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)
Which is the thing I find myself fixating on, because my mind is doing what it always does when the emotional load exceeds its carrying capacity—it catalogs. It observes. It retreats into architectural criticism as a coping mechanism.
Pocket doors. In a log home. In Prairie County, Montana. With the elk-antler chandelier and the hand-hewn stone hearth and the sixteen-foot ceilings and the whole curated mythology of rugged Western living, and yet here we are, pulling Victorian pocket doors closed like this is a drawing room in a Brontë novel and I have just swooned over Mr. Rochester's horse.
What is wrong with my mind?
Your mind, Savannah? Try your whole fuckin' life.
"Drink," Cash says, bringing the glass to my lips.
I do drink. It's good too. So I gulp it. Then feel stupid. Again.
Cash takes the glass, sets it down, and looks me in the eyes. "What the hell just happened?"
I want to tell him. I really do. I want him to know everything about Legion and me, and the clubhouse—which he already knows, actually, because that bitch Brandy—the dead bitch Brandy because Legion shot her—sold my clubhouse life to someone and made it all public.
But only God understands that moment. Cash doesn't. Can't. And it's not even about the clubhouse or the Badlands, it's about Legion, and Mother, and the book, and… everything.
Murder.
Mass burial.
And honestly, I don't even care about that.
A massacre at an outlaw biker clubhouse is the least of my concerns right now because… everything is fucked.
And I think Cash would actually understand—that's the part that makes this so unbearable. He gets it. This life, this land, this particular brand of Montana loneliness that looks like legacy from the outside and feels like a slow drowning from the inside.
No, he wasn't used the way I was—nobody aimed a camera at Cash's childhood and monetized every skinned knee and first frost and awkward-teeth phase for eight million strangers—but he was here.
He stayed. And he's been holdin' things together with nothing but calloused hands and quiet resolve for years now, with absolutely no help from me, or Wyatt, or Colt.
His careless, distracted, self-involved siblings who don't go to cattle auctions because they couldn't pick a Wagyu-Angus hybrid out of a lineup if their inheritance depended on it. Don't care to learn, either. Don't care that someone has to.
And I'm ramblin', even inside my own head, and the point is, I want him to understand. I want Cash to understand the catastrophe that just unfolded out at Badlands.
The layers of it, the way it isn't just blood, and bodies, and federal implications but is also somehow, ironically, about me and a leather-bound book, and a dead woman's obsession, and seventeen years of a secret so sacred I built a whole life on top of it to keep it buried.
But the thought of findin' the correct words—the right words, the precise and adequate words—for how much the earth just shifted beneath our feet is… impossible.
If telepathy were a real and available thing, I am absolutely certain this moment would go considerably better for everyone involved.
But it's not so…
I just…
Cry.
Cash lets me cry.
He takes himself over to the wingback leather chair by the dark window and sits down heavy, one ankle propped up on one knee, the way men do when they're trying to look unbothered and failing just slightly.
My eyes follow him across the room, watchin' him, but he's not looking at me. He's staring at the cold fireplace. The massive stone thing that climbs twenty feet up to the beamed ceiling, hand-hewn and dark with years of smoke and silence, the kind of fireplace that looks like it was built to outlast everyone who ever stood in front of it.
His foot jiggles a little.
My tears ride down my cheeks slow and deliberate, the way grief moves when it's finally stopped pretending it's something else, and I let them, because this is a pity party and I haven't thrown one of those ever—not even once—mostly out of this deep-trained fear that Eleanor would materialize from somewhere with her Nikon and her eye for the golden ratio and catch me mid-sob, beautiful in my ruin, caption already composed: Even a princess has a bad day. #Authentic #RanchLife #Blessed.
She would have made it gorgeous. That's the worst part.
But I need this pity party. I need it the way you need the last word in an argument you already lost—desperately, uselessly, with your whole chest. And since Eleanor isn't here to stage it and charge brands for the placement, I'm gonna throw it exactly the way I want.
I need it to come with expensive decorations—orchids and trailing ivy and those towering candelabras that drip wax like they're mournin' something too—and a massive gift table stacked floor to ceiling with every apology I was never offered, and the kind of luxe grab bags that guests take home heavy and feel vaguely guilty about.