The Honey Trap
Copyright© 2026 by Komiko Yakamura
Chapter 1
The lawyer drove four hours from Billings to deliver thirty minutes of bad news.
David Branson sat across from him at the kitchen table his grandfather had built from a single ponderosa pine, listening to Ray Cutler explain what his father had left him. The ranch was his. The water rights were his. The $340,000 note against the grazing lease was also his, due in eighteen months, and the First Bank of Hardin was not sentimental about family history.
“Your father refinanced in 2019,” Cutler said. “The drought years.”
“I know about the drought years.”
“Then you know the eastern pasture produced at about sixty percent.”
“I know that too.”
Cutler closed the folder. He was a careful man who had learned not to push the Bransons. “There’s the matter of the Crow agreement.”
David looked out the window. The Beartooth range sat white and permanent on the horizon, the same view his grandfather had looked at, his father after him. The creek that ran off the eastern slope crossed Branson land for eleven miles before it reached the reservation boundary. His father had charged the Crow for that water since 2015. Not much. Enough to make a point.
“What agreement,” David said.
“Exactly,” Cutler said.
His father had let the informal arrangement his grandfather maintained lapse and replaced it with an invoice. Twenty-two hundred dollars a month, which the tribe paid because they had no legal alternative and no money to fight it in court. Robert Branson had called it fair market rate. David had called it something else, the one time they’d argued about it, and his father had told him to mind his own business until it was his business.
It was his business now.
He walked Cutler to his car and stood in the yard after the dust settled. The ranch ran to twelve thousand acres, most of it good grass, some of it exceptional. His father had worked it hard and loved it in the particular way of men who express love through ownership. David had grown up here knowing every fence line and waterhole, had left for six years, had come back because his mother got sick and then stayed because the land got into you whether you wanted it to or not.
To read the complete story you need to be logged in:
Log In or
Register for a Free account
(Why register?)
* Allows you 3 stories to read in 24 hours.