Chapter 3
I move through the clubhouse like I'm already dead. Eyes slide past me, conversations die, and I keep walking. No one speaks. No one touches.
Outside, the sun cuts low across the compound. The whole world laid bare from this vantage point—the Yellowstone River winding like an artery through the valley floor, Terry, Montana, the closest town, is a sad cluster of buildings looking like toys someone forgot to put away.
The Terry Badlands unfurl beyond like a violent dream, their twisted rock spires and clay formations rising from the earth like ancient bones.
Wind and water have carved this landscape into something unnatural—ridges sharp as knife wounds, valleys deep as regrets, colors bleeding from rust-red to bone-white under the merciless sun.
A terrain that's been tortured by time and elements, sculpted by pain into something both beautiful and wrong.
Something deep in my chest cavity vibrates in recognition, like my body knows its twin when it sees it. This land and me, we're made of the same broken stuff.
And this high up, I can see everything that matters and nothing I need.
I keep walking. My boots drag gravel with each step. The compound spreads around me—cinderblock buildings, chain-link fences topped with razor wire, outbuildings that started as storage and became whatever was needed. Ratchet's garage. The armory. The laundry room.
I pass the laundry building and notice a stack of spiral notebooks on the front desk. Small ones, pocket-sized. The kind you can hide. The kind that holds secrets.
I take one. And a pen. Both disappear into my pocket.
The brand on my chest throbs with each heartbeat. Infection or belonging, I can't tell the difference anymore.
Mercy. I need to find Mercy.
The guilt sits like lead in my stomach. I should have gone to her first after the vote. Before the drinks, and the dancing, and the tattooing. Before Colt. Before Destiny. Before the gun and the baby and the choice I had to make for the sake of the club, for Savannah, for my sanity...
I head toward the playground—a sad collection of rusted equipment where clubhouse kids sometimes hang out. It's where Mercy's been spending her days while I've been busy trying to keep us all alive.
She's there. But she's not alone.
Two boys. Twelve, maybe thirteen. Circling her like they're playing some game, but I know that look. I wore that look once, watching Savannah from across the church playground when we were kids. Before I knew what hunger was.
These boys are too young to understand the thing growing in them. But I'm not.
Fury bubbles up from somewhere deep and dark. Three days. I looked away for three fucking days, and already they're circling her. The world doesn't wait. It doesn't forgive. It doesn't give little girls time to be little girls.
Destiny's face flashes in my mind. Fourteen and nothing but hard edges remaining of her childhood. Seventeen and pregnant. Eighteen and someone else's.
I failed her. I let her slip through my fingers while I was inside, paying for crimes that weren't mine, thinking I was protecting her by staying silent.
And now she's gone. With a baby that has Ashby eyes.
Never again.
I make a vow right there, standing in the dirt with the sun at my back and the taste of metal in my mouth. Mercy will not suffer the same fate. She will not be another Kane girl broken by men who take what isn't theirs to take.
I will burn this whole fucking world to the ground before I let that happen.
I whistle, sharp and low.
Mercy's head snaps up. She sees me. She knows that sound.
I get a hold of my anger before she reaches me, forcing a smile. Not my real one—the one that says I'm fine when I'm not. The one that doesn't scare children.
She smiles back, but it's thin. Careful. Too much like mine.
"Whacha doin'?" I ask. Trying to be casual.
Mercy narrows her eyes. "Talkin'. Why?"
The boys hover at the edge of the playground, uncertain now that I'm here.
"This is not a place for girls."
"You already told me that. And then you disappeared for three days."
Her words land. Three days. Seventy-two hours of her waiting, wondering if I was coming back. Just like before. Just like always.
"I didn't disappear—I..." But I don't wanna tell her what happened. I don't wanna tell her that Destiny was here, either. That the baby was born. That her name is Marigold. That I love that name and I love my sisters too.
But I failed them both. One's gone. One's standing in front of me with eyes too old for her face.
"You what?" she pushes, and there's an edge to her voice that I’m not used to. "You got caught with Savannah." She crosses her arms over her chest. "I already know."
