CHAPTER 10
I wake to the soft glow of dawn seeping through the wooden shutters. The light stretches across the ceiling in pale gold bands. Below, voices rise through the floorboards—sharp, insistent, unwelcome.
Marcus.
I roll onto my side, pressing my face into the cool pillow. The sage-colored sheets twist around my legs, evidence of another restless night. I haven't slept much after Legion.
The argument downstairs grows louder. Colt's voice cuts through, defensive and firm. They're discussing me, of course. Marcus wants to come up here, Cash is tellin’ him no. Marcus has a hard time with rules. But here in the Ashby house, we have a pretty hard and fast one.
No one but family comes upstairs. Ever.
This bedroom might’ve been a stage all growing up, but these days it is mine, and mine alone. No photographs allowed. No social media tours. No carefully staged moments for followers to dissect. After twenty-three years of performin’—and the death of my mother—I carved out this one private corner.
I swing my legs over the edge of the bed, my bare feet meeting the wide-plank floor as the memory of Legion's hands on my skin lingers from the dream Marcus just pulled me out of, and I head to the closet.
The door opens silently. I walk in, scanning the rows of hanging clothes—endless skirts and prairie dresses, boots lined up like soldiers. The uniform of the Ashby heiress, curated for maximum engagement. Hashtag AuthenticRanchLife.
But I’m not in here lookin’ for clothes. I’m lookin’ for secrets.
At the back of the closet, behind winter coats and formal gowns, sits a small panel. I slide the pocket door open, revealing the elevator door. It opens when I use my mother’s code and inside there is a single button to press. The doors close and the elevator descends smoothly. Forty feet down, past foundation and earth, into solid rock.
It's been a while since the overwhelmin’ urge to see the treasures down here were strong enough to make me actually descend, but today, I crave these secrets like they are life itself.
The safe room is exactly as I saw it last. Temperature-controlled. Enough airflow to create a wind. Windowless, with dim lightin’ that won't damage the hundreds of thousands of photographs that live here in negative form. All cataloged, preserved, and protected.
There are thousands more on contact sheets and archival paper.
I walk between the shelves, past boxes labeled with dates and subjects. Twenty-three years of my childhood, all neatly archived. Every milestone, every "candid" moment, every outfit change.
Sometimes I do look at them—not recently. But sometimes.
Today, though, all I want is what’s in the safe.
It stands against the far wall, ancient and imposing. Eight feet tall, six feet wide, the combination dial is worn smooth fromdecades of use. It’s been here since before the house was built on top of it. A relic from the early 1900s, something that belongs in a black-and-white bank-heist film.
I stand before it, turning the dial with practiced precision. The mechanisms inside click and shift. It’s filled with private treasures. But I'm not here for those, either.
I'm here for The Book.
I lift it carefully, lovin’ the weight of it in my hands. The red leather cover is soft from handling, the pages thick and heavy.
Then I take it over to the velvet couch in the corner, lower myself down, and open it up.
The first page stares back at me like it always does—a single black and white image of a dust-streaked toddler squattin’ in the dirt. Blond hair catches the sunlight, standing up in wild tufts. His small hands grip a matchbox car, but his eyes—those impossibly blue eyes when not dulled to monochrome—look directly at the camera.
Legion Kane. Maybe three years old.
I turn the page with care. The progression is familiar—close-ups of those eyes, narrowed against prairie sun. A series of candids where he doesn't know he was being watched.
Climbing fences, throwing rocks at nothing, sleeping under a tree with his arm flung over his face.
The pages whisper as I turn them. Eleanor arranged these photos by some internal logic only she understood. Mostly age, but there’s several series that span decades, and then the progression will loop back on itself and seemingly start over.
Here's Legion at seven, his school photo taken from an angle no school photographer would choose—slightly below, catching the light in his lashes, making him look celestial and feral all at once.
Then Legion at nine, ten, eleven—leaning against fences, looking outward, always outward, as if searching for hole in afence he can’t ever escape. His features sharpening with each passing year, baby softness giving way to angles that now cut like glass.
Me and Legion, fourteen and sixteen. She knew. She'd found us… somehow. Her camera capturing moments we thought were ours alone. Kisses stolen behind hay bales. Our bodies stretched beneath stars. My head on his chest, his hand in my hair.
