Chapter 16
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
Mila
They call church at eleven and Amara sends Razor to come get me, which means I'm going in.
Not standing outside the door. Not waiting in the main room for somebody to come tell me what men decided about my life. Inside, at the table.
"You sit where I put you," Razor says as we walk. "You don't talk unless the Prez asks you something. You understand what this room is?"
"Yes."
"I don't think you do." He stops outside the door. He's not being unkind about it. "There's men in there with fifteen years in who've never spoken first at that table. It's not about you. It's about how the club stays a club."
"I understand."
"Good." He opens the door. "Then behave."
I've been told to behave in a lot of rooms.
I don't say that to him, because he doesn't deserve it and because he's right about the room.
But my body hears it the way my body hears everything now.
By the time I'm through that door my shoulders have already come up around my ears and I have to make them come back down.
The chapel's smaller than I pictured and it smells like old smoke and gun oil and the lemon polish Ruby uses on the wood.
They're all at the table.
Amara at the head with her hands flat on either side of a folder.
Razor on her right.
Python. Zorro. Boulder, Brick, Doom, Axel down the sides.
Finn at the end, sitting down, but he shouldn’t be in here. Prospects aren’t allowed in church. Considering this has something to do with me, I’m sure that’s why he’s allowed in.
There's a chair against the wall behind Amara's shoulder. That's mine.
Against the wall. Behind everybody. Where you put a thing you might need later.
I sit in it, and I keep my back straight, and I put my feet flat because that's what you do when you might need to move fast, and I count the doors out of habit and there's one, and it's on the far side of eleven men.
Lashes is in the chair beside me, hands folded in her lap, and she gives me half an inch of a nod.
"Hope's down," she says under her breath. "Ruby's got the monitor."
Amara opens the folder.
"Everybody's read the file," she says. "Ollie Kincaid's deposition, the ledger cross-match, the property survey, the photograph that came out of a Christmas card in this building four days ago.
I'm not walking anybody through it twice.
What's on the table is whether this charter puts men over the border to hit a property in Cochise County, Arizona, that belongs to Wendell Trask, to bring out captive women being held underground. "
She lets it sit among the group.
"Vegas rides with us on the other side. Alejandro's tunnel gets us across with what we're carrying. That part's arranged." She looks down the table. "What isn't arranged is whether we go. So talk. Everybody talks before anybody votes."
For a second nobody does.
Then Zorro shifts in his chair, and I watch every man in the room clock it, because Zorro doesn't speak first. Ever. He's the one who listens for an hour and then says nine words that end the argument.
"I'm going to say it," he says, "because somebody has to, and it's going to make me sound like a piece of shit."
"Say it," Amara says.
"They're not ours."
The room goes still.
Mine doesn't. My pulse comes up in my throat, and I make myself keep my hands loose in my lap, because if I grip anything I'll start shaking and I’m not shaking in this room.
“They're not ours. And before anybody says it—I know what that makes me sound like. It’s the cruel reality here.” Zorro's got both hands flat on the table and he's looking at the wood, not at anybody.
"Eleven women in a hole in Arizona, and I hope to God somebody gets them out.
But we're not the ones who owe it. There's not a name on that ledger who ever touched this club.
There's not one woman down there who's kin to anybody sitting here. "
"Zorro—" Boulder starts.
"Let me finish." He raises a hand, still not looking up.
"Our people got taken. Ours. Lashes got taken out of a parking lot forty minutes from this building and sold, and it took Brick eight months and a plane to Colombia to bring her home.
That ring's still standing. Those men are out there right now taking somebody's daughter.
We've got a live thread on them, and instead of pulling it, we're putting every rider we've got two hundred miles into another country for people who've got no claim on us. "
He looks up now.
"I want to go after the ones who took Lashes.
That's ours. That's this club's." His jaw goes tight.
"Kelsey's brothers came through that gate and we handled it.
Sally Bernard came for one of ours and we handled it.
