Chapter 4
CHAPTER FOUR
Cody
I don’t appreciate people messing with my system.
That isn’t something I say out loud, because it sounds obsessive when phrased that way, and I prefer to keep my reasoning structured rather than defensive.
The explanation I give, when necessary, is that Ironwood runs on precision, and precision requires consistency, and consistency requires oversight.
What I don’t say is that oversight requires control.
And control requires me.
Which is why, standing in the doorway of the main office and watching Annie Wright work at my desk—because it is my desk, regardless of where it physically sits—I can feel the first fracture in something I’ve spent years holding together.
She doesn’t really belong here.
That was my first assessment.
It still is.
Electric blue hair twisted into a shape I can’t quite name, piercings catching the light, clothes that read as practical but not compliant. The kind of presentation that encourages people to underestimate her before she has to prove them wrong.
I understand that strategy.
I just don’t trust it.
What I trust are systems, patterns, repetition, and the absence of error. What I trust is what can be proven, tracked, and verified without interpretation.
Which is why I stand still longer than necessary, observing.
Her desk appears disordered at first glance, papers spread in a way that would normally irritate me enough to correct on sight, but the longer I watch, the more the structure reveals itself.
Nothing is misplaced. Nothing is random. Each document sits within reach of the next logical step, each note positioned where it will be seen exactly when needed.
It isn’t my system.
But it works.
I adjust my glasses once, then remove them as I step fully into the room, the shift from observation to interruption intentional.
“Annie.”
She looks up, attention snapping into place without hesitation, which is exactly what I expect and still something I note.
“Cody? Is everything alright?”
I set the file down in front of her and open it to the page she marked earlier, the annotations clean but not formal, efficient without being rigid.
“Walk me through this.”
There’s no need to specify further. If she understands what she’s doing, she’ll know where to begin.
Her gaze drops to the page, scanning, her thumb tapping lightly against the side of her camera in a rhythm I’ve noticed but haven’t categorized yet.
Thinking.
Processing.
Then she leans forward, anchoring herself to the work in front of her.
“These consulting charges,” she says, tone even, controlled. “They repeat and Sherry didn’t know who they were from.”
“Jake Dorsey deals with that,” I shoot back. “He’s the op manager.”
She cocks her head to one side. “And you don’t know anything about it?”
I don’t answer immediately.
Not because I don’t have one, but because the question itself is… imprecise, and I don’t respond to imprecision without correcting it first.
“I know everything that passes through my system,” I say, evenly. “That doesn’t mean I personally approve every operational expense.”
Her eyes don’t leave my face.
She’s not intimidated.
Also noted.
“But you didn’t flag these,” she says, tapping the page once. “Which means either they’re normal or they’re designed to look normal.”
I adjust my watch, the motion measured. “You’ve been here less than a week.”
“And I already think it looks… off. But if it makes sense to you, then…”
“Walk me through your conclusion,” I interject.
Her thumb taps once against the camera again before she looks back down at the page.
“They’re irregular in spacing but consistent in behavior,” she says.
“Amounts fall within a range that doesn’t trigger alerts.
Timing aligns with high-volume periods, which increases noise in the system.
They don’t stand out unless you’re specifically looking for repetition across context, not just entries.
” She slides another sheet forward. “I cross-referenced them against shipment logs and payroll spikes. They cluster.”
I follow the data without needing to read every number. She’s not guessing, she’s mapping. “And the vendor?”
“Exists,” she says again, but this time there’s more weight behind it. “Bare minimum documentation. Enough to pass a surface check. Not enough to explain the frequency of use.”
I pick up the paper, scanning it myself, because I don’t trust conclusions I haven’t verified personally.
The structure’s sound.
Annoyingly so.
“And you came to this in…” I glance at the timestamp on her notes. “Three days.”
She shrugs. “Four, if you count the first day I spent figuring out how your system works.”
“And?” I press. “How do you find the system?”
“It’s good,” she says simply. “Very good. Clean, layered, efficient. You built it to scale.” She pauses for the briefest of moments. “But it’s also predictable in the way all structured systems are predictable. So it can be exploited.”
I narrow my eyes at her. “You’re assuming intent.”
“I’m identifying pattern,” she corrects. “Intent comes later.”
That’s… exactly how I would phrase it.
I set the paper down carefully, aligning it with the edge of the desk.
“You don’t act on pattern without verification,” I say.
“I didn’t,” she replies. “I brought it to you.”
I study her again, this time not just assessing her capability, but recalibrating it.
She isn’t disruptive because she’s careless. She’s disruptive because she’s precise in a way that intersects with mine, which means she can find things.
