PART 2 — THE NAME BENEATH THE TABLE

Serilda Wayross stared at the carved letters until the room around her seemed to disappear.

A. WAYROSS.

Her husband’s name.

Not merely his initials. The exact way he had carved his name into the wooden handle of his favorite knife, the way he signed every letter he sent home.

“Ma’am?” the foreman asked. “You all right?”

Serilda ran her fingertips over the letters.

“Who carved this?”

The oldest wrangler, a gray-haired man named Hollis, slowly set down his coffee.

“Your husband did.”

Her breath caught.

“You knew him?”

Hollis looked at the other men before answering.

“Every man who worked Bell Yoke before the Bogardis family took over knew August Wayross.”

Serilda sat down.

August had died four years earlier, leaving her with a modest inheritance, a battered recipe book, and a promise that she would never have to beg anyone for a place at the table.

But he had never told her he worked at Bell Yoke.

“He was here?” she whispered.

“More than twenty years ago,” Hollis replied. “Before the ranch belonged to Sophronia’s family. Before the land disputes. Before the four cattle kings stopped speaking to one another.”

Serilda looked up sharply.

“The cattle kings?”

Hollis nodded.

“Four men who built their fortunes together. August was the one who brought them together in the first place.”

The name of her husband suddenly felt different.

Not a memory.

A key.

“Tell me everything,” Serilda said.

Hollis pulled out a chair.

And for the next hour, the men told her stories about August Wayross that she had never heard.

He had been a cook, a ranch hand, a mediator, and the only man who could convince four stubborn cattle barons to sit down and settle their disagreements over supper.

He had built the enormous bunkhouse table himself.

Every name carved beneath it belonged to someone he had once fed.

“Why did he leave?” Serilda asked.

Hollis’s expression darkened.

“That’s the part nobody agrees on.”

Before he could continue, the kitchen door slammed open.

Sophronia Bogardis stood in the doorway.

Her eyes swept across the clean room, the polished table, and the men sitting with their hats removed.

“What is this?” she demanded.

Nobody answered.

She pointed at Serilda.

“I ordered you to clean this kitchen, not turn it into a parlor.”

Serilda rose calmly.

“The men were hungry.”

“They are paid to work, not to socialize!”

Hollis stood.

“With respect, ma’am, we’ve worked here twenty years. Nobody ever treated us like this.”

Sophronia’s face reddened.

“Then perhaps you should all remember who owns this ranch.”

Serilda glanced down at the carved names.

“Perhaps you should remember who built it.”

The room fell silent.

Sophronia stepped closer.

“What did you say?”

Before Serilda could answer, a distant sound rolled across the ranch yard.

Four horses.

Four riders.

And four men whose arrival would change everything.

Hollis turned toward the window.

His coffee cup slipped from his hand.

“Lord help us,” he whispered.

Sophronia looked outside.

For the first time since Serilda had known her, the woman appeared afraid.

Because the four cattle kings had not visited Bell Yoke in eighteen years.

And now they were coming straight toward the bunkhouse kitchen.