Chapter Seven #2
"How much has it cost you so far? Actually cost you, not hypothetically.
" Rowan leaned forward, meeting him head-on.
"Because from where I'm standing, all I've seen the Vultures do is send one man to ask questions at a truck stop and let a woman with a grudge pull eight hundred dollars through a login nobody bothered to close.
That's a problem. It's not a war. You're talking about escalating to intimidation over a problem that's still, technically, containable through channels that don't put my license at risk. "
"And if it stops being containable next week? Next month? You want me sitting on my hands while they get bolder because I was too cautious to send a message when a message still would've worked?"
"I want you finding another way. A legal way.
I'll press charges myself if it comes to that, I'll get a restraining order, I'll do whatever it takes through channels that don't put my license or your club's clean record at risk.
But I won't sign off on sending anybody to have a quiet conversation with her, and if you do it anyway, without my blessing, you need to understand that I will treat it as exactly what it is, a liability I didn't agree to and can't control, and I'll act accordingly.
" She held his eyes, steady, the same voice she used on suppliers who tried to shortchange her, because this, at least, she knew how to do without flinching.
"I built this business to be clean, Walt.
I'm not going to watch it get dirty because the club got tired of waiting for the slow way to work. "
"You'd go to the county on your own club, over this?"
"I'd protect the one thing I built with my own two hands that nobody's ever had a legitimate claim to take from me, yes.
Even from you." She didn't blink. "I'd rather be the woman who protected her license than the woman who let intimidation happen on her property and told herself it wasn't her problem because she didn't throw the punch.
You taught me that rule yourself, Walt, back when you were the one insisting the Yard had to stay clean no matter what it cost either of us.
I'm just the one still holding you to it. "
Walt was quiet for a long moment, and Rowan watched something move behind his eyes that she couldn't fully read, not quite anger, something closer to the particular frustration of a man who respected the person telling him no more than he wanted to.
"You've got more nerve than most men at my table," he said finally, standing.
"I'll give you that much. That doesn't mean I'm agreeing to leave it alone forever, understand.
I'm agreeing to leave it alone for now, because you're not wrong about the license, and I built that rule myself, same as you said.
But if this drags on much longer, if she keeps pulling money or worse, I need you to understand my patience isn't infinite, and neither is my club's. "
"Understood," Rowan said, and meant it, even as some small, cold part of her filed away the shape of the warning, because she'd learned a long time ago that a man telling you his patience had a limit was a man you needed to start planning around, and Walt Doyle had never once in her experience made a threat he didn't fully intend to keep.
Walt left, and Rowan spent the rest of the afternoon in the particular fog of a woman who'd won an argument and didn't feel any better for it, restocking shelves that didn't need restocking, checking a delivery schedule she already had memorized, anything to keep her hands busy while her mind circled the conversation looking for a crack she might have missed.
She thought about calling Cole to tell him what Walt had proposed, and then didn't, because some stubborn part of her still wanted to be the one who handled her own club politics without needing him as a translator between herself and his brothers, even now, even with the terms she'd written herself sitting in a drawer at home as proof she was allowed to ask for his help with exactly the parts of this that required it and not one inch more.
Jonas left at four, the delivery truck came and went without incident, and by the time the light started going long and gold across the gravel lot again, Rowan had almost managed to talk herself into believing the day was going to end as ordinarily as it had started.
The note was waiting on the bar when she came back from the walk-in around five, tucked under the edge of the register where anyone walking past the front door could have slipped it, no envelope, just a single folded sheet of paper in handwriting Rowan recognized instantly, the same careful, looping script that used to appear on inventory sheets two years ago, back when Vanessa Cruz had been someone Rowan trusted enough to hand a set of keys.
She stood holding it a full ten seconds before she made herself unfold it, some old instinct telling her that whatever was written inside was going to require her full attention and she wasn't going to get it by reading with shaking hands.
I know you found the login. I know what it looks like.
It's not everything you think it is, and it's more dangerous than you think it is, both at once.
We need to talk. Alone. Before this goes somewhere neither of us wants it to go.
I'll be at the old feed mill on Route 9 tomorrow night, ten o'clock. Come by yourself, or don't come at all.
Rowan stood very still, the note trembling slightly in her hand, and understood, reading it twice, that whatever this was, it had just stopped being a problem she could solve with security patches and written terms, and had become something with a time and a place attached to it, waiting for her in the dark two lots down from her own front door.
She read it a third time, slower, trying to hear it in Vanessa's actual voice instead of the flat, dread-soaked register her own mind kept supplying, and found she couldn't decide, on this read either, whether the words on the page belonged to a woman making a threat or a woman asking, in the only language she apparently had left, for help.
It's not everything you think it is, and it's more dangerous than you think it is, both at once.
That single line kept catching, snagging on something Rowan couldn't quite name, because it didn't read like the words of someone trying to extort her.
It read like someone who was scared, and Rowan had spent seven months building a version of Vanessa Cruz in her head that had no room in it for scared, only for cruel, only for a woman who'd taken something and deserved whatever came back around to her for it.
She folded the note along its original creases and slid it into her back pocket, because some decisions couldn't be made standing at a register with the dinner rush an hour out and Jonas gone for the day, and locked up early for the first time in longer than she could remember, carrying the weight of tomorrow night's ten o'clock the whole quiet walk up to her apartment above the storage building.