Page 7 of Iron and Ivory

It is the most profoundly, absurdly, catastrophically stupid thing I have ever done.

Cash doesn't ask if I want to be carried. He just does it. His arms are iron under my knees and behind my back, and I am horizontal and helpless and bein' moved like furniture repositioned before a shoot, and there is absolutely nothing I can do about it because my legs have apparently filed for independent governance and the vote did not go my way.

He's barking orders before we even clear the doorway. I can hear the house manager's shoes on the flagstone, quick and purposeful, and the maids scattering into useful configurations the way they always do when Cash takes command of a room, because Cash has that quality—the quality of a man who expects the world to rearrange itself around his intentions, and the world, to its credit, generally obliges.

I am deposited onto the great room sofa with more gentleness than I deserve.

"Put your feet up," Cash says, and it is not a suggestion.

Then there are hands everywhere—not his, other hands—someone pressing a glass of water against my palm, someone else arranging a cool cloth across my forehead with the kind of theatrical efficiency that suggests this household has a protocol for exactly this sort of emergency.

Which, knowing my mother, it probably does.

She'd have staged it first. Checked the light.

It is, without question, the most ridiculous tableau I have ever been part of, and I have been photographed on horseback at sunrise in a custom Chanel field jacket for a brand partnership, so my threshold for absurdity is not low.

I am the invalid on the fainting couch.

I am the delicate creature requiring smelling salts and a devoted household staff.

I am every soft-spined heroine in every overwrought film I have ever watched with my eyes half-rolled, and the fact that I am living it right now, in my own home, is so cosmically humiliating that I briefly consider whether unconsciousness might actually be preferable to this.

It is not. But I consider it.

Cash begins snapping his fingers and the room empties the way rooms do when the person asking isn't actually asking.

The pocket doors slide closed on their brass track with a sound so polished and final it belongs in a different kind of house entirely.

Which is the thing I find myself fixating on, because my mind is doing what it always does when the emotional load exceeds its carrying capacity—it catalogs. It observes. It retreats into architectural criticism as a coping mechanism.

Pocket doors. In a log home. In Prairie County, Montana. With the elk-antler chandelier and the hand-hewn stone hearth and the sixteen-foot ceilings and the whole curated mythology of rugged Western living, and yet here we are, pulling Victorian pocket doors closed like this is a drawing room in a Brontë novel and I have just swooned over Mr. Rochester's horse.

What is wrong with my mind?

Your mind, Savannah? Try your whole fuckin' life.

"Drink," Cash says, bringing the glass to my lips.

I do drink. It's good too. So I gulp it. Then feel stupid. Again.

Cash takes the glass, sets it down, and looks me in the eyes. "What the hell just happened?"

I want to tell him. I really do. I want him to know everything about Legion and me, and the clubhouse—which he already knows, actually, because that bitch Brandy—the dead bitch Brandy because Legion shot her—sold my clubhouse life to someone and made it all public.

But only God understands that moment. Cash doesn't. Can't. And it's not even about the clubhouse or the Badlands, it's about Legion, and Mother, and the book, and… everything.

Murder.

Mass burial.

And honestly, I don't even care about that.

A massacre at an outlaw biker clubhouse is the least of my concerns right now because… everything is fucked.

And I think Cash would actually understand—that's the part that makes this so unbearable. He gets it. This life, this land, this particular brand of Montana loneliness that looks like legacy from the outside and feels like a slow drowning from the inside.

No, he wasn't used the way I was—nobody aimed a camera at Cash's childhood and monetized every skinned knee and first frost and awkward-teeth phase for eight million strangers—but he was here.