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)
Savannah laughs too.
I turn another page. Find the last photograph in the book. The selfie. Eleanor and me in a truck, summer sun blazin', both of us smilin' genuine smiles. I remove it from the book and look at Savannah. "We did have a secret, though."
She sucks in a breath, afraid of what I'm gonna say.
But I say it anyway. Holding up the photo. "She was dyin', Savannah. A month before we took this road trip, she was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer."
Savannah gasps. "What? What are you talkin' about? She didn't die of cancer! She had a…"
She doesn't finish. She doesn't have to.
Eleanor Ashby had no intention of goin' out dyin'.
She had no intention of wasting away to some shell of her former self.
And Savannah knows this.
"I was takin' her to the Mayo Clinic for treatment. We only went three times. Then she just said… fuck it. I try to talk her out of givin' up. I did. I didn't want her to die. But she was done. And, in the end, I had to respect that. That's what we were doing in this pic. I was her friend. She was my friend and I was taking her to the hospital."
And now, I'm really fuckin' crying. Because I've never had the chance to tell anyone about how much I loved Eleanor.
Hell, I never even told myself how much I loved her.
But everything is over now. I've got nothing left. Just dead bodies in the blood red dirt.
I blow out a breath, collect myself, then pull out the old, weathered envelope I dug up from the ground out on our twenty acres of scrubland.
I hand it to her. She takes it, not knowing why.
"Read it," I tell her.
So she does.
Dear Legion,
I failed the man I loved. Let me not fail his son.
You think Brick Ransom is your savior. He is not. He is a predator who feeds on boys who remind him of what he could never become. Your father blazed too bright, too wild, and Brick extinguished him because men like Brick cannot tolerate beauty they cannot possess.
Matthias rode into Drybone with fire in his veins and poetry in his fists. He made me believe in resurrection. Then Brick murdered him in cold blood and called it a necessity. Badlands swallowed the lie whole.
Now Brick watches you the same way he watched your father—with hunger masquerading as brotherhood. He sees Matthias in your shoulders, your silence, your refusal to bow. It enrages him. It always has.
He will destroy you, Legion. Not quickly. Not cleanly. He will hollow you out from the inside, make you complicit in your own erasure, then discard what remains when you no longer amuse him.
Leave Montana. Leave before Brick makes you another tally mark in his decades-long war against everything your father represented.
Run, sweet boy. Run before he buries you beside the only man I ever loved.
—E.
E.
S.
They signed their letters the same way. A single letter. It says everything.
Savannah looks at me. "Brick…"
I nod. "He killed my father. I've known this for seven years. And this morning… I killed him. "
"What?" Her lips form the word, but no sound comes out.
I pull the letter from Savannah's hands and set it on the steel table beside Eleanor's red book. The paper's edges are soft from years folded in my wallet, then buried in Montana clay, then dug back up tonight before I rode here.
I tell her about the Feds. The nomads who weren't nomads. Brick's deal that turned forty-seven brothers into informants over two years while I sat in Whitefall, keeping my mouth shut about crimes that never fuckin’ mattered.
I tell her about the fine. Twenty-five thousand dollars I couldn't pay. The bag of money under my pillow with a note that said got you tomorrow—bait I took anyway because I needed to see who'd try to buy me.
I tell her about church this morning. The gun. Brick's head. The nomads. Havoc's death.
Thirty-five people in nine holes twelve feet deep.
Savannah doesn't speak. Doesn't move. Just watches me with those blue eyes that used to look at me like I could be saved.
I watch her face for disgust. Horror. The moment she understands what I am.
But she stays still. Listening. Present.
Like she already knew.
Maybe she did. Maybe Eleanor told her in ways I'll never understand. Maybe Savannah saw it the first time we met at the silo when I was fourteen—saw the mark already written on me in ink that wasn’t even there yet.
My damnation was signed the day Matthias Kane rode through Drybone, fucked a waitress, and disappeared.
Sealed when Eleanor found me as a baby burning with fever and decided I looked like the ghost she couldn't stop loving.
Finalized when Brick put a bullet in my father's skull and waited thirty-two years for the chance to do the same to his son.