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Madeline Baker/Amanda Ashley

Prologue

Apache Reservation
Fort Sill, Oklahoma
March, 1895


Chase the Wind had always known he was a half-breed. As a young boy, he hadn't understood what that really meant. Half-breed. Part Apache. Part White. What he had understood was that his mother had left him, that she had chosen to go off with a white man rather than stay at the rancheria with him and his father.

As he grew older and more proud, he told himself it didn't matter. His white blood didn't matter. His heart and soul were Apache. He was Apache. A proven warrior, with a warrior's name. He had fought alongside Mangus and Geronimo, fighting against the armies of Crook and Gatewood during the Apaches last desperate bid for freedom.

A long sigh escaped Chase's lips. There was no point in dwelling on the past. The Apaches would never fight again, and he was a man alone. And yet, on nights like this, when the earth was quiet and the sky was clear and sprinkled with stars, he was haunted by the ghosts of his past, tormented by thoughts of the mother who had deserted him when he was no more than an infant. He knew little about her. His father had called her Golden Dove, but, after considerable prodding, Kayitah had revealed that her white name had been Jenny. She'd had pale hair and bright green eyes, Kayitah had said, adding that the last time he had seen her had been near a small town called Twin Rivers. Was she still alive? Did she ever regret giving him away? Had she married the man she had run off with? Had other children?

Questions without answer. A hurt that refused to be ignored no matter how often, or how deep, he tried to bury the pain beneath layers of indifference and disinterest.

Why had she left him, he wondered bleakly. Had she been so ashamed of having an Indian baby that she had refused to accept him, refused to claim him as her own?

When he'd been a child, he had often asked his father about the white woman who had given him birth, but Kayitah, like Alope, had refused to speak of the past. And now they were both gone. His father had been dead these past eight years; Alope, the only mother he had ever known, had died three days ago.

Shivering from the cold, he stared up at the heavens, wondering if he would ever see the land of his birth again, if he would ever find the answers to the questions that had plagued him all his life.

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