Chapter Nine #2
The offer, simple and immediate, no hesitation in it at all, catches something in my chest, a reminder of exactly how lucky I am to have a friend who'll drop everything and drive into a motorcycle clubhouse with me on ten minutes' notice without asking a single unnecessary question first.
"No. Watch the shop. I'll call you the second I'm done."
"Fine. But text me if anything feels off, and I mean anything, Ro. Not just emergencies."
"I will."
I sit at the register a long time after, the invoice with her careful handwriting-adjacent notes sitting in front of me, and I think about what Deb said days ago, about how I don't have to be angry to still protect myself, how those are two different jobs.
I think I understand now what she meant.
I'm not less angry at Reina Cole for this phone call.
I don't think I'll ever not be angry, somewhere underneath everything else, about the role she played in the worst eight months of my life.
But sitting here with real, usable information in front of me, gathered specifically because a woman who owed me nothing decided to give it anyway, I find I can hold both things at once without either one canceling the other out.
She's not a monster. She's not innocent either.
She's just a person who made a choice that hurt me badly, and is now, in her own limited, too-late way, trying to be someone slightly better than the choice she made.
I call Wyatt before I even finish that thought all the way through, because whatever else is true, the club needs this information faster than my complicated feelings about where it came from have any right to slow it down.
"She called me," I say, when he picks up. "Reina. Just now."
Silence on his end, brief, absorbing it.
"You okay?"
"I don't know yet. But I've got a date, a rough location, and a description of the man Dax is meeting. Get to the clubhouse. I'm bringing it in myself."
"Rowan—"
"I'm not asking, Wyatt. This is my shop, my deed, my problem as much as it's yours.
I'm bringing it in myself." I grab my keys, already moving toward the door, some old, familiar resolve settling into my spine that has nothing to do with him and everything to do with the woman I've spent eight months rebuilding myself into, a woman who doesn't sit on the sidelines of her own life waiting for someone else to fix it for her.
"Okay," he says, after a beat, and I hear something in his voice that sounds almost like respect. "I'll meet you there."
I lock up early, leave a note taped to the boarded window for the two clients I still have booked today, and drive to the clubhouse with Reina's careful, borrowed handwriting on the seat beside me.
The clubhouse looks exactly the way I remember it, which surprises me more than it should, the same gravel drive, the same long metal building that used to be a feed store, the same weathered sign by the road that my father helped hang himself back when I was young enough to think riding on the back of his bike out here on Sunday afternoons was the whole world.
I haven't set foot on this property in over a year, not since before the separation even, some quiet drift away from club functions that started long before the affair ever gave me a real reason to stay away.
Deuce meets me at the door, visibly startled to see me there in person instead of watching over the shop from a distance, fumbling briefly with the door before getting it open for me, and ushers me back to the meeting room where Silas, Preacher, and Wyatt are already gathered around the same scarred table I remember from childhood, from potlucks and Christmas parties before my father died, before any of this.
Silas stands when I walk in, an old-fashioned courtesy that catches me off guard. "Rowan. Wasn't expecting you out here."
"Reina called me directly. I've got a date, a rough location, and a description of the man Dax is supposedly meeting.
" I set the invoice down on the table, my handwriting hasty and slightly shaky next to Reina's careful details, and watch all three men lean in to study it closely.
"I wanted to bring it myself instead of relaying it secondhand.
Figured you'd have follow-up questions I could actually answer. "
"Smart," Preacher says, something like approval in his weathered face. "Walk us through exactly how she said it. Word choice matters in this kind of thing, more than people expect it to."
I do, as precisely as I can remember it, and Silas asks sharp, specific questions I mostly have answers for, and for the length of that conversation I feel something I haven't felt in longer than I want to admit, useful in a way that has nothing to do with tattoo machines or invoices, folded into the actual work of protecting what's mine instead of just waiting anxiously on the sidelines of it.
"This is good work, Rowan," Silas says, once he's satisfied he's gotten everything I know. "Genuinely good work. I know it's not comfortable, getting information from a source like this. Doesn't make it less valuable, and it doesn't make you any less sharp for having gotten it."
"I didn't do it to be comfortable. I did it because it's my shop on that deed too.
" I glance at Wyatt, who's been quiet through most of this, watching me with an expression I don't have the energy to fully parse right now.
"I'm not interested in being protected from information that affects my own life.
I told him that the day the window broke. I meant it then and I mean it now."
Silas nods, slow, taking that in the way he seems to take in most things, careful and unhurried.
"Understood. Preacher, get this to Deuce, cross-reference the location against anything we've already got on that storage facility outside Clearview.
Wyatt, walk her home. I want eyes on her the whole way, not just tonight, every night until this is over. "
Wyatt doesn't argue, doesn't perform gratitude at getting the assignment, just nods and falls into step beside me as we head back out to the bikes, and the ride back into town is quiet, both of us turning over everything that just happened, and I find, somewhere in that quiet, that I'm not dreading the silence between us the way I would have even a week ago.
At my door, he doesn't linger the way I half expect him to, doesn't try to turn the quiet into something it isn't ready to be yet.
Just waits until I've got the key in the lock, says goodnight in that same careful, deliberate way he's said it every night since this started, and heads back to his post across the street, and I stand there a moment in my own doorway thinking about my father's sign creaking on its hinges out at the clubhouse, still standing after all these years, still marking the same gravel drive he used to ride me down as a kid.
I wonder, not for the first time, what he'd make of watching his daughter walk back into that meeting room after a year away, not as anyone's old lady exactly, but as a woman standing on her own two feet demanding a seat at a table that used to just be his.
Ten days standing between now and whatever Dax Cole thinks he's going to get away with, and for the first time since a rock came through my window, I feel less like a woman waiting for the next blow to land and more like one finally stepping into the fight on her own terms.