Total pages in book: 38
Estimated words: 35372 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 177(@200wpm)___ 141(@250wpm)___ 118(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 35372 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 177(@200wpm)___ 141(@250wpm)___ 118(@300wpm)
Then he turns back to the table and starts making himself a plate of food. Wearing his entitlement the same way I wear my certainty.
I leave. Mind spinnin'.
He's lyin'.
Wyatt Ashby is many things, but clever is not one of them.
He's got no idea what I'm doin'.
And even if he does… he's got no say in it.
I… am the Ashby heiress.
I'm the one with power here.
CHAPTER 5
After the initial sizin' up.
After the slow circlin' that men do when they're not sure if they're meetin' a brother or a ghost.
After the surprised faces—the squinted eyes and the tilted heads and the yeah, yeah, I know that guy, whatever happened to him?
After the half-drunk recognitions, and the low whistles, and the elbows nudged into ribs like, that's him, that's the fuckin' Demon.
After the shots lined up on the bar like little glass soldiers waitin' to die.
After the toasts that don't mean shit but feel like scripture when the room's loud enough.
After the back slappin' that rattles my teeth and the handshakes that squeeze too hard because every man in this room needs to prove somethin' with his grip.
After all of that.
I find myself sittin' alone at a booth in the corner.
Sippin' a glass of whiskey like a goddamn teenager. Nursin' it. Turnin' it between my fingers like it's got answers written on the bottom. The whiskey's warm and it sits in my chest like a coal that won't catch, and the noise of the room keeps pushin' against me but none of it sticks.
I'm here but I'm not here.
I'm sittin' in the corner of a room full of brothers and I feel like a man watchin' his own funeral from the back pew.
And I'm wonderin'.
That's what I'm doin'. Just wonderin'.
If God—if there is a God, and I go back and forth on that subject dependin' on the day and the blood alcohol content—if He sits up there and thinks that makin' my life nothin' but a series of contradictions is ironic.
Or sad.
Or funny.
Because it's gotta be one of the three, right? It's gotta land somewhere on His celestial fuckin' spectrum. The fatherless son who joins his father's killer's club. The man who took a fall for brothers who'd sell him for gas money. The convict who loves the princess. The demon who fights the angels. Every piece of my life foldin' back on itself like a blade closin' into its own handle.
Personally, I find it insultin'.
I started this life with a mother who couldn't look at me without seein' the man who left her. That's the foundation. That's the dirt I grew up in.
Lynn Kane, sweet Lynn, tired Lynn, the woman who worked two jobs and hid bruises and loved me the way you love a wound—by coverin' it up and hopin' it heals on its own.
But it don't. It never does.
And her not lovin' me right wasn't even the worst of it, because the worst of it was that somebody else did.
Eleanor Ashby.
The photographer. The matriarch. The woman who turned privacy into currency and children into content and somehow—somehow—decided that the feral little blond kid from the trailer park across the dry gulch was worth her time. Worth her lens. Worth whatever the fuck she was doin' when she pointed that camera at me and made me feel like I existed.
Every moment of my mother's indifference—and there were plenty, ya know, whole years of it, whole seasons where Lynn looked through me like I was a screen door—every single one of those moments was countered by Eleanor's equal and opposite force. Her attention. Her care. Her passion, if that's what you wanna call it, though I'm not sure what to call it anymore.
She saw me. That's what I'm sayin'. When nobody else did, Eleanor Ashby saw me. And I don't know what she saw, and I don't know what she wanted, and I will never know because she's dead and the dead don't explain themselves. They just leave their mess for the livin' to sort through.
And then I fall in love with her daughter.
Savannah Rose Ashby. The girl who was born into light, and cameras, and curated fuckin' mythology. The girl who cannot marry me.
Not because she doesn't want to—she does.
But because I am not good enough for the family name.
I am not respectable. I am not suitable.
Then I wind up in the club.
The club responsible for my father's abandonment. His death. Brick Ransom put a bullet in Matthias Kane and then years later let Matthias Kane's son walk through his clubhouse doors wearin' a prospect's cut like that wasn't the most twisted thing God ever allowed.
And I knew. I knew the whole time.
Swallowed it like glass, and smiled, and called him President and earned my patch through silence because I needed the club more than I needed revenge.
Or I thought I did.