Page 10 of Iron and Ivory

"I'm okay with it, I guess." He sets the hat back on his head, squares the brim. "But Marcus…" He blows out a slow breath, shakin' his head like the name itself costs him somethin' to say.

"He what, Cash? What did he do?"

"He's got a team of lawyers on us."

"For what?" I say, and the sneer that comes with it is not my most elegant moment, but I can't help it, and I don't try.

Cash lets out a breath. "The engagement. It was arranged, Savannah. There was a deal. Mother did it. Years ago."

I laugh.

I actually laugh—a real one, short and sharp and a little bit ugly. Because of course there was a deal. Of course I was a line item. Of course Eleanor, who turned my entire childhood into a content strategy, would also go ahead and sell me before she died, tying the bow on her legacy with my future like it was hers to give away. Of course she did.

"What does he want?"

"Besides you?" Cash says it flat, no softening, the way he delivers every piece of news that's gonna leave a mark. "Money. The ranch. Even the fuckin' photographs."

I sit up on the couch and swing my legs over the side, and for a moment I just look at him, because I need a second to let the full shape of that settle.

The money I understand.

The ranch I expected.

But the photographs—my God, Eleanor, the photographs—that is the detail that tells me exactly what kind of man Marcus White Junior really is. You don't reach for a dead woman's archive unless you know what's in it. Unless someone told you it was worth reaching for.

"That's ridiculous," I say, and my voice is very calm, which means I am not calm at all. "It's all in a trust. Untouchable."

Cash looks at me the way he looked at me when I was twelve and convinced myself the frozen pond would hold. Patient. Certain. Already grieving what's about to happen.

"Not true." He says it quietly, which is worse than if he'd shouted it. "It is touchable. If you don't marry, Savannah. Marry respectable. Then the trust breaks and the ranch gets sold."

The breath that comes out of me is nothin' but a huff—small and reflexive, like the air just got knocked loose from somewhere behind my ribs.

Because this is Eleanor's architecture, down to the last beam. She didn't just build an empire while she was alive—she built a trap and set it to spring after she was gone, and I am standin' right in the middle of it in my good boots, and she is not here for me to ask why, or scream at, or forgive.

She is gone.

She is photographs and a will written in ink that didn't give a single damn about what I wanted.

She's haunting me from the grave.

And the infuriating, devastating thing about Eleanor Ashby is that… even her haunting is elegant.

CHAPTER 3

I jolt awake, sunshine streamin' over my face through a crack in the blind, and for one long, stupid second I don't know where I am, or what I owe, or who's comin' for me, and it's the closest thing to bliss I got left.

Then it all comes back.

Not slow—all of it at once.

The whole fuckin' weight of it, droppin' down on my chest like a brandin' iron blazin' red hot.

I sit up slow, every muscle in my back protestin', and I look around at what's supposed to be a goddamn perimeter.

A dozen men. All of 'em slumped against walls or stretched out flat, rifles cradled to their chests like they're holdin' babies, every last one of 'em caked in that red Badlands dirt that gets into everything—your skin, your teeth, the creases of your knuckles.

It don't wash out. Nothin' about this place washes out.