Chapter 7
Freya
The secret ends on an ordinary Saturday morning, the way these things always do — not with a confrontation we planned for, but with a coffeepot and a jacket and the worst timing in the history of the Katsaros family.
Kieran's in my kitchen. It's barely eight.
He stayed over, which he almost never does, because almost-never is safer, but last night was the cove and the long ride back and we were both too wrung out and too happy to be careful, and now he's standing at my counter in nothing but his jeans, hair a wreck, making coffee in the absurd domestic way he has, like a man who can't quite believe he's allowed in a kitchen.
His canvas jacket is slung over the chair by the door.
His boots are by mine. The whole apartment looks like exactly what it is, which is a place where two people who belong to each other woke up together.
And then there's a knock, and before I can move, before I can even register the threat, the door opens — because Theo has a key, of course he has a key, he installed the deadbolt himself two years ago and kept one, for emergencies, he said, and I never took it back because he's my brother and I trusted him with it.
He's holding a bag of the cardamom rolls I like from the boardwalk bakery.
A peace offering. He came to make peace.
That's the part I'll never get over. He came to make peace after our fight in the bay, and he walked in with pastries and an apology half-formed on his face, and what he found was his prospect making coffee in his sister's kitchen with his jacket on her chair.
He stops in the doorway.
I watch it happen on his face — the bag of rolls, the recognition, the math doing itself in real time.
The jacket. The boots. The bare-chested kid by the coffeepot.
The bed visible through the open door behind me, unmade, obviously slept in by two people.
I watch every piece of it land, and I watch my brother's face do something I have never seen it do, not when our father died, not ever.
It breaks.
Just for a second. The wall — the enforcer wall, the stillness that makes grown men confess — it comes down entirely, and underneath it isn't rage.
It's hurt. Raw, enormous, the hurt of a man who walked in to apologize and found out he was the only one in the room who didn't already know the truth.
And then it's gone, slammed back up brick by brick, faster than I've ever seen it move, and what's left is so much worse than anger that I'd give anything for him to just yell.
"Theo," I say. "Let me —"
"Don't." He doesn't look at me. He's looking at Kieran. He sets the bag of cardamom rolls down on the small table by the door, very gently, like it's made of glass, like setting it down hard would shatter something he's barely holding together. "How long."
Kieran sets down the coffeepot. He doesn't reach for his shirt. He doesn't make himself smaller. He stands there bare-chested with all his bad ink on display and he meets Theo's eyes and he says, "Three weeks. The wanting, longer. Months."
"Months." Theo says it like a foreign word. "I ran you ragged for months. I gave you my trust for months. I looked you in the eye every morning and you —"
"Yes," Kieran says. He doesn't flinch. "Every morning. I'm not going to tell you I'm sorry I love her, because I won't lie to you again, not even to make this easier. But I'm sorry I lied. That part I'll carry. That part was mine and it was wrong and I knew it the whole time."
The word love lands in the room like a dropped tool. I see Theo hear it. I see what it does to him.
"You're done," Theo says. Flat. Final. The enforcer voice.
"As a prospect. Right now. You don't come back to the compound.
You don't show up for duty. You hand your rag back and you're done.
" He says it without raising his voice, and that's how I know it's not a threat, it's a sentence.
"I sponsored you. That makes you mine to un-sponsor.
It's the one thing in this I actually get to decide. "
Kieran nods. Once. He doesn't argue. He doesn't beg. He takes it the way I've watched him take every hard thing, standing still, eyes open, like a man who learned a long time ago that flinching only makes it worse.
"Understood," he says quietly.
And that — that's what breaks me. Not Theo's hurt. Kieran's silence. The way he just takes it, the way he's been taking it his whole life, the way the world has trained him to believe that good things get taken back and the only dignity left is to not fight when they go.
"No," I say.
Both of them look at me.
"No," I say again, louder, and I step into the middle of the room, between them, because somebody in this family has to stop bleeding long enough to fight.
"You don't get to do this, Theo. Not in my apartment, not over my bed, not about my life.
You want to take his patch? Fine. That's club business and I can't stop you.
But you don't get to stand in my kitchen and act like I'm a possession that got stolen off your shelf.
I'm not a thing. I'm not the prize you protect.
I'm a thirty-year-old woman who chose this, who started this, who closed the distance every single time, and if you want to be furious at someone for crossing your line, be furious at me. "
"He was told —"
"And I told him I wanted him, knowing he was told!
So which of us crossed your line? Because from where I'm standing it was me, and you can't take a patch I don't have, so what you're really doing is punishing the one of us who can't fight back because it's easier than admitting your sister made a choice you don't like. "
Theo's jaw works. "He betrayed my trust."
"He treats me with more respect than any man you ever approved of.
" It comes out shaking and I let it shake.
"Every man you liked treated me like a chess piece in your club's politics.
Kieran stood between me and a drunk twice his size without thinking about it.
He found a part of me nobody in this family ever bothered to look for.
He's the first person who ever wanted me instead of wanting to keep me.
And you walked in with cardamom rolls to apologize for the last fight and you're about to start a worse one, so let me tell you exactly where it ends.
" I plant myself. "If you force this — if you take his patch over me, if you make him choose between the only family he's ever had and me — you don't win, Theo.
You lose us both. You lose him, and you lose me, and you'll have a clubhouse full of brothers and an empty chair where your sister used to sit, and you'll have done it to yourself, over pride, with pastries in your hand. "
The apartment goes completely silent.
Theo looks at me for a long, long time. The hurt is still there behind the wall; I can see it, I'll always be able to see it, it's my hurt too, the same blood.
And I watch him weigh it — the principle, the pride, the love, the cost — the exact collision I saw in the bay, except this time there's no half-built bike to hide under, this time it's a kitchen and a coffeepot and the truth standing in the middle of it refusing to move.
He doesn't say anything.
He picks up the bag of cardamom rolls. He looks at it like he can't remember why he bought it.
And then he sets it back down on my table — leaves it, the peace offering, the apology he never got to make — and he turns and walks out, and the door clicks shut behind him, soft, which is so much worse than a slam, and his boots go down the back stairs slow, and then the truck starts, and then he's gone.
I stand in the silence with a bag of cardamom rolls and the man I love, and I start to shake again, the third kind of shaking I've learned this season, the kind that comes after.
Kieran crosses the room and takes me in his arms and holds me until it stops, the way I held his arm, the way he held my hand, and neither of us says anything because there's nothing to say that the closed door didn't already say louder.
When the shaking finally goes, I pull back and look at him, and he's gone somewhere far away behind his eyes, the still flat place I recognize from the compound, the place a person goes when they're bracing to lose something.
He's already grieving it. I can see him doing it — folding the club up small and putting it away, the way he must have folded up his mother and his father and every other thing that got taken, packing it down into the locked place where he keeps the losses so they can't bleed.
"Don't," I tell him. "Don't do that. Don't put it away yet. It's not gone."
"Freya." He says my name gently, the way you talk to someone who hasn't understood the news.
"I lied to him for weeks. He un-sponsored me.
That's — that's not a thing that comes back.
I know how this works. I've watched it work my whole life.
You do the thing, and then the door closes, and then you learn to live without whatever was behind it.
I'm okay. I knew the price. I'd pay it again.
" He tries to smile and it doesn't hold.
"I just need a minute to put it where it goes. "