Page 5 of Branded

She writes that down too. Mott watches the pen like the ink has insulted his mother.

I call Cole Barrett. We’ve worked bad cattle and worse men together since we were nineteen, so he gets the order without the preamble. “Hold Lot 118 in the north water pens. Two men on the gates. Nobody touches a tag or a mark. Next delivery goes through west receiving.”

He asks one question about staffing. I answer it, and the barn bends around the decision. One hundred eighty-three head are scheduled through the ring before noon. Freezing everything would be easy. Keeping honest cattle and honest people moving around one poisoned lot takes work.

That’s the work my father left me. Apparently he also left me an auditor with calm gray eyes and no instinct for self-preservation.

“If you shut the whole system down,” Tessa says, speaking to me now, not Mott, “you lose what’s still in memory and you teach whoever did this exactly what I saw.”

“You think they’re still watching.”

“I know the field changed during an active session. How requires the log.”

For twelve days, men have been handing me certainty because they believe certainty is what the eldest McCall needs after a funeral. She gives me limits instead. I trust them more than I should.

“Export the session,” I tell Mott. “Native copies to our counsel and the estate attorney. The sale runs slow if it has to.”

His jaw sets. Mott has worked for my father for twenty-one years. He knows every buyer who pays late and every driver who backs badly. During the drought he started calling the barn something he and Calvin built together, and when receipts came back he asked for a piece of it. Calvin gave him a bonus instead and told him wages were payment. I filed the argument under old grievances because Mott stayed and the barn kept running.

I’m starting to see the flaw in that filing system.

“I’ll want a copy of everything you documented in my pens,” I tell Tessa.

“Your counsel can request a release under the audit terms. My originals stay with me.”

“Those photographs are of my cattle.”

“That’s one of the things we’re trying to establish.”

The office goes quiet in the particular way of employees who want to witness a bad decision without being included in it.

I hold out my hand.

She looks at it. Then at me. She isn’t intimidated by the size difference or by the fact that everyone in this building answers to me. Her pulse moves once in her throat. Her gaze doesn’t.

I want her.

It hits clean and total, and it has nothing to do with whether I believe a word she says. I want to know what her mouth does when she stops being careful. I want to see that gray gaze go unfocused. I want her in my house, where I can see her, and the violence of the want makes me colder, not warmer.

“No,” she says.

The refusal lands between us with no room for a useful misunderstanding. I lower my hand.

“You enjoy correcting me,” I say.

“I enjoy correct categories. You keep creating opportunities.”

Mott coughs into his fist to hide something that might be a laugh.

While she collects the printouts, I step into the hall and call Cole again. “I want her identity, work history, clients, lawsuits, debts, and every person who knew she was coming here.”

Half a second of silence. “She can hear you?”

“Not this call.”

“How far inside her life do you want me?”

“Far enough to know who benefits if she breaks this ranch.”