Page 23 of Chains and Vows

His eyes narrow again. In confusion this time. "What?"

I let out a breath. "I understand that you walked me to my bike because you want me to get the fuck out of here. But if you've got a minute, I would like to tell you a story."

CHAPTER 6

I find myself trembling a little as the elevator takes me deep into the bedrock below the house where Eleanor's vault exists in perpetuity.

This morning took a turn up in the dining room.

Not a gentle turn, either. A hard one.

I play Cash's words back in my head on repeat.

She set something up, Savannah. She made me buy debt. Oil field debt.

What does it mean? I'm not sure. Cash told me, but I was only barely followin' along. It's complicated, like he said. And I am the wrong person to be talkin' to about money, because the only thing I know about money is that it's always there when I need it.

The elevator hums around me as I press my back against the cold steel wall. The descent is only thirty feet but it feels like falling into the center of something I can't name.

He didn't know. That's the part that sits wrong. My brother—Cash Ashby, the man who runs forty-seven thousand acres like a general runs a campaign—spent the entire five years prior to our mother's death buyin' mineral rights and oil rig equipment debt.

Not because he understood the endgame.

Because she told him to.

She didn't tell him to buy the actual things themselves. Not the rigs or the leases or the metals in the ground.

She told him to buy the notes the bank held on said things.

The paper.

The promise of payment.

Cash says this is a powerful position. It means he basically owns these things. The mineral rights, the equipment, all of it. The catch is that they have to default on their loans.

Which he could make them do? I think.

Which would ruin them. And by 'them' he means Marcus and his family. And others, he said. Which is the dangerous part. He could call the debt and cause a default, but he's not sure what kind of hornet's nest he's kickin'.

He needs to know who the owners are before he makes a fuss and riles them up. And can't find that out because of shell companies.

Layers upon layers of corporate paperwork designed to obscure the actual human beings behind the money.

He said this is a common thing men with money do. They buy… debt?

They buy the right to collect. The right to foreclose. The right to call in what's owed and strip a man down to nothing if the payment doesn't come.

It sounds predatory, is what it sounds like.

It sounds like Eleanor handed my brother a loaded weapon and told him to keep it clean until the time came to aim.

This was about all I got out of that conversation.

His mouth was moving and words were spillin' out. But all I heard was that Charlie Brown teacher voice.

It makes no sense to me. My mind just doesn't work this way.

I understand land. I understand water rights, and bloodlines, and the weight of a name.