Page 16 of Iron and Ivory

He told me everything down in the archives.

It's just… I don't care.

And that is probably a character flaw I should examine at some point. I am aware of that.

But when I told my four-point-two million followers that there is no time, no distance, no consequence formidable enough to make me stop loving him—I meant it.

I was not performin'.

I was not curating. That was the truest thing I've ever said, and I said it to four million strangers because I couldn't say it to him.

I don't care how many outlaw bikers he kills.

I mean, yes. I do have a limit. I am not a sociopath.

I do care… if the people are innocent.

That's the line. Legion doesn't kill innocent people, and I know that the way I know which pastures flood first after a hard rain and which ones hold.

These men were traitors to the club, which in the Badlands MC is not a philosophical designation—it is a death sentence they wrote for themselves the moment they broke the oath.

They do not count.

They simply don't.

The silo materializes out of the dark the way it always does—sudden, patient, like it's been standin' there holdin' its breath the whole time I was walkin' toward it. My wandering mind pulls back enough to take it in properly.

When I look at this silo I see innocence, which is a strange and maybe dishonest thing to say about a place where we have done profoundly uninnocent things together, and yet the feeling persists regardless of the evidence.

It is the major landmark of my childhood in the same way other girls had their grandmother's kitchen or their church pew—a fixed point the heart orients around when everything else is spinning.

Legion and I met when I was twelve and he was fourteen, which some people would call children and some people would call the beginning of something inevitable, and I think both assessments are accurate in ways that don't cancel each other out.

We were not exactly children. Not if you account for context. Not if you factor in what his life already looked like by fourteen, what mine already required of me by twelve.

Me with my curated online presence and the particular loneliness that lives inside a life that is entirely, exhaustingly public.

Him with that scrappy, load-bearing stubbornness that comes from having nobody to depend on but yourself, from learning early that the world is not going to offer you anything it isn't legally required to.

But we were innocent at the same time.

Both of those things are true and I have made peace with the paradox.

It is a beautiful silo, I think. Objectively beautiful, in the way that things are beautiful when they have been shaped by weather, and time, and the slow patient indifference of decades rather than by anyone's intention or design.

The metal walls have a patina you absolutely cannot buy or manufacture, that particular blue-gray oxidation that comes from Montana winters stackin' on top of Montana summers until the steel itself seems to have opinions about the weather.

The solar-powered string lights Legion put up months ago are still lit, which surprises me every time and moves me in a way I can't fully explain, the fact that he thought to do that, the fact that they're still working, still waitin'.

The sky behind the silo is inky, and enormous, and salted with stars so dense and low they look almost architectural, and the Milky Way cuts across it like someone spilled something luminous and never cleaned it up.

It is, taken on its own terms, perfect.

I wouldn't want to meet him on the sly anywhere else on this earth.

But. And there is always a but when it comes to Legion and me, some subordinate clause attached to the beauty that reframes the whole composition.

It sits in the middle of an old craggy pasture that hasn't seen a productive season in probably twenty years, and it has a dirt floor, and the track Legion rides to get here is more of a deer trail than a road—two ruts pressed into dry grass by habit rather than engineering, more suggestion than infrastructure.