Chapter 5 #2
Jess was near the garage. Eden was already back in the house.
The lockdown separated them without costing me another lie, and the relief that came up through me was so complete that I had to look at the map until it passed.
Six days at the outside. Bear opens the gate, the Denver trail does its work, Jess goes east, and I find my wife and give her every word of it in a room with a door I’m not standing in.
Then Jax pushed his phone across. A cropped image of our south fence from beyond the trees, posted minutes before the first shot through an account tied to one of Silas’s runners. It could have come from somebody who knew which cameras we’d moved for the fundraiser.
“They hit when the vendors started lining up,” Jax said. “Either they watched us for days, or somebody told them the east lot would be empty and the civilians would be inside.”
Bear ordered a review of phones, gate records, and every vehicle admitted that morning. A leak inside this club hears anything I say at that table. Until Jax clears the phones and the logs, the affair stands. That’s risk, not preference.
Through the window, Eden appeared in the front room long enough to pull the curtain across the glass.
She was alive inside a building with two walls between her and the road.
I am the only man on this property who knows how fast that woman’s chest can close, and how quiet she gets while it happens, and what it costs her to ask.
“Jess needs to move into the clubhouse,” I said. “If there’s another hit the garage won’t hold. Keep her off the smoke and out of the crush by the hall.”
Bear lifted his head. “You planning to tell me why your pregnant mistress turned up at my fundraiser and got herself locked inside my perimeter?”
“She was told to come today. I didn’t expect the attack.”
Gage was watching me from across the table, and I could tell he’d heard the shape of what wasn’t in it. “Did Eden?”
“No.” The word covered the attack, the affair, the leaving, and every road that had put her on that porch. I let each man pick which failure he thought I’d owned.
Bear gave Jess a room by the infirmary and told me to take the east-row house back when the perimeter cleared. Leah cut him off before he finished.
“Eden decides who comes into her home.” She pulled her wrist out of Gage’s hand. “His things are on the porch and she told him not to cross the door. If you put him in there because he wears a cut, you’re helping him take the house off her.”
Bear looked at me and waited for the argument every man in the room expected. The house belongs to the club entity. My name sits on the occupancy record. Until this morning my key opened that door, my boots stood beside her sandals, and I slept against her every night we were both home.
“I’ll use a bunk in the officers’ hall.” It wasn’t kindness. The story needed me out of that house, and I wasn’t ready to find out what Eden would do with the burner if I crossed the threshold. “Nobody goes in there unless she asks for them.”
Leah studied my face and found something she liked less than resistance. “You don’t get credit for obeying her after you built a day where she had nothing to choose.”
She left for the house. June stayed long enough to ask where Jess had been living, when it started, whether the account was empty, and why Eden’s car had been serviced before the disclosure.
Every question landed on a seam. I gave her the diner, the false months, the money, and the claim that the service on the Civic was ordinary maintenance.
June wrote none of it down, which frightened me more than a notebook would have.
“You told Eden that danger would reach her through you before it reached her any other way,” June said, picking up her clipboard.
“Now the gate’s shut, that girl can’t leave either, and you keep talking as if only one of them needs protecting.
If that’s the man you intend to be, say it without putting a baby in front of it. ”
“Jess and the baby are my responsibility.”
“Eden was your wife this morning.” June turned for the door. “What was she?”
I had an answer. It was locked in a case forty feet away and it would have emptied the room. I let her go without it.
Tessa caught me in the hall after Bear released the first perimeter teams. No clipboard, no interest in who heard. “If Eden needs her medication and you get between her and it again, I’ll break the hand you shoot with.”
“I didn’t block her medication.”
“You stood in the door of your own house with your hands at your sides while your wife went gray on the porch.” Tessa’s eyes had reddened and she was too angry to wipe them.
“Leah watched it through the window. You knew Eden would crawl over glass before she’d ask you for help after what you said to her, and you made her walk past the pair of you anyway. ”
What I wanted to say was that I moved. I moved when Jess said the words out loud.
It was long enough for me to count while my wife held the doorframe while my wife held the doorframe and worked for air eleven feet from a bright orange zipper.
I had the phone in my hand for Aris the whole time.
None of that is a defense and I offered it to myself anyway, and it held me up.
“Don’t make her ask me,” I said.