Chapter Eighteen
FOREVER I LOVED that woman from from a distance and called it honor. Got good at it, even, the way you get good at anything that hurts, if you do it long enough. Figured I'd carry it quiet the rest of my life and never once let her feel the weight.
Then she woke up in my arms in the morning light, put her hand flat over my heart, and told me I was the reason she'd started living again.
What felt like a lifetime of getting used to it came apart in about four seconds.
I've been the wall my whole life, the thing people stand behind, glad it's there and not thinking past it.
She didn't look at me like a wall in that moment.
She looked at me with love pouring out of her eyes. A man doesn't walk that off.
So when she stood in the yard three days back and went white and pointed up the north road and told me a man was watching her—no. I didn't hear lumber. I didn't feel nothing. I felt the floor go out from under me.
I know what it costs to call that woman's fear a liar. Her body told her something was wrong in those trees four years ago, and every voice inside her said she was being silly. I will not be one more of those voices. Not ever.
So I lied to her face instead. Told her it was a workman, lunch, nothing, kept it gentle and sure and watched her shoulders come down.
Then the second she was back inside I put Hex on that crew like a dog on a bone, every man on the Henderson lot, who hired them, every plate in that gravel, the quiet one most of all.
He's been digging two days. I've ridden that road myself during the day. Scyth's on the rise in shifts.
And the whole time I'm digging, there's a cold thing I keep shoving down, because it won't add up.
A man on that rise watching her would have to be somebody from back then.
And there is nobody from back then. I know that better than any man alive, Throttle and I made sure of it four years ago, with our own hands, and I've carried the knowing every day since.
It's the thing she can't ever learn: they're gone, Bee.
All of them. I made sure. Dead men don't stand on a rise and watch a woman in her own yard.
So it isn't that.
She doesn't know what me and her brother did to those men. And that's about the closest thing to a sin I've got in me where she's concerned. I can’t tell her what we did. Tell myself I'm sparing her.
That evening she came and found me in the common room and sat down next to me.
Close. No gap, her shoulder into my arm, feet tucked up, easy, like it was the most natural thing in the world to fold herself against my side in a room full of my brothers.
I sat dead still and let the whole clubhouse see it.
She'd chosen it, in the light, in front of everybody, and I wasn't going to be the one to make it a secret.
Across the room, Holly watched it happen over the rim of a glass.
She'd had her say with me already, weeks back, out on the lot, the night she put a hand on my chest and got it handed back and went cold for good.
There was a mean little thread working through her these days I couldn't fix, because the only thing that would've fixed it was a thing I'd never felt and couldn't fake.
So I marked it the way you mark weather and turned back to the woman actually in my arms.
Bee got to talking low with me, the two of us in our own pocket of that loud room, and I forgot to guard my face. That was the mistake. You spend years keeping a thing covered and you get sloppy the first season somebody lets you stop.
Throttle saw.
I felt it before I looked up. He was across the room with a beer he'd quit drinking, looking at the two of us, his sister tucked warm into my side, my whole dumb undefended face bent down over hers, and I watched him do the math I'd kept him from doing for years.
Watched it land. He didn't say a word. Just tipped his head toward the back hall, once, and walked off into it.
I kissed the top of Bee's head, got up, and followed. You don't not follow.
He was waiting by the bay door with his arms crossed.
"How long," he said. No heat in it yet. Just the question.
I'm not a liar. Not to him. "Since before she got taken," I said.
"Years. I never said a word. Never did a thing about it.
She was your sister and then she was hurting and it wasn't mine to want, so I put it away and I left it there, and I'd have left it there forever if she hadn't—" I stopped.
Scrubbed a hand down my face. "She's the one who opened it, Throttle. Not me. I'd have died with it shut."
He was quiet a long time. Long enough that I heard the bar through the wall, somebody's music, a woman's laugh that wasn't Bee's.
"You love her," he said. Not a question this time.
"More than I love being alive. It's not even close."
He nodded slow, and something in his shoulders came down, and I understood that some part of him had already known, or hoped, or both.
