Day Six — The Draw

In the heart of the arena, where smoke curled like restless spirits and fanfare rattled through the rafters, the final riders advanced one by one. Each man reached into a velvet-blue sack, fishing for a token carved from wood—numbers that weren’t mere numbers at all, but sentences handed down like fate.

Ryder Hayes, billionaire in the boardroom and cowboy in the dirt, stepped forward. The weight of two decades in New York boardrooms hadn’t dulled the tremor in his ...