"Yes." One syllable, no hesitation. "If I walk away from my family, you walk away from yours."
It's a fair deal. Too fair. Which means it's impossible.
"If I did that," I ask slowly, "you'd get on the back of my bike, let me take you somewhere where you know absolutely no one—where I know absolutely no one—and you would start over with me?"
She nods, and there's not a single shadow of doubt in her eyes.
I shake my head, almost laughing. "And how exactly would I support us, princess? What would I do for work with a prison record and no club backing me?" I gesture at the trailer behind us. "This? This is club money. That job I have? Club connections. You think I can just walk into some town and get hired as what—a fucking accountant?"
The fairy tale she's spinning falls apart against the sharp edges of reality. She doesn't understand what it means to have nothin’. Tobenothin’.
"You think we'll rent some cute little apartment? That I'll bring home flowers while you—what? Wait tables? Post pictures of your breakfast for sponsors?" I'm being cruel now, but she needs to hear it. "The moment you step off that property without your name on it, you're just another pretty girl with empty pockets."
"I have money of my own," she says, but her voice wavers.
"For how long? A year? Two? And then what?" I step closer. "And what about Mercy? I just leave her here while we run off to play house?"
Something in Savannah's face shifts, and I know I've hit a nerve. She hadn't thought about Mercy.
"She could come?—"
"To live how? On what? In a world where she has no one but us?" I shake my head. "You don't understand what it means to have nothing to fall back on. No safety net. No rich brother to bail you out when things get hard. This shitty twenty acres of scrub is all I got, Savannah. This new trailer is a dream come true. I get it, I understand what you're saying. And… it's even fucking reasonable. But I'm not walking out on my land."
She shakes her head and huffs out a breath. "But you want me to do it."
"No," I say firmly, taking her face in my hands. "I want what is best for you. And this?" I pan to the land and the trailer. "This isn't it."
"But it's good enough for you. It's good enough for Mercy."
"Savannah—"
But before I can say anything else, she presses her fingertips against my mouth.
"I'm going home to change," she says softly. "I feel ridiculous standing here like this." Her fingers trail down from my lips to my chest, resting right over the brand I took for my brothers.
She doesn't know it's there. Doesn't know I've already carved another name on my heart. And her touch, light as it is, hurts.
"But you'll know where to find me at midnight."
She steps back, and for a second, I see something in her eyes I've never seen before. Not the careful calculation of an Ashby or the practiced seduction of our silo nights. Something wilder. Something that scares me more than prison ever did.
Then she's leaving. Walking back to her Range Rover. The engine purrs to life, expensive and certain, just like everything else in her world.
I stand on my porch, feeling the night settle around me, wondering what kind of man I am—the kind who follows a woman into a dream that can't possibly last, or the kind who stays with the only family that ever truly wanted him.
I go inside and start counting the minutes to midnight.
At a quarter to twelve, I check on Mercy. She's sprawled across her bed, one arm dangling toward the floor, the other still clutching that damn BB gun like it's a teddy bear. I adjust her blanket, careful not to wake her. On her nightstand sits the fortune cookie from dinner, still unopened.
"Be back soon," I whisper.
Outside, the night air hits good. Stars punch through the black, cold and sharp. I take the old footpath down past thedried-up creek bed, my boots crunching on stones that have felt my weight a thousand times before.
The silo rises against the horizon like a sentinel. Ten minutes by foot from my door, but it might as well be another world.
The place where damnation and light begin.
My pulse is jumpin’. I'm five minutes early when I reach the clearing. The metal shell gleams silver in the moonlight, worn but standing. Like me.
