Total pages in book: 38
Estimated words: 35372 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 177(@200wpm)___ 141(@250wpm)___ 118(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 35372 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 177(@200wpm)___ 141(@250wpm)___ 118(@300wpm)
Family.
And these men are family.
Everyone in this room showed up.
They put it all on the line to get us out.
Or, at the very least, to give me the chance to get us out.
To find a way.
To buy their souls back.
I am not without sin.
Judge not, lest ye be judged.
So I let the rage sit. I let it cool. I don't feed it and I don't fight it.
Instead, I say, "They're gonna be out at June's for the next three days. Helpin' her sort things. I guess she's gonna sell the farm."
Diesel doesn't quite know what to make of that. His jaw works a little, like he's chewin' on a question he doesn't wanna ask. "OK," he says. And that's it. Just OK. Which is about as much as either of us can handle right now.
I let the silence hold. Let it do the work my mouth can't.
Because eventually—and this is a sooner rather than later type of eventually—I'm gonna have to confront them all. Every patched man in this room. Every man who rode with Brick and looked the other way, or didn't look at all, or looked and decided it wasn't their fuckin' problem.
We're gonna have to have it out. Gonna have to lay every card face up and reckon with what we were part of. What we let happen. What we didn't see because we chose not to.
That conversation is comin'. It's comin' like weather. Like a wall of black cloud you can see from thirty miles out, crawlin' across the flats, and you know goddamn well there isn't any shelter between here and there.
But not today.
Today I let it sit. Today I let these men breathe. Let 'em go home to their women, their couches, their silence. Let 'em drink, or pray, or stare at the ceiling and wonder what comes next. Same as me.
"I'm gonna head over to Savannah's," I say. "Stay the night."
Diesel smiles. Real one too—not the tight-lipped kind he's been wearin' all mornin'. This one reaches his eyes. "You stayed there last night too, didn't ya?"
It's not an accusation. But I play it like one anyway, if only because I'd rather explain somethin' good for once instead of somethin' evil. And anyway, it's not even true. I stayed at my own house last night.
But I don't say that. Instead, I say, "You don't live here. You go home every night, don't ya, Diesel? Go home to Mama Jo, and your bed, and whatever the hell she's got cookin'. Nobody asks you to explain that."
He leans back, crosses his arms over his chest, and his eyes get that look. That knowin' look. The one that says he sees through me but respects me enough not to say so.
"Is the Ashby ranch home now, Legion?"
And the way he says it—not mean, not even skeptical, just curious, like a man who genuinely wants to understand what the fuck I'm buildin' out here—it makes me stop. Makes me think about the word.
Home. Four letters. Smallest word in the language that still carries the weight of the whole goddamn world.
"Home is Savannah," I say. And I mean it. "Wherever she is, that's my home. Could be the ranch. Could be the silo. Could be the fuckin' ditch on the side of Route 200—doesn't matter. If she's there, I'm home."
I feel the heat of that in my chest. Right over the brand. Right where the ink shows an archangel drivin' a blade through darkness.
"But actually," I say, deciding to explain myself further. Because he's thinkin' that I'm confused. And I'm not. Not one bit. "We stayed at my place last night, Diesel. At the new trailer."
I let that sit for a second because it still sounds weird comin' out of my mouth. My place. Like I'm a man who owns somethin'.
Like I'm a man who deserves walls and a roof.
"Had ourselves a little fuckin' movie night and everythin'. Popcorn. Candy. Big Trouble in Little China."
Diesel's laugh is a bellow. A full-body thing that comes up from somewhere deep in that wreckin'-ball frame of his and rolls through the room like thunder.
And I like it.
I like the sound of it.
I like him too.
So I look him in the eye. Hold it. Let him see whatever's behind mine—the gratitude, the grief, the way I'm still figurin' out how to be the man sittin' in this chair instead of the one takin' orders from it.
"We all make mistakes, Diesel."
His smile drops. Not all the way—not like a man caught in a lie. More like a man who just remembered where the bodies are buried. He knows what I'm talkin' about. Knows it in his bones the same way I know it in mine.
"Yeah," he says. And that one word carries the weight of every wrong turn this club has taken in the last however many years it's been since we were clean.