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CHAPTER ONE

IF THERE WAS one thing Levi Granger knew, it was that he was never—not ever—getting into bed with someone from Four Corners.

They were, in his opinion, a ranching Death Star. Their choke hold on the region was why he’d formed the Huckleberry County Ranching Association five years ago. Four Corners had resources many of them could only dream of, and Levi had never been comfortable with one group having so much power. So he’d decided to do his part to try to balance that out.

Maybe, just maybe, it was partly because he had an old-school axe to grind with the Four Corners folks. But that wasn’t his driving motivation. Being petty could only get you so far, and it certainly couldn’t earn you the respect of your peers, which he’d done.

His voice was now one of the most influential in the community apart from the Four Corners people, and he took pride in that. And if it was partly because of his prior experience with Four Corners, fine.

It only meant he knew better now.

He’d been there and done that, in a business deal gone horribly wrong, and he’d learned his lesson. He wasn’t going to sign himself over to them, to their collective, no matter how nice and clear-cut the deal seemed.

No matter how persuasive of a presentation they gave tonight.

Levi Granger was no longer a man who could be persuaded.

“Do you think that they’ll do a ritual?”

Levi looked down at his little sister, who was full-on gawking as they walked into the barn that served as a meeting place for Four Corners Ranch.

“Obviously not,” he grunted. “They only pray to Beelzebub when none of the uncleansed are around.”

“So this is more like recruitment. A promise of enlightenment, and once you actually sign up, then the blood drinking begins.”

He chuckled softly. It did something to ease the tension that he had felt creep up into his shoulders the minute that he had driven onto the property.

He hadn’t been on the Four Corners property in more than a decade, and having to come back just made him mad. It served as a memory of all kinds of things. Things he preferred to not think about. Particularly difficult times in his life that he didn’t like to dwell on.

Camilla, on the other hand, had no such baggage when it came to Four Corners, and had been desperately curious to come onto the property and get an inside look.

He understood.

For those who weren’t part of the Four Corners collective—either as an employee or as one of the founding families—it remained a mystery. A ranching monolith out here in the middle of nowhere, in Pyrite Falls, Oregon.

They were far bigger than any other operation out here. Hell, they were the biggest family ranching operation in the state. A group of four families whose land totaled forty thousand acres all up.

They supported one another financially, they made decisions as a team, and they basically made it almost impossible to earn a living as a rancher in the surrounding area.

Not without being creative, at least.

The town had been invited to this meeting because now the Sullivan family—who Levi had personal beef with, the conflict kind, not the literal kind—wanted to create a new road access onto the Four Corners property that would make a road that bypassed Pyrite Falls altogether and bring people straight to the farm store that they were making at Sullivan’s Point.

The small ranching collective that Levi ran, a response to Four Corners, was against it.

As was the town council.

And he had been chosen to voice the dissent today at the meeting.

He knew how this kind of thing went. Typically, the Four Corners people did whatever they wanted to in isolation, but when they asked for outside community approval, they expected townsfolk to fall in line. They expected the townsfolk to agree with them because they had money and a certain amount of influence in the community. Because many people sent their kids to school at the little schoolhouse on the property, many people worked for them or had family who did.

Levi stood apart. A rancher who wasn’t afraid to go after them, head-on.

Because he already knew what a disaster it was to try to work with them. And he wouldn’t be doing it again.

So he had been the natural choice to get up and speak his mind.

He didn’t have his speech written down. He had it in his head.