Page 46 of Chains and Vows

At some point I'm told to undress, so I do. Then I just stand around, forcin' myself to act natural in my boxers as Cash looks me over.

"See somethin' ya like?" I ask him.

He actually looks thrown for a moment. An expression I've never seen on Cash Ashby. "It's just… those tattoos, Legion. What the hell kind of war is happening on your skin?"

"The kind no one wins," I deadpan. Then I grab a magazine and take a seat too. Whatever is happenin' with my clothes, it's got nothin' to do with me. I might as well entertain myself.

The magazine is… lacking. Something meant for bankers on a cowboy side quest, I think. But it's all I got, so I make do.

Finally, after what feels like hours, the tailor comes back with the clothes and I put everything back on one more time.

Cash picks me a hat and belt, and I put those on too. Then I stand in front of the full-length mirror and recognize exactly six inches of myself. The space between my lips and my eyes.

That's all that's left of Demon Kane.

The rest of him looks like a banker who does cowboy side quests.

CHAPTER 12

Cash leaves town through the back door—crawlin' through town, crossin' the Yellowstone River—and we dump out on the north end on the old river road runnin' northeast.

We're not goin' home yet, though. We didn't come to Miles City for a glow-up.

We're here to issue Marcus White Jr. a warning, and the badlands breaks are where it all goes down. It's his family's stompin' ground because it belongs, part and parcel, to Marcus's father, Senator White.

What came first? The chicken or the egg?

Same question can be asked of politicians. What came first, the money or the power?

Does it matter?

It doesn't.

The White family owns Miles City the same way the Ashbys own the water under Drybone. It was acquired, bit by bit, over a series of decades, more than a century ago.

With one key difference.

Which was pointed out to me the other morning by Cash Ashby himself as I rode out on the back of the feral filly at dawn, to fix a well pump.

The difference is, the Whites own city blocks and they hold their power through coercion.

"Explain," I'd growled back at Cash, tryin' my best to control the filly under me.

"Every powerful family you've ever heard of is part of a game, Legion," he'd said. "It's a long game too. Been going on since the dawn of time. No one ever gets handed power. It only comes when you take it."

This landed with me and even though he kept talkin’ about his thesis on power, I was thinkin' about how I took the power of an outlaw biker club and didn't ask a single fuckin' person if they had feelin's about it.

Cash told me about Banker's Block in Miles City—that's how the Whites came up first. They ran the only bank in five hundred miles, and every time a hard winter or a dry decade wiped out the cattlemen, the Whites foreclosed on the wreckage for pennies and got richer off every bust that broke everybody else.

Banker's Block is the entirety of that operation. A hundred and fifty years of people owin' money to the White family and not bein' able to pay.

They own more than one block at this point. They own the land downtown Miles City sits on. Every block, every building, with a handful of exceptions. Harmon & Sons bein' the perfect example. Plus a few other powerful families who never needed a loan or had the good sense to pay it back quickly if they did.

Miles City is the county seat of Custer County, and since the Whites own the town, that senate seat's been theirs whenever they wanted it.

"That's how you get power," Cash had said. "You cheat it out of people and then you live in it."

I wasn't lookin' at him when those words came out. I was watchin' a whole herd of black angus cattle grazin' what was left of the fall grass as we rode a fence line.