Page 43 of Bones and Ashes

It's in the land itself, forty-seven thousand acres of leverage that just sits there appreciating while the rest of Drybone dries up and blows away.

The money was here before the cattle, and it'll be here long after the last head ships out.

But it is a real working ranch. That part isn't performance. We do sell cattle for meat. Not because we need the revenue, just because… that's what a ranch does. That's what this land demands. You don't sit on forty-seven thousand acres and pretend it's a museum. You work it, or it works you, and either way the earth gets what it wants.

We even have our own little private-label branding now, thanks to a wild idea Colt pitched a few years back. I'll give him that one. The branding was smart. Designer beef with the Ashby name stamped on it like a promise, sold at five times the market rate to people who care more about the story on the packaging than the steak on their plate.

Eleanor would've loved it, actually.

Turning product into mythology. That was always her gift.

The whole operation would collapse if Cash wasn't here.

We have hands. Good ones, too. Men who've been workin' this land since before I could sit a horse, and they could take over most of the day-to-day animal work if they had to.

The feeding and the moving and the checking and the mending.

But not the business.

Not the contracts with the steakhouses in Bozeman and Billings.

Not the negotiation with the water board when somebody downstream starts askin' questions about our senior rights.

Not the quiet phone calls with the lawyers who keep the shell corporations breathing.

Cash does all of that with his Stetson on, and his boots planted, and his jaw set like he was born knowin' the difference between a handshake and a threat, and maybe he was. Maybe that's what being the eldest son of Eleanor Ashby does to a person—turns you into a diplomat who could break your arm if the diplomacy fails.

And once again, just like earlier, I have this sick feeling settlin' low in my stomach. This creeping, awful recognition that I wasted my childhood focusing on things that have nothing to do with this land.

Nothing to do with the operations, or the water board, or the calving schedules, or any of the machinery that actually keeps this empire turning.

And it bothers me.

It bothers me more than I want it to.

Which is the worst part. The wanting it not to matter and the mattering anyway.

These two things sit side by side in my chest like two horses pullin' in opposite directions.

I stand up from the vanity, adjust my hair, and then my dress.

I stare at myself.

Who are you?

I'm not sure.

But it's time to find out.

CHAPTER 10

After being kicked out of Savannah's bedroom so she can get ready for dinner, I go downstairs and use the study bathroom to clean up a little. It's not a big deal to eat dinner at the Ashbys. I did it every night for months.

But that was under special circumstances.

I was recovering from the brand infection.

Hell, I was on my way back from death.