"There's nobody else I'd want it to be," he said, rough.
"You hear me? Nobody. I've watched you put yourself between that girl and the whole world since the day they pulled her out of those trees.
I know what you are. I'd hand her to you with both hands and sleep easy.
" His jaw worked. "Which is the only reason I'm gonna say the next part nice, the one time. "
He stepped in close, and the brother went out of his eyes and something older came into them, the thing in him that had raised a little girl with his own two hands when nobody else would.
"She has been broken by two men who were supposed to be safe," he said, low and even.
"Her own blood that made her, the boy that walked her into those woods, all of it.
You are about to be the first man in her whole life besides me who gets to be the safe one and mean it.
So you mean it, Maul. Every day. You protect that woman and you're good to her and you never, ever give her one more reason to think safe is a lie.
" His voice dropped to nothing. "And if you ever put a mark on her, her heart, her body, any part of her, I will forget thirty years.
I'll forget you're my brother. I'll put you in the ground next to the ones who already tried, and I won't lose a wink over it. We clear?"
"Clear," I said. And then, because he deserved the whole of it: "You won't ever have to. I'd cut my own throat before I'd be one more man that taught her she was right to be afraid. She's the only thing I've got, Throttle. You and her. That's the whole list. I'm not gonna break the list."
He looked at me a beat longer. Then the brother came back into his face all at once and he grabbed the back of my neck and pulled my forehead to his, hard, the way we'd done since we were kids, and let out a breath that shook on the end of it.
"Good," he said. "Good. About damn time, too. Years. You absolute fucking idiot."
And that was Throttle's blessing, and Throttle's warning, both in the same breath, and I took them both and carried them back down the hall to where his sister was waiting for me on the couch with her feet tucked up and her face turned toward the door, watching for me to come back.
For me. Watching the door for me.
I sat back down and she folded into me like she'd never once doubted I'd come back.
Over her head I caught Throttle dropping onto his stool beside Julia, grinning crooked, and off at the edge of it Holly turning her back, and I held the woman I loved in a room full of the only family either of us ever had.
***
HEX FOUND ME early one morning a laptop under one arm and a face on him I'd known him long enough to read. Hex doesn't do worried. Hex does certain, and certain on that boy looks like a man holding very still so he doesn't drop something.
"You're gonna want to sit for this," he said, leading me to the war room.
I didn't sit. I leaned on the table in the war room, and I crossed my arms so my hands had something to do that wasn't making fists, and I said, "Tell me."
He set the laptop down and turned it so I could see, but he talked me through it instead of making me read, because that's Hex, he knows a screen full of records doesn't land on a man the way a voice does.
"The crew's real," he started. "Henderson lot, residential build, framing subbed out to an outfit called Calder & Sons out of the valley.
Licensed, bonded, been around twenty years.
The loud half of that crew is exactly what it looks like.
I pulled the GC's payroll, the sub's payroll, the daily sign-in sheets, workers' comp filings, all of it.
" He looked up at me. "Eight men get paid on that job.
I've got names, socials, trucks, the works on all eight. You with me so far?"
"Eight."
"Eight." He let it sit. "There's nine men on that lot most days, Maul.
I counted off the camera footage Rex had, I counted three different mornings.
Nine bodies swinging hammers. Eight on the paper.
" He turned the laptop another inch toward me.
"Your quiet one is the ninth. And the ninth man doesn't exist."
That one word rattled in my head. Exist.
"Calder's got no record of him," Hex went on.
"Not on the books, not on a 1099, not a day-labor cash ticket, nothing.
I had Ross make a call as a comp investigator, routine, boring, the kind of call nobody thinks twice about, and the foreman out there couldn't tell us a thing.
Says the guy showed up one morning a few weeks back, picked up a nail gun, did clean work, and nobody asked.
You know how those lots run. Bodies come and go.
A man works hard and shuts up, the foreman's not gonna chase him off over paperwork that's the office's problem. "
"A few weeks back," I said. My voice came out flat and far away. "When'd he show. Exact as you can."