Chapter 25
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
Annie
The worst part about fear is how quickly it learns your routine.
By morning, mine has already moved in.
It’s there when I wake up, before I’ve even opened my eyes fully, sitting heavy in my chest like it belongs. It’s there when I brush my teeth. When I pull my hair into a bun.
When I stand in front of the mirror and tell myself, very firmly, that I’m not going to let some splintered barn lock and a missing SD card and a note with all the emotional nuance of a serial killer fan club turn me into a trembling Victorian heroine.
I look exactly as unconvinced as I feel.
“Cool,” I tell my reflection. “We’re thriving.”
We aren’t thriving.
We are, however, still employed and in possession of a working laptop, which means I can at least pretend my life makes sense for a few more hours if I stare hard enough at spreadsheets.
That’s the plan.
I get to the office early, because apparently self-preservation now looks like beating everyone else to the data before the day starts generating fresh ways to ruin me.
The ranch is still peaceful when I slip into the chair at my desk, coffee in hand, camera bag looped around the chair leg out of habit and paranoia.
Probably both.
The screen glows to life, giving me something to focus my attention on.
Yesterday’s damage is still sitting in me in layers, the conversation with Duke by the creek, the lock, the weird horror of seeing proof that someone has been physically trying to get into spaces they shouldn’t, and underneath all of that, the ugly pulse of Vivian’s voice from dinner, smooth and poisonous as ever.
But I have to focus.
I have to work.
I open the financial files and start where I left off. At the property expenditures.
That category has been irritating me for a while now, but not in a clear enough way to explain. More like a splinter under the skin of the data. A pressure point I keep circling without being able to name why.
So I do what Cody does.
I stop trying to make the numbers confess all at once and start making them line up with reality.
Dates, approvals, development bids, land use proposals, property assessments, infrastructure estimates, anything that touches Ironwood’s long-term planning instead of just day-to-day operations.
At first it looks like exactly what it should look like: a wealthy ranch with growth pressure. Maintenance expansion. Potential land development options. Bids for road work, utility planning, irrigation upgrades, neighboring parcels under discussion.
The kind of paperwork operations this size drag around like an expensive, deeply annoying second skin.
Then I isolate the missing funds against those periods. And my whole body goes still.
No.
I sit up straighter and run it again.
The spikes in embezzlement don’t just align with busy operational periods, they align with property pressure, development talk, acquisition conversations, renewal windows where Ironwood would be making decisions about expansion, contracts, and long-term leverage.
My pulse kicks harder.
Because that changes everything.
I start cross-checking faster, my coffee forgotten beside the keyboard, fingers flying over keys while my brain tries to keep up with the shape forming underneath it all.
When the ranch is stable, the bleed stays controlled. When the ranch faces larger financial decisions, the bleed increases, enough to strain liquidity, to complicate choices, to make certain options suddenly feel necessary.
My stomach drops.
“This isn’t theft,” I whisper.
That’s not the point, anyway. The point is pressure, leverage.
Whoever is doing this isn’t just stealing because they can.
Someone’s trying to make Ironwood vulnerable.
Maybe enough to make it negotiable. A sale, a land deal, a takeover.
Some kind of forced dependency wrapped in paperwork and urgency.
I stare at the screen, feeling that sick, cold kind of adrenaline spread through me. The kind that doesn’t feel dramatic or cinematic or useful. Just painful. Thin. Horribly clear.
Because if that’s true, then the money trail isn’t the whole crime.
It’s the setup, the weakening, the background infection that makes the next step possible.
And if the next step was going to be bigger, if someone expected Ironwood to crack at the right moment, then whatever’s been happening around me?
That’s not random intimidation.
The missing card, the notes, the lock, the pressure? It’s to stop me digging deep.
My chair scrapes back hard against the floor as I stand.
Okay. No panic. Panic is for people who aren’t too stubborn to have useful coping mechanisms.
I grab my notebook and start writing.
Dates. Bid windows. Missing fund spikes. Vendor clusters. Development references. Associated approvals. Jake. Legal links. Shell entities. Consulting charges. All of it.
The more I map it, the uglier it gets. The more I need to save this all in various places to keep it safe.
By 10:30, I have three separate backups.
By 11:00, I decide that still isn’t enough.
I print hard copies of the crucial pages, but not all at once, and not in one stack. Too obvious. Too easy to steal, destroy, or “misplace.”
