Page 1

Chapter 1

Cash

Lot 14 decided he had objections to capitalism halfway down the alley, and I was the lucky bastard standing between twelve hundred pounds of principled resistance and a sale ring full of men with checkbooks.

“Come on, handsome.” I slapped the sorting stick against my jeans, careful not to raise my left arm too high. “Go become somebody else’s tax deduction.”

The bull planted all four feet.

Behind him, Boone shifted one step to the side.

That was it. No shouting. No stick rattling. No performance. Just six feet five inches of my brother appearing in Lot 14’s peripheral vision like the judgment of God.

The bull reconsidered his position.

He trotted forward through the gate, black hide polished, ear tag flashing yellow. Boone swung the panel shut behind him with one hand and looked at me.

“What?” I asked.

His eyes dropped to my left shoulder.

“Clean shirt,” I said. “I know. It’s upsetting for everybody.”

Boone kept looking.

I rolled the shoulder once because not rolling it would have looked like hiding something. Fire bit from the old wrecked joint down toward my elbow, hot and familiar. I gave him both dimples.

“See? Factory condition.”

“You were never factory condition.”

That was six words before ten in the morning. Sale day had him chatty.

Josie sat behind a folding table near the ring entrance, surrounded by health certificates, registration papers, transfer forms, and three pens lined up parallel to the table edge. She looked small enough to tuck into one of Boone’s coat pockets, though I’d watched her face down a prolapsed cow in a snowstorm and knew better than to confuse size with softness.

Her braid had started neat. It no longer was. Wisps of honey-brown hair had worked loose around her freckled face, and there was a faint blue smear of carbon paper along the side of her hand.

She glanced up from Lot 14’s file.

“Factory condition is a generous claim.”

I pressed a hand to my chest. “Josie Marsh. Was that mockery?”

“No.”

Boone’s mouth moved.

Not much. Half an inch, maybe, but I knew him. That was practically a public laugh.

Josie looked at him, caught it, and pink climbed into her cheeks.

There were entire conversations happening around Carrow Creek now that didn’t involve words. This was deeply inconvenient for me, a man who considered words one of nature’s finest inventions.

“Both of you are getting mean,” I said. “Love has ruined this family.”

Wyatt appeared at the end of the alley with his clean hat, sale book, and the expression of a man who had already discovered six errors in the universe and intended to address them in order.

“Lot Fourteen should have been in the ring thirty seconds ago.”