6. Chapter 6 - Savannah
I'm still panting and moaning from the climax when Legion rests his face against my neck.
It's a surrender of sorts, I can feel it.
Like it's all catching up with us. Like the adrenaline is runnin' low.
Like the fight or flight instinct has been on red flag for too long and the whole thing is about to come apart.
"I love you," he says. And then he lets out a long breath and everything I just thought becomes true.
In this moment, there's nothing left but this.
Us.
Two people in an old silo, clinging to each other like opposite ends of a magnet.
"Come home with me." It's not the answer, but I say it anyway. "Just… you can leave your bike here. We can ride double on Cassia and just go home."
He chuckles, low and soft, and then he lowers me down off the wall, gentle in a way that contradicts everything else about him, and leans back—just slightly, just enough—like he's tryin' to get a better look at me and needs the distance to do it right.
Like I'm something he has to stand back from to properly see.
His unruly blond hair falls forward over his eyes, castin' a shadow across his face, and even though the dim amber light filtering in from the fairy bulbs strung outside the silo does its level best to glow him up, it still can't quite get there—because he's the kind of beautiful that light has to work for.
He still looks like an angel—even now, even here, even after everything—and I think that is the cruelest joke God ever told. That He made a man this beautiful and then built a whole mythology of ruin around him like a fence.
I will never see the demon he claims to live inside him.
I've studied every inch of that ink, traced the war on his skin with my fingertips in the dark, learned the whole terrible scripture of it—the falling angels, the broken gate, the chained thing held by the throat—and I still cannot find the monster he insists he is.
Because when I look at him I only ever see the boy.
I don't care how old he gets, all I see is that perfect, beautiful, strong, funny boy who wanted to take me places. Who learned my name like a prayer and never stopped saying it.
Maybe that demon is there for other people.
Maybe it's there in the clubhouse, in the dark rooms, in whatever happens when I'm not watching.
But standin' here in the dark silo, with his blond hair falling forward and his eyes on mine like I'm the only fixed point in a spinning world—all I see is him.
Just him.
And the wanting inside me is so complete it feels like a sickness.
"I want to," he admits. "Trust me, Savannah, I would love to go home with you right now."
This costs him a lot. It must feel a little bit like surrender. That he made a mistake when he left me in the middle of the night last summer. When he went back to Brick, and the Badlands, and all the trouble and death that came with it.
He reaches up with gentle fingers and swipes the hair away from my eyes.
"I want to. I really do. But I don't know what's happenin'.
The FBI never came. I really thought they'd take us down by now.
The only reason I was able to get away was because everyone back at the clubhouse is so fuckin' wound up, there's no way to hold it together until somethin' gives. "
I smile despite not gettin' what I want. "I'm the somethin' that gives?"
His return smile is big and real. "You break everything in me. In the best way possible. And I swear it, Savannah, hundred percent I would go home with you right now if I thought it was safe. I just don't think it is."
"Do you think they're coming?"
He nods, slowly. "There's no way they're not. I don't know why they're takin' so long. I want it to be a good sign. Like… maybe we got away with it. But it's not. There's somethin' wrong here."
"You make it sound inevitable."
He strokes my cheek with the back of his knuckle. "What's that?"
"The end."
"Well…" He huffs a laugh. "Darlin', I hate to break it to ya, but the end is most certainly inevitable.
" His thumb traces the line of my cheekbone like he's memorizing it, like he's already composin' the memory.
"But I'll make ya a promise right now, Savannah Rose Ashby.
" The full name. All three parts. Never a good sign.
"I will get through this. And when I do, I'll come back. "
Hmm. I don't like that.
I don't like it even a little bit, and the smile I give him is the kind I've worn in photographs since I was four years old—composed, radiant, and entirely hollow.
Because what he wants me to think he's sayin' and what he's actually sayin' are two profoundly different things. And I have spent enough years studyin' the distance between a man's words and his meaning to know exactly where Legion Kane is standin' right now.
He wants me to believe he can fix this. He wants me to hear I'll come back like it's a guarantee, like it's a deed to somethin' real. And I want that too.
But the other side of I'll come back isn't a prison sentence this time, and it isn't happily-ever-after either. It isn't even the gray uncertain middle where hope still has a foothold.
That is what he means.
He's goin' down, and he knows it, and he's not even tryin' hard to pretend otherwise.
His thumb is still on my cheekbone and his eyes are soft and careful and that is how I know.
Legion Kane does not do careful unless something is already breakin'.
But I want him to think I believe him. I want to give him that much, at least—the grace of a woman who takes a man at his word even when her whole body knows better.
It's a small mercy, and I am capable of small mercies.
Especially for him.
He needs it.
So I place my hand over his, my palm covering his knuckles where they rest against my face, and I let the warmth of that be enough. The words come out easy, the way only the truest things do, the ones you've been holdin' so long they've worn smooth. "I'll be here when it's over."
I don't know if that's a promise or a prayer. I say it anyway.
Then I do what I always do when I'm disappointed—when the ground gives just slightly under one boot and I am expected to keep walkin'.
I straighten my back. I pull myself together the way my mother taught me, the way years of ridin' in front of judges taught me, the way four-point-two million strangers and a lifetime of bein' watched has perfected into something that barely even costs me anything anymore.
This time it involves findin' my pants and stepping back into them one leg at a time on a silo floor, which is a new variation on the ritual.
