Chapter 6
I pull Savannah close, guilt washing through me like flood water. My hands shake as I wrap them around her body, pressing her against my chest where she can feel my heart hammering.
Why did I take her like that? Like I was trying to fuck my way through to something on the other side. Like this might be the last time.
Like I'm already dead or disappeared.
"What's wrong?" she asks again, softer now. Her palm presses against my chest, right over the ruined brand. "Legion, talk to me."
I can't. So I deflect.
"You remember that summer I got the dirt bike?"
She goes still in my arms. "What?"
"The dirt bike. When I was fifteen. You were thirteen."
"Well... yes. Of course I remember."
"You had that big fancy thoroughbred your mother bought you. You'd ride her out to Makoshika, and I'd take the bike. Meetin’ up at the trailheads."
Savannah pulls back enough to look at my face. Her eyes search mine, trying to figure out what the hell I'm doing, bringing up ancient history while her ass is still burning from what I just did to her.
"You took me to see the dinosaur fossils," she says slowly. "It was a hundred degrees. I got so sunburned my shoulders blistered."
"I gave you my shirt."
"You did." Her hand moves from my chest to my face, thumb brushing my cheekbone. "You wrapped it around my shoulders and made me wear your stupid baseball cap even though it was way too big for me."
I remember the way she looked—this tiny blonde thing drowning in my clothes, her nose pink from the sun.
We hiked three miles into the badlands to see some formation she'd read about in a library book.
Fossil beds, or some shit. I didn't care about dinosaurs.
I cared about the way her eyes lit up when she talked about things that mattered to her.
"Best summer of my life," I tell her. It comes out rough.
"Mine too." She traces the line of my jaw. "Before everything got complicated."
Before I joined the club. Before she left for boarding school. Before Eleanor started paying me to sit in her studio while she photographed me like I was art instead of a person. Before prison, before Marcus, before I learned how to break things, instead of protect them.
"I'm sorry," I say, and I mean it for more than just tonight. For all of it. For being too rough just now, for fucking her ass like I was trying to punish something—her, me, the world. "I shouldn't have—"
"Don't." She presses her fingers to my lips. "Don't apologize for that. I wanted it. You didn't hurt me. I'm not made of glass, Legion."
But she is. She's made of light, and air, and everything good I've ever touched, and I keep putting my filthy hands on her anyway.
"You're everything clean," I tell her. My voice cracks on the words. "Everything good. And I just keep—"
"Stop." She kisses me before I can finish the thought. Slow and deep, her mouth soft against mine. When she pulls back, her eyes are wet. "I'm not clean. I'm not good. I'm just... yours. That's all I've ever been."
I kiss her again because I can't fucking help myself. Pour everything I can't say into it—the goodbye I won't speak out loud, the thank you that doesn't go far enough, the love that's going to outlive both of us, and probably burn the world down in the process.
When we break apart, I rest my forehead against hers.
"Thank you," I whisper. "For taking care of me when I was dying. For loving Mercy. For—"
"You don't need to thank me for loving you." Her voice is fierce. "That's not... it's not something you earn or pay back. It just is."
I think about that. About how people like me don't get loved. We get used. We get feared. We get forgotten in prison cells and buried in unmarked graves when the club decides we're more valuable dead ,than breathing.
Except by her.
She's loved me since she was twelve years old and I was fourteen and neither of us knew what the fuck love even meant.
"You had that pink helmet," I say, because I need to stay in the memory a little longer. Need to live there instead of here. "With the flowers on it."
Savannah laughs, the sound breaking through the heavy air between us. "Oh my god, I forgot about that helmet."
"It was hideous."
"It was adorable."
"It was pink."
"I was thirteen!" She swats my chest, and for a second she looks like that girl again—the one who'd show up at the silo with dirt on her jeans and wildflowers in her hair. "And you said it made me look like a wildflower fairy."
I did say that. Meant it too.
"You'd put it on," I continue, "and climb on the back of my bike, and we'd just... ride. For hours. Through all those backroads. The trails. Places nobody else went."
"I'd hold on to you so tight." Her fingers trace patterns on my chest, following the lines of ink and scar tissue. "Like if I let go, you'd disappear."
Maybe she knew something I didn't.
"Even back then," I tell her, "I'd look at you and think... that's my girl. Nobody else knew it. But I did."
