Page 204 of Ironwood Ranch Cowboys

Unavoidable.

Annie’s lips part. “Silas…”

“I don’t care what it costs me,” I admit roughly. “I don’t care what line I cross. If somebody threatens you again…”

Her hand closes suddenly around my wrist. The contact stops the rest of the sentence in my throat. I look down at her fingers wrapped around me. Then back up at her face.

“You don’t always have to carry everything alone,” she whispers.

The words hit somewhere dangerously deep. Because carrying things alone is the only way I’ve survived this long.

I lift my hand slowly, brushing one loose strand of blue hair back behind her ear. My fingers remain against her jaw longer than necessary.

Annie leans into the touch instinctively. That tiny movement nearly destroys me.

I kiss her.

Annie makes this soft sound against my mouth that nearly snaps the last thread of control I have left. And I realize I’m falling deeper than I ever thought I could.

CHAPTER THIRTY-NINE

Annie

The fake payment moves at 9:14 a.m.

I know the exact time because Cody’s system clocks everything down to the second, and because the moment it happens, the atmosphere in the office changes so violently it feels like the air pressure drops.

Cody goes still.

His eyes lock onto the monitor in front of him, shoulders tightening beneath his dark henley as lines of system activity begin populating across the screen.

And beside him my own pulse starts hammering hard enough to make my fingertips cold.

“Oh shit,” I whisper.

The bait worked.

Someone took it.

The fake vendor payment, buried beneath livestock maintenance transfers and deferred operational costs, suddenly reroutes in real time across the system like a flare going off in the dark.

Approved. Moved. Redirected.

Whoever’s been bleeding Ironwood dry just exposed themselves.

Cody’s fingers fly across the keyboard beside me, as he opens tracking windows and access logs simultaneously.

“Timestamp locked,” he says. “Routing path confirmed.”

I pull up the secondary vendor sequence, cross-referencing the reroute behavior against the previous shell company patterns we already flagged.

And there it is.

The same laundering structure. The same staggered redistribution timing. The same disguised operational layering designed to make theft look like normal ranch movement.

My stomach twists. Because this isn’t theory anymore. This is real.

“Jeez,” I murmur. “They actually did it.”