Something that won't heal clean and I'll never get back.
CHAPTER 2
The blood beneath my tattoo bandage pulses with each heartbeat. Fresh ink, fresh claim—the words "PROPERTY OF DEMON" still pressing into the clear wrap.
The Range Rover disappears, leaving a cloud of dust behind as Colt drives away with my niece. Legion's niece.
Ourniece.
I'm not sure that makes sense yet.
I'm not sure anything makes sense these days.
Watching Legion point a gun at my youngest brother didn't evoke the kind of reaction it should've.
He was calm. His hand did not shake, not one bit. There was no wild, jittery aim of someone who might miss, but the practiced calm of someone who never does. The way men who understand consequences handle death when the possibility of it rises up in front of them.
I should've felt fear for Colt. I should've felt sympathy for Destiny.
But God help me, watching Legion handle that gun made something low in my belly tighten.
Not because I wanted Colt dead—though part of me might after what I just learned—but because Legion in control is violence made beautiful.
In another timeline, I would have been Destiny's sister-in-law.
In that timeline, I would marry Legion instead of running away to college in order to put off the reality of Ashby expectations.
But I don't live in that timeline, I live in this one. The one where I came back to mama and the ranch, and the camera.
The one where Legion went to prison for something he didn't do.
The one where my thirty-one-year-old brother got his seventeen-year-old sister knocked up.
Now we're strangers connected by a child who shouldn't exist.
I'm ashamed for Colt, though Colt didn't look the least bit ashamed of himself. Standing there in his designer clothes next to Destiny in her sundress, like they're playing house instead of running from the wreckage they've created.
Legion turns from the empty road, dust settling around his boots as he walks back toward the clubhouse. Toward me. His eyes find mine for just a heartbeat. No words, just a look that says everything and nothing at all.
The space between us stretches wide as prairie sky though I could reach out and touch him if I dared. But I don't. His jaw is set in that way that means he's already gone, already somewhere I can't follow.
He disappears into the clubhouse without slowing, and I'm left standing on the porch with my bleeding wrist and my Badlands jacket, feeling the weight of choices made and unmade, settling into my bones.
My mother would've framed this moment differently.
Eleanor Ashby would've posed me just so—chin lifted, eyes reflecting the dying light, my hand reaching after something I can't have. She would've called it art instead of heartbreak.
The memory of finding her secret rushes in, unbidden and unwanted. It happened after the reading of the will that made me both prisoner and queen of everything she built. The brass key the lawyer slid across his expansive mahogany desk. With a very serious expression, he said it was for my eyes only.
That night, I'd climbed the stairs to her study—the one place in the house where the light always felt wrong. Cold. The wooden box behind her awards was inlaid with mother-of-pearl. Inside, a note with numbers. Not coordinates, though they might as well have been. They led me down, down, down.
The elevator hidden in my closet. The vault thirty feet below where the ranch's bedrock starts.
Eleanor Ashby's photograph archive.
I'd been down there, but never alone. Never allowed to wander or look through things. Mother kept her negatives in perfect archival condition—every single photo she ever took. So it was exciting to finally have the code to use the elevator and see the photos without supervision.
But it was the safe that called to me. Heavy steel, turn of the century.
