Chapter 18
Austin
Six Months Later
Six months of mornings where I wake up and she's there.
Six months of EJ calling her Savvy like it was always her name.
Six months of Rosie stopping by with food she doesn't need to bring, just because she wants to, and Jules asking Sav if she wants to learn to grow tomatoes, with Sav saying yes like she's been waiting to be asked.
Six months of her medical office filled with patients who come in for their appointments and leave talking about the new doctor who actually listens.
Six months of the compound shifting, the way a room shifts when someone sits down in the empty chair, and everything settling back into a shape that's better than it was before.
She moved her things into my house at the end of month two, which was EJ's idea.
He told her she was sleeping there every night anyway and her apartment was just costing money that could be spent on something else.
She told him that was very logical. He said thank you.
She looked at me and I shrugged because he was not wrong.
Month three she finished the drawing with EJ.
He'd been working on it since the Sunday she came to the compound for the first time, practicing girl-on-a-bike sketches on whatever paper he could get his hands on.
When he finally added her to the wall she stood there for a long time looking at it.
I asked her later what she was thinking.
She said she was thinking that she was in the right place.
Month four I came home late from a run and found her asleep on the couch with EJ asleep on her chest, the book they'd been reading open face down on the floor beside them.
I stood in the doorway for a while. I didn't take a picture because I didn't need one.
I just put it in the part of my memory I don't touch and left it there.
The first time she was here for Church, she didn't go in.
Old ladies never go in. That's not the rule, it's just not how it works.
But she was in the kitchen with Jules and Rosie and Meg when the men filed past on the way to the table.
I watched Razor stop at the kitchen doorway for half a second and nod at her, just once, and she nodded back.
Then Brick went past and stopped and looked at her with his arms folded.
"Sprog's old lady," he said. Not a question. Not an introduction. Just naming the thing.
It was the first time anyone had called her that.
I watched her face. She took it in for a moment and then something in her eyes settled, something that had been holding itself at a slight distance for six months finally let go, and she smiled at Brick, and he nodded once, and he went into Church.
Afterwards, she came and found me in the yard, stood next to me and said, "Is that how it works? Someone just says it and then it's real?"
"In this club," I said. "Yeah. That's pretty much how it works."
She thought about that. "I like it," she said.
I put my arm around her, and we stood there in the yard in the late afternoon light, and I thought about being eighteen years old, I thought about Cherry Lane and a girl I was too young to keep and somehow got back anyway, and I thought, yeah. This is where everything was always headed.
It's a Friday night six months in and EJ is at Lily-Rose's for a sleepover. The clubhouse is loud in the way it gets on a Friday, the brothers spread out, old ladies at the corner table, someone's music on too high and nobody's turned it down yet.
I'm at the bar with Decker when I feel it.
It's not something I can name. Just a current in the room, a thing running underneath the noise that shouldn't be there. I've felt it before, in the months before the hotel raid, and the back of my neck goes tight.
"You feel that?" I ask Decker quietly.
He looks at me. He's got sharp instincts for a prospect, army-bred, the kind of awareness that doesn't switch off. "All day," he says. "I was on the gate this afternoon and there were trucks going past too slowly. Three times in two hours."
"Did you call it in?"
"Told Prez. He said people check out the compound sometimes, curiosity."
"Did it feel like curiosity to you?"
Decker turns back to the bar. "No," he says. "It felt like someone counting bikes."
I look across the room at Sav. She's laughing at something Meg said, her head tipped back, completely at ease in this room in a way that took her a while to get to and that I don't take for granted. She catches me looking and raises her eyebrows in a question.
I shake my head slightly. Not yet.
Then we hear the gunshots.
The room moves fast, the way it moves when men who've trained for exactly this snap into it without thinking. The old ladies are already gone before Prez has finished shouting, out the back door, fast and practiced, because they've been briefed and they know.
"Find the women," Prez says, and his eyes are on me as he says it, because he knows me.
I go.
I come through the back of the clubhouse at a run and for three seconds, three seconds that feel much longer, I don't see her. I see Rosie, Jules and Meg. I see Cam behind them, but I don't see Sav, and something cold goes through me that I don't want to examine.
Then she steps out from behind the door where she's been shielding Cam's youngest.
"I'm here," she says, the moment she sees my face. "I'm here, Austin."
The relief hits me like a physical thing, not warm but sudden, the kind that makes your hands shake if you let it. I get my hands on her face and I look at her.
"You're okay."
"I'm okay. Go. I know what to do."
I kiss her hard and fast and go back.
Richie is down in the front yard. Decker sees it the same time I do and moves for the door.
"Decker." Prez's voice is a wall. "Do not open that door."
But the grenades come through the windows before any of it matters.
The first one blows out the east wall. The second takes the bar.
The third lands in the middle of the room and we're already moving, throwing ourselves behind whatever's standing, and the blast goes up and takes the ceiling tiles and the noise of it is all-encompassing. It’s the whole world for two seconds, and then it's smoke, ringing ears and someone is shouting Richie's name.
Prez gets us out the side door and we move up the flank in the dark, quiet and fast. We find them in the tree line.
The High Stakes MC, or what's left of them after the hotel, and they've brought new men the way Ruby said they would.
