Page 46 of Branded

“Drake.”

The word lands loud enough that the men outside the feed store look up. Loud enough that a woman coming out of the post office stops with her hand still on the door.

I stop walking.

Beside me, Lennox goes still. “Sebastian, who is that?” she whispers as I turn around.

Thomas Marshall is crossing the street toward us, and he is not interested in being subtle about it. He’s a big man, my father’s age, the kind of man who was raised to take up space and has never once been given a reason to stop. He’s got two of his ranch hands with him, hanging back a half step.

His face is red. “You’ve got some nerve,” he says, “showing your face in this town.”

I keep my voice even. “Thomas.”

“Don’t.” He stops six feet from me, and I am aware of the street, the distance, the angle of his hands—not reaching for anything, just fists at his sides, looking for somewhere to go. “You know what you did. You know exactly what you did and yet here you are standing here on this street like it’s nothing.”

“This isn’t the place.”

“The hell it isn’t.” His voice goes up an octave, and I hear a door open somewhere behind me. “That land has been promised to my family for forty years. Forty years.” He stops. Works his jaw. “You went around me. You went to the county, you found some surveyor from Austin who’d never set foot in this county in his life, and you took it.”

“I made an offer that was better than yours, there’s nothing more than that,” I say. “That’s business, Thomas, nothing else.”

“It’s stealing.” The word comes out like he’s been holding it in his teeth for months.

What I am aware of, more than anything Thomas Marshall is saying, is Lennox standing to my left. How close his men are to her. The fact that she’s beside me, in the open, I don’t like it.

I angle my body slightly, just enough to protect her if I need to. But Thomas notices.

His eyes go to Lennox for the first time, and I watch him register her, assessing relationship and relevance. His eyes cut back to mine.

“This your wife?” he says.

“Yes.”

Lennox doesn’t say anything. I can feel her looking at the side of my face.

“Heard you’d gotten married.” Thomas’s voice shifts. Not softer—something else. Calculating, under the anger. “Didn’t take you for the type.”

“People surprise you.”

“They do.” He looks at her again, longer this time, and something moves behind his eyes that I don’t like. “From Montana, right? Heard that too.”

“Thomas.” My voice is still even. I am very good at even. “Whatever you have to say to me, you say it to me.”

His eyes come back.

“I’m going to get that land back.” He holds my eye. Then he looks at Lennox one more time, deliberate and slow, and something in my chest does something I’ve never once felt in my adult life. I want him to stop looking at her. Now.

Thomas turns and walks back across the street. His men follow. A truck door slams. An engine turns over. And then he’s gone and the street is quiet again and the men outside the feed store look away and the woman from the post office finishes her walk to her car, and Madera goes back to its Thursday like nothing happened.

Lennox is quiet for a moment. Then she says, “How long has that been going on?”

“Almost a year, give or take a few days.”

“And the land?”

“Is mine.”

She looks up the street where Thomas’s truck was. “He doesn’t think so,” she says. I look at her.