Diego took Imani's father and we went and got him, because Imani sits at this table's family.
That's how it works. You defend what's yours. "
Nobody's moving.
"And I've got a wife fourteen weeks pregnant standing in that kitchen right now and a three-year-old asleep down the hall, and I know exactly how many men are left in this compound if everybody at this table rides north.
I'm not trying to be a dick. I'm really not.
But somebody in this room has to count the people inside the fence, and if it's not the Sergeant at Arms, then who the hell is it? "
Nobody answers him.
And the terrible part, the part that's got my eyes stinging while I sit against a wall with my feet flat, is that he loves his people so much he's willing to be hated for it.
That's a good man. That's exactly the man I'd want standing between a door and my child.
My mother was that. My father was that.
Two people who'd have done anything for what was theirs, and what was theirs was me, and they died on a kitchen floor keeping their mouths shut about a boy across the street.
Nobody's been that for me since.
Python leans forward on his forearms.
"He's not wrong on the security," Python says.
"Take the head count. You put Amara, Razor, me, Boulder, Brick, Doom, Rooster, Lashes over that border, plus whatever Vegas brings—this club's got Zorro, Axel, one prospect and a cartel man on the gate holding a compound with nine women and five kids in it, and a man up in Arizona who's been reading our mail for a decade.
" He sits back. "I'm not saying no. I'm saying somebody's got to say the number out loud. "
"The number's said," Amara says. "Anybody else."
And I hear myself talking.
"Eleven doors," I say.
Every head at that table comes around.
I don't know I've stood up until I'm standing.
Razor's hand goes flat on the table and Amara's comes up off it an inch, and I know exactly what that inch is—it's the start of the gesture that puts me back in my chair and reminds a woman with no patch that she was brought in here as a resource, not a voice.
Nine years I waited for a door to open so somebody could decide what happened to me next.
I'm not sitting down.
"There are eleven doors inon that hallway," I say. "Twelve rooms, but the second one on the right flooded the summer before I got out and they never fixed it. So eleven. And I know what's behind every one of them, because for nine years learning it was all I had."
Amara's hand stays where it is. She doesn't bring it down.
"Fourth door on the left is a woman from Guerrero.
She's been down there longer than I was.
She doesn't talk anymore, and not because they did anything to her throat.
Because she decided not to. Sixth door's a girl who came in the winter before last and cried for twenty days and then stopped, and stopping's worse.
Everybody down there knows stopping is worse.
" My voice is steady and I have no idea how, because nothing else about me is.
"Eighth door on the left was a girl who couldn't have been seventeen.
I never saw her face. Not one time in two years. I knew her by the way she knocked."
Zorro's looking at the table again.
"You want to know what it sounds like," I say. "That's what everybody in this room is sitting here not asking me. It's fine. I'll tell you."
"Mila." Finn's voice, low, from the foot of the table.
"No." I don't look at him, because if I look at him I'm finished. "He said they're not ours, and he's got the right to say it, and I've got the right to answer it. That's the deal, isn't it? Everybody talks before anybody votes."
Amara's hand goes back down flat on the wood.
"Talk," she says.
So I go back down there.
I don't want to. I've spent nine months keeping the door on that hallway shut in my own head, and I open it now in a warm room full of men because it's the only currency I've got.
The smell comes first, the way it always does—wet concrete, bleach, and the sourness of eleven women who get one bucket of water a week.
"Concrete and dirt strip the words out of everything, so you don't hear sentences.
You hear sound with the edges worn off." My hands are on the back of the chair in front of me and they're not shaking yet.
"You hear a door open. That's the worst of it, the door.
You count footsteps coming down that hall and you know before they stop whose it's going to be.
Every woman on that hallway is doing the same count at the same time. "
I have to stop.
Not for effect. My throat's closed and I have to wait it out, standing up, in front of Amara, Lashes, and these men, and nobody says a word while I do it.
"And when they stop at somebody else's door," I say, "you feel relief."
Boulder's head comes up.