2. Chapter 2 - Savannah
My world closes in around me, and I mean that in the most literal sense.
The ranch, and the driveway, and the mountains, and the whole enormous sky just compress themselves into a single narrow corridor of dark, and at the end of it is Legion's taillight gettin' smaller and smaller until there's nothin' left but the sound of the bike's exhaust fadin' into the kind of silence that swallows you whole.
He left.
"What the hell just happened?"
My words come out as a whisper, thin and uncertain and nothing like the voice I use when I mean something.
Cash's hand is on my shoulder. He's bein' gentle about it. Tryin' to steady me.
"Ya OK?" he asks.
I don't answer right away. I let the breath out slow, just blinking.
Then I turn and start walkin' toward the Range Rover like I've already made the decision, which I have, because there is no other decision available to me. The gravel crunches under my boots and the sound of it feels like the only real thing in the world right now.
"Hey." Cash grabs my arm. Not rough. But not negotiable either. "Where are you going?"
I pull free from his grip and I am acutely, precisely aware of how many times in my life a man's hand on my arm has been the thing standin' between me and where I needed to be.
"Where am I going?" I repeat it back to him, and I hear the edge creepin' into my voice. "Where the hell do you think I'm going, Cash? After him. Obviously."
"Savannah, when your man, your outlaw biker boyfriend, tells your older brother to keep you away from him—don't you think he's got a reason for that?"
I gesture toward the empty dark where the taillight used to be, where there's nothin' left now but the ghost of exhaust and the silence that followed it.
"He can't just—" I stop. Start again. "I mean, what the fuck was that?"
Cash is shrugging, shaking his head, and I can see it on his face—he has absolutely no idea what just happened in there.
He doesn't know I pulled that book out of the safe and laid it open in front of Legion like some kind of confession.
He doesn't know what I showed him. He doesn't know what Legion said back.
He doesn't know any of it, and the distance between what Cash knows and what I know feels like standing on one side of a canyon and wavin' at someone across it, pretendin' it's nothing, pretendin' the drop isn't there.
And he has no idea our mother was dying.
Dying.
I let that word sit in my chest for a second and it doesn't fit. It doesn't have anywhere to go.
How could she have kept that from us?
She didn't tell us. Not a word, not a single hint, not a tremor in her voice at dinner or a look that lasted a second too long.
I thought— God, I thought she was on some new diet when she started losin' weight. I thought that because she told me that.
Some new Mediterranean thing. I can hear her sayin' it. I can hear the particular way she made it sound practical and elegant at the same time, like something she'd read in a magazine she curated just as carefully as she curated everything else.
She used those exact words.
And I believed her.
And what the hell is wrong with me that I didn't see through it? That I stood right in front of her and took the explanation at face value, the way you accept a photograph without ever asking what happened five minutes before the shutter clicked?
My mother built a career on the art of the frame—on what you include and what you cut out of the shot—and I still stood there like a tourist in my own life, noddin' along, sayin' oh, Mediterranean, how lovely.
That's dumb, Savannah.
That's not just dumb. That's the particular kind of sad that quietly rearranges the furniture of everything you thought was true until you walk into a room and can't find anything familiar.
I didn't know her.
After thirty years of bein' her subject, her content, her most monetized asset, her daughter—I didn't know her at all.
I knew the version she held up to the light.
I knew the caption.
But apparently Legion Kane knew the whole damn album.
"Savannah?" Cash grabs me by the shoulders, and I realize I'm swayin' because his hands are the only reason I'm not meeting the ground. "Savannah, what's going on? Are you okay?"
The world is turning at an angle that it has absolutely no business turning at, and I am aware, in that distant and clinical way you become aware of things when your body has quietly decided to override your dignity, that the dirt is comin' up to greet me whether I like it or not.
Cash is staring down at me now. I'm in his arms, which means some interval of time has elapsed that I cannot account for, and his face is doing something it almost never does.
Something unguarded, and raw, and genuinely frightened, and I file that away somewhere—the fact that Cash Ashby looks scared—because it feels important in a way I don't have the capacity to examine right now.
"Savannah. Can you hear me?"
I can hear him. I can hear everything.
That's the problem.