I crouch down to her level, my knees cracking. My ribs scream where Cash's boot connected. "It's complicated, Mercy."
"Everything with you is complicated, Legion." She kicks at the dirt as she sneers my name, sending a cloud of dust over my boots. "Those boys said their dads are mad at you. They said you brought trouble here."
I glance at the boys, who are pretending not to listen while obviously straining to hear every word. One belongs to Roach, I think. The other might be Ledger's nephew.
"Those boys need to mind their own business," I say, loud enough for them to hear.
"Is she your girlfriend now?" Mercy asks, her voice small. "She got a tattoo of your name on her wrist. Demon. Not Legion, Demon."
I don't know how to answer that. Savannah is... everything.
And nothing I can explain to a nine-year-old.
"She's important to me," I say finally. "And she's staying with us for a while."
"In our house?"
"No. Here. At the clubhouse."
Mercy's face clouds. "So we're staying here too?"
I wanna say no. I wanna say, well… just no. But there's nothing I can do right now. Half a night of refuge isn't enough time to burn off the heat of what happened.
"Yeah," I breathe. "We're staying. But Mercy, you cannot hang around those boys. They're too…" Much like me, I don’t say… "They're too…"
Mercy scoffs. "I'm not Destiny."
"No," I agree. Unsure of exactly what she means by that. I don't even wanna think about what she might mean by that. Nine-year-old girls should not compare themselves to their knocked-up teenage sisters and decide to be the opposite.
I blow out a breath. "Can you just trust me? I mean, I get it. There's really no kids here. They're probably all you've got. But you can't have them, Mercy. Ya just can't."
Her mouth is a flat line of anger. "Then who the hell am I supposed to talk to."
I point at her for the swearing. "Me. You talk to me. "
"You're busy. And don't say Savannah. She's busy too.
I'm not even allowed to go inside the clubhouse no more.
If I do, then Mama Jo is gonna take away 'my privileges'.
" She makes little air quotes for those last two words.
"Whatever the hell that means, because from the way I see it, the hot-dog dinners and tortilla-and-beans breakfast aren't what I'd call a privilege. "
My laugh is so unexpected, it comes out loud. "No. I guess they aren't. But… what Mama Jo is really saying—"
"Don't over-explain things to me, Legion. I know what she's saying. This isn't a place for girls. But I'm a girl. So what am I supposed to do?"
It's a good question. I grab her by the shirt and pull her along after me.
She balks, but I don't let go. I take her over to the laundry room where someone's woman is apparently in charge.
"Hi," I say. Flashin’ her a charming smile. "I'm Legion, I don't think we've met."
She smiles back. I have that effect on people—especially women. "I'm Giselle."
"Are you…"
"No. I'm not a hang-around. I'm Dusty's regular girl."
I don't even know who Dusty is. One of the prospects, probably. But it doesn't matter. If she's not a whore, I'm good. "This is my sister, Mercy. She needs a job."
Giselle, being a clubhouse woman, gets my meaning. She studies Mercy, pretendin’ to look her over with a critical eye. "Well," Giselle says. "I don't hire just any old girl for the laundry. It's a good job."
Mercy makes a face, and with it comes another scoff. "What's so special about laundry?"
"It's air conditioned," Giselle says smoothly. "And no one comes out here. You know what I do all day, Mercy?"
"Laundry?"
"Well, of course, I do laundry. If I didn't, people would complain and I wouldn't have this cool job no more. But that's easy. What I really do is listen to audiobooks."
"Audiobooks?" Mercy is interested in this perk. "What kind of audiobooks."
Please, I pray. Please do not say dark romance. Please, please—
"Mysteries."
"Thank fuck," I blurt.
"Yeah," Giselle continues. "And, if I let you work here in my AC with my cool audiobooks going all day, that would be a privilege."
Mercy side eyes me.
I shake my head and put up my hands. "I did not tell her to say that."
"Hundreds of girls have asked to work with me in the laundry, Mercy. I've turned them all away because they didn't wanna work. They just wanted my AC and audiobooks. So…"
"I'd work," Mercy says. "Laundry's easy. I've been doing my own laundry since I was six."