I split them by category, then I slide them into plain folders with labels so dull they should probably come with a sedative.
By lunchtime, I have the evidence spread across my desk in a pattern that makes sense only if you know the logic beneath it, which, unfortunately, I do.
I sit back, rub at my eyes, and finally let myself think the thought all the way through.
Someone wants Ironwood weakened enough to push a larger move.
And if I’m right, if I’m even mostly right, then this is bigger than Jake, bigger than vendor fraud, bigger than one person skimming money for fun.
This is long game territory.
I spend the afternoon pretending to do normal work in between the deeply abnormal work of building a survival strategy out of accounting records.
I answer emails, approve legitimate invoices, check payroll timing, smile at Sherry when she pops in with a question about vendor processing and try not to wonder if she’d notice if I suddenly dragged my filing cabinet onto the lawn and set it on fire.
Around three, I make myself stop and move the backups.
One stays in my room, hidden where no one would look unless they had a deeply specific interest in my collection of black cardigans.
One goes into my camera bag inside a padded lens pouch.
And the third…
The third I take outside. Because I need to be sure before I go forward with this.
There’s a little hollow near the edge of the old fence line behind the staff quarters where the ground dips under a cluster of scrub and pine roots.
It’s not pretty. It’s not dramatic. It’s exactly the sort of place no one notices because there’s nothing to notice there.
Perfect.
I slip the flash drive into a waterproof pouch, crouch down and tuck it under the root shelf, and cover it lightly with old needles and dry earth.
I stand back up with dirt on my fingers and my heart beating like I’ve just buried a body.
Great. Love that this is my life now.
The rest of the afternoon passes in a blur of nerves and fake normalcy.
Every sound makes me look up, every truck makes my shoulders tighten, every passing shadow in the office window registers a little too hard before my brain catches up and says no, that’s just a ranch hand carrying feed, relax, weirdo.
By the time evening rolls around, I feel stretched thin. Like I’ve spent the whole day held together by tabs and highlighted cells and one very stubborn refusal to become the sort of woman who gets scared into silence.
Work finally slows enough that leaving doesn’t feel irresponsible.
I shut down my laptop, slide the most important hard copies into a folder, then change my mind and take only two pages with me.
Paranoia isn’t elegant, but it is adaptable.
The barn office is hushed now. Late enough that the ranch has gone into its evening rhythm.
Distant voices, the thud of a stall door, horses shifting, the muffled sound of life continuing around the edges of my own private nightmare.
I sling my bag over my shoulder and head outside.
The sky is fading toward purple and gold, one of those sunsets that feels almost rude in its beauty when your nervous system is busy trying to stage a mutiny.
My car is parked where I left it. I hit the unlock button and hear the soft clunk of the doors. Then I reach for the handle.
And stop.
Because something is wrong.
At first I can’t even tell what, it’s just instinct. That same thin, terrible stillness my body gets before my mind has language.
The passenger seat.
There’s something on the passenger seat.
My heart stops so hard it feels physical. The world narrows instantly.
I open the door slowly, as if whatever is in there might start moving if I’m not careful, and then I see it.
My missing SD card.
Just sitting there.
Small. Black. Innocent looking. For one stupid, surreal second, relief hits me first.
It’s back.
Then I see what’s just next to it.
A single photo print, glossy, four by six. Placed carefully like a gift.
No.
No, no, no.
My fingers go numb.
I stare at it without touching it, because some ancient animal part of my brain has finally clocked in and is screaming now.
The photo is of me. Walking into the office, camera bag over my shoulder, head turned like I heard something just out of frame, taken from behind a tree.
I can tell because the left edge of the photo’s blurred by bark, just enough to anchor the angle. Just enough to make the perspective feel intimate and hidden and so horribly close that my skin goes cold all at once.
The back of my neck prickles.
I look around. Tree line, barn, office windows, parking area.
Nothing.
No one.
Just the ranch settling toward dusk, ordinary as sin.
My stomach turns, because someone took this. Someone stood close enough to watch me, to frame me, to wait, and then they got into my car.
My hands are shaking now.
I force myself to breathe and finally reach into the car.
Two fingers on the edge of the photo, and lift. The SD card slides underneath it, making a dry little plastic sound against the seat.
Under the picture, written in black marker directly on the vinyl edge of the print:
YOU’RE NOT THE ONLY ONE WHO CAN TAKE PHOTOS.