If He Destroys Us Both

CHAPTER ONE

The Gate

Nadia

The gate was the same rusted iron it had always been, hung between two posts of welded rebar with the Betrayal Brotherhood patch welded at the top in black steel.

Winged skull, wings spread. She had stood on the far side of that gate a hundred times in the years she dated Cade and never once thought it looked like a warning.

Tonight it looked like a warning.

Knox was awake against her chest, which was the only mercy.

When he slept, the car seat was fine, but for the last forty miles of highway he had been fussing in that specific, low-grade way that meant he was overtired and overstimulated and not quite far enough into exhaustion to surrender.

She had driven with one hand on the wheel and one reaching back, two fingers in his grip, letting him squeeze. He had squeezed. He always squeezed.

She had not planned to come here.

That was the truth she had rehearsed for herself on the drive from Elko, through the blank dark of the Nevada highway, past the single gas station that marked the edge of Redrock proper.

She had not planned this. She had been practical.

She had assessed the situation with the same specific calm she used when a patient coded at two in the morning and the attending was still in the parking lot — what do I have, what do I need, what is the fastest path between those two things.

She had laid out her options on the kitchen table of her rented house in Elko while Knox slept in the next room and Rosa sat across from her with her hands wrapped around a mug of tea, saying nothing, because Rosa had always known when Nadia needed silence instead of counsel.

Her options had been three. She could go to the Elko police, who already knew about the two men parked outside the clinic and had done nothing, because two men sitting in a car was not a crime, and because Redrock was not Elko and Elko was not interested in what happened in the territory between them.

She could take Knox and run further — north, maybe, or east toward Utah, spend what remained of her savings on a motel chain and a forwarding address, and buy herself weeks before Iron Reign’s reach caught up.

Or she could come back to the one place that Iron Reign had already decided not to touch, because the men who lived behind this gate were the only force in three hundred miles they had reason to respect.

She had come back.

She had come back because her son’s life was not a variable she was willing to gamble against the odds, and because survival was not the same thing as pride, and because she had learned — at cost, at specific and named cost — that asking for help was not the same as surrendering to the person you asked.

She was not surrendering.

She pressed the intercom button on the gate post. The speaker crackled with the particular static of old equipment that had never been replaced because the Brotherhood valued function over appearance, and then a voice came through that she did not recognize.

Young. Slightly uncertain. “Who’s there? ”

“Nadia Rivera,” she said. “I need to speak to Cade Mercer.”

A pause. Then: “One second.”

She stood in the dark with Knox against her chest and the desert wind moving around her in a way that carried dust and the distant smell of motor oil, and she counted her own heartbeats the way she had learned to do in nursing school when she needed to stay very still inside herself.

It was ninety-four at rest tonight. High.

She noted it the way she noted all clinical data: without judgment, without interpretation, simply as a fact that existed in the world.

The floodlight above the gate came on.

She kept her face neutral.

She heard the compound door before she saw it open — the specific sound of a steel door that had been rehung incorrectly and dragged on its frame every time it moved. Then footsteps on gravel. Then Cade.

He came through the gap in the gate before it was fully open, which was a thing she had forgotten about him — he was always moving slightly ahead of the space available, as though stillness was something that happened to other people.

He had cut his hair shorter since the last time she had seen him, which was fourteen months ago at a gas station on the edge of town where she had stopped to get Knox’s formula and he had been filling his tank, and they had looked at each other across twelve feet of concrete and then she had gotten back in her car and driven away without buying the formula because she couldn’t be in that parking lot for another thirty seconds.

He stopped when he saw her.

She watched his eyes do the thing she had known they would do. They found Knox before they found her.

She had prepared herself for this. She had told herself it would be fine, that it was information entering a system and she was the system and systems did not collapse from information. She had been wrong about how it would feel to watch his face when he saw his son for the first time.

It did not look like softness. It looked like something being taken apart.

“Mercado.” Cade’s voice was the same. Low, controlled, the particular flatness of a man who had taught himself to feel things only in private. “Since when do you use the intercom?”

“Since I’m not stupid enough to walk up to a Brotherhood compound gate in the dark without announcing myself.”

He moved his eyes from Knox to her face. She held his gaze. This was also something she had practiced.

