Page 30 of Branded

Idon’t sleep. I don’t try.

At one in the morning I stand in the dark guest suite. The bed is still made. Her water glass is upside down in the drying rack where she left it. The room smells faintly of the soap she brought, something with no perfume in it, and I breathe it in like an idiot.

She isn’t in danger tonight. Mercer has her. Her lawyer has her. She’s behind a door whose address I don’t know and have ordered nobody to find.

That was the hardest order I’ve ever given, and nobody but Cole knows I gave it.

I spent my whole life believing that if I could see a thing, I could protect it. Cattle. Men. Fence line. My mother, after my father got bad. My brothers, till they left. You count it, you walk it, you keep it inside the wire. My father taught me that the ones you can’t see are the ones you lose.

Now the only way I don’t lose her is to not look.

I sit on the edge of the bed she never slept in and put my head in my hands.

At 5:10 I’m in the security room with the lights on and every exterior lock unchecked. The habit claws at me. I stay in the chair.

Mercer stands at the counter. A systems examiner hired by estate counsel is working remotely on a forensic image of the mirror server while Tessa’s attorney watches through the video link. My lawyer, Owen, sits beside me with an acknowledgment I’ve read twice.

I sign in on camera and kill the tag’s service line. The provider warns me it can’t be undone. I confirm.

The screen no longer shows a route under her name. It doesn’t give her back the road beside the water tank.

“Mr. McCall,” Mercer says. “Do you claim any right to keep a copy of Ms. Rowe’s working files?”

Yesterday I refused because I thought her work was safer inside my walls. Mott walked into it thirty-seven minutes after she left. I built a second door into her life and put it where the man she was investigating could reach it.

“No.”

The examiner preserves a forensic image under counsel’s lock and deletes the rest. Every live copy. Every backup. The credential package goes too.

Owen watches me delete Cole’s background report from my phone. Cole destroys his copy and notes while we stay on the call. Owen records the destruction in the acknowledgment, alongside what I did.

Then I sign the acknowledgment. Four pages. It says I tracked her without consent, copied her work without permission, had her background run on the first morning, and left the copy where Mott could open it. It says Barbed Crown pays for the damage without asking her for silence, a release, or anything else.

“You understand this is an admission,” Owen says.

“It was an admission yesterday. Today it has signatures.”

At 8:15, Cole brings me the sale-office camera footage. Mott at his private terminal, thirty-five minutes after Tessa’s truck cleared the gate, for eleven minutes. Seven minutes after he opened her folders, his account marked the two remaining suspect consignors for closure. Reason: owner request. No owner communication attached.

He learned which accounts she was chasing because I put her work where he could read it. Then he started burning the trail.

I add that to the acknowledgment before I sign the final copy. Owen doesn’t suggest softer language again.

Mott is at the scale alley when I cross the yard. A receiving hand has crammed nine yearlings into a lane built for six. The last one backs into the crowd behind her, eyes rolling white, and the kid reaches for the hot shot hanging by the gate.

“Put it down,” I say.

He drops his hand. I send three head back through the sort gate and give the rest room to face forward, and I wait until their feet settle before I close the alley. It takes twenty seconds longer. Nobody gets hurt. Nothing bends.

Mott meets me beside the scale. “You froze my account.”

“Your remote access is suspended. Your office terminal is off the network.”

“Because an admin service indexed a folder nobody told me was restricted?”

“Your login opened three directories from your private terminal and then cleared the history.”

“The sale software runs scheduled tasks under my credentials. Calvin set it up that way.”