Total pages in book: 35
Estimated words: 32319 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 162(@200wpm)___ 129(@250wpm)___ 108(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 32319 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 162(@200wpm)___ 129(@250wpm)___ 108(@300wpm)
"Shut up, Destiny."
"Shut up, Destiny," she mocks back. "No, Legion. I will not shut up."
"Can I just explain," Colt says.
"Fuck off," I snarl. "No one's talking to you, Colt."
But he doesn't fuck off, and Destiny—who has never been afraid of me a single moment of her entire life—takes over. "We met at the library," she says, bouncing the baby when she fusses. "I was looking through college catalogs online. Community college stuff. Thinking maybe..." She trails off, that dream already fading. "Colt was having a meeting with the librarians. Something about organizing a show for Eleanor's photographs and…"
Eleanor.
The name hits me like a fist to the face. Unexpected. Eleanor Ashby with her camera always pointed at me. From the time I was small enough to fit in the viewfinder, she was there. Watching. Documenting.
I see her in flashes—the way she'd adjust the light with her hands like she was sculpting it. How she'd tell me to hold still, just one more, just like that. The smell of her perfume when she'd get close to position my chin just right.
But that was later. Much later. That's not how it started.
It started with her showing up at my school, dropping off a bagged lunch. Sandwiches. She even cut the crusts off. Nobody ever cut my crusts off.
I can't even count up the number of times Eleanor Ashby showed up at Drybone Elementary with a bag of food at noon. It must've been hundreds, though. Hundreds of times.
But the number of times she found my face in the lens of her camera must've surely numbered in the thousands.
She took tens of thousands of photos of me.
It wouldn't even surprise me if, after everything was all accounted for, she took more of me than she did Savannah.
She'd slip me twenty-dollar bills sometimes. Tell me it was for modeling. Make me promise not to tell no one.
Which, ya know, is your first clue that something isn’t right.
But none of it ever felt wrong.
That's the problem with wrongness, I guess. It rides a line.
I didn't understand what was goin' on back then, and I still don't fully understand it now.
The confusion must show on my face because Destiny's voice suddenly cuts through my thoughts. "—and that's how we started seeing each other. Legion? Are you even listening?"
I blink, realizing I've missed something important. Some critical piece of how my underage sister ended up pregnant by an Ashby while I was locked in a cell.
"What do you want from me?" I ask, refocusing on the present. "Why come here now?"
Colt answers this time, his voice steady despite the gun still aimed at his head. "Nothing. We're leaving town tonight. Heading west. I just thought..." He glances at Destiny. "We thought you should meet your niece before we go. That's all."
"That's all," I repeat, the words hollow.
"It's a good place," Destiny adds, shifting the baby to her other hip. "Somewhere I've always wanted to go."
I squint at her, because she's looking me dead in the eyes when these words come out.
Some place I've always wanted to go.
And just like that, I'm back in our old trailer. Destiny, little then, taping pictures cut from magazines to the wall above her mattress on the floor. Snow-capped mountains. Log cabins with smoke curling from stone chimneys. Lake that looked like glass.
There are lots of pretty places in Montana. Like… thousands, probably. Hell, even Drybone, with its proximity to Glendive and Makoshika State Park, has breathtakingly beautiful places all around it.
But Destiny only had eyes for the Tetons.
Jackson Hole, Wyoming.
"I'm gonna live there one day." She must've told me that a hundred times as she looked at the pictures on her wall. "In a big fancy house made of logs."
I remember nodding along. Telling her she could go anywhere she wanted.
Until I didn't.
Three days before I took the fall for the club, I snapped at her. "That's not a place for us, Destiny. Only rich people live there." I tore down one of her pictures. "People like us don't get happy endings in places like that. We get trailer parks and prison sentences. That's our inheritance."
God, I'm a dick.
I don't say Jackson Hole out loud now. Not that I’m hedging my bets on my brothers behind me, but the less they know about this, the better. What Destiny just told me was a code, so that’s how it’s gonna stay.
They’re not just on the run from Cash and whatever Ashby bullshit will follow them forever now that a bloodline baby is involved, they’re runnin’ from me too.
My arm is starting to ache from holding the gun level. My ribs scream every time I inhale, my head is poundin’ like a motherfucker. Everything hurts.
The baby makes a soft sound, like a question.
I lower the gun slowly, muscle by muscle, like I’m dismantling a bomb. The metal feels heavier going down than it did coming up. Like gravity knows what this surrender costs me.