Chapter Nine
Rowan
Nine days since Colton Reyes walked into my shop and told me the clock was still running, and the strange rhythm of fear and routine has only gotten stranger since.
Deuce covers mornings now, a second Reaper I've only met once covers afternoons, and Wyatt still holds down nights, the three of them rotating through my life like a security detail I never asked for and have stopped, somewhere in the last week, resenting quite as much as I expected to.
Business has actually picked up, oddly enough, curiosity dressed up as loyalty bringing in customers who want to see the shop everyone's been talking about, and I've decided not to examine too closely what it says about this town that tragedy is apparently good for foot traffic.
The call comes on a Thursday afternoon, an unfamiliar number lighting up the shop's landline, which almost never rings anymore since everyone under sixty just texts my cell.
"Marked, this is Rowan."
Silence on the other end, long enough that I almost hang up, and then a voice I've never heard before but somehow, immediately, know exactly whose it is.
"Please don't hang up." A woman's voice, careful, thin with nerves. "This is Reina. I know I'm the last person you want calling your shop. I need five minutes, and then I'll never contact you again if that's what you want."
My whole body goes cold and then, strangely, very still, the particular stillness I get right before something enormous either breaks me or doesn't. I could hang up.
Every reasonable, self-protective instinct I've built over eight months is screaming at me to hang up, to not give this woman one more second of my attention, one more piece of my already exhausted emotional bandwidth.
For eight months I've imagined this voice only in the abstract, flat and cruel in whatever version of her my worst nights invented. Hearing the real thing, thin and frightened and entirely human, is its own small violence, undoing a story I'd gotten comfortable living inside.
I don't hang up.
"Five minutes," I say instead, my voice coming out flatter and steadier than I feel.
"Thank you." A shaky breath on her end. "I'm not calling to apologize.
I don't think an apology from me means anything to you, and honestly, I don't think I've earned the right to offer one, so I'm not going to insult you by trying.
I'm calling because my brother is about to do something that's going to hurt you badly, and I can't stop him, and I can't live with myself if I don't at least try to warn you. "
"Wyatt already told me what you told him."
"I figured he might." A small, humorless laugh. "Guess I should've expected that. He tell you everything, or just the parts that made him look good?"
"He told me everything. He's been doing that lately. Telling me everything, I mean, whether it makes him look good or not."
"Good." She says it simply, no bitterness in it that I can detect, which surprises me more than I expect it to.
"He should. He owes you that much and a lot more besides.
I'm not calling to defend him, in case that's what this sounds like.
I don't get a vote in whether you take him back, and I wouldn't take it if you offered it to me. "
"I know. I called him because he was easier to call first. I've been putting off calling you directly for two days because I didn't know how to start this conversation, and I still don't, so I'm just going to say the parts that matter and let you decide what to do with them.
" Another breath, steadier this time. "Dax has a meeting set up in about ten days with somebody from outside Blackthorn, some third party I don't fully understand, but it's about the deed to your building.
He's planning something with actual paperwork involved, not just intimidation.
I heard him on the phone saying something about a forged signature, making it look like Wyatt agreed to sign his half over under pressure, creating a legal mess that would tie your business up in court for years even if you eventually won. "
Something in my chest goes tight and cold, a different kind of fear than the one Colton Reyes put in me standing in my own shop, quieter, more insidious, the fear of a threat that could unfold slowly instead of all at once.
"Why are you telling me this?"
"Because you didn't do anything to deserve any of it.
" Her voice cracks, just slightly, and I hear, underneath the practiced calm, something raw and exhausted that I recognize despite every reason I have not to want to recognize anything about this woman.
"I made my own choices. I'm not going to sit here and tell you I was some innocent bystander, because I wasn't, I knew he was married, I knew exactly what I was doing every single time I did it.
