Chapter 9 Levi Briggs
LEVI brIGGS
Ten months ago... Pinedale, Wyoming
I stared at the bright yellow sticky note defacing the front of my pristine, recently cleaned monitor screen. I’d had one cup of coffee, not enough for this nonsense.
The handwriting was unmistakable—Cooper's chicken scratch, almost illegible. Apparently, he’d spent four hundred and twenty-eight dollars.
Didn’t tell me what for, just sketched a smiley face beneath the price.
He was driving me nuts with these random purchases, but I couldn’t yell at the guy who’d saved us from financial ruin.
Still, though, sometimes I wanted to shake him for forgetting what life used to be like.
Struggling to feed the horses.
Selling off fifty head of cattle at a time, just to stay afloat.
And then… a long time ago… my stomach growling in hunger, empty because there was no food in my house.
Mom passed out on the sofa with a cigarette clamped between her slack lips.
And Cooper, living only a block away from me, his body black and blue from beatings, too scared to eat even if there was food in his house.
Because what if he took the wrong thing?
What if his dad wanted the leftovers and they were gone when he came home drunk?
Things were good now, but they used to be fucking horrible.
I tried not to think about what might have happened if the Nelsons hadn’t let us move to Sagebrush, if they hadn’t become our ‘adopted’ parents.
I peeled the offensive paper square from my screen, crumpled it into a tight ball, and pitched it into the wastebasket with more force than necessary. The satisfaction was minimal, but it was something.
My office—though calling the converted bedroom an office was generous—was the only truly organized area in the entire rambler.
Boone had sacrificed his private space when it became clear that trying to keep the books while sitting at the kitchen table meant constant interruptions, coffee spills, and me losing my temper every five seconds.
In here, everything had its place. Receipts were filed by date and category.
Reference materials were alphabetized. An old school rolodex sat waiting to save the day when the rural internet crapped out.
The only scar was the wastebasket evidence of broken pencils and pens.
And then Cooper would barge in, slap sticky notes on everything, and leave the door open behind him. Every. Damn. Time.
At least there’d only been one this morning, not dozens.
With a sigh, I opened the accounting software and pulled my ledger closer.
The ranch's operating expenses for last month were higher than I'd projected.
We'd had to replace the pump on the north well, and one of the trucks needed tires.
Normal unexpected bullshit, the kind we'd always had, but this stuff used to keep me up at night wondering if we'd make it another month.
Now? Now, we had a cushion. More than a cushion—a goddamn California king-sized mattress of financial security.
I pulled up the banking app on my phone, confirming what I already knew.
A cool million still sat in the ranch's business account, untouched.
More than enough to keep Sagebrush afloat.
Cooper's broker had diversified the rest of his inheritance into a mix of high risk/high yield and low risk/low reward investments.
Smart move, I had to admit. Even if the high-risk portion tanked completely, we'd still be secure.
All thanks to some great aunt Cooper had met exactly twice, who'd decided to leave a fortune to her “darling great-nephew who’d once made her an apple pie”.
For years, I'd agonized over every penny, working the books until my eyes burned, finding ways to stretch our resources further than they should go.
I'd been the one who insisted we couldn't afford to replace the truck when its transmission went, who'd patched the roof of the barn myself instead of hiring professionals, who'd stayed up late calculating exactly how many head of cattle we needed to sell to make the bank payment.
And then Cooper's windfall had rendered all of it moot in a single day.
I should have been grateful. I was grateful.
But gratitude was a complicated emotion when mixed with the knowledge that our collective lifetime of hard work and sacrifice hadn't been enough to save the ranch.
It had taken dumb luck, a random act of generosity from a woman who barely knew us, to solve our problems.
My pencil snapped between my fingers as I punched numbers into the calculator. I hadn't realized I was gripping it so tightly. I tossed the broken pieces into the trash and reached for another.
The projected expenses for next month looked reasonable, even with the added costs of the new horse. A horse for an Omega we didn't have. A horse that might never have a rider.
Four million dollars from his portfolio.
