Shespelled it out.
What the actual fuck.
I’m not even sure I can explain what it feels like when a woman you kinda, sorta, liked and trusted, threatens her daughter with generational poverty if she so much as thinks about marrying my biker ass.
Engagement party.
What a fuckin’ joke.
I reach the middle of the riverbed and stop, looking up at the blue slice of sky between cottonwood branches. On my right, twenty acres of Kane scrubland with a rusted trailer sinking into dust. On my left, the endless green pastures of the Ashby Ranch, where sprinklers run even in drought years, courtesy of artesian wells.
Water rights are like magic around here.
So. I guess Savannah made her choice. Got the ring to prove it.
Never mind that I know her better than I know the ink on my skin. That I've tasted the salt on her cheeks when she cries. That I've heard confessions she'd never tell a priest. That I've held herwhile she shook with rage at her mother's cameras, and fucked her softly under the starlight.
Never mind all that, Legion.
She’s moved on…
Cash can warn me all he wants. That Marcus guy can buy her diamonds big as her knuckles.
But I'm willing to bet my last twenty-seven dollars that if I show up at that engagement party, Savannah won't turn me away. The girl who met me in an abandoned grain silo for six years is still in there somewhere, behind the perfect smile and designer dress.
And I'm not quite ready to give her up.
Because if there's one thing I've learned while inside, it’s this: You get one shot in this life.
And that one shot translates to one precious, fleeting fucking moment when everything hangs in the balance—when the scales could tip either way and your whole future stretches out before you like a highway with two very different destinations.
One shot.
Don’t miss.
Because if you miss it, if you hesitate for even a heartbeat too long, that road disappears forever, leaving nothing but dust and regret where the possibility once lived.
One shot.
I don't miss.
