Chapter 2 #2
Even came to the trailer once. On a pretense, of course. My mama never knew about the photos. Deacon wasn't my daddy, so whether he knew or not, no one cared.
So I knew the Ashbys the way other folks around here know them—from afar.
But also, from the other end of Eleanor's camera lens.
And I knew Savannah in that first way as well.
But on this day, I knew her in a different way.
I had her all to myself that day.
And that's where it all started.
Innocently, of course. It would be a year before we held hands. Two before I kissed her. And three years, almost to the day, before we made it all official by losing our virginity together. I was seventeen, she was fifteen, and it was perfect.
We never dated.
Nah. Just hookups.
That's all I was to them—the Ashbys. Something to be seen through a lens. Something to be held at a distance.
The truck hits a pothole, jolting me back to the here and now. The memory fades, but the ache doesn't.
I stare out the window, watching Montana blur past. I was a different person back then. We both were. Before the ink on my skin, before the blood on my hands, before prison walls and engagement rings.
But the relationship stuck, that’s for sure.
The next week after that first meetin’, I gave Savannah a pocketknife with my initials scratched off. She let me brush her pony. We didn't tell anyone. We didn't have to.
We just kept meeting—no lies, no pressure. No one taking pictures.
Just two kids sitting in a silo where the silence wasn't empty, it was safe.
Now, nothing's safe.
Not the memories or my future.
Earl drops me at the crossroads with a friendly honk, dust billowing behind his eighteen wheels as he pulls away. I tip an imaginary hat at his taillights and continue my walk.
The sun's still high enough to burn, but I can see the shade of the cottonwoods ahead where the old riverbed cuts between Kane scrub and Ashby wealth. I turn toward it like a man following his religion.
Two miles to my trailer. Two miles of memory and dust.
The dry riverbed is a wound in the earth that only bleeds water three months a year.
Spring makes it something else entirely—rushing snowmelt carving through soft banks, wildflowers nodding heavy on the edges.
Water so cold it burns your feet when you wade in.
Used to dare Destiny to cross it during the flood season, watching her balance on slippery rocks while I pretended not to be ready to dive in after her.
I step down the crumbling bank, boots sliding in loose dirt.
The cottonwoods stand like sentinels on both sides, their leaves whispering secrets above me.
They've been here longer than any Ashby, longer than any Kane.
Their roots drink deep from water that's still there, hidden under the baked clay and stones.
This place was everything once. Territory line. Playground. Baptism pool—figuratively, of course.
I kick at a smooth river stone, watch it skitter across the cracked earth. Used to skip these across rushing water, teaching Mercy how to count the bounces. Five was our record. Five perfect skips before the current took it.
Cash's words crawl through my head like wasps looking for somewhere soft to sting. "She's changed. You're just a phase she outgrew." His face when he said it—half-smirk, half-warning. Like he was doin’ me a favor by cutting me loose before I embarrassed myself.
The staged photograph burns behind my eyes. Savannah with her perfect smile, leaning into that man with his politician's jawline and manicured hands.
I wonder if he knows how she tastes after swimming in this riverbed. If he's ever seen her with mud up to her knees and her hair wild in the wind. If he knows she can sing "Ave Maria" so sweet it makes your chest ache.
I doubt it. Men like him don't love women—they acquire them.
The engagement party is nothing but a moment to be curated.
But I get it. When Eleanor died, she left everything to Savannah. Out of guilt, maybe. For takin’ all those pictures and erasing any hope of Savannah ever having a private life. But it came with conditions.
“It says I have to marry respectable.”
“What the hell does that mean?” I understood what it meant, I just wanted to hear her say it.
“It means I can’t marry you, Legion. Not if I want the Estate to exist.”
I can’t marry you, Legion.
As if this was something we had discussed.
It wasn’t. We never dated. We fucked. A lot, some years. A lot less, some others.
Never, not for a single fuckin’ second, did I ever think I would marry Savannah Ashby.
So… I guess that’s where Marcus Jr whatever comes in.
Respectable.
Engagement party.
Everyone in Drybone will be there, dressed in their Sunday best, drinking champagne they can't afford, watching the Ashby princess fulfill the requirements in Eleanor's will. Marry rich. Marry respectable. Marry anyone but the trash from across the dry riverbed.
Savannah Ashby’s life has been choreographed from start to finish, courtesy of Eleanor. And Eleanor knew what I meant to Savannah. How much Savannah meant to me.
And still, she spelled it out.
She spelled it out.
What the actual fuck.
I’m not even sure I can explain what it feels like when a woman you kinda, sorta, liked and trusted, threatens her daughter with generational poverty if she so much as thinks about marrying my biker ass.
Engagement party.
What a fuckin’ joke.
I reach the middle of the riverbed and stop, looking up at the blue slice of sky between cottonwood branches.
On my right, twenty acres of Kane scrubland with a rusted trailer sinking into dust. On my left, the endless green pastures of the Ashby Ranch, where sprinklers run even in drought years, courtesy of artesian wells.
Water rights are like magic around here.
So. I guess Savannah made her choice. Got the ring to prove it.
Never mind that I know her better than I know the ink on my skin. That I've tasted the salt on her cheeks when she cries. That I've heard confessions she'd never tell a priest. That I've held her while she shook with rage at her mother's cameras, and fucked her softly under the starlight.
Never mind all that, Legion.
She’s moved on…
Cash can warn me all he wants. That Marcus guy can buy her diamonds big as her knuckles.
But I'm willing to bet my last twenty-seven dollars that if I show up at that engagement party, Savannah won't turn me away. The girl who met me in an abandoned grain silo for six years is still in there somewhere, behind the perfect smile and designer dress.
And I'm not quite ready to give her up.
Because if there's one thing I've learned while inside, it’s this: You get one shot in this life.
And that one shot translates to one precious, fleeting fucking moment when everything hangs in the balance—when the scales could tip either way and your whole future stretches out before you like a highway with two very different destinations.
One shot.
Don’t miss.
Because if you miss it, if you hesitate for even a heartbeat too long, that road disappears forever, leaving nothing but dust and regret where the possibility once lived.
One shot.
I don't miss.