Chapter 2
Forty miles might as well be four hundred as the Montana summer sun beats down, hot and merciless. It doesn't care who you are or what you've done—it burns everyone the same.
My jeans hang loose after three years of prison food and too much time to work out, but the white t-shirt sticks to my back, filled out with muscles I never even knew existed before pull-ups became a ritual. My brown biker boots still fit and feel like home, but not meant for walking.
So this walk gets old fast.
The first mile passes in a blur of numb thoughts and burning skin.
By mile three, my throat feels like I swallowed sandpaper.
By mile five, I've gone through two cigarettes, saving the rest. Not much else to ration.
By mile seven, I'm thinking about all the ways to kill a man with a Stetson hat.
The sun climbs higher, past merciful and into cruel.
I pull my shirt off, using it to wipe sweat from my face before tucking it into my back pocket.
The ink across my chest and arms drinks in the heat—the archangel over my heart, the bone court on my left pectoral, the scorch line climbing my ribs.
Prison art layered over older work, a history of bad decisions written in permanent ink.
Three hours in, I figure I've done about ten miles. Only thirty more to go.
I almost laugh at that. Almost.
A distant rumble builds behind me—the first vehicle I've heard since Cash's truck disappeared. I don't bother turning or sticking out my thumb. No one stops for men who look like me.
But the semi slows anyway, air brakes hissing, wheels kicking up dust as the truck slows down next to me, coming to a stop.
The passenger window slides down. I have to take several steps back to see the man inside.
"Where you headed?" he calls out. Older guy, maybe sixty, with a beard gone mostly gray and eyes that have seen enough highway to circle the earth.
"Drybone.”
He nods once. "Hop in."
I hesitate, just for a second. In prison, nothing comes free.
"Ain't got all day," he says, not unkindly.
But even if this old man was a serial killer, I’d still accept the ride. Be stupid not to. So I haul myself up and the AC hits me like salvation, cold enough to raise goosebumps on my sun-baked skin.
"Name's Earl," he says, putting the rig in gear.
"Legion."
He gives me a look. "That what your mama called you?"
"That's what everyone calls me."
Earl nods like that answers more than his question. "Only thing out this way is Whitefall," he says, eyes back on the road. "How many years did ya do?"
"Three."
"Could've been worse, then."
Yup. That’s my philosophy too. It can always get worse.
I turn toward the window, watchin’ the land roll by at sixty-five instead of three miles an hour. Earl doesn't push for conversation, just reaches into a cooler between the seats and hands me a bottle of water without comment.
The cold plastic feels unreal in my hand. I drink half in one go, forcing myself to cap it before I make myself sick.
Then… well, now that I’m not fixated on dyin’ of heatstroke on a barren highway, my mind drifts to Savannah.
Always Savannah.
It’s always been Savannah.
The angel to my demon.
I was fourteen the first time I ever got her all to myself. She was twelve. She found the old grain silo on her pony, I was on my bike. It was a regular place for me. Situated somewhere right along the boundary of ours and theirs.
Which makes us sound like neighbors, and technically, I guess we were. But there were twenty acres of Kane land and about three hundred of Ashby land between the two parcels. Let’s just say, our mailboxes didn’t stand side-by-side on the road.
So I’d found that old silo years before she ever had the pony, or permission, to get herself out exploring that far from home.
It was late summer, the time of year when the heat hangs so thick you can taste it.
My BMX had a rusted frame and brakes that only worked when they felt like it.
The chain slipped if you pedaled too hard, so I learned to ride gentle even when I wanted to tear through the world.
I wasn't looking for anything that day. Just moving along. Getting away from the trailer because my teenage life was a fuckin’ mess. Step-dad, Deacon, was working double shifts and my mama was home, pregnant with my middle sister, Destiny.
The idea of my baby sister, Mercy, wouldn’t appear for nine more years.
It was a weird time. Still an only child, but not really. Deacon didn’t take much notice of me. I’m not sure why. Maybe I’m just uninterestin’. Maybe I was just never worth his time. Whatever it was, he left me alone.
Not my mama, though. He bullied her pretty good and by the time she was pregnant and I was fourteen, I’d had enough. Started mouthin’ back. I wasn’t big, not yet. But Deacon could see the writing on that wall. I would be big. And he didn’t want any part of that.
