11. Chapter 11 - Legion
At some point, we fall asleep. After the movie is over, after Savannah insists on cleaning up like a housewife, after the night is gone and the mornin' is comin', Savannah drapes herself over me like she's afraid I'll disappear again.
And I let her. Because if there's one thing I've learned about this world, nothing is permanent.
Somethin' wakes me before the sun comes up. Then the buzzin' of my phone solves the riddle. I lean over tryin' not to wake Savannah, and grab it off the coffee table.
It's four-thirty and the message is from Diesel. I need to talk to you.
I extract myself from Savannah's arms, makin' her groan. But I just kiss her and whisper, "I'll be right back."
I shrug on my jacket and go outside, closing the door behind me as I press Diesel's contact.
He answers first ring and I say, "Someone better be dead for you to be waking me up at four fuckin' thirty, Diesel."
"Yeah," he drawls. "Someone is."
"What the hell are you talkin' about?"
"Havoc."
"Havoc?" For a moment I'm relieved. "Yeah. He is. Been that way for a month now. What's that got to do with this call?”
Diesel lets out a long, slow breath on the other end of the line—the kind that sounds like it was caught somewhere in his chest for a while before he finally let it go.
"I forgot too," he says, his voice rougher than usual.
"I'm not callin' to put that on you. With everything that went down, everything that's still goin' down—I just forgot. We both did."
"I ask again. What the fuck are you talkin' about?"
"June, Legion. We forgot about fuckin' June."
The name lands like a gut punch. The hard kind that makes you immediately feel sick. "Oh, fuck. Did you talk to her?"
"I literally had a dream about her and just woke up sick."
"Yeah," Mama Jo's voice in the background. "And he started yellin' at me for it!"
"Woman," Diesel snaps. "I already fuckin' apologized for that, but it is your fuckin' job to take care of the old ladies!"
"I know," Mama Jo hits back. "I was out there on day three with all the other bitches. It's not my fault you and fuck-face didn't have the decency to go pay your respects! I'm not a damn babysitter!"
While they go back and forth—Diesel barking, Mama Jo giving just as good as she gets—I stop hearing any of it.
Their voices blur into something distant, like radio static coming through thick walls, and everything else collapses in on itself.
The weight of it hits me fast and ugly, the way bad things always do when you've been holding too much else in your hands to see them coming.
June Dun. Havoc's wife. Six kids, a farmstead ten miles out, bake sales, and school drives, and a woman who wore vintage dresses like she was born in a better era than the rest of us.
A woman who baked bread for the club on patch days. Whose loyalty to her man, her family, and this club in that order was absolute.
Every single time she kissed Havoc goodbye and he rode out, she knew—the way all the old ladies know—that this might be the last look of him she ever gets.
He took three bullets for the club. Literally went down shootin'.
And I never went to see her.
Hell, it was my job to tell her what happened. Not Mama Jo's.
"OK," I say into the phone. And whatever insults these two were throwing at each other, they stop and fade to silence. "OK. We go today, Diesel. Me, you, every fuckin' officer. We ride out today and make this right. I'll be back in two hours."
"Got it," he sighs. And the call ends.
I go back inside and Savannah is sittin' up, rubbin' her eyes. "What's goin' on?"
"Nothin'," I lie. It's not her burden to carry. She hasn't asked about the dead bodies, so she has no idea Havoc is dead and I'm not gonna tell her until I have to.
This is not that day.
"I just gotta get back," I say. "Club stuff."
Savannah gets up and grabs her jeans, pulling them up her legs still lookin' sleepy and sexy as fuck.
"Yeah, me too. No need to make Cash crazy.
But I want you to know," she says, zippin' up her jeans as she walks over to me.
She takes my face in her hands and smiles. "This was the best date I ever had."
Then she kisses me real slow and I let myself enjoy it.
Savannah hugs me tight as we ride back to the ranch. The wind is cold. A constant reminder that winter is comin' and this bike will go in the garage until spring.
The long Ashby driveway is somethin' else in the dark.
Every fencepost lined up like soldiers, each one wearin' a little solar light that glows amber against the black.
Hundreds of 'em, maybe thousands, runnin' the whole length of the road in two perfect lines, and off in the distance in every direction.
The kind of pretty only rich people could afford to dream of, let alone install.
Savannah's arms tighten around my ribs as I slow down, her breath warm on my neck. The mansion materializes out of the dark and I pull up to the front walk and kill the engine.
The silence after a motorcycle is always loud. She swings off the bike slow, like she's stalkin' the moment, and stands there in the new cut, and my t-shirt, and her jeans with her hair wrecked and her lips still swollen and she looks like every prayer I never finished.
Savannah leans down. Both hands on my jaw. Kisses me long and deliberate, the kind that ain't goodbye but ain't stay either.
"See ya soon, Demon."
She says it like a fact. Like weather. Like somethin' that just is.
I watch her walk the stepping stones that lead to her log mansion. Watch the door open, the warm light spillin' out around her like it's been waitin'. Watch her step inside without lookin' back, because she doesn't need to.
She already knows I'm watchin'.
The door closes.
I sit there one more second. Two. Then I kick the engine over and the rumble tears through the quiet like a confession nobody asked for, rollin' out across all forty-seven thousand acres of Ashby land as I ride back toward mine.
Ten miles out from the ranch the sky starts bleedin'. That thin line of pale fire along the eastern ridge where the sun's comin' up whether you want it to or not. Montana don't ask permission to be beautiful. It just does it and you either look or you don't.
I look.
The highway is empty and straight and mine. Just me and the rumble and the cold and that bleed of light crawlin' across the badlands like God's openin' an eye.
I check the rearview out of habit. The kind of habit three years in a cell and a lifetime of bein' watched puts in your bones. Nothin' back there but dark road and that growin' light.
Then I check again.
Headlights. Small. Comin' up fast but not too fast. I clock the distance—maybe half a mile back, maybe less. Could be ranchers. Could be truckers runnin' late or early dependin' on which side of a shift they're on.
I check again.
Not headlights. Not the wide-set pairs of trucks or the single beams of cars. These are tight and low and clustered. The way bikes ride when they're ridin' together.
My hands don't tighten on the grips. Not yet. Could be anyone. Maybe some weekend riders catchin' the sunrise 'cause they saw it on some fuckin' Instagram post.
Could be.
I count the lights in the mirror. Eight.
And then… every single one of 'em goes red and blue.
The flash hits the rearview and burns straight through my retinas and into the back of my skull.
State police.
Eight sets of lights cyclin' in perfect sync like a heartbeat made of sirens.
They don't come up behind me.
They surround me.
Two bikes slide past, then cut in front. Clean and practiced. Two more fill the right lane beside me. Two settle in tight on my left flank. Two more behind, close enough I can feel their engines in my spine.
An escort.
Nobody's pullin' me over. Nobody's wavin' me to the shoulder. They're just... there. Movin' with me. Matchin' my speed exactly. The formation tight and symmetrical and professional and patient as a fuckin' funeral procession.
I ease off the throttle. They ease off with me.
It's over.
There was no siege. There was never gonna be a siege. No armored vehicles rollin' up the compound road, no negotiators on bullhorns, no helicopters turnin' the sky into a war zone. None of that.
All they had to do was wait.
Wait for me to stop lookin' over my shoulder.
Wait for me to take my woman on a date, to eat Chinese food on a couch and fall asleep like a man instead of a hunted animal.
Wait for the one night I let my guard down—the one fuckin' night I chose to be a person instead of a president.
And here they are.