But you didn't choose any of this, and my brother's about to make your life a legal nightmare because of something that happened between me and your husband, and I can't stand by and let that happen without at least giving you the chance to get ahead of it. "
I sit with that a long moment, turning it over, and I find, to my own surprise, that I believe her.
Not because I've decided to forgive her, not because five minutes on a phone call undoes what she did to my marriage.
Because the specific, mundane cruelty of what she's describing, a forged signature, a manufactured legal mess, tracks exactly with everything else I've learned about Dax Cole in the last week, and because nothing about her voice sounds like a woman performing sympathy for an audience.
It sounds like a woman who's lost nearly everything and is trying, badly and too late, to salvage some small piece of her own conscience before it's gone too.
"What do you want from me?" I ask, because I can't quite believe there isn't a catch somewhere in this.
"Nothing. I mean that. I don't want anything from you, and I know I don't deserve anything from you either.
" A pause. "I lost my job because of this.
Lost my apartment two months later. Most of my friends stopped calling once the whole charter knew what happened.
I've spent eight months trying to figure out who I am when I'm not the woman everybody in Amarillo whispers about, and I'm not saying that to make you feel sorry for me, because you shouldn't, I earned every bit of that.
I'm just telling you so you understand I'm not calling from some position where I have anything left to gain from helping you.
I'm calling because it's the one decent thing I can still do in this whole mess, and I'd like to be able to look at myself in the mirror when this is finally over, whatever's left of me by then. "
I don't know what to say to that. Some part of me wants to hate her cleanly, without complication, the way I've hated her in the abstract for eight months, a name and a photo and a copied tattoo, easier to despise as an idea than as an actual woman on the other end of a phone line sounding as tired and human as I feel most days.
There's a particular kind of vertigo in realizing your villain has an inner life, regrets, a mirror she doesn't like looking into some mornings.
I spent eight months building a very clean, very simple story about who Reina Cole was, and some petty, exhausted part of me resents her for complicating it now, for making me do the harder work of holding contradictory truths about her at the same time instead of getting to keep hating her the easy way.
It would be so much simpler if she were still just a name and a photo, uncomplicated and hateable, someone I never had to hear breathe or crack or apologize badly for something an apology could never actually fix.
Simple isn't the same as true, though, and I've spent eight months learning the hard way that the truth rarely bothers to be convenient.
"I need everything you know," I say instead, because whatever I feel about her can wait, and the shop can't. "The meeting date, the location if you have it, who this third party is. All of it."
She gives me what she has, careful and specific, a date ten days out, a location she's not fully certain of but has a strong guess about, a description of the man Dax is supposedly meeting.
I write it all down on the back of an invoice, hand shaking slightly, and when she's finished there's a long, awkward silence on the line, neither of us quite sure how to end a conversation that was never going to have a clean, satisfying close.
"I hope you get to keep it," Reina says, finally. "Your shop. Your husband, if that's what you decide you want. I know that's not mine to hope for on your behalf, but I hope it anyway."
She hangs up before I can decide whether I want to say anything back.
Deb comes out from the back a minute later, drawn by God knows what change in the shop's atmosphere, and takes one look at my face before crossing straight to me.
"What happened? You look like you saw a ghost. Actual ghost, not Wyatt's road name kind."
"Reina called." I say it flat, still processing it myself. "She had information about what Dax is planning. Real information, dates, locations."
Deb's eyebrows go up, surprise giving way fast to her usual sharp practicality. "The mistress just handed you intel on her own brother?"
"Apparently."
"Well." She leans against the counter, considering this with the particular thoroughness she brings to any new piece of gossip, though there's real concern underneath it this time, not just curiosity.
"That's either the most redemptive thing I've heard all year or an incredibly elaborate setup, and I genuinely don't know which one my gut says it is. "
"Mine doesn't either. But it tracks with everything else we already know about Dax, and I don't think she's lying." I fold the invoice carefully, tucking Reina's information against my own hasty notes. "I have to take this to the clubhouse."
"You want me to come with you?"