4. Chapter 4 - Savannah
I walk Cassia slow through the dry creek bed, which is just dust and smooth stone this time of year, cracked earth that used to carry water. Cassia picks her way through it with the kind of careful, practiced grace that makes me feel like I am not actually falling apart inside.
She's steady when I'm not. She has always been steady when I'm not.
Her ears flick forward and then back, readin' the wind, and I let myself follow her attention out across the valley toward the silo, which sits on the horizon the way it always has—patient, condemned, and entirely unbothered by the fact that I am not sure he'll be there this time.
Slow goin' doesn't matter because I'm early. I couldn't stand it anymore—couldn't stand bein' inside that house one more minute, surrounded by all that expensive silence, all that curated stillness, every room in it arranged like a mood board for a life I'm no longer sure I'm livin'.
I feel like I'm losin' my mind, is the thing. And the trouble with losin' your mind inside a house that beautiful is that nobody notices, because from the outside everything looks exactly right.
When I tried to leave that day—when every instinct I have pointed at the front gate and said go—Cash stepped in front of me and said something that stopped me cold.
He said, "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?"
And the infuriating thing is, he's right.
I hated that he was right. I hated that Cash Ashby of all people was the one talkin' sense into me.
Cash, who has never once in his life been on Legion's side.
And yet there he was, deliverin' Legion's own message back to me with that flat, deliberate tone he uses when he's already won and he knows it.
Because Legion did say that. He did. And he hates Cash with the bone-deep contempt of a man who has spent twenty years watchin' another man be given everything he had to bleed for.
But even so, he looked at my brother and said something to the effect of do your fuckin' job, bro. Be the big brother.
He handed Cash the one role Cash was born for and told him to use it on me.
Which means he knew I'd come after him.
Which means he planned to keep me away.
"Somethin's goin' on, Savannah," Cash said the next day. "Somethin' happened. Did you even see him?"
I did. I saw every inch of him—the blood-red dirt ground into the creases of his knuckles, packed under his nails, streaked across his forearms like warpaint that hadn't had time to dry.
I know why he looked that way because he told me.
He told me everything down in the archives.
It's just… I don't care.
And that is probably a character flaw I should examine at some point. I am aware of that.
But when I told my four-point-two million followers that there is no time, no distance, no consequence formidable enough to make me stop loving him—I meant it.
I was not performin'.
I was not curating. That was the truest thing I've ever said, and I said it to four million strangers because I couldn't say it to him.
I don't care how many outlaw bikers he kills.
I mean, yes. I do have a limit. I am not a sociopath.
I do care… if the people are innocent.
That's the line. Legion doesn't kill innocent people, and I know that the way I know which pastures flood first after a hard rain and which ones hold.
These men were traitors to the club, which in the Badlands MC is not a philosophical designation—it is a death sentence they wrote for themselves the moment they broke the oath.
They do not count.
They simply don't.
The silo materializes out of the dark the way it always does—sudden, patient, like it's been standin' there holdin' its breath the whole time I was walkin' toward it. My wandering mind pulls back enough to take it in properly.
When I look at this silo I see innocence, which is a strange and maybe dishonest thing to say about a place where we have done profoundly uninnocent things together, and yet the feeling persists regardless of the evidence.
It is the major landmark of my childhood in the same way other girls had their grandmother's kitchen or their church pew—a fixed point the heart orients around when everything else is spinning.
Legion and I met when I was twelve and he was fourteen, which some people would call children and some people would call the beginning of something inevitable, and I think both assessments are accurate in ways that don't cancel each other out.
We were not exactly children. Not if you account for context. Not if you factor in what his life already looked like by fourteen, what mine already required of me by twelve.
Me with my curated online presence and the particular loneliness that lives inside a life that is entirely, exhaustingly public.
Him with that scrappy, load-bearing stubbornness that comes from having nobody to depend on but yourself, from learning early that the world is not going to offer you anything it isn't legally required to.
But we were innocent at the same time.
Both of those things are true and I have made peace with the paradox.
