Total pages in book: 40
Estimated words: 38333 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 192(@200wpm)___ 153(@250wpm)___ 128(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 38333 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 192(@200wpm)___ 153(@250wpm)___ 128(@300wpm)
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.