Six. Three years. The guilt never stops.
"Well." Giselle looks at me. "Can you confirm this, Legion?"
"I can. She's real good at laundry."
Giselle folds her arms. "OK. But you're on probation. One week. If I catch you being lazy, I'll have to fire you."
Mercy lets out a long breath, steals a look back over her shoulder at the boys—still hovering, those sons-of-fuckin'-bitches—and relents. "I'll work. I like AC. And I've never listened to an audiobook."
Giselle guides her inside, talkin’ about whatever the hell is on the audiobook menu today. When she takes one final look over her shoulder at me, I mouth the words, “Thank you.” She gives me a small nod, then turns her attention back to her mini-employee.
Satisfied, I cross the compound. Headin’ north where the buildings thin out and the scrub takes over.
The old hunting blind sits crooked on stilts against the skyline—abandoned since they built the new watchtower.
Back when I first started running with Badlands, I'd come out here when the noise got to be too much.
When I needed to breathe without someone watching.
The ladder creaks under my weight, but the trap door swings open easy with a push of my palm, and I haul myself into the blind.
Someone's been here. Not recently, but enough to leave traces. Blankets folded in the corner. A camp stove, tarnished from weather. Coffee pot. Can of off-brand coffee. Two tin cups.
I stand in the center, suddenly feelin’ like I'm trespassing in someone else's sanctuary. The thought twists something in my chest.
That's the thing no one tells you about gettin' out.
Life goes on without you. The world doesn't pause while you're payin' your debt.
For three years I sat inside Whitefall, fightin' through each day, taking my beatings, earning my place in the hierarchy.
Six days in the Pit taught me more about silence than the twenty-nine years that came before it.
And all that time, what did I think about? Myself. Like the fucking universe orbited around Legion Kane and his pain. Like my absence left a hole nobody could fill.
But the truth is, everyone's just tryin’ to survive. Even the wolves. Even the men who think they're kings. We're all just animals scratchin’ for territory, for food, for somewhere safe to lick our wounds.
Very little inside Badlands counts as private property. The office belongs to Brick. Sacred ground. Everything else is communal—claimed by whoever needs it most in the moment.
Right now, that's me.
I pick up one of the blankets and drop it down next to the wall. Then I lower myself to the floor, back against the particle board wall where I can see both the compound and the distant hills, and pull out the little spiral notebook and the pen.
For a moment, I'm back in Whitefall. Back in my cell with nothing but concrete walls and these little spiral notebooks I'd buy from commissary.
Writing was something I did on the inside, and I did it on the regular.
So regular, I had dozens of these little fucking spiral notebooks by the time it was all said and done.
I filled every single one of them up—tiny, cramped writing covering every inch of paper.
The guards would take them during contraband checks sometimes. But they never gave them back. Probably sold them to the feds thinking I was stupid enough to write down club business or confessions.
But there was never anything about Badlands in there. Nothing about deals, or names, or territory.
Just... thoughts. Questions. The kind of shit that keeps you awake when you're alone with nothing but your heartbeat for company.
I didn't write about me. Didn't write about my time. Didn't write about the other guys, or crime.
I wrote about life, and the lessons learned. Just tryin’ to make sense of why this place even exists.
Why.
Why.
Why?
I click the pen. Unclick it. Click it again.
Then I open the spiral notebook to the first blank page and start to write…
Life don’t hand out answers, it just keeps throwing shit at the wall to see what breaks first. Maybe it’s your body, maybe it’s your will, maybe it’s your damn sense of what’s fair.
People talk like there’s meaning tucked somewhere deep in the grind, like if you suffer long enough you earn some kind of prize.
But all I ever saw was pain stacking up on pain, like bricks in a wall you end up building around yourself just to breathe.
Maybe the point isn’t to break out. Maybe it’s to learn the shape of the cell.
Figure out who you are when no one’s watching, when there’s no applause, no woman in your bed, no gun in your hand, just you and the dark, and the quiet, and the question you keep asking even though you already know the answer: what the hell am I doing this for?