Chapter 7
Angels sound like salvation you don't deserve.
Demons feel like the damnation you've earned.
Savannah tastes like both.
Her body arches beneath me, lips parted, eyes half-closed. The fairy lights I strung up this afternoon catch in her hair, making her glow while she falls apart. I hold back, grinding my teeth against the need to follow her over. Not yet. I wanna watch her first.
Wanna see if she still looks the same when she comes. If she still whispers my name like it's something holy instead of the curse it is.
She does.
Three years locked away, and her body still remembers mine. Still responds to my fingers, my mouth, my cock like we were made to fit together. Like we didn't spend a thousand nights apart.
I pull out and she reaches for me, grabbing at my cock to put it back inside her. But I shake my head. “I’m gonna go slow now. I needed to be inside you, but now I want to go slow.
I trace my fingertips over her nipples, feeling them harden under my touch. Trail down her ribs, counting each one. She's thinner than before. Sharper. Like prison carved parts of her away too.
My hand slides over her hip, stopping at the small tattoo there. Seven words inked into her skin:
A place where damnation and light begin.
The last line of a poem I wrote her when we were sixteen. When I was still stupid enough to believe words could capture what we were to each other. Because that’s where we live. That’s where we’ve always lived. In some unholy purgatory where love is evil.
"You kept it," I murmur, running my thumb over the ink.
She nods, breath still coming fast. "It's the only part of you they can’t ever take from me."
I don't tell her I recited that poem every night in my cell. Line by line. Word by word. Like a prayer or a curse or both.
I slide down her body, spreading her thighs. She's wet and swollen, and when I put my mouth on her, she makes a sound that would bring angels to their knees.
I work her with my tongue, with my fingers, until she's shaking again. Until she's gripping my hair so hard it hurts. Until she's coming against my mouth, my name a broken plea on her lips.
This is what we are. What we've always been. Fire and ruin. Grace and sin. Forbidden longings burning from within.
I kiss my way back up her body, tasting salt and sweetness. When I reach her mouth, I kiss her deep, letting her taste herself on my tongue.
"Turn over," I tell her, voice rough with need.
She doesn't hesitate. Doesn't question. Just rolls onto her stomach, face pressed into the blankets, ass raised slightly. Waiting.
I spread her legs wider, positioning myself between them. Run my hands over the curve of her spine, the swell of her ass. She shivers under my touch.
"Look at me," I say, and she turns her head, eyes meeting mine over her shoulder.
I push into her slow, watching her face as I fill her. The way her lips part. The way her eyes flutter closed. The way she bites down on her bottom lip to keep from crying out.
"Don't," I growl, reaching around to grip her jaw. "I wanna hear you."
She nods, and when I thrust deeper, she moans my name. Loud enough to echo off the silo walls. Loud enough for God himself to hear.
I fuck her hard and deep, one hand gripping her hip, the other tangled in her hair. Each thrust pushes us both closer to the edge. Each sound she makes strips away another layer of prison-hardened skin.
"Mine," I mutter against her shoulder, teeth grazing the soft flesh there. "Always been mine."
"Yes," she gasps, pushing back against me. "Yours."
I believe her. Even though she wears another man's ring—it's missing now, but the shadow of it remains, burned into her skin like a brand on a bull.
Even though she built a life without me. In this moment, with my cock buried inside her and her body trembling beneath mine, she's mine.
This wasteland keeps their secret, dark and grim.
When I feel her tightening around me again, I let go. Let the heat and pressure build until there's nothing left but release. I come inside her with a groan that starts somewhere in my chest, emptying myself into the only woman who's ever seen past the ink, and the scars, and the rage.
A place where damnation and light begin.
I don't pull out right away. Just collapse on top of her, careful to keep most of my weight on my forearms. Her skin is slick with sweat, her heart hammering against her ribs. I press my lips to the back of her neck, tasting salt.
"I'm gonna ruin you," I whisper, and it's not a threat.
It's a warning. A promise. A confession.
She reaches back, fingers finding mine, squeezing tight. "I've been waiting three years to be ruined."
I roll onto my back, pulling Savannah against me. Her skin sticks to mine, sweat cooling between us. The silo creaks and groans—metal shifting in the restless prairie wind.
Or maybe it's ghosts. Same damn thing in Montana. The dead don't rest here; they just find different ways to haunt you.
"You're quiet," she whispers, fingers tracing the new scars on my chest. Prison souvenirs. Her touch is feather-light, as if she's reading braille, trying to decipher the story written in my skin.
