Page 137 of Ironwood Ranch Cowboys

That’s the plan.

I get to the office early, because apparently self-preservation now looks like beating everyone else to the data before the day starts generating fresh ways to ruin me.

The ranch is still peaceful when I slip into the chair at my desk, coffee in hand, camera bag looped around the chair leg out of habit and paranoia.

Probably both.

The screen glows to life, giving me something to focus my attention on.

Yesterday’s damage is still sitting in me in layers, the conversation with Duke by the creek, the lock, the weird horror of seeing proof that someone has been physically trying to get into spaces they shouldn’t, and underneath all of that, the ugly pulse of Vivian’s voice from dinner, smooth and poisonous as ever.

But I have to focus.

I have to work.

I open the financial files and start where I left off. At the property expenditures.

That category has been irritating me for a while now, but not in a clear enough way to explain. More like a splinter under the skin of the data. A pressure point I keep circling without being able to name why.

So I do what Cody does.

I stop trying to make the numbers confess all at once and start making them line up with reality.

Dates, approvals, development bids, land use proposals, property assessments, infrastructure estimates, anything that touches Ironwood’s long-term planning instead of just day-to-day operations.

At first it looks like exactly what it should look like: a wealthy ranch with growth pressure. Maintenance expansion. Potential land development options. Bids for road work, utility planning, irrigation upgrades, neighboring parcels under discussion.

The kind of paperwork operations this size drag around like an expensive, deeply annoying second skin.

Then I isolate the missing funds against those periods. And my whole body goes still.

No.

I sit up straighter and run it again.

The spikes in embezzlement don’t just align with busy operational periods, they align with property pressure, development talk, acquisition conversations, renewal windows where Ironwood would be making decisions about expansion, contracts, and long-term leverage.

My pulse kicks harder.

Because that changes everything.

I start cross-checking faster, my coffee forgotten beside the keyboard, fingers flying over keys while my brain tries to keep up with the shape forming underneath it all.

When the ranch is stable, the bleed stays controlled. When the ranch faces larger financial decisions, the bleed increases, enough to strain liquidity, to complicate choices, to make certain options suddenly feel necessary.

My stomach drops.

“This isn’t theft,” I whisper.

That’s not the point, anyway. The point is pressure, leverage. Whoever is doing this isn’t just stealing because they can. Someone’s trying to make Ironwood vulnerable. Maybe enough to make it negotiable. A sale, a land deal, a takeover. Some kind of forced dependency wrapped in paperwork and urgency.

I stare at the screen, feeling that sick, cold kind of adrenaline spread through me. The kind that doesn’t feel dramatic or cinematic or useful. Just painful. Thin. Horribly clear.

Because if that’s true, then the money trail isn’t the whole crime.

It’s the setup, the weakening, the background infection that makes the next step possible.

And if the next step was going to be bigger, if someone expected Ironwood to crack at the right moment, then whatever’s been happening around me?