Total pages in book: 38
Estimated words: 35443 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 177(@200wpm)___ 142(@250wpm)___ 118(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 35443 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 177(@200wpm)___ 142(@250wpm)___ 118(@300wpm)
The clock says nine-thirty.
Two and a half hours to midnight.
I look around at the room—the noise and the pour and the bodies movin' the way bodies move when they finally remember they're still alive—and none of it touches me. None of it gets in. There's a wall between me and all of it now and it is one word tall and two letters wide.
Enough time to shower again.
Enough time to get where I need to be.
With her.
CHAPTER 4
I walk Cassia slow through the dry creek bed, which is just dust and smooth stone this time of year, cracked earth that used to carry water. Cassia picks her way through it with the kind of careful, practiced grace that makes me feel like I am not actually falling apart inside.
She's steady when I'm not. She has always been steady when I'm not. Her ears flick forward and then back, readin' the wind, and I let myself follow her attention out across the valley toward the silo, which sits on the horizon the way it always has—patient, condemned, and entirely unbothered by the fact that I am not sure he'll be there this time.
Slow goin' doesn't matter because I'm early. I couldn't stand it anymore—couldn't stand bein' inside that house one more minute, surrounded by all that expensive silence, all that curated stillness, every room in it arranged like a mood board for a life I'm no longer sure I'm livin'.
I feel like I'm losin' my mind, is the thing. And the trouble with losin' your mind inside a house that beautiful is that nobody notices, because from the outside everything looks exactly right.
When I tried to leave that day—when every instinct I have pointed at the front gate and said go—Cash stepped in front of me and said something that stopped me cold.
He said, "Savannah, when your man, your outlaw biker boyfriend, tells your older brother to keep you away from him—don't you think he's got a reason for that?"
And the infuriating thing is, he's right.
I hated that he was right. I hated that Cash Ashby of all people was the one talkin' sense into me.
Cash, who has never once in his life been on Legion's side.
And yet there he was, deliverin' Legion's own message back to me with that flat, deliberate tone he uses when he's already won and he knows it.
Because Legion did say that. He did. And he hates Cash with the bone-deep contempt of a man who has spent twenty years watchin' another man be given everything he had to bleed for.
But even so, he looked at my brother and said something to the effect of do your fuckin' job, bro. Be the big brother.
He handed Cash the one role Cash was born for and told him to use it on me.
Which means he knew I'd come after him.
Which means he planned to keep me away.
"Somethin's goin' on, Savannah," Cash said the next day. "Somethin' happened. Did you even see him?"
I did. I saw every inch of him—the blood-red dirt ground into the creases of his knuckles, packed under his nails, streaked across his forearms like warpaint that hadn't had time to dry.
I know why he looked that way because he told me.
He told me everything down in the archives.
It's just… I don't care.
And that is probably a character flaw I should examine at some point. I am aware of that.
But when I told my four-point-two million followers that there is no time, no distance, no consequence formidable enough to make me stop loving him—I meant it.
I was not performin'.
I was not curating. That was the truest thing I've ever said, and I said it to four million strangers because I couldn't say it to him.
I don't care how many outlaw bikers he kills.
I mean, yes. I do have a limit. I am not a sociopath.
I do care… if the people are innocent.
That's the line. Legion doesn't kill innocent people, and I know that the way I know which pastures flood first after a hard rain and which ones hold.
These men were traitors to the club, which in the Badlands MC is not a philosophical designation—it is a death sentence they wrote for themselves the moment they broke the oath.
They do not count.
They simply don't.
The silo materializes out of the dark the way it always does—sudden, patient, like it's been standin' there holdin' its breath the whole time I was walkin' toward it. My wandering mind pulls back enough to take it in properly.
When I look at this silo I see innocence, which is a strange and maybe dishonest thing to say about a place where we have done profoundly uninnocent things together, and yet the feeling persists regardless of the evidence.
It is the major landmark of my childhood in the same way other girls had their grandmother's kitchen or their church pew—a fixed point the heart orients around when everything else is spinning.