They didn't count on us coming out of the clubhouse still standing.
We hit them hard and we hit them clean and they scatter and then they run, leaving their dead behind them the way they did the first time, and the night goes quiet.
Decker is the one who sees the all-clear first. He steps out in front of the building, into the light.
"Get back," Prez calls.
"It's clear. The shots have stopped; we need to."
"Decker, get the fuck back here now."
He turns.
The grenade comes from the dark at the edge of the property. One of theirs, delayed, the last thing they left us.
I'm already running.
I'm not fast enough to get him clear but I'm fast enough to get to him.
The blast goes off six feet from where I am, and it throws me sideways and when I get up there's ringing in both ears and the yard is full of smoke and Decker is on the ground.
I get to him and I go down on my knees next to him.
His left leg is wrong. I don't look at it for more than a second. I take his face between my hands, and I make him look at me.
"Stay with me. Look at me. You hear me? Look at me."
His eyes find mine. His face is white, the absolute white of someone in shock, and he's breathing too fast.
"Sprog."
"I'm here. Stay with me. You're a Black Saint. You hear me? You're a Black Saint and you stay."
His mouth works for a second. "Is my leg still there?"
I don't answer that.
"Austin."
"The club is here. You're not alone. Every one of your brothers is right behind me and you are not alone. Look at me, not down there. Look at me."
His eyes come back to mine and stay there. Good.
"You're going to be alright," I say. "I need you to stay with me."
"Yeah," he says, very quiet. "Okay."
His eyes close. I keep my hands on his face and I say his name. He makes a sound that tells me he can still hear it, and that has to be enough for right now.
Sav is beside me before I've registered her coming.
She doesn't ask questions. She does what she does.
Her hands move fast and sure and she talks to Decker the whole time, steady and calm, the voice she uses in the office when she needs someone to stay present.
I watch her work and I think about the girl I knew at seventeen who wanted to be a doctor and how completely, absolutely she became one.
"Ambulance is four minutes out," Prez says behind us.
"Tell them leg injury, blast trauma, he's in shock," Sav says without looking up. "And tell them to come in hot."
Prez makes the call.
The four minutes are long. Sav keeps Decker talking and I keep my hand on his shoulder.
The brothers stand around us in a ring that isn't discussed, just forms, the way things form in this club when one of us is down.
Knuckles at the back with his arms folded and his jaw tight.
Pops with his hand on Cash's shoulder. Shadow watching the tree line because someone has to.
Brick just behind my left shoulder, the way he's always been there, since day one in that workshop at five in the morning.
When the ambulance pulls through the gate Sav is already talking to the paramedics before the doors open, running through what she knows, what she's done, what they need to do next. They listen to her the way medics listen to someone who knows what they're talking about.
She climbs in the back with Decker.
At the doors she stops and looks at me. Not panicked. Not apologizing. Just clear and certain the way she is when she's working, the way she was the first time I brought EJ to her surgery, and she took control of the room without raising her voice.
"I'll bring him home," she says.
The doors close.
I stand there until the ambulance lights disappear through the gate and then I stand there for a while after.
I’ve ash on my face from the blast, blood on my hands, both Decker's and mine, dried now and dark at the edges.
The clubhouse front is destroyed, the east wall half down, smoke still rising from the window frames in the cold early air.
The yard is quiet now. The High Stakes are gone, their dead left behind like they were left behind at the hotel, and somewhere out there their Prez is running. We'll find him because we always do.
Brick is beside me. Not saying anything, just there, the way he's been there since he found me in the workshop at five in the morning when I was eighteen years old and had nowhere to put what I was feeling. Some things about a man don't change.
Around me my brothers are doing what we do.
Someone has a phone to his ear. Someone is checking the men in the tree line.
Cash and Ramsey are already at the damaged wall with their flashlights out.
Ramsey is saying something low and Cash is listening.
Whatever they're deciding, they'll decide it together.
Decker has been a prospect for seven months.
He got on his first bike at sixteen with his grandfather watching from the porch.
He spent two years in the army and came home quieter than he left.
He took gate duty seriously on his first day and has never stopped taking it seriously.
He told me once that he joined this club because it was the first place since the army where he understood the rules and the rules made sense to him.
He asked me in the yard if his leg was still there.
I think about that. I think about who he's going to be on the other side of tonight and whether we're going to be enough for what he needs.
We will be. That's not nothing, knowing that.
This club has never walked away from one of its own and it's not starting with a twenty-four-year-old kid who stepped in front of a grenade because he thought the fight was over.
I look at the compound. The houses behind the clubhouse with their lights still on. The bikes in their row, untouched. The vegetable garden along Jules and Pops' wall that somehow took no damage at all.
I think about the night EJ was shot and Sav's hands working under the operating room lights without hesitating.
I think about Decker's white face between my hands.
I think about six months ago, Brick saying Sprog's old lady and the door that opened in her eyes.
This is what I chose. Every part of it, the brotherhood and the cost of it. The specific weight of being responsible for something worth protecting. The risk that runs underneath the ordinary days. The things you carry when one of your own goes down.
I would choose it again. All of it, without hesitation, every single time.
I put my hands in my pockets and I stand in the yard and I wait for news from the hospital.