“So what did you do?”
“At first? We tried to do everything legal. Truett and I, we worked our asses off trying to make the numbers work. We sold equipment and cut expenses everywhere we could. But it wasn’t enough. We needed cattle to sell, needed them fast, or we were going to lose everything our families had built.”
The memory of those early days still makes my jaw clench. The desperation, the fear of failing everyone who’d been left in our care. “We needed about twenty more head to make our payment to the bank. Just twenty cattle to buy us some time to figure out a real solution.”
“Where did you get them?”
“That’s when things got…complicated.” I roll onto my side to face her properly, needing to see her reaction. “We found ten head that had wandered off from their herd, looked like they’d been missing for months. Thing is, when cattle wander like that, sometimes the brands get weathered, hard to read.”
Understanding dawns in her eyes, but she doesn’t say anything yet.
“It wasn’t hard to change those brands. Make them look fresh again. Took them to market, sold them as our own.” I pause, watching her face carefully. “Made enough money to keep the bank happy for another month.”
“Jesse…”
“I know how it sounds. But it worked, Aubree. It actually worked. And when you’re drowning, when you’re watching everything your family built about to disappear, you’ll grab onto any lifeline you can find.”
She sits up, pulling the sheet around herself, and I immediately miss the warmth of her skin against mine. “So you kept doing it.”
“We kept doing it.” I sit up too, running my hands through my hair. “Started small, always from the big corporations that were buying up land left and right. Figured they wouldn’t miss a few head here and there. And they didn’t, not at first.”
The guilt that’s been eating at me for years rises in my throat. “We told ourselves we were just taking back what those companies had stolen from smaller ranchers. That we wereevening the score somehow. But the truth is, we were desperate, and it was easy money.”
“How long have you been doing this?”
“Started right after the accident.” I lean back against the headboard, suddenly feeling exhausted. “We’ve been careful, never taking too many at once, never hitting the same place twice in a row. But those big organizations, they’ve gotten wise. They’ve moved their cattle further out, hired more security. It’s not as easy as it used to be.”
She’s looking at me like she’s seeing me for the first time, and I hate it. But I also know she deserves the whole truth.
“We’ve been saving every penny. We’ve each decided to sell off portions of our land, both ours and yours, the parts that aren’t central to the ranch operations. But we need one more job to set us up for the rest of the year, give us enough cushion to make this land sale work without going under before we find buyers.”
“And that’s what you were doing last night at the Morrisons.”
“That’s what we were doing last night at the Morrisons,” I confirm. “Scouting. The Morrison Corporation bought out the old Fletcher place about six months ago, moved a decent-sized herd in there. We were seeing how many they had, what their security looked like, planning our route.”
She’s quiet for a long time, her eyes focused somewhere beyond me. I can practically hear her thinking, weighing everything I’ve told her against whatever she thought she knew about me, about us.
“You don’t have to do this,” she finally says, her voice soft but firm. “There has to be another way.”
Something hot and fierce rises in my chest at her words. Not anger, exactly, but something close to it. Something that’s been building for months as I’ve watched everything slip through our fingers despite our best efforts.
Before she can react, I reach out and wrap my hand around her throat, not squeezing, not hurting, but firm enough to make my point clear. Her eyes widen, but she doesn’t pull away.
“Listen to me,” I say, my voice low and steady. “Either we do this job, or we’ll never be able to break away from this life. We’ll be stuck in this cycle forever, always one step away from losing everything. I’m asking for you to understand, but I’m damn sure not asking for your permission.”
Her pulse is racing under my palm, but her gaze doesn’t waver from mine. There’s something in her eyes—fear, yes, but also something else. Something that looks almost like respect.
“This isn’t just about money anymore, Aubree. This is about proving that we’re not victims of circumstance. That we can take control of our own destinies instead of waiting for someone else to save us or destroy us.” My thumb strokes along her jawline, gentle despite the firmness of my grip. “Your parents and mine, they played by all the rules. They did everything they were supposed to do, and it got them nothing but debt and early graves.”
“Jesse…”
“I’m not asking you to like it. Hell, I don’t like it. But I am asking you to trust that I know what needs to be done to secure our future. To secure your future.”
The weight of responsibility sits heavily on my shoulders. Not just for my own land, my own legacy, but for hers too. She’s tied to this life, whether she admits it or not. And if I fail, if we lose everything, she loses everything too.
“This one job, and we’re out. We take our share, sell the land we need to sell, and we go legitimate. Build something real and lasting instead of just surviving day to day.”
I can see the conflict in her expression, the war between what she thinks is right and what she knows is necessary. It’s the same war I’ve been fighting with myself since all this started.
