Chapter 10
The brother's name was Hatchet, and he bled all over the compound kitchen table for three hours before the bleeding stopped.
Tamsin worked beside the old ladies through the night.
Maggie—Still's woman, the one who ran the BBQ joint and ran everything else when nobody was looking—had the kitchen organized before the bikes were cold in the lot.
Towels, hot water, the medical kit that lived in the closet behind the bar.
She didn't panic and she didn't ask questions, and when she saw Tamsin's hands were steady, she put a pair of hemostats in them and said, "Hold that, right there," and went back to cutting away Hatchet's jeans.
The bullet had gone through the meat of his thigh and out the other side, which was the best version of getting shot in the leg. No bone, no artery, just a lot of muscle damage and a lot of blood and a man who kept trying to sit up until Tamsin put her hand on his chest and pushed him down.
"Lie still."
"I'm fine—"
"You're bleeding on the table and you're making it worse. Lie still or I'll hold you down."
Hatchet looked at her. Then at Maggie. Then at the ceiling.
"She always like this?" he asked.
"She pulled you out of a burning building," Maggie said, threading a suture needle without looking up. "I'd do what she tells you."
Tamsin held the hemostats and watched Maggie work and said nothing about the fact that her hands knew this.
The angle of the clamp, the pressure you kept on a wound while someone else closed it, the steady voice you used when a man was hurt and frightened and trying to pretend he wasn't. She'd done this in the facility after yard fights, holding gauze against a woman's ribs while the nurse came, talking her through it, staying calm because someone had to and it was never going to be anyone else.
The other old ladies moved through the kitchen in rotation.
One brought coffee. Another took the bloody towels away and brought clean ones.
They worked around Tamsin without making her feel like a stranger, which was its own kind of acceptance—not words, not welcomes, just a space made at the table and a job given without being asked.
By midnight, Hatchet was stitched and sleeping and the kitchen was clean and Tamsin's arms ached from holding pressure for two hours.
By two in the morning, the compound had gone quiet.
By four, Tamsin was sitting on the dock with the ledger open in her lap and the cost of everything finally landing.
Three rooms. Three of her eighteen rooms were gone—nine burned out, eleven stripped, twelve contaminated with whatever chemicals had been in those crates.
The motel she'd rebuilt with her own hands was boarded up and dark on a highway she'd made safe through three years of honest work, and the man who'd done this—the man behind all of it, the voice on the phone, the dispatcher who'd never once stood on the ground he used—hadn't even shown his face.
He'd sent Sharp. Sharp was dead. He'd sent Tillman. Tillman was dead. And the network was still out there, four states wide, and somewhere a man she'd never met was looking at the same problem she was and deciding what to send next.
She stared at the ledger pages. Three months of entries in her own handwriting, and the picture they made was the picture of a woman who'd been standing in the middle of something much bigger than she'd understood, writing it all down because that was the only thing she knew how to do.
The dock creaked behind her.
She didn't turn around. She knew the sound of his boots by now—the weight of him, the rhythm, the way he walked like a man who expected the ground to hold but wouldn't be surprised if it didn't.
Buckshot sat beside her on the dock edge. Not touching. Close enough that she could feel his warmth in the predawn air, but not touching, giving her the space to decide what she needed.
"How's Hatchet?" he asked.
"Sleeping. Maggie stitched him up. He'll limp for a while."
"You pulled him out."
"Somebody had to."
"Somebody didn't have to. You chose to. There's a difference." He paused. "The brothers are talking about it. Cottonmouth said he'd buy you a beer, which from him is the same as a medal."
She almost smiled. Almost.
"Three rooms," she said quietly. "Nine is gone.
I'll have to tear it down to the studs and rebuild.
Eleven and twelve need to be gutted. That's three rooms out of eighteen, and my note is due in eleven days, and the man who did this is sitting in Springfield or wherever he sits and he hasn't lost a single thing except men he can replace. "
"The club isn't doing this because of your motel."
She looked at him.
"Tamsin." His voice was low, steady, the voice he used when he was saying something that mattered.
"Eleven men came onto a Ridgerunner highway today and tried to burn a building on a road we control.
