Page 182 of Ironwood Ranch Cowboys

There are tracks in the dirt near the fencing. Deep enough to see despite the churned mud from the horses.

Too large to mean anything useful. Too messy now to identify.

My pulse kicks harder.

Silas straightens slowly. “Get inside,” he says without looking at me.

“No.”

“Annie.”

“This isn’t random.”

His jaw tightens. “I know. I’m worried for you.”

“No,” I snap, frustration slicing through my fear. “I mean, this specifically isn’t random. Somebody wanted disruption. Panic. A mess big enough to pull attention away from something else.”

Cody walks up behind us just as the words leave my mouth. “What are you thinking?”

My brain starts moving before I can stop it. “Vendor entries.”

Silas frowns. “What?”

“The gate happened before shift rotation. Everybody’s distracted now. Nobody’s watching admin systems this early.” I look between them. “If somebody needed access to move something through the books quietly, this would be a good time to do it.”

Cody’s expression changes. “You think this was coordinated.”

“I think,” I say carefully, “that whoever’s doing this understands how Ironwood functions.”

Silence again.

Cody looks toward the house. “Office. Now.”

The admin building is eerily silent compared to the drama outside.

The fluorescent lights hum overhead while my fingers fly across the keyboard hard enough to ache.

Coffee sits untouched beside me, which might be the clearest sign yet that the apocalypse is coming.

Cody stands behind my chair, close enough that I can feel heat radiating off him. Silas paces near the window like a storm trapped in human skin.

Duke leans against the desk beside me, arms folded tight across his chest.

Nobody talks much.

I pull up vendor approvals first. Then entry logs. Then timestamps.

My stomach sinks lower with every screen.

“There,” I whisper.

Cody leans closer. A vendor approval request, submitted early this morning, approved through Jake’s admin credentials, but the company name is different this time.

Not Hollow Creek Consulting.

Not one of the names we already flagged.

This one reads: Northline Agricultural Solutions.