I don't answer. Nothing to say that doesn't taste like regrets. My words turn to dust before they reach my tongue.
This was never gonna work.
Not then. Not now. Not ever.
Has nothing to do with how my heart pounds like a war drum when she's near or how my hands still remember every curve of her body.
Has everything to do with blood, and dirt, and concrete. The walls between our worlds built higher than any prison fence I could ever climb.
She's Savannah fucking Ashby. Instagram royalty. Montana aristocracy. Woman with a future bright enough to blind.
I'm the man whose name means "many."
Many demons.
Many sins.
Many scars.
Many reasons this ends bloody.
Just another Kane marked for destruction, carrying curses instead of promises.
The fairy lights I hung earlier flicker against the metal walls, casting honey-gold shadows across her bare shoulders. Three hours of work for this moment. This beautiful lie. This last time.
Climbing rickety ladders, stringing delicate bulbs with calloused hands that have broken men's jaws. Playing at tenderness when we both know what I am.
"What are you thinking about?" she asks, voice heavy with sleep, eyelids fluttering.
Always could fall asleep anywhere. In this rusted silo.
In my beat-up truck. Against my shoulder while I drove her home before dawn, back when we were kids playing at rebellion, stealing moments between sunset and sunrise, thinking we were invincible.
I never sleep when she's with me. Too busy memorizing. Cataloging. Storing up for the winter that's always coming. The curve of her hip. The freckle behind her ear. The way her breath catches when I touch her just right.
It’s all ammunition against loneliness.
"You're allowed to marry him," I say, the words scraping my throat raw, tasting of surrender.
She laughs, soft and sleepy against my chest. Doesn't even open her eyes, just nuzzles closer like a cat seeking warmth. "Since when do I need your permission, Legion?"
Since always. She knows it. I know it. The dirt knows it. The ghosts in this silo know it. The scars on my knuckles spelling my sister's name know it.
We all know it.
"I mean it," I say, voice harder now. "You should marry him. White House Marcus with his clean hands and Georgetown degree."
Now she looks up, those blue eyes narrowing, sleep vanishing like mist under a harsh sun. "What are you talking about?"
I sit up, dislodging her from my chest, reaching for my jeans crumpled on the floor. My shirt. My boots. All the armor I dropped when she rode in on her hundred-thousand-dollar horse, hair wild, eyes wilder. "You need to get back before they miss you. Before someone comes looking."
"Legion—" My name on her lips still sounds like prayer, even after everything.
"They're gonna notice." I pull my shirt over my head, covering the ink, the scars, the places her fingers just touched. "The Little Ashby Princess can't disappear at her own engagement party. Not with half the state's political machine watching."
She sits up, blanket clutched to her chest like virtue she abandoned hours ago. "Don't call me that."
I don't answer. Just finish lacing my boots with quick, efficient movements. Stand up. Offer her my hand. "You need to go."
For a second, she doesn't move. Just stares at me, something breaking behind those eyes—oceans freezing over in real time. Then she takes my hand, lets me pull her to her feet, our bodies close enough that I can feel her heart hammering against mine.
She dresses silently, efficiently. No more words between us. Just the sound of fabric against skin. The rustle of her fixing her hair, erasing the evidence of my fingers tangled in golden strands.
The heartbreak isn't that she's leaving. It's that she believes me when I push her away - as if there was ever a universe where I didn't want her to stay, as if I could ever mean the words that cut between us like barbed wire.
I knew this day was coming. Even before prison swallowed three years of my life. Even before I let her go the first time. Some things are written in blood, not ink. Some fates are carved in bone before you're born.
"That worlds will shake if they should truly touch," I say, quoting the poem she tattooed on her ribs.
She finishes straightening her dress, smoothing expensive fabric over hips I just held, then steps close. Places her hands on my face, thumbs brushing over stubble. Kisses me once, soft and final, tasting of goodbye and broken promises.
"It has only ever been you," she whispers against my mouth, breath mingling with mine one last time.
Then she's gone, stepping out of the silo into the moonlight, whistling for her horse with two fingers between perfect lips. I watch through the doorway as she mounts up, bareback and barefoot, and rides away across the silver-washed prairie.
Back to her mansion.
Her fiancé.
Her life.
Her destiny that never included a man named Legion.
I stand in the empty silo, fairy lights might as well be prison bars. The ghost of her perfume lingers, mixing with dust and memory.
This is the end. I swear it.
It's over.
I just needed to see her one last time.
And now I'll set her free.