Chapter 23
After the Storm
The others eventually drifted out—Eagle barked orders, Brick checked the perimeter, the familiar shuffle of boots and the low hum of engines coming and going. The sound faded until it was just the two of them in the clubhouse, the rain outside a faint, steady rhythm against the tin roof.
Ren hadn’t moved from the couch. The coffee sat untouched, steam long gone. Her eyes were half-lidded, not asleep, not awake, just tired in a way that went deeper than the body.
Tater sat across from her at the old, scarred table, elbows on his knees, staring at the chain coiled in his palm. It looked smaller in his hand than it had when he first found it. Lighter somehow, though he knew damn well it wasn’t.
He turned it over once, twice, thumb brushing the dent in the charm—the one that had come from a night long before her and before this war they’d just survived.
“Wasn’t supposed to end like that,” he said quietly.
Ren’s eyes opened, slow. “It ended. That’s what matters.”
He nodded, still watching the chain. “He hurt you bad?”
Her answer took a long time. “Not tonight. Not anymore.”
He sat the chain down on the table, between them, the metal clinking soft against the wood. “Then we bury him. All of him. Everything he tried to leave on you.”
Ren looked at the chain for a moment, then at him. The green in her eyes was clear again, the kind that didn’t glow or burn—it lived.
“I already did,” she said. “Up there on that hill.”
Tater leaned back and exhaled. He hadn’t realized how much of him was still braced, waiting for her to break.
She didn’t.
He watched her for another minute, the faint tremor still running through her fingers, the quiet steel in her voice. “You scared the hell out of me tonight,” he said finally.
Her mouth curved, faint. “That makes two of us.”
He smiled at that and reached across the table, slow, palm up. “You done runnin’?”
Ren looked at his hand for a moment before sliding hers into it. Her grip was soft but sure. “If I ever run again,” she said, “it’ll be toward something.”
He squeezed once, then stood. “Good. Then we start with food and sleep.”
She snorted—a ghost of humor breaking through exhaustion. “You feeding me, or is that an order, President?”
“Little of both,” he said, and she didn’t argue.
Outside, the morning light pushed its way through the rain, thin gold slicing across the floorboards. The air smelled like coffee and smoke and something new, something that might, if they were lucky, turn into peace.
For the first time in a long damn while, Tater let himself believe in that.