But the ritual itself? Nope. That part's familiar. That part I could do in the dark.
I already am.
And that's the signal. That's always been the signal. When the sex is over and the clothes are back on straight, we kiss goodbye with nothin' more between us than a look.
I watch him leave from Cassia's back.
The red taillight disappears over a ridge. Reappears five seconds later to climb another one.
And then, that's it.
I can still hear him—a low rumble in the distance.
But he's gone.
The next morning I wake to the sound of voices outside my window, low and clipped, and even before I'm fully conscious I know who it is.
Marcus.
I lie still for a moment, starin' up at the ceiling, listenin' to the cadence of him. And I think about how strange it is that a voice can be so familiar and feel so foreign at the same time.
Like a song you used to love that now just makes you tired.
What the hell is he doing here?
I want to resist the urge to go downstairs and confront him—I want to stay up here in the quiet of my sanctuary and let Cash deal with it, let the ranch deal with it, let the whole enormous and implacable machinery of Ashby land absorb Marcus White Jr. the way it absorbs everything else that doesn't belong here—but there is really no chance of that happening and I know it.
I'm up and out of bed before the thought finishes itself, draggin' last night's jeans up my legs and still pullin' the hoodie down over my head when I step out into the hallway that overlooks the foyer, one hand catching the railing and the other still fighting with a sleeve.
Marcus is not inside the house. He's on the porch, like he means to force his way in here, arguing with Cash, and to my surprise—Wyatt too.
He's here to intimidate me. That's what he does when the world stops arranging itself around him—he coerces it back into order.
He's left several messages over the last week. Threats dressed up in the careful language of a man who majored in legalese and knows exactly which words leave no fingerprints.
My Instagram confession sent him into a spiral that reached low orbit. Not even his father's handlers can talk him down from this rage now.
But there's nothing he can do about it.
What's done is done, and we are over.
Once a thing lives on the internet it's no longer yours to negotiate with.
It's simply… true.
All the way down the stairs I'm thinkin'… rage, Savannah. Rage like the spring wind across the badlands. Pull out that vocabulary of yours, put all that elite education to good use, and tell him off in a way he will never forget.
But there's another way to handle this too.
And that's the response I choose just before I open the door and face him.
"Marcus," I say, my voice just as soft as my smile. "What brings you by?"
He's speechless for a moment. I've interrupted whatever lawyerly argument he was making and so his mouth just… gapes. Then he makes this weird noise like a gasp, or a croak, or a cough, and unleashes on me in a way that makes me feel both content and in control at the same time.
"What brings me by? What. Brings. Me. By? You little schemer. You little tramp. You think you've won, but you have no idea what kind of contract I had with your mother. You owe me." He's looking at Cash now. "You owe me everything and you know it. You know what that contract says."
This is all very disturbing and I've been doing my very best to ignore the fact that my mother sold me to a man without even a hint that this was even a thing.
I get it. She didn't want me to marry Legion.
But what kind of woman puts that in a will with conditions like 'you will lose everything and your descendants will rot in poverty for all eternity if you do not marry respectable.’
I'm being hyperbolic, obviously. But only a little.
"Marcus, may I have a word with you, please?"
I don't wait for an answer. Just push past him and my brothers, and walk barefoot out into the driveway.
He follows me—huffing, and moaning, and complaining the whole way. "I cannot believe you put that online. I cannot believe you embarrassed me like that."
It's always about him.
I walk right up to his BMW and turn at the driver's side door.
Because this isn't a conversation, it's a good old-fashioned dismissal.
I lean back against the car, fold my arms, and just look at him.
Let him finish.
"—do you understand what this does to my campaign? Do you have any idea—"
"Marcus."
Quiet. Easy. Like callin' a dog off a porch.
He stops.
"You drove four hours to stand on my family's porch and call me a tramp in front of my brothers.
" I smile at him. It's a good smile. I've been practicing it all my life.
"And I want you to notice that Cash is still standing up there.
And Wyatt. And neither one of them came down here to help me.
And do you know why, Marcus? Because they know I don't need their help. "
He opens his mouth.
I keep going.
"You want to talk about that contract?" I tilt my head just a little.
"The one where you had to buy me through a dead woman's will because you could not get me to stay on your own merits? That contract? You want to stand in my driveway, in front of my brothers, and tell me I owe you?” I let that word sit between us like something rotten.
"Sweetheart, the fact that you needed paperwork should have been your first clue. "
The color moves up his neck. Good.
"Savannah, you have no idea what I can—"
"I'm standing here barefoot in last night's jeans," I say. Real pleasant. Real easy. Like I'm commenting on the weather. "You're a smart man, Marcus. Got all those degrees hangin' on your office wall. So I know you can do that math."
He does the math.
I watch it land.
"And I want you to know something." I push off the car and step close enough that he has to look down at me, which means he has to see my face, which means he has to see that I am not even a little bit sorry.
"A man told me he loved me last night. Said it like it was the truest thing he'd ever said out loud. No contract. No conditions. No leverage. Just the words, and the weight of them, and me."
I step aside. Give him his door back.
"You could not buy what he gives me for free. And the fact that you tried tells me everything I will ever need to know about the kind of man you are."
I smooth my hoodie down like I'm straightening a gown.
"Drive safe. You've got a long way to go."
I turn around and walk back toward the house before he can answer.
Because that's the other thing about a dismissal.
You don't watch them leave.