Page 66 of Branded

“You’re not on duty. You’re on my shoulder.” A pause. “If you want to be.”

I look at him. His face is tired and completely serious.

I lean over and put my head on his good shoulder.

He goes still for a second, like something wild has landed on him and he doesn’t want to scare it off. Then he lets out a breath. His cheek rests on top of my hair. He doesn’t put his arm around me. He can’t. He just stays there, steady as a fence post, and I can hear his heart under my ear, slow and even.

I don’t sleep, exactly. But for twenty minutes I stop counting, and I didn’t know how much I needed that until I did it.

He wakes me at 3:21 by saying my name very softly into my hair. It’s the gentlest thing anyone’s done for me in years.

At 4:30, the sky begins to pale beyond the roof vents. Employees wash the ring alley and read the morning water count. Buyers take seats with fresh catalogs carrying a yellow insert for held and reordered lots.

The examiner reports that the sale server is intact. The outage was a local network path. Nobody restores it until the paper controls are documented. Mott sits at the secondary booth desk with no keyboard and a correction list Nora’s already reviewed.

At 5:11, his phone buzzes on the desk.

He turns the screen away before he reads it. The camera catches the motion, not the message.

Mott stands. “Need the restroom.”

“Use the public corridor,” Nora says.

He leaves through the records door instead. The corridor camera shows him turn left toward the east service stairs, not right toward the public rooms.

I key the radio. “Mott left the booth after a message. East stairs.”

“I see him,” Garrett says. He went back down to the floor at four. His voice is controlled and close. “Nobody touches him unless Tessa or Mercer calls it.”

The south-pen employee starts the five-thirty read-back. “South twelve, twenty head, Barbed Crown, six on audit hold, water normal.”

Steel slams steel under his next word.

On the booth monitor, the outer gate of South Twelve starts to roll open. No active card authorizes it. The employee jumps clear and calls it over the radio while the cattle crowd away from the moving rail.

The next gate opens. Then the next.

Every gate in the east alley opens at once.

Chapter 22

Garrett

Twenty head can turn an alley into a wall. Sixty turn it into weather with hooves.

The first cattle come out of South Twelve shoulder to shoulder, red heifers mixing with black cows from the next pen before either group finds room. A third gate rolls open farther down. Steel bangs its stop. Men shout. Every animal in the alley throws her head toward the loudest pressure.

“Stop yelling,” I say into the radio. “Get behind steel. Open the ring catch gate and the north empty pen.”

Cole repeats it from the east stairs. He doesn’t send anybody in front of the moving cattle or ask a man with a flag to outmuscle several tons of fear. The alley is built to move stock by giving them choices. We need to give them one before panic finds another.

Buyers crowd the rail above the ring. Employees push them back toward the concrete seating aisle and shut the pedestrian gates. The auctioneer kills his mic, and the barn fills with hooves on concrete, cattle bawling, and the hum of gate motors still running without a valid command.

“Kill hydraulic power after the open cycle,” Cole calls.

The maintenance man hits the cutoff. Motors stop. Five gates stay wide open. Three half open. One shudders against a heifer shoving through the narrowing gap.

“Leave it,” I say. “Don’t close on her.”