18. Rowe
ROWE
“What happened?” Elias asks again. The question hasn't finished leaving his mouth before the doors start opening.
They come out of their trailers like crows to a carcass.
Cole first, half a sandwich still in one hand, a knife already in the other.
Logan vaults over one of the picnic tables by the cantina instead of walking around it.
Jonah fills his doorway, ducks under the frame, and crosses the lot in six strides.
Jules and Nova appear from the direction of the new meeting trailer with Silas and Teddy behind them, and Marek simply is there, at the edge of the circle, the way Marek always is.
Blood in the water. My family can smell it from a hundred yards.
Wren shrinks against my palm. I feel it through her ruined blouse—her whole body trying to fold in on itself, to take up less space, so I press my hand more firmly against her spine because I will not let her disappear.
“Wren,” I say. My voice comes out rougher than I intend. “I've told you about Elias. He runs the show. Silas, his brother. Jules. Nova. Jonah. Marek. Teddy.” I tip my chin at each of them. “You've met Cole and Logan.”
“Hi,” Wren whispers. She's clutching the torn edges of her blouse together with one white-knuckled fist, mascara tracks down both cheeks, and she looks like she'd trade a kidney for the ground to open up beneath her. “Sorry. I'm—sorry. I didn't mean to—”
“Don't,” Nova says. Her green eyes have gone flat and hard, fixed on the ring around Wren's wrist. “Don't you dare apologize.”
“Who did it?” Logan's voice is low. Dangerous. His eyes are on the blouse, the wrist, the beard burn on her neck, my hand on her back—and I watch him do the same math Elias did. His jaw flexes.
“Rowe.” Elias again. Quiet. “Talk.”
I look down at Wren. At the top of her head, the hair coming loose from her ponytail, the tremor that hasn't stopped since she got out of the car.
“Jules. Nova. Would you—” I swallow. “Take her to my trailer. Help her clean up. Please.”
Jules's eyebrows climb toward her blue hair. “You want us to leave right when it's getting interesting?”
“Jules.”
“I'm just saying, historically the fun part happens next, and historically I participate—”
“She's pregnant and I'm bloodthirsty,” Nova adds, already peeling off her leather duster. “Wait. Reverse that.” Carefully, she drapes the coat over Wren's trembling shoulders. “Fine. Fine. But if there's stabbing, someone films it.”
“There's been stabbing,” Wren says faintly.
Everyone stops.
“I stabbed him,” she clarifies, to the gravel. “With a scalpel.”
A beat of silence. Then Cole makes a sound like a man falling in love.
“Oh, I like her.”
“Trailer,” I say. “Now. Please.”
Jules carefully herds Wren to my trailer. “Come on, Doc. Let's get you a shirt that closes and something with alcohol in it. You can tell us about the scalpel. Spare no detail. I want angles. Depth of penetration.”
“Jules,” Elias says, sounding exasperated.
“What? I'm interviewing.”
Wren looks back at me over her shoulder—bug-eyed—and I hold her gaze until my trailer door shuts behind the three of them.
Then I turn to my brothers.
“Her boss. Dr. Howard Vance. Owns the practice in town.” My hands have curled into fists without my permission. “He came in while she was alone. Tore her blouse. Hurt her wrist.” The words taste like copper. “She got a scalpel in him and ran here.”
Nobody speaks for a moment, everyone taking it in.
“Well,” Silas says finally, sliding his hands into his pockets. “It sounds like the good doctor is overdue for a very long vacation. Unplanned. No forwarding address.”
“His wife's leaving him,” I say. “Wren mentioned it. A man in the middle of losing everything, drinking, sleeping in his car. Nobody blinks if he skips town. Might not even get reported until we're long gone from Thistlewood.”
“Might,” Jonah rumbles. He's got his arms crossed, and while he looks reluctant, he also looks resolved.
I saw him look at Wren's wrist the same as the rest of them.
“Two men vanishing from one small town in the same week is a lot to swallow, brother.
Harlan's already got paint on his house and rumors in the diner.
The town's awake. They'll start counting heads.”
“So we don't make him vanish.” Logan's voice is casual.
Too casual. He's got that light behind his eyes, the one that used to scare the workers before they got used to it.
“Failing practice. Wife's leaving him. He's been drinking. Everyone at that diner has watched him circle the drain for months.” He shrugs.
“Sad, really. Man like that, losing his marriage, his money.
Sometimes they just go out to the barn and don't come back.”
“A suicide,” Elias says.
“A suicide,” my twin confirms.
Silas is already nodding, the machinery behind his eyes turning.