“Are you safe right now?”

“I was safe until two days ago. Two Iron Reign men. Outside my clinic in Elko.”

He absorbed this without reaction, which was a thing she had always recognized as his specific form of attention — the stillness was not absence, it was processing.

He looked at Knox again. Knox, who at this particular moment had his eyes open and his fist wrapped around the fabric of her jacket collar and was looking at this large dark-haired stranger with the focused, unafraid curiosity of a seven-month-old who had not yet learned that some things in the world were worth being afraid of.

“His name is Knox,” she said. She had not meant to say it like an offering. She had meant to say it like a statement of fact. It came out somewhere in between. “He’s seven months old.”

Cade didn’t say anything for a moment that was long enough to have its own specific weight.

“Come inside,” he said finally.

She followed him through the gate.

She did not look at the back of his cut as they walked.

She looked at the compound, which had not changed in the ways that mattered — the row of bikes along the south wall, the dull yellow light from the bar windows, the smell of grease and cigarette smoke and something underneath those things that was specifically and only the Brotherhood, a smell she had spent fourteen months trying to forget and had not managed.

She catalogued it all the way a nurse catalogues a scene: efficiently, without sentiment, preparing for what she might need to know.

The prospect on gate duty stepped back to let them pass.

She recognized him when the floodlight caught his face.

Trey Walsh. He was nineteen now, maybe twenty.

He had been the one who told her, at a club party fourteen months ago, that Cade had been with Dani Holt the night Nadia called him with the pregnancy test in her hand.

Trey had said it the way you say something to someone you assume already knows — casual, incidental, confirming rather than revealing.

He had seen her face afterward and understood immediately what he had done.

He was not meeting her eyes now either.

She filed this away and walked through the gate.

* * *

The compound at eleven at night had its specific rhythms. Three men in the bar, the sound of a game on a television with blown speakers.

Dice Reeves at the fire pit with a beer in his hand, who saw her and went very still in the way of a man who had known this moment would come eventually and still wasn’t ready for it.

She nodded at him. He nodded back. That was sufficient.

Cade led her not to the bar and not to the bunkhouse but to the small room off the back of the garage that the Brotherhood used as a private office — a room with a door that locked, a folding table, two chairs, and a cot along one wall that was usually reserved for members who were too compromised to ride.

He turned on the overhead light and it was fluorescent and unflattering and she was grateful for it because unflattering light was honest light.

“There’s formula in my bag,” she said. “I need hot water. Not boiling. Lukewarm.”

He left without a word. She used the time to set her bag on the table and unstrap Knox from the carrier with the specific practiced efficiency of a woman who had done this thousands of times in the dark, alone, and she held him against her shoulder and said quietly into his hair, “We’re okay.

We’re okay right now,” which was not a lie, she decided.

Right now, in this specific moment, they were.

Cade came back with a mug of lukewarm water.

He had done it exactly right, which meant he had used the temperature trick — boiling water cut with cold until it was wrist-safe.

He had known to do it correctly, which meant he had been paying some form of attention over fourteen months, which she did not know what to do with.

She made the formula. She fed Knox. Cade stood across the room with his back to the wall and watched in silence, and she let him watch because Knox was not a secret anymore and she had not come here to keep secrets.

When Knox was half-asleep and still pulling intermittently at the bottle, she looked at Cade across the room and said, “I am not here because I want to be here. I am here because the alternative is less safe for him. I need protection for Knox and for myself until Iron Reign’s Elko operation is neutralized.

That is the only transaction I am proposing. ”

Cade held her gaze.

“Nadia.”

“Don’t.”

He closed his mouth. That was the right choice. She appreciated it more than she would ever tell him.

Knox’s eyes were closed. She shifted him to her shoulder and patted his back in the slow, rhythmic way that meant sleep was thirty seconds away, and she did not look at Cade again until she heard the door behind him.

Trey Walsh, in the doorway. Not looking at her. Looking at Cade.

Neither of them said anything.

Trey pulled the door closed.

She looked at Knox’s face, which was slack and trusting and completely certain that the world was safe, the way only very young things are certain, before the world teaches them otherwise.

She did not let herself feel anything about the fact that Knox had Cade’s eyes.

Not yet.