"I was," she confirms. Her eyes find mine. "I still am."
I want to believe that. Want to live in the world where thirteen-year-old Savannah and fifteen-year-old Legion could just keep riding forever through the badlands. Immortal, and free, and too stupid to know what the future would cost.
"Best summer of my life," I say again. "Nothing's been that clean since."
She's quiet for a long moment. Then… "We could go back."
"What?"
"Not literally. But we could... try. To be those kids again. The ones who didn't know how to ruin things yet."
I look at her—this woman who left Marcus's engagement party to fuck me in a silo, who got my name tattooed on her wrist after I took the fall for a crime I didn't commit, who stood in a room full of outlaws and let me claim her in front of everyone because she chose this life over everything else.
And I think about how in twenty-four hours, I might be dead, or disappeared, or worse.
How Brick's twenty-five-thousand-dollar fine is really just a death sentence with paperwork.
How Savannah deserves better than watching me bleed out in some Montana ditch because I wouldn't become a rat.
"Yeah," I lie. "Maybe we could."
She smiles. Believes me. Curls against my chest like she's got all the time in the world to figure it out.
And I hold her there in the silo where we first learned what wanting meant, letting myself pretend—just for a few more minutes—that we're still those kids racing across the badlands.
That summer could last forever.
That neither of us knows how this story ends.
I make myself a promise in the silence that follows.
Whatever's happening at the club—the Feds, Brick's betrayal, the twenty-five grand I don't have, the blood I'll probably pay in instead—none of it touches her.
Not Savannah.
Not the girl who rode bareback through the badlands with flowers in her hair.
If that's the only gift I ever give her, it'll be worth it. Keeping her away from that life. From what I've become. From the slow death the club deals, to everyone who stays too long.
She deserves better than watching me choose between becoming a rat or bleeding out in some ditch.
She deserves the life she's building at the ranch. The one where Mercy thrives at Rimrock Academy, and wears pink riding helmets, and doesn't know what a prospect does to earn his patch.
I want a do-over.
Want to lay Savannah down gentle and worship every inch of her skin like she's something sacred, instead of something I use. Want to erase the last hour—the roughness, the degradation, the way I made her beg and called her mine while treating her like property.
But I can't.
What's done is done. And trying to fix it now just feels performative. Like I'm playing the part of the man she wants me to be instead of showing her the truth.
This is who I am.
Not the gentle lover who whispers pretty things.
I'm the crude animal that lives in the dark. The one who fucks rough, and leaves marks, and can't touch anything clean without destroying it.
So I don't try to pretty it up.
I help Savannah to her feet, steadying her when she wobbles. Hand over her white dress—now wrinkled and stained. Watch her pull it over her head, the fabric settling over skin that's already bruising where I gripped too hard.
She doesn't complain. Doesn't ask me to be softer next time.
Just pulls her panties up her legs, smooths the dress down, and looks at me with those blue eyes that see too much.
I tuck myself back into my jeans. Button. Zip. Pull my shirt over my head and shrug into my cut—the leather settling across my shoulders like the weight it is.
This is how I'll leave it.
Ugly, but true.
No apologies. No promises I can't keep. No fairy tale ending where the outlaw becomes the prince and the princess slums it in a trailer.
Just this: her in a white dress. Me in black leather. The space between us filled with everything we can't say.
"Come on," I tell her. Keeping my voice even. "I'll walk you back."
Savannah doesn't argue. Just takes my offered hand—her fingers small and pale against my scarred knuckles—and lets me lead her over to her horse.
Cassia's waiting where Savannah left her, reins trailing in the dirt, looking bored.
The mare huffs when she sees us. Probably judges me for what I just did to her rider.
I cup my hands for Savannah's bare foot—why does she always come barefoot? Then I give her a leg up into the saddle.
She settles onto Cassia's bare back, legs dangling, white dress riding up her thighs, looking down at me with an expression I can't read.
"Legion—"
"I'll see you," I interrupt. Because I can't hear whatever she's about to say. Can't stand here and pretend I deserve the concern in her voice or the love she keeps offering like it's free.
I turn to go, but words split the night open, stopping me.
"One word between us splits the very sky," she says quietly. "They come for us but still we strive to try."
The words freeze me mid-step.
My poem. The one I wrote when I was sixteen, still stupid enough to believe words could mean something permanent.