Chapter 21
ROWAN
Iwoke to a silence that didn’t feel like morning.
The ranch was usually quiet at dawn, sure, but it was a living quiet. Horses shifting, wind nudging the barn doors, the kettle clicking as it cools on the stove. This silence felt emptied out. Like something had been removed.
I knew before I even sat up that Tex was gone.
When I went downstairs his jacket wasn’t on the chair.
His boots weren’t kicked off by the door.
The coffee pot was cold. And outside, instead of his bike, a different one sat in the dirt, black, unfamiliar, and definitely not his.
A man I didn’t recognize leaned against the porch rail, arms crossed, scanning the horizon like he expected trouble to come riding in at any moment.
One of the Kings of Anarchy, but definitely not Tex.
The two prospects were still around too, hovering near the barn like they’d been told not to let me out of their sight.
He hadn’t even said goodbye to me.
A stupid, sharp sting hit me right in the chest and I pressed my palm there, trying to smooth it out. Wondering why it hurt so much.
There’s no future for us.
That’s what he’d said and I’d hated him for saying it last night, yet now I got it. Now I understood and agreed with him.
No, there was no future for us.
We were from two different worlds, and our worlds should never have collided like they had.
I let out a slow breath and nodded like he was there and I was telling him it was okay.
It was better this way. I told myself that twice, then again when it didn’t stick.
He had a club to help run. A life that didn’t include babysitting a ranch girl with a dead family and a pile of unanswered questions.
Still, he could’ve said goodbye at least.
I pushed the thought away before it could grow claws and get ahold of me.
The house felt heavier than usual, like the walls were holding their breath and waiting for something to happen. I made myself coffee and some toast so that I could take my meds, and I was glad when the pain relief kicked in, turning the sharp pain in my arm to a dull ache.
I headed to the front of the house and opened the door, and the man that was standing there turned around slowly like he had all the time in the world and no cares.
He was taller than Tex, his head shaved and showing off tattoos along his skull.
A nose ring sat through his septum so large that I wondered briefly if it had been taken off one of my bulls.
“Coffee?” I asked.
He shook his head but said nothing, just continued to stare at me silently. Blue sapphire eyes that were clearer than any ocean I had ever seen.
“Beer?” I asked, reluctantly.
He waited a breath, the silence echoing, and then he nodded. “I could take a beer.”
I kept my judgement at bay and headed back to the kitchen. I grabbed one of Tex’s bottles from the refrigerator, but after five minutes of trying to pop the lid off with one hand and not drop the bottle I gave up and headed back outside. I held out the bottle to him and he took it.
“I couldn’t get the lid—” I began but he cut me off by popping off the lid with his teeth and taking a long drink. “Never mind.”
He stared at me, his forehead clear of worry and his blue eyes looking like they held the answers to the universe.
“I’m Rowan,” I said.
“I know,” he replied.
I waited to see if he would tell me his name, but when he didn’t I groaned and rolled my eyes.
“And you are?”
“Busy,” he replied, calmly.
“Busy as in your name is Busy or busy as in you’re busy?”
It felt like both a stupid question and a sensible one to ask, because all the bikers in the Kings had nicknames. Some made sense right off the bat, while others were a little more ludicrous, at least to me.
“As in, I’m busy and my name isn’t relevant to the situation.” He took another long mouthful of beer.
“And what is the situation?” I asked.
“Keeping you alive.”
I snapped my jaw closed and narrowed my eyes. I wasn’t sure what I expected, but his answer was not it.
“I might need some help later.”
“With?”
“My animals. They need cleaning out and feed—”
“Already done.”
I raised an eyebrow and he sighed. It wasn’t just a small sigh either. It was a sigh like I was the most irritating woman he had ever come across and he wanted to squash me like a bug under his heel.
He jutted his head toward the two men over by their bikes. “Got the prospects cleaning out the shit this morning. I fed ‘em and exercised ‘em.”
“Well, not just anyone can—”
“I can. Used to keep horses back in the day. I know what I’m doing.”
“Fine,” I bit out. “Well—”
I wasn’t sure what to say next, but I really did not like this man. Not one bit.
He was rude, mean, and made me feel like I was inconveniencing him even though he was on my property and I hadn’t asked him for a damned thing.
I had a good mind to tell him so. I wasn’t afraid of him, despite how huge he was.
And he really was huge. Maybe the biggest man I had ever seen.
But there was something in his eyes that made me not want to annoy him.
His eyes were pretty, but they were dead inside.
A coldness seeping out like he wouldn’t bat an eyelash at snapping my neck.
I decided to change the conversation.
“Where did Tex go?” I finally built up the courage to ask the real question I wanted answered. Screw this guy. I didn’t actually care about his name anyway; I was just being polite. Though Lord knows why.
The man waited a beat before replying.
“Don’t worry yourself about it, darlin’.” He held out the empty bottle to me and I took it, feeling even more frustrated. He turned around, effectively dismissing me.
“I wasn’t worrying,” I mumbled, heading back inside.
I walked through the house, unsure of what to do with my time. Any other day, there would be a million and one things to do—animals to clean out and feed, some training to do—but today it had all been done. Besides, even if I wanted to, I wouldn’t have been able to ride; not with my arm in a sling.
Instead, I went into my father’s office and looked around.
I had been putting off clearing out this room for long enough, but since I was effectively put on desk duty, now seemed as good a time as any.
I needed answers more than I needed comfort.
Now I had to think of a way to help myself, and the only way I could do that would be by trying to follow the paper trail my parents had left behind, because there had to be a paper trail for what they had been doing all those years.