That's not about your rooms or your note or your property.
That's about a man who thinks he can use our territory like a supply line and send convoys to clean up the mess when somebody notices.
The club answers that whether you're here or not. "
"But I am here."
"Yeah." His hand found hers on the dock boards. His fingers laced through hers, rough and warm, and he held on like he'd been waiting for permission. "You are."
The lake was black and still. No moon, no stars—just the dark and the sound of water and the frogs going in the tree line and the two of them sitting on the edge of a dock with their legs hanging over water neither of them could see.
"I quit my job because I couldn't win," she said.
It came out of her like something she'd been carrying in a closed fist, and the release of it made her chest hurt.
"Four years at the facility. Four years of writing reports and filing complaints and documenting everything—the overcrowding, the medical delays, the women who got hurt because there weren't enough staff and the staff who were there didn't care.
I wrote it all down. Every incident, every failure, every time someone got hurt because the system was broken and nobody wanted to fix it. "
She looked at the ledger in her lap. The torn pages, the careful handwriting.
"Nothing changed. I filed reports and nothing changed.
I went to my supervisor and nothing changed.
I went to the warden and he told me the budget was the budget and I should stop creating problems." Her jaw tightened.
"So I quit. I walked out. I told myself I was choosing my own ground, but the truth is I lost and I left, and I've been running a motel on a quiet highway ever since because it was the one place where the only person responsible for anything was me. "
Buckshot was quiet for a long time. The water lapped the pilings. A fish jumped somewhere out in the dark cove, the splash carrying across the still surface.
"You didn't lose," he said. "You survived a system that wasn't built to let you win. That's different."
"Is it?"
"Yeah. Because you're sitting here with a ledger full of evidence that an operation spanning four states didn't see coming, and you're the reason the club knows what it's fighting. That's not losing. That's being the only person in the room who was paying attention."
She turned to look at him. In the dark his face was all planes and shadow, the pockmark scars catching the faint light off the water.
He was looking at her the way he'd looked at her in the wrecked office that first night—not assessing, not calculating, but seeing.
Like she was something he'd decided was real and couldn't look away from.
"I'm not doing it twice," she said. "Quitting. Walking away because I can't win. Whatever this is, however big the man behind it turns out to be—I'm not leaving."
"I know you're not."
"I mean it."
"Tamsin." He lifted their joined hands and pressed his mouth to her knuckles—a gesture so tender and so at odds with everything else about him that it cracked something open in her chest. "I know."
She leaned into him. Put her head on his shoulder. Let herself be held by a man who didn't need her to be strong right now, who would hold her up tonight and stand beside her tomorrow and never confuse the two.
His arm came around her. Heavy, warm, possessive in the way that had become as natural between them as breathing—his hand spread across her hip, pulling her tight against his side.
"Come to bed," he said.
"Not yet."
"Okay."
They sat on the dock until the sky started to lighten behind the bluffs, and neither of them spoke again, and it was enough.
At dawn, Still found them on the deck outside the clubhouse with coffee and the ledger open between them.
He stood with his hands on the rail and looked at the lake going pink and gold and listened to Tamsin walk him through the map one more time—every waypoint, every route, every gap in the network that Tillman's death had just torn open.
"The man behind this has lost his waypoint enforcer and his transport lieutenant in a week," she said. "He'll either pull back or come himself. And a man who's never once stood on his own ground doesn't pull back easily—he sends someone else."
"He's running out of someone elses," Buckshot said.
Still nodded. Slow. Patient. The kind of nod that meant a decision had been made before the conversation started.
"We don't wait for him to send the next one," Still said. "The club goes on a war footing. Every waypoint on that map gets watched. Every road gets ridden. And the ledger"—he looked at Tamsin—"stays in the chapel where it belongs."
Tamsin held his eyes. A president putting her work at the center of his table. Not a favor. Not protection. Recognition.
"It stays," she said. "And so do I."
Still almost smiled. Then he walked inside to start giving orders, and Buckshot put his hand on the back of Tamsin's neck and pulled her into him and kissed her hair, and the sun came up over the cove and the compound started to move.