Which means she can also break things. If she chooses to.
“You’ll continue documenting,” I say.
“I was going to.”
“You’ll route everything through me.”
She tilts her head. “I already know that.”
“I’m clarifying.”
“Fine.”
I shift the file, turning the page with care, re-centering the conversation where it belongs. On verification, not interpretation.
“Alright,” I say, tone even. “Let’s remove assumption.”
Her attention sharpens again.
I tap the margin once. “Quarter three operating variance. Adjusted for livestock fluctuation, excluding deferred maintenance.”
“Three-point-eight percent,” she replies without hesitation. “Three-point-nine if you factor in seasonal feed increase, though it hasn’t been fully accounted for yet.”
Correct.
I move on.
“Feed allocation discrepancy. Last month. Net impact.”
“Two-point-one percent,” she says. “It balances across the next cycle, so it doesn’t register as a loss unless you isolate the period.”
Again, correct.
She isn’t working through the numbers, she already understands them.
I pick up a pen from her desk and write a figure in the margin, rounding it deliberately, then I slide the page back toward her. “So, this percentage would be…”
“That’s wrong.”
I smile. “Oh yeah?”
“You rounded early.”
“By how much?”
“Point two,” she says. “Same as before.”
She can operate at my level, maybe even beyond my level with the speed at which her brain gets around the numbers, which means she can see the system the way I do.
Which means she can also see where it fails.
I just hope she finds it quick so I can get back to normal.
With that, I head back through the house, my mind spinning at a million miles an hour. What has she found? Could this be why we’re having issues?
Has she found what I’ve missed already?
The questions don’t stop when I close my office door.
They don’t fade into the background or dull with distance from the conversation. If anything, they keen. Narrowing, growing more precise, more insistent.
Because once a pattern appears, it demands resolution. And resolution, if it’s going to mean anything, requires verification. Data.
I move to my desk without hesitation and sit, waking the system with a familiarity that borders on automatic.
The screen flickers to life, and before it fully loads, my fingers are already moving, pulling up access logs, user credentials, file histories. Everything that sits beneath the surface of the system Annie has only just begun to understand.
The visible structure is only ever part of it. The rest is what keeps it intact.
And I don’t trust anything I haven’t checked myself.
The data populates in layers, clean and ordered, exactly as it should be. I begin with the same timeframe Annie isolated, narrowing the window to match the invoices she flagged, then refining further.
File types, vendor tags, access frequency. The process is methodical, each step reducing noise, stripping away what isn’t relevant until only the necessary remains.
At first, everything aligns.
It usually does.
If something is wrong, it won’t be obvious. It won’t present itself as a mistake or an error or anything careless enough to be caught on a surface pass.
It’ll be embedded, structured to survive scrutiny, which means I have to go further than most people would think to look.
So I do.
I isolate the specific vendor files she flagged and run a deeper query, cross referencing access patterns across time rather than entries. It takes a few seconds longer than usual, which is enough to make me pause, because it isn’t immediate.
Then…
There.
A timestamp.
Unremarkable in isolation.
02:13 a.m.
I don’t move right away. I scroll back, then forward again, confirming the entry rather than reacting to it. The file’s correct. The path is correct. The access record is clean.
Too clean.
I pull the associated credentials.
Annie Wright.
That’s where it stops aligning.
She doesn’t have full access clearance yet. Not without secondary authentication, not without a corresponding system acknowledgment that validates the entry.
I pull the authentication logs next, refining the query to match the exact timestamp.
Nothing. No login record. No authentication sequence.
No system recognition that access was granted at all.
Which means the file was opened without the system acknowledging how.
That isn’t a delay or a missed entry or anything that can be explained by lag or oversight. The system doesn’t function in that way.
I built it specifically to avoid that kind of failure.
This isn’t failure. It’s interference.
I lean back slowly, adjusting my watch as I process the information, the movement more intense than necessary, but calming in a way that keeps the analysis structured rather than reactive.
Annie wasn’t working at two in the morning. There’s no version of that scenario that fits within the established patterns of the ranch.
Someone would’ve seen her. The staff, the night rotation, even Silas on one of his walks… there’s too much overlap for that kind of movement to go unnoticed.
So either someone used her credentials or someone wanted it to look as if they did. Neither option is acceptable.
I sit there, eyes fixed on the screen, because I’m committing it to memory instead of saving it. The timestamp, the file path, the credential pairing.
Every detail locked in place without leaving a trace in the system itself.
Not yet.
This isn’t something I escalate without certainty, and it’s definitely not something I bring to her.
Not until I know whether she’s part of it, or the reason I found it at all.