Grabbing a roll of sacks from the kitchen, I opened one up and began going through the piles of neatly organized paperwork, sorting it into trash or keep.
My dad, God bless him, had been an organized man.
Too organized, looking at the stacks of paid electricity bills going back fifteen years.
He’d even kept old newspapers and magazines in a filing system, keeping everything in date order and neatly stacked inside the metal cabinet in the corner.
At the top of the cabinet, cardboard boxes lined the top shelf, and I began pulling them down and checking through them.
Behind them was an old metal lockbox and I pulled it down.
Of course it was locked, but I already knew where the key was and I ran from the room to the set of keys that I’d hung by the back door.
After my parents had died, I’d been bestowed this ranch, this house, and a whole heap of keys that I had no idea what they were for.
As the months had gone on, I’d figured them out, one by one, until all that remained was one singular key hanging from my truck’s keyring.
Unlocking the lockbox, I peered inside, looking at more receipts, tax returns, and a couple of envelopes of unpaid bills.
I frowned, knowing how unusual it was for my parents to have not paid a bill. It was a trait they had instilled in me since I was a kid—Pay your dues in money or time, never owe anyone anything or they’ll have you for life.
And then, right at the back, there was a thick brown envelope with my father’s handwriting on it that said, “for Rowan. For emergencies only.”
My stomach tightened as I opened the envelope and stared down at a bank statement.
My parents had never been wealthy. They’d lived simply, worked hard, saved where they could, and I’d thought they’d paid everything they owed.
Or that’s what I had always believed until this past week.
But this account, there were deposits going into it, large and regular.
And the amounts didn’t match anything I knew from their income.
In fact, other than their names on it, I didn’t recognize anything about the account. I had supposedly been given everything after my parents’ joint funeral, but it would seem not.
I swallowed hard and continued rifling through them.
The statements went back years, each month new payments coming in for the same amount.
This had to be the payments from the cartel for using their land, though I guess I had expected it to be in cash, what with it being money from drug deals and such.
I grabbed my phone, my hands shaking and after a maze of automated menus and security questions, a polite clerk finally came on the line and I explained about my parents’ passing and the account details I had just found.
I went through some security questions with her and then she informed me that I was the sole beneficiary of the account.
I swallowed, confused and terrified.
“Is the account still active?” I asked.
“Yes, Ms. Hayes, I can confirm the account is active, though there hasn’t been any payments in or out of it for almost two years now. Would you like the current balance?”
“Yes please.” I braced myself, not knowing exactly what to expect.
“Two point five million,” the clerk said with missing a beat.
She said it coolly and calmly, like she hadn’t just made me a millionaire. With those four simple words, that was anything but simple.
I blinked. “I’m sorry, can you repeat that?”
“Two point five million dollars,” she repeated, slowly.
My pulse thudded in my ears. I sat down hard on the edge of my father’s desk.
“That can’t be right.”
“It is. Would you like any of it transferred to the other account?”
I froze. “Other account?”
“Yes. The monthly transfer was stopped two years ago, but if you’d like to resume it, I can arrange that.”
My mouth went dry. Two years ago…that was just before my parents had died.
No, not died. That was when they had been murdered.
But they had stopped the transfers prior to them dying.
In which case it only confirmed to me one thing, they had been murdered because they had stopped the payments to the other person.
“Whose name is on the other account?” I asked, my voice sounding hollow and far away, like the air in the room was too thin, and not enough oxygen was going into my lungs.
“Peter Anthony, ma’am.”
The name meant nothing. No relative. No family friend. No one I’d ever heard my parents mention before.
“Would you like me to resume the transfers?”
“No,” I said quickly. “Don’t transfer anything. Don’t restart anything.”
“Of course. Is there anything else I can help you with today?”
“No,” I whispered, and hung up.
I sat there for a long time, staring at the papers spread across the desk. Two and a half million. Secret transfers. A stranger’s name.
My parents—my quiet, ordinary, hardworking parents—had been hiding something enormous. And now I was sitting on top of it with no idea who might come looking. Actually, that wasn’t true. I knew the cartel was involved, but they only seemed interested in killing me so they could get to my land.
I suddenly realized that it had to have been this Peter Anthony person that had killed my parents.
The cartel were happy with the system they had in place.
They had the route and my parents had their money and then this Peter Anthony had his money transfers…
and then the transfers to him had stopped, so he had killed them.
Now the cartel wanted the land—the route, and they wanted me dead. But what would Peter Anthony get out of it?
I wondered briefly if I could just walk away from the ranch.
I was a millionaire now, did I really need the ranch?
Surely I could save myself a whole lot of trouble by just handing it over to them and leaving.
But when I looked out the window at the land I had grown up on, the land that soothed my soul, that I had been desperate to come back home to, I knew I couldn’t.
Maybe the cartel would take the money instead?
I rubbed my hands over my face, already knowing they wouldn’t.
The money—the millions—that was money from the cartel, obviously.
Money they had been paying my parents so they could use our land.
2.5 million was a drop in the ocean to them.
But the other transfers out of the account, to Peter Anthony, that was something.
Maybe someone else might know who he was.
And if they could find out who he was, maybe they could stop all of this.
“Who the hell are you, Peter Anthony,” I murmured, “and what did my parents get mixed up in?”
I looked back out the window, watching the unfamiliar biker shift his weight, scanning the tree line, and I knew where I needed to go and who I needed to speak to. It was just a matter of convincing the giant man on my porch to let me.