Page 26 of Iron and Ivory

Like I'm something he has to stand back from to properly see.

His unruly blond hair falls forward over his eyes, castin' a shadow across his face, and even though the dim amber light filtering in from the fairy bulbs strung outside the silo does its level best to glow him up, it still can't quite get there—because he's the kind of beautiful that light has to work for.

He still looks like an angel—even now, even here, even after everything—and I think that is the cruelest joke God ever told. That He made a man this beautiful and then built a whole mythology of ruin around him like a fence.

I will never see the demon he claims to live inside him. I've studied every inch of that ink, traced the war on his skin with my fingertips in the dark, learned the whole terrible scripture of it—the falling angels, the broken gate, the chained thing held by the throat—and I still cannot find the monster he insists he is.

Because when I look at him I only ever see the boy.

I don't care how old he gets, all I see is that perfect, beautiful, strong, funny boy who wanted to take me places. Who learned my name like a prayer and never stopped saying it.

Maybe that demon is there for other people.

Maybe it's there in the clubhouse, in the dark rooms, in whatever happens when I'm not watching.

But standin' here in the dark silo, with his blond hair falling forward and his eyes on mine like I'm the only fixed point in a spinning world—all I see is him.

Just him.

And the wanting inside me is so complete it feels like a sickness.

"I want to," he admits. "Trust me, Savannah, I would love to go home with you right now."

This costs him a lot. It must feel a little bit like surrender. That he made a mistake when he left me in the middle of the night last summer. When he went back to Brick, and the Badlands, and all the trouble and death that came with it.

He reaches up with gentle fingers and swipes the hair away from my eyes. "I want to. I really do. But I don't know what's happenin'. The FBI never came. I really thought they'd take us down by now. The only reason I was able to get away was because everyone back at the clubhouse is so fuckin' wound up, there's no way to hold it together until somethin' gives."

I smile despite not gettin' what I want. "I'm the somethin' that gives?"

His return smile is big and real. "You break everything in me. In the best way possible. And I swear it, Savannah, hundred percent I would go home with you right now if I thought it was safe. I just don't think it is."

"Do you think they're coming?"

He nods, slowly. "There's no way they're not. I don't know why they're takin' so long. I want it to be a good sign. Like… maybe we got away with it. But it's not. There's somethin' wrong here."

"You make it sound inevitable."

He strokes my cheek with the back of his knuckle. "What's that?"

"The end."

"Well…" He huffs a laugh. "Darlin', I hate to break it to ya, but the end is most certainly inevitable." His thumb traces the line of my cheekbone like he's memorizing it, like he's already composin' the memory. "But I'll make ya a promise right now, Savannah Rose Ashby." The full name. All three parts. Never a good sign. "I will get through this. And when I do, I'll come back."

Hmm. I don't like that.

I don't like it even a little bit, and the smile I give him is the kind I've worn in photographs since I was four years old—composed, radiant, and entirely hollow.

Because what he wants me to think he's sayin' and what he's actually sayin' are two profoundly different things. And I have spent enough years studyin' the distance between a man's words and his meaning to know exactly where Legion Kane is standin' right now.

He wants me to believe he can fix this. He wants me to hear I'll come back like it's a guarantee, like it's a deed to somethin' real. And I want that too.

But the other side of I'll come back isn't a prison sentence this time, and it isn't happily-ever-after either. It isn't even the gray uncertain middle where hope still has a foothold.

That is what he means.

He's goin' down, and he knows it, and he's not even tryin' hard to pretend otherwise.

His thumb is still on my cheekbone and his eyes are soft and careful and that is how I know.