and admit that one of the biggest reasons it had never been meth was that there had been a massive explosion in one of the trailers in the park back when she was fifteen or so, and any designs her father’d had on cooking the more volatile substance had gone out the window then and there.

If you were doing illegal things to survive, there wasn’t much sense doing an illegal thing that could kill you.

She could almost justify making alcohol. Her father had passed on so many opinions on the Oregon Liquor License Commission and the racket they were running that she could nearly make a case for the actions beingbenevolent.

But mostly, she didn’t care.

The truth was, life had beaten any desire to be benevolent right out of her.

She’d had a criminal record since she turned eighteen and could no longer rest on the possibility of her juvenile record being expunged. She had never really cared. No one in her family lived on the right side of the law. The law, in her estimation, was mostly designed to set up roadblocks to keep people like her down. At least that was her experience.

Her experience was the only one she cared about.

Empathy for others was hardly going to put a roof over her head.

But thankfully, this new place had. The spring in the area had come highly recommended to her by some other moonshiners who her dad had known back in the day, and they’d made alcohol here years back that they’d claimed was the best around.

She’d only just barely made it here. Her van’s starter was shot, and she needed to earn money to get her going again. She was all right if she could get a jump—sometimes. But she wasn’t going to head down to Humboldt with things going that badly, and being in a position where she was going to be dependent on the kindness of strangers.

For two reasons: She didn’t do dependence, and she didn’t believe strangers were kind.

So she’d taken the van over here, pulled it into an alcove along the highway and as deep into the woods as she could, concealed behind some trees.

Then she’d decided to set up her still.

The spring was further into the woods, and while she could sleep in her van it wasn’t convenient and it was nearer to the road than she liked.

She’d been slowly scoping the property out for the last five days. And it seemed to her that it was unusual for anybody to come to this end. She wasn’t entirely sure where things began and where they ended, but as far as she could sus out this was a massive ranching spread, with more outbuildings than she could count.

And it definitely had more outbuildings than anybody went into with regularity.

This thicker, more wooded part of the mountainside hadn’t had a single soul wander through the whole five days she’d been up here. She’d moved into the cabin, which gave her a little break from the van and got her farther off the road, with her knapsack and her supplies, and hadn’t been bothered at all.

Maybe she could settle here for a while. That would be nice.

She’d been running for so long.

Thankfully, she didn’t have any warrantspresently. Though, the one thing about prison was at least you had a place to sleep. And food.

Not that any of her stays had been extensive.

She was well acquainted with misdemeanors, but nothing that had gotten her more than a few weeks and probation. Which, in her family, was underachieving. If anything.

She was trying to decide if she was grateful that she’d been forced to quit smoking simply because she couldn’t afford the habit. Right now, she wished she had a cigarette. But that was the kind of thing that tempted her to shoplift, which was the kind of thing that often landed her in the sort of silver bracelets a girl didn’t like to wear.

She chuckled to herself and settled back in the clean corner of the cabin she currently called home.