It wasn’t that I didn’t care about the way he treated my mama, it was just a consequence of her own choices. She was a grown woman, for fuck’s sake. I was a child.
She knew better than anyone that Deacon was an asshole.
But sometimes, when life is cruel, ya just hold your nose and make due. The cold, hard fact is that she needed his money. Asshole, yes. Deadbeat… I mean, I hate to say it. I’m not a Deacon supporter, but the man always kept a job. And nah, he didn’t make good money. But at least he paid the bills.
Anyway. On that day, the day I first had Savannah Ashby’s full attention, I went out to the old silo because there was a creek there that actually ran—trickle of a thing as it was.
There was a pony tied to the fence post when I got there.
Buckskin, with a saddle that look both old and expensive at the same time.
I don’t claim to be a horse expert, but it’s pretty easy to identify the ones that worked hard and slept under the stars and the ones that didn’t.
Lots of kids out here had horses and ponies.
Most of them caked in dirt, even when well cared for.
This little buckskin was shiny and clean.
I don’t remember its name. Savannah had lots of ponies and horses over the years. They came and went, most of them.
But this was the first of them for me. It was just standin’ there, right outside the cutaway door in the old metal silo, grazing on scrub.
Inside the silo, Savannah was singing.
That’s how it all started.
Me and my BMX, her and her pony.
And that voice. Like an angel.
She didn’t hear me, or if she did, it wasn’t enough to make her stop singing.
When I stepped inside the silo the sunlight was streaming through the cracks cuttin’ the dust into thin gold blades and Savannah Ashby was sitting on the upper platform, legs dangling off, her dress ruffles fluttering as she swung her feet.
She was even wearing white. Dress, cowboy boots, and the cowboy hat on her head were all soaking up the dusty sunlight like she was the definition of a good girl.
The song was Ave Maria. I’d heard it before, but never like this. I almost backed out of the silo without sayin’ nothin’ because kids like me didn't breathe the same air as kids like her.
But she’d already seen me. She stopped singing and said, "Ain't it loud in here with nothin' in it?"
Her voice was all Ashby polish wrapped around long vowels. And these sounds hung in the air—or, at the very least, in my mind—like church bells that vibrate long after they’ve been rung.
"Yeah," I told her back, because I couldn't think of anything smarter to say.
We already knew each other, sorta. Same town. Same church, sometimes. But she went to private school a few towns over, only home on weekends. There wasn't a moment in my life when Savannah Ashby wasn't in it.
But it was in a distant way.
Nothing somethin’ this up close and personal. That meetin’ right there was the first time we were ever alone together. The first time we ever talked.
She sang a little more. All church songs. All songs I knew, if only by osmosis.
And I sat on the lower rungs of the ladder, elbows on my knees, sweaty from my ride explorin’. She stayed on the edge of the platform, swinging her feet and twirling a piece of hay between her fingers like it held answers.
We talked about siblings. My new one upcomin’ and her older brothers. She had three—of course, I knew this. Everyone knows the Ashby brothers. Cash, Wyatt, and Colt in descending order.
We talked about her being watched by her mother’s camera lens. I understood—fuckin Eleanor watched me too. But I didn’t say nothin’ about that to Savannah. I could relate though, that was the important part.
We talked about growin’ up in a town where everyone knew your name.
Hers, and how she would elevate it.
Mine, and how I was gonna ruin it.
I knew Eleanor much better than I knew Savannah back then. Eleanor Ashby was a very famous photographer and the Little Ashby Princess was the subject of every single published photo.
Every single bit of Savannah’s life was online. I didn’t look at it back then. I didn’t have a phone to check socials. Didn’t want a phone to check socials. Still don’t have any fuckin’ socials.
But other kids did. So I’d seen my share of those photos.
Eleanor didn’t put me online. She said I was somethin’ else. Photogenic. The most beautiful child she'd ever seen, is what she really told me—hundreds of times.
But Legion Kane was a story nobody really wanted to hear about.
I was too poor to put on a magazine cover.
It was never my face online—just Savannah's.
Every day, three, four, five, six times a day Eleanor posted a picture or two of her perfect little princess.
She took pictures of me everywhere as well. Riding my bike, running around the county fair, coming out of school. There isn't a place within fifty miles of Drybone, Montana that Eleanor Ashby didn't find me and take a fuckin’ picture.