Page 4

Cash doesn't say nothin'.

Which makes me keep talkin' for some reason. "I never saw that. Never. Never even a hint. And Diesel. And Dusty—no. Just… no. We had women there, Cash. Good women. There's no fuckin' way."

"Well, I don't know those men. But I do know Brick and his buddy Ledger." He stops at the end of the exit ramp and looks at me again. Holds my gaze for what seems like eternity. "They were doin' kids, Legion. They were running the whole operation and they knew. And not only that, those LARPers? The Feds? They were the bosses.”

He looks back at the road and takes a left, heading home.

Neither of us says nothin'. Not for a long time. Six or seven miles at least.

Then finally, Cash says, "So. Don't ya wanna know how I'm gonna make you rich?"

"Not really, Cash."

He laughs. "Why the hell not?"

"Because it's gonna come with strings and I'm so done with this shit."

"Well, then you're in luck. Because while yes, it does actually come with strings, it turns out, you're gonna be the one pulling them for once, not the one dancing."

"Yeah?" I look at him now too. "And how much of my soul do I have to sell to do that?"

"Not a single slice. You, see Legion, I was gonna do this with or without you. But I already figured out that you didn't know about Brick and what he was up to. You really aren't that kind of guy. At some point, I have to concede that my sister knows how to pick a good one. So I figured… I might as well make you respectable."

And after he says this, something happens inside me. Not in my head—not like a thought, not like a plan comin' together. Lower than that.

Deeper. In the chest, where the brand lives, where the 'B' is burned into the skin over my heart and the archangel drives his sword through the demon just below it, all of it inked and scarred and layered one on top of the other like the debt of a man who's been payin' and payin' and hasn't never once been paid back.

Something shifts.

Not big or loud.

Quiet, actually. Just a thing that's been wrong for so long ya forgot what right was supposed to feel like.

Cash Ashby—Cash fuckin' Ashby, the man who dropped me off forty miles from Drybone the day I got out of Whitefall just to make me earn the walk home—is sittin' in this truck tellin' me he's gonna make me respectable.

And maybe in any other life, in any other version of this story, I'd laugh at that. I'd find it funny, or pathetic, or insultin'.

But I don't laugh. I don't find it any of those things.

I look at my hands. My knuckles. M-E-R-C-Y stretched across 'em, the letters old now, the ink long past fresh.

I think about the ink on my arms, the war I been wearin' since I was old enough to walk into a tattoo shop and lay down my own money and get somethin' back worth havin' forever.

All those angels descendin' with their weapons drawn.

All those demons comin' up to meet 'em.

The whole terrible gorgeous mess of it that never once ends in my favor, not in any version that matters.

And for the first time in my life—I mean my whole life, every minute of it—for the first time I realize somethin'.

The angels have won a goddamn battle.

CHAPTER 2

Waking up late for the third day in a row is now a pattern, and the difference today brings isn't guilt exactly—it's more like the absence of it, and the absence of the absence, which means I have stopped waitin' for the punishment that isn't comin'.

There's no berating monologue this morning. Just light comin' through the pale pine slats of my bedroom and the particular quality of silence that ten thousand acres of privately held land affords a person, and I'm layin' in it like a woman who was born to it, which I suppose is the whole point.