Chapter Eight – The Old Name
He had not spoken the family name in seven years.
Not since leaving Europe.
Not since deciding that whatever happened across the ocean belonged to a life he no longer intended to claim.
Yet the crest pressed into the rope made denial impossible.
It had belonged to a trading company once controlled by his family.
A respectable name.
A polite name.
One that appeared on shipping papers, contracts, estates, and charitable donations.
It had also appeared on documents his father had kept locked away.
The cowboy had discovered those records shortly before leaving.
Land purchases.
Transport routes.
Unofficial agreements made through other men.
He had never understood all of it.
He had only understood enough to leave.
Now, standing in the red dirt of a town thousands of miles away, he looked at the symbol again.
The woman watched his face.
“You are connected to them.”
“Not by choice.”
“That is rarely how blood works.”
He met her gaze.
“I left.”
“And they followed?”
“No.”
He looked toward the mounted figures.
“Maybe I followed them without knowing.”
That possibility disturbed him more than the riders themselves.
For years, he had believed distance had separated him from his family’s past.
The rope suggested otherwise.
Perhaps the West had never been an escape.
Perhaps it had been where the same story continued.