It is a beautiful silo, I think. Objectively beautiful, in the way that things are beautiful when they have been shaped by weather, and time, and the slow patient indifference of decades rather than by anyone's intention or design.
The metal walls have a patina you absolutely cannot buy or manufacture, that particular blue-gray oxidation that comes from Montana winters stackin' on top of Montana summers until the steel itself seems to have opinions about the weather.
The solar-powered string lights Legion put up months ago are still lit, which surprises me every time and moves me in a way I can't fully explain, the fact that he thought to do that, the fact that they're still working, still waitin'.
The sky behind the silo is inky, and enormous, and salted with stars so dense and low they look almost architectural, and the Milky Way cuts across it like someone spilled something luminous and never cleaned it up.
It is, taken on its own terms, perfect.
I wouldn't want to meet him on the sly anywhere else on this earth.
But. And there is always a but when it comes to Legion and me, some subordinate clause attached to the beauty that reframes the whole composition.
It sits in the middle of an old craggy pasture that hasn't seen a productive season in probably twenty years, and it has a dirt floor, and the track Legion rides to get here is more of a deer trail than a road—two ruts pressed into dry grass by habit rather than engineering, more suggestion than infrastructure.
Which makes the whole situation feel, from the outside, like exactly what my brothers would call it.
Trashy.
That's the word. I know it is.
But if this is trashy—if this is what trashy looks like, lit lanterns, and solar fairy lights, and a cathedral of stars—then I suppose I can live with it.
Cassia stops without me askin' her to. She always does. She knows where we are the same way I do. She never needs me to explain myself. She just knows.
After I slide down off her bare back I slip her bridle off in one easy motion and she doesn't even wait.
She already knows the assignment. She drops her head and wanders off toward what's left of the summer scrub, content, unhurried, perfectly certain that I'll still be here when she's ready, and I envy her that certainty more than I can say.
I cross the soft dirt with bare feet and hang the bridle on the tree limb the way I always do. Same branch, dead since the first time I ever came here, and still holdin'.
And isn't it funny, I think, the way dead things can be so perfect like that.
So useful.
So quietly, stubbornly beautiful.
I resist the urge to check my phone. To check the time. To pollute this IRL moment with things that don't belong.
I know I left very early, but I took my time. If he's comin', he should be here soon.
I go inside the silo and everything is just as we left it.
The fairy lights glow faintly, like the limits of their usefulness is nearing their natural end.
The little sage bundles inside have dried to a dark green color now.
Even the blankets Legion brought the night of my engagement party are still here.
On the ground, dusty and probably crawling with bugs.
Well, not bugs. Not this late in the year. The days are still warm, but the nights get cold. I'm not wearing a dress tonight like I usually do so Legion doesn't have to waste time taking my clothes off. Tonight it's loose faded jeans and a rust-colored Ashby Ranch hoodie with a jean jacket.
I draw the line at shoes though. I can't imagine comin' here in shoes. It's never been a winter place, but if I can't convince Legion to let me back into his life, I might have to rethink my footwear decisions.
I take a seat on the wooden ladder that leads up to the loft, settling my bare feet on the lowest rung, and prop my chin in my hands.
Just thinkin'. Lettin' my mind wander back the way it always does in here, like the silo itself is a kind of memory palace, and every stone and splinter holds a different piece of the girl I used to be.
That first time I found this place, I was wearing a white dress.
It was a Sunday, so there'd been church, and the dress was the kind my mother would've photographed from six different angles—eyelet cotton, smocked across the chest, the sort of thing that photographs like innocence and irons like a penance.
But that afternoon everyone had somewhere else to be, and the ranch was as close to empty as 47,000 acres can get, which is to say there were cowboys in the east pasture, and hands in the equipment barn, and probably someone movin' cattle somewhere I couldn't see, but not a single one of them was in charge of my afternoon.
Nobody's eyes on me. Not one lens pointed in my direction.
That was a rarity so complete it felt almost physical, like the pressure in the air had changed.
So I saddled Bucky—my fat little buckskin pony—and I took off.