That's what Cooper had paid Eros. Four million fucking dollars for blood samples, scent collection, and promises. When he'd finally told us the price tag, I'd been certain I'd misheard. Four million for what amounted to a high-tech dating service.
The anger bubbled up in my stomach, fierce and hot.
My inner Alpha, always too close to the surface these days, clawed at my restraint.
I could feel my control slipping, the rage building until my vision blurred at the edges.
I could throw the desk through the wall.
I could storm into the kitchen and grab Cooper by his stupid apron, shake him until he understood what he'd done. I could—
No. I wouldn't. I couldn't.
It was his fucking money.
Even if he’d said the ranch and our pack came first, I couldn’t shake the notion the money was his, not ours.
Maybe the way I felt was an artifact of having nothing that belonged to me when I was little.
The first time I ever got something new—not something stolen or borrowed or rummaged from the dumpster behind the thrift store—was at Sagebrush.
Granny Kat handed me a crisp, creased pair of blue jeans, tags still attached.
I yanked open my desk drawer and grabbed the small package of gum Eros had so thoughtfully included in their "welcome to our database" gift basket.
The foil crinkled as I unwrapped a piece and shoved it into my mouth.
The flavor was medicinal and faintly bitter; suppressant compounds mixed with spearmint and artificial sweetener.
I chewed vigorously, focusing on the mechanical action rather than the rising tide of alpha aggression.
The chemicals would hit my bloodstream soon enough, easing the feral edge that had been sharpening in all of us lately.
It was humiliating, relying on this crap.
But it was better than the alternative. Better than letting the ranch descend into a combat zone of competing alpha pheromones and territorial displays.
Better than becoming the cautionary tale they showed in high school health classes—the pack that fell apart because they couldn't find an Omega to balance them.
Fuck, maybe it was just me. Maybe I was the only one beginning to decay to this point…
imagining war when the others wished for peace.
The Eros basket sat in the corner of my office.
None of us had wanted it in the common areas.
Too much of a reminder. Too pathetic. Fruit (most of it now spoiled and trashed), tonics promising "alpha clarity" (untouched), a box of this god-awful gum, and a card with flowing script that read "Congratulations on taking the first step toward completing your pack! We’re so excited for you!”
It was too damn cheerful. Something you’d give young Alphas at the start of their journeys.
We weren’t kids anymore.
The frustration and fury began to recede as the suppressants took effect.
My shoulders relaxed, my jaw unclenched, my grip on the second pencil loosened.
I took a deep breath and returned to the spreadsheet.
Numbers didn't lie. Numbers didn't promise things they couldn't deliver.
Numbers were honest, even when the truth hurt.
I wondered how long we'd wait before admitting that Eros might not find anyone. Or worse, that they'd find someone who wasn't compatible but who they'd convince to join us anyway, just to justify their exorbitant fee. A fortune for a fraud.
Four million dollars. Jesus Christ.
The gum quickly lost its flavor, becoming a tasteless wad in my mouth.
I spat it into the trash can atop the snapped pencils and the crumpled sticky note.
Freaking Cooper. It wasn't his fault, not really.
He'd been trying to solve our problem by throwing money at it. He wanted this to work as much as any of us. More, maybe, since he’d gone the extra mile to think outside the box and find Eros.
But wanting something didn't make it happen.
I'd learned that lesson the hard way, and I wasn't sure Cooper ever would. He’d just keep being himself, someone nobody could control, doing crazy shit to keep our lives interesting.
I turned back to the screen, forcing myself to focus on the rows of numbers. This, at least, was something I could control. This made sense. This had rules and patterns I understood. Unlike the rest of my life, which seemed to be slipping further into uncertainty with each passing day.
For the next hour, I lost myself in the columns and formulas.
There was a certain peace in the orderly progression of calculations, the predictable patterns of Sagebrush’s financial ebbs and flows.
When my Alpha instincts threatened to overwhelm me, I could always count on numbers to bring me back to center.
They didn't demand, they didn't disappoint.
They simply were. I was so engrossed that when Cooper's voice bellowed down the hallway announcing lunch, I nearly toppled backward in my chair, the spell broken.