“It writes itself. He's got a stab wound that needs explaining, but a man who's decided to end it doesn't go to the hospital over a puncture.
We control the scene, we control the story.
Note's easy. I'll have his email history and his handwriting inside an hour.”
“The wound placement matters,” Cole says. “A puncture from a scalpel doesn't fit any self-harm pattern. We make sure the method we pick renders it irrelevant. Or unfindable. Self-inflicted shotgun blast to the stomach?”
“Then it's settled.” Elias plants the cane and looks around the circle.
“Rowe, Silas, Cole, Logan. Tonight, after closing.
Jonah, Marek, Teddy—we stay. The women don't leave the lot, and nobody who isn't ours gets within a hundred feet of them.
If Vance called the police on her, they'll come here looking.”
“He hasn't,” Marek says.
We all turn. He's standing at the edge of the circle with his hands loose at his sides, those dreamy eyes on the middle distance, and for a second, I brace for tarot logic.
“You pulled a card on it?” Teddy asks warily.
Marek's mouth curves. “No. I thought about it for five seconds.” He looks at Teddy the way a teacher looks at a slow student he's fond of.
“A man like that doesn't walk into a police station and say a woman he considers beneath him put a blade in him.
He'd have to explain why he was close enough for her to reach.
He'd have to say the words out loud in front of other men.” He shrugs, just with one shoulder.
“His pride will kill the report faster than we'll kill him.”
Cole barks out a laugh. “I hate it when you do the mystic act and then it's just common sense.”
“The common sense is the mystic act,” Marek says, and drifts back toward his tent.
Elias catches my eye. “Go see your woman. We move at midnight.”
Your woman. Nobody corrects him. I don't either.
The trailer smells like whiskey and Nova's perfume when I step inside.
Wren's on my bench wearing one of my henleys—swimming in it, the collar slipping off one shoulder—with a glass in her hands and a blanket over her knees.
Jules is sitting on the floor across from her.
Nova's claimed my chair with her boots up on the table, one hand resting on her belly.
Wren's eyes find mine the second the door opens. They’re still red-rimmed but steadier.
“Hi,” she says.
“Hi.” I crouch in front of her, careful, my forearms on my knees. “How are you doing?”
“They gave me whiskey and told me stories about the love triangle in the cantina.” She glances between Jules and Nova. “I don't think they finished the stories.”
“We were building suspense,” Nova says.
“Wren.” I wait until she's looking at me. “I have to go out tonight. After closing. With Silas and Cole and Logan. We're going to take care of the Vance problem.”
The glass stills halfway to her mouth. “Take care of it how?”
“Permanently.”
The word is met with silence. Her throat bobs as she swallows. Her eyes move over my face, searching, and I watch her arrive somewhere that isn't surprise. Like she's been doing the math, she just hadn't said the answer out loud yet.
“Rowe.” Her voice drops to a whisper. “You could go to prison. You could—if anyone saw my car come here, if they connect—”
“No one will connect anything. This is what we do.
What we've done for a long time.” I hold her gaze.
“I know you have questions. When I get back, I'll answer every one of them. Who we are. What Seven Sins actually is. Why we came to this town.” My voice roughens.
“All of it. You've earned the truth and I want you to have it. But right now, I need you to stay inside this lot, and I need you to trust me for one night.”
She stares at me. The lamp hums.
“He would've done it,” she says quietly. “If I hadn't reached the tray. He wasn't going to stop.”
“I know.”
“And you're going to—” She doesn't finish it.
“Yes.”
A long breath goes out of her. Then, so soft I almost miss it: “Okay.”
Not don't. Not how could you. Okay.
Her permission feels monumental. Like maybe she'll accept me—accept us—for who we are.
“Okay,” I echo.
Jules pushes up off the floor and stretches until her spine pops.
“Right. Boys work, girls drink. Pregnant company excluded.” She points at Wren.
“You're staying with us tonight. Nova's trailer has the good couch, and Silas has a truly unhinged liquor selection.
We'll get you warmed up while the men do their chores.
And by the time they're back, we’ll have finished planning my wedding and you'll know every embarrassing story about all seven of them.”
“There's a story about Cole and a goat,” Nova says, swinging her boots off my table. “It changes lives.”
Wren huffs out something that's almost a laugh, watery but real, and I stand and memorize her like this—drowning in my shirt, flanked by two women who've decided she's theirs now, alive and safe.
She stops at the door.
“Rowe.”
She presses two fingers to her lips. Blows across them.
“Come back,” she says.
“Always.”