Wild Blood

Nobody Told Zane

Nobody told Zane Holloway his father was a multimillionaire.

Not when he was seven years old, sitting in Mrs. Delacroix's kitchen at the group foster home on Clement Street while she stitched his split lip closed with a needle and thread because there was no money in the house budget for urgent care. She hummed while she worked — a church hymn, low and steady — and Zane sat still without being asked because he'd learned early that flinching made things worse and that stillness was a form of control, which was the only form available to him.

Not when he was twelve and fought three boys twice his size behind the rail yards on a Tuesday afternoon. He hadn't been looking for a fight. The fight had been looking for a smaller kid to land on and found a younger boy named Darnell who was small and frightened and had nowhere to go, and Zane — who was neither small nor frightened but who had also had nowhere to go for most of his life — had stepped between them. He won because he was fast and because he had no attachment to looking graceful, two advantages that experienced fighters often underestimate in untrained ones.

Not when he was eighteen and walked out of his final foster placement with forty dollars cash, a backpack that held everything he owned, and an expression that people on the street read and gave room to — the particular expression of a young man who had settled his accounts with expectation and decided to proceed without it.

Nobody told him. So Zane Holloway built himself from the materials available.

He learned to fight properly from a man named Geraldo who ran a boxing gym above a laundromat on Fifth Street and who had, over decades of working with young men of limited options, developed a reliable instinct for which ones were worth the investment. He watched Zane for two sessions and then pulled him aside and said: I'll teach you for free if you clean the gym three mornings a week. Zane said yes before Geraldo finished the sentence. He cleaned the gym for four years. By the end, he was the one running the Tuesday–Thursday junior class.

He learned cattle in west Texas, on a ranch belonging to a man named Earl Briggs who hired people through a cousin of a cousin and didn't ask for much paperwork and paid under the table on Fridays in cash. Zane was nineteen when he arrived. He knew nothing about cattle. He learned by watching and by asking questions and by making mistakes in the specific, careful way of someone who makes a mistake once and exactly once. Earl Briggs watched all of this and after two seasons said: you're the best hand I've had in twenty years, and I've had about forty. He said it the way men like Earl said things they meant — flat and without fanfare, which made it more true rather than less.

He learned to read people the way a man reads a room he might need to exit: fast, complete, accurate. This was not a skill he'd been taught. It was a skill the world had required him to have by the time he was ten, and he'd developed it accordingly.

He was twenty-eight years old, elbow-deep in a truck engine in the garage bay he rented on a month-to-month basis in Millbrook City, when the woman in the pencil skirt found him.

She walked in from the street with the contained discomfort of someone in professional clothing in a working garage, and she stood at a careful distance from the truck and said, "Mr. Holloway."

He didn't look up. "Yeah."

"My name is Patricia Vance. I'm an attorney representing the estate of Gerald Holloway. I've been attempting to reach you for three weeks."

He looked up then. She had the look of someone managing a significant gap between what she'd expected and what she'd found.

She held out an envelope. He took it with a hand that had motor oil on it and opened it and read the contents twice, slowly, the way he read anything that required understanding rather than reaction.

He set the letter on the truck hood. He picked up his wrench. He finished the job he'd been doing, which took eleven minutes, with complete focus and no visible change in his demeanor.

Then he sat on the hood of the truck in the quiet garage and let the number from the letter settle into him the way a significant thing settles — not with noise or drama but with the slow, restructuring weight of something true.

Gerald Holloway. A father he had never met. A multimillionaire with ranch holdings, hotel properties, a construction company, and a legitimate son named Roman, twenty-eight years old, raised properly in the life that Zane had not been part of.

The letter indicated he'd been left half of everything.

He sat on the hood of the truck for a long time. Then he picked up his phone and called the number on the attorney's card.

"Monday," he said. "I'll be there Monday. Tell the other son."

He hung up and looked at the wall of the garage — tools hung in order, everything in its place, the organized world of a man who had built his own systems because no one had built them for him.

He thought, So that's where I came from.

It wasn't joy. It wasn't grief. It was something without a clean name — the specific, unsettling feeling of finding the missing piece of a story you'd been living inside without knowing it was incomplete.

He went home that night, packed a bag, and didn't sleep much.

CHAPTER 2

Roman Holloway

Roman Holloway received the news in his penthouse, on a Tuesday evening, during his third glass of Scotch.

His attorney called at eight-fifteen. Roman was standing at the floor-to-ceiling windows that made up the west wall of the living space, looking at Millbrook City spread below him — all that lit geometry, the city at night doing what cities do at night, which is look more organized from above than it actually is. He'd been standing there for an hour doing nothing productive, which was unusual for him and which he attributed to his father's death two weeks prior.

Gerald Holloway had died the way Gerald Holloway had lived: on his own terms, in his own bed, after spending his final months putting his affairs in order with the precise, methodical efficiency of a man who had always believed that preparation was the highest form of respect. He had not asked Roman's opinion on any of it. He had not asked Roman's opinion on most things, which was either the defining characteristic of their relationship or the thing that had prevented their relationship from having other characteristics. Roman had not yet decided which.

He was twenty-eight years old. Dark-haired, dark-eyed, six-foot-three, with the kind of face that required no assistance and the kind of bearing that communicated — without trying, which made it more effective — that he was accustomed to being the most significant person in any room he walked into. He wore a charcoal dress shirt with the sleeves rolled to the forearm because he'd been working when the mood for Scotch and windows had overtaken the work, which happened, lately, with more frequency than he was comfortable examining.

"We've located him," his attorney said. No preamble, because Roman had specified, early in their professional relationship, that he preferred information delivered without the scaffolding of social management.

"The other beneficiary."

"Yes. His name is Zane Holloway. He's twenty-eight. He's been living in Millbrook City for the past fourteen months." A pause. "He's a mechanic, apparently. And a rancher."

"A rancher."

"He has experience with cattle operations. According to Ms. Vance, he was — composed when she delivered the news."

Roman turned from the window. "Composed."

"She said he read the documents carefully and finished the repair he was working on before he said anything."

Roman held his Scotch glass and thought about a man who received news of an inheritance worth several million dollars and finished fixing a truck before he acknowledged it. He held this thought for a moment.

"When is the will reading?"

"Monday at eleven. He'll be there."

"Good."

He ended the call and returned to the window and his Scotch and the city below. His half-brother. The word had no texture yet — it was just a word, assembled from two pieces he understood separately and not yet together.

His father had been silent on the subject for twenty-eight years. Not evasive — Gerald Holloway was not, in Roman's experience, evasive about anything. Just silent, the way certain men are silent about certain things, with the specific quality of silence that says: this is not open and I will not negotiate that.

Roman had never pushed. He'd been raised to recognize closed doors and to find other doors, which was a life skill that had served him well in business and poorly in everything that required him to push anyway.

He poured a fourth Scotch. He thought about Monday.

He thought, for the first time in a while, about the ranch — the east pasture, the morning light on it, the quarter horse named Atlas his father had sold when Roman was fourteen. He'd cried about Atlas privately, at fourteen, in the way boys who have been told that crying is a private matter handle the things they feel strongly about.

He'd never told his father that.

Monday, he thought. See what comes.