Chapter 12
He took her to the hollow on a Tuesday afternoon because he didn't know how else to say it.
The road climbed out of the lake country into the hills, gravel turning to dirt, the trees closing in overhead until the sunlight came through in broken strips across the handlebars.
Tamsin rode behind him on the bike for the first time—her thighs pressed against his, her arms around his waist, her chin on his shoulder—and the weight of her against his back felt like an answer to a question he hadn't figured out how to ask.
The hunting supply store sat at the end of a logging road that hadn't been maintained in five years.
What was left of it. The walls still stood—cinder block doesn't burn the way wood does—but the roof was gone and the windows were black holes and the parking lot had been reclaimed by pokeweed and sumac growing through the cracked asphalt.
Buckshot killed the engine and let the silence settle.
Tamsin swung off the bike and stood looking at the building the way she looked at everything—steady, direct, taking the full measure of it before she spoke.
"This was yours," she said.
"Thirteen years." He got off the bike and stood beside her.
The afternoon heat pressed down, thick with humidity and the green smell of the hollow.
Cicadas going in the trees. A red-tailed hawk circling over the ridge.
"Opened it when I was twenty-three with a loan from a man who didn't ask where the collateral came from.
Sold legal guns over the counter and ran illegal ones through the back.
Rifles, handguns, whatever the hollows needed and the government didn't want them to have. "
He walked toward the building. She walked with him. Their boots crunched on the broken asphalt, and he could feel her watching him, waiting, giving him the same space he'd given her on the dock when she'd told him about the facility.
He stopped at the edge of the parking lot where the asphalt gave way to gravel, and he looked down at the ground.
"Deal went wrong right here," he said. "Buyer brought a friend I hadn't planned for.
The friend brought a twelve-gauge. Words went sideways, somebody pulled, and the buyer's friend put a load of buckshot into the space between us.
" He touched his scarred shoulder without thinking about it.
"Meant for the man standing three feet to my left. Hit me instead."
"What happened to the other man?"
"Walked away clean. I took his load and he walked away without a scratch and I never saw him again." Buckshot looked at the gravel. "I went down right here. Face in the dirt. And I lay there and I felt the blood coming out of me and I decided something."
"What?"
"That falling was a choice. That lying in the gravel and bleeding out and dying was something I was choosing to do, and I could choose not to.
" He looked at her. "So I got up. Drove myself to a vet clinic in the next hollow because a hospital asks questions.
The vet pulled thirty-seven pellets out of me and told me I should be dead, and I told her dead was a choice I hadn't made. "
Tamsin looked at him for a long time. The sunlight came through the trees and caught the scar through her eyebrow and the gray of her eyes, and she didn't say anything comforting or sympathetic or any of the things people said when you told them a story like that.
She just looked at him like she understood it at a level that went past words.
"The store burned a year later," he said.
"Insurance fraud. Not mine—the man who held my loan decided the building was worth more as a claim than a business, and by then I'd already walked away from the counter and into the club.
The patch was more honest than anything I'd done behind that register. "
He turned to face her. Put his back to the burned building and his eyes on her.
"That's who I am. A man who sold guns out of a cinder block store and took a load of buckshot meant for someone else and got up because lying down felt like losing.
And I'm telling you this in the only place I know how to tell it, because I don't have the words for the rest of it and I thought maybe standing here would do what talking won't."
Tamsin stepped into him. Close. Close enough that he could smell the shampoo in her hair and the lake water on her skin from the morning. She put her hands flat on his chest, palms over the scars, and looked up at him.
"I've always been the only one at my own back," she said.
"Four years of standing in rooms with violent people taught me that nobody was coming.
Nobody was going to step in, nobody was going to cover me, nobody was going to be there when the situation turned.
I was it. And I learned to live with that, and I learned to be enough, and I got good at it. "
Her fingers curled into his shirt.
"But I don't know how to want someone at my back without it feeling like I'm losing something. Like needing you means I wasn't enough on my own. And I was enough. I am enough."
"I know you are."
"Then why does wanting you feel like giving something up?"
Buckshot put his hands on her face. Thumbs tracing her cheekbones, the way he'd done in the motel doorway when he'd said you're mine for the first time. But this was different. This wasn't claiming. This was asking.
"Because you've never had anyone worth giving it to," he said. "And neither have I. And that's what makes this terrifying instead of easy."
She closed her eyes. Leaned into his hands.
"I don't want you behind me," he said. "I've never wanted that. I want you beside me. I handed you a loaded gun and I didn't wonder for one second whether you'd use it right, and I have never done that with anyone. Not the brothers, not the club, nobody."
"Buckshot—"
"I'm not done." His forehead came down to hers.
His voice dropped to something rough and low and stripped of everything except what he meant.
"This isn't me protecting you. This isn't an arrangement.
This isn't the club taking care of a problem on its highway.
This is me standing in the ugliest place I've ever been and telling you that you're mine and I'm yours, out loud, where it counts. "
She opened her eyes. Gray, steady, full of something he'd been waiting to see without knowing he was waiting.
"Yours," she said.
One word. She said it the way she did everything—direct, certain, without qualification.
Not surrender. Not submission. A woman who was enough on her own choosing to be something else as well, because the man standing in front of her had earned it by letting her see the worst of him and not flinching when she saw it back.
He kissed her. Soft. Slow. His hands on her face, her hands on his chest, the burned-out shell of his old life behind him and the new one standing in his arms.
"Yours," he said against her mouth, and the word tasted different when he said it—heavier, more permanent, like a door closing on a room he was never going back to.
They stood in the broken parking lot for a long time. The hawk circled. The cicadas sang. The hollow held them the way hollows hold everything in the Ozarks—close, warm, hidden from the rest of the world by hills and trees and roads that outsiders didn't know existed.
Then he took her hand and walked her back to the bike, and she got on behind him and wrapped her arms around his waist tighter than before, and he kicked the engine to life and took them down out of the hollow and back toward the lake.
His phone buzzed in his pocket on Highway 76.
He pulled over at a wide spot where the road overlooked the lake, the water going silver in the afternoon light, and checked the screen. Cottonmouth.
"What."
"Got a problem." Cottonmouth's voice was flat, cold, the voice he used when something had gone wrong in a way that didn't have a quick fix.
"A man was spotted on the cove road this morning.
On foot. No vehicle, no description that matches anything we've got.
Walked the road from the south end to the north and back again, hours apart.
By the time the watcher got to his last position, he was gone. "
"Gone where?"
"That's the problem. Nobody knows. No vehicle, no track, no trail. He walked the road twice and disappeared like he was never there."
Buckshot looked at the lake. Silver water, green hills, the quiet beauty of Ozark country that covered everything dangerous underneath.
"A man who walks a road twice is learning it," Tamsin said from behind him.
He looked at her over his shoulder. She was still straddling the bike, her arms loose around his waist, her gray eyes sharp.
"He's not scouting the compound," she said. "He's scouting the approach. He wants to know how to get in without being seen, which means he's not coming with a convoy. He's coming alone."
Buckshot felt the cold settle into his gut. Sharp had come with threats. Tillman had come with numbers. Whatever this was—whoever this was—was something different. Something patient. Something that studied a target's routine before it moved.
He kicked the bike back to life and they rode for the compound, and the silver lake fell behind them, and neither of them said what they were both thinking—that the man behind the network had stopped sending crews and started sending something worse.