Page 226 of Ironwood Ranch Cowboys

Not really.

Three hours unconscious in the office chair doesn’t qualify as rest. It qualifies as temporary system failure.

The study smells of stale coffee and overheated electronics. Six different spreadsheets glow across my monitors while external drives crowd the desk around me like paranoid little landmines.

Jake’s archive sits open on the center screen, packed with vendor chains, holding companies, and tax records.

At first glance, the shell corporations look competent enough to survive surface review. Seasonal LLC rotations. Agricultural consulting overlays. Land management subsidiaries attached to development portfolios.

Standard concealment architecture.

But there’s something wrong with the formatting.

Tiny inconsistencies.

The kind nobody notices unless they’ve spent half their life buried inside financial structures while developing unhealthy coping mechanisms and trust issues.

Which, unfortunately, I have.

I zoom into the filings again. Cross-reference the routing structures. Then the tax identifiers.

And there it is.

A pattern.

Not identical numbers. That would be amateur hour. No, this is subtler. Variants. Rotational sequencing buried beneath layered registrations. One digit displaced consistently across multiple entities.

It’s intentional. Elegant, even. And painfully familiar.

My stomach turns slowly cold. Because I know exactly who taught me that trick.

Tessa Grange once spent forty minutes explaining tax compartmentalization to me over dinner when I was sixteen.

“You never duplicate structures exactly,” she’d said while cutting steak with surgical precision. “Patterns expose intention.”

At the time I thought she was helping me learn business management.

Now I wonder what else she was teaching me without my realizing it.

The realization settles ugly beneath my ribs.

I lean back slowly in the chair, removing my glasses long enough to rub both hands over my face.

Tessa.

The office door opens softly behind me.

Annie.

I know it without turning around because my body recognizes her before my brain catches up. Camera strap against denim, vanilla coffee, the soft scuff of her boots against hardwood.

“You’ve got the serial killer posture again,” she says.

“I found something.”

That changes her voice. “What kind of something?”

I rotate the monitor toward her.