I can hear every single thing my mother never said to me, echoing around inside my chest like a voice in the silo, and apparently my body has decided that is simply too much information.
I think I just fainted.
I, Savannah Rose Ashby, have fainted in the dirt like a Victorian heroine who just received bad news about the estate.
It is the most profoundly, absurdly, catastrophically stupid thing I have ever done.
Cash doesn't ask if I want to be carried.
He just does it. His arms are iron under my knees and behind my back, and I am horizontal and helpless and bein' moved like furniture repositioned before a shoot, and there is absolutely nothing I can do about it because my legs have apparently filed for independent governance and the vote did not go my way.
He's barking orders before we even clear the doorway.
I can hear the house manager's shoes on the flagstone, quick and purposeful, and the maids scattering into useful configurations the way they always do when Cash takes command of a room, because Cash has that quality—the quality of a man who expects the world to rearrange itself around his intentions, and the world, to its credit, generally obliges.
I am deposited onto the great room sofa with more gentleness than I deserve.
"Put your feet up," Cash says, and it is not a suggestion.
Then there are hands everywhere—not his, other hands—someone pressing a glass of water against my palm, someone else arranging a cool cloth across my forehead with the kind of theatrical efficiency that suggests this household has a protocol for exactly this sort of emergency.
Which, knowing my mother, it probably does.
She'd have staged it first. Checked the light.
It is, without question, the most ridiculous tableau I have ever been part of, and I have been photographed on horseback at sunrise in a custom Chanel field jacket for a brand partnership, so my threshold for absurdity is not low.
I am the invalid on the fainting couch.
I am the delicate creature requiring smelling salts and a devoted household staff.
I am every soft-spined heroine in every overwrought film I have ever watched with my eyes half-rolled, and the fact that I am living it right now, in my own home, is so cosmically humiliating that I briefly consider whether unconsciousness might actually be preferable to this.
It is not. But I consider it.
Cash begins snapping his fingers and the room empties the way rooms do when the person asking isn't actually asking.
The pocket doors slide closed on their brass track with a sound so polished and final it belongs in a different kind of house entirely.
Which is the thing I find myself fixating on, because my mind is doing what it always does when the emotional load exceeds its carrying capacity—it catalogs. It observes. It retreats into architectural criticism as a coping mechanism.
Pocket doors. In a log home. In Prairie County, Montana.
With the elk-antler chandelier and the hand-hewn stone hearth and the sixteen-foot ceilings and the whole curated mythology of rugged Western living, and yet here we are, pulling Victorian pocket doors closed like this is a drawing room in a Bronte novel and I have just swooned over Mr. Rochester's horse.
What is wrong with my mind?
Your mind, Savannah? Try your whole fuckin' life.
"Drink," Cash says, bringing the glass to my lips.
I do drink. It's good too. So I gulp it. Then feel stupid. Again.
Cash takes the glass, sets it down, and looks me in the eyes. "What the hell just happened?"
I want to tell him. I really do. I want him to know everything about Legion and me, and the clubhouse—which he already knows, actually, because that bitch Brandy—the dead bitch Brandy because Legion shot her—sold my clubhouse life to someone and made it all public.
But only God understands that moment. Cash doesn't. Can't. And it's not even about the clubhouse or the Badlands, it's about Legion, and Mother, and the book, and… everything.
Murder.
Mass burial.
And honestly, I don't even care about that.
A massacre at an outlaw biker clubhouse is the least of my concerns right now because… everything is fucked.
And I think Cash would actually understand—that's the part that makes this so unbearable. He gets it. This life, this land, this particular brand of Montana loneliness that looks like legacy from the outside and feels like a slow drowning from the inside.
No, he wasn't used the way I was—nobody aimed a camera at Cash's childhood and monetized every skinned knee and first frost and awkward-teeth phase for eight million strangers—but he was here.
He stayed. And he's been holdin' things together with nothing but calloused hands and quiet resolve for years now, with absolutely no help from me, or Wyatt, or Colt.
His careless, distracted, self-involved siblings who don't go to cattle auctions because they couldn't pick a Wagyu-Angus hybrid out of a lineup if their inheritance depended on it. Don't care to learn, either. Don't care that someone has to.