Book 1 in the Sacred Bonds series.
There are two kinds of scars on a man. The ones you can see, etched into skin by the Texas sun, and the ones you can't; the kind carved into a twelve-year-old boy watching his legacy get stolen at the barrel of a s...
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The conversation didn't so much stop as it died a sudden, quiet death the moment I crossed the threshold. I'm used to that. It's a sound I've cultivated, the silence that follows me into a room. It's more telling than any introduction.
I entered last, letting the weight of the door clicking shut behind me do the talking. Five seasoned cattlemen, faces the color of raw steak under their sweat-stained hats, were arranged around the reclaimed cypress table. They'd been loud a moment ago, I'd heard them from the hall; a chorus of bluster and anger. Now, they instinctively straightened, their calloused hands fiddling with hat brims, their eyes suddenly fascinated by the wood grain of the floor. Their world had just recentered, and the axis was me.
My foreman, Elias Valdez -- the only man in this state I'd trust with a match and a gasoline can -- cut off his own sentence without a flicker of annoyance. He just gave me a single, slow nod and sat. The floor was no longer his; it had never really been his to begin with. It was always mine.
I took the chair at the head of the table, the one that faces the wall of glass. Behind me, my kingdom stretched out under the brutal Texas sun: a thousand irrigated acres of emerald green, a stark, manufactured miracle in a land built on dust. I poured water from a crystal pitcher into a heavy tumbler. The clink-clink of the stream was a tiny melody. The final thud of the glass on the table was a full stop.
I took a slow drink, savoring the cool water as it traveled down my throat. I let my eyes travel over them with the detached focus of a surveyor assessing a tract of land. This was the part they never understood. The negotiation wasn't happening now. It had happened years ago, in the choices they'd made, the corners they'd cut. This was just the reading of the verdict.
The lead cattleman, a bull of a man named Jed, finally broke. He couldn't stand the silence. It's a vacuum men like him feel compelled to fill with noise.
"Look," he started, his voice too loud, his eyes fixed on a point somewhere in the middle of the table. He was talking AT us, not TO me. A fundamental error. "We've all been in this business a sight longer than you have, son. There used to be old ways. A man's word used to mean something around here. A handshake."
Son. The word hung in the air, cheap and pathetic. A ghost from a past that no longer existed, trying to haunt a house that had already been burned to the ground. I didn't react. I just set my glass down. The soft, definitive click of crystal on wood severed his sentence clean in half.
I still didn't look at him. I looked at Elias, my voice calm, low. It wasn't loud. It didn't have to be. "Elias."
"Boss."
"What was the moisture content in the last shipment of alfalfa we sent the Lazy J?"
Elias, without looking at a single paper, replied instantly, "Fourteen point two percent, boss. Three points higher than the contract specified. We logged it."
