Chapter 5 #2
"Close enough if you ask me. I've got a contact who says the crew running product is out of Ohio.
They're using the mining roads to bypass the highway checkpoints and staging everything at rural properties before distributing into Morgantown.
" He pauses. "There's a lot of product moving through there, Coin.
This isn't small-time. Whoever's running this is treating West Virginia like a distribution hub—cook it somewhere else, ship it in, cut it here, push it out. "
"That's why the dosing is inconsistent. They're cutting it locally."
"And they don't give a shit about quality control because the end users are expendable." Ounce's voice is flat, but his eyes aren't.
There's something in them that looks like the ghost of the man he used to be—the one who moved product himself, before he found his way to this club and this life.
He knows this world from the inside.
That's what makes him valuable and what keeps him up at night.
"Ruger wants to hit the stash house?"
"Ruger wants to send a message. I want to map the full network first—stash house, distribution routes, the crew running it. If we hit one property and they've got three more, all we did was piss them off."
"And if kids keep dying while we map?"
He looks at me. Doesn't flinch. "Then we move faster."
I nod. There's nothing else to say.
Two threats, two fronts, and my club stretched between them like a rubber band that's about to snap.
I head for the parking lot.
Bloodhound is already there, leaning against my truck with his arms crossed and his keys in his hand.
"I'm following you home," he says.
"You don't have to—"
"I'm following you home, Coin."
I don't argue.
There's no point arguing with Garrett Mercer when he's decided something, and the truth is I don't want to argue.
The truth is that driving home alone with those photographs in my pocket and six hours until my girls come through the front door sounds like the kind of silence that would eat me alive.
"Okay," I say. "Yeah. Okay."
We drive in a two-vehicle convoy through Morgantown—my truck, Bloodhound's bike behind me, the October sun cutting through the windshield and the mountains blazing red and gold on every side.
Beautiful. Always beautiful.
Even today, when the world feels like it's closing in, West Virginia is so goddamn beautiful it almost hurts.
I pick the girls up at three. Both schools, same order—Wrenleigh first, then Sadie Jo.
Bloodhound stays at the house.
Wrenleigh is in a mood.
Not the normal Wrenleigh mood—the sixteen-year-old-with-a-boot kind, all fire and complaining.
This is quieter. Sharper.
She's sitting in the passenger seat with her arms crossed and her jaw set, staring out the window.
"What's going on?" I ask.
"Haley Briggs told the whole school that her cousin OD'd last weekend. She was crying in the bathroom during third period." A pause. "Is that true? About the drugs? That people are dying?"
My hands tighten on the wheel. "Where'd you hear that?"
"Dad. Everyone's talking about it. That girl Caitlyn who died—she was a junior. I had Advanced English with her last year." Her voice is flat in a way that scares me because it sounds like mine. "Is it really that bad?"
I want to lie. God, I want to lie.
I want to tell her it's not that bad, that the news exaggerates, that Morgantown is safe and her school is safe and nothing is coming for the people she knows.
I want to wrap her in the same bubble I've been trying to keep around both of them since the day Angelica left and I became the only wall between my daughters and the world.
But Wrenleigh is sixteen and sharp and she reads bullshit the way her sister reads me
Instantly, completely, without mercy.
"Yeah," I say. "It's that bad."
She's quiet for a long time. "Are you doing something about it?"
I look at her.
She's looking back at me with those blue eyes—her mother's eyes, but there's nothing of her mother in them right now.
This is all her. All Wrenleigh. The girl who refused to cry with a bone sticking out of her leg.
"Yeah, baby. We're doing something about it."
She nods once, turns back to the window and the conversation is over.
We pick up Sadie Jo.
She climbs in the back seat, takes one look at Wrenleigh's face, takes one look at mine, and says nothing.
She pulls out her homework and starts working on it in the back seat because that's what Sadie Jo does—she reads the room and she adjusts and she carries on, and it breaks my heart every single time.
Leah shows up at six.
I don't expect her.
She calls first. Calls me, not Garrett, which means she got my number from someone and I don't have time to think about what that means—and says Vanna mentioned Wrenleigh was asking about physical therapy exercises she could do at home, and she has some printouts from the PT department, and she can drop them off if it's not a bad time.
It's a terrible time.
There's a full-patch member of the Saint's Outlaws sitting on my front porch with a gun under his cut, photographs of my daughters in my wallet, and a debt I didn't earn hanging over my house like a storm cloud.
"Sure," I say. "Come by whenever."
Bloodhound is on the porch when she pulls up.
I watch from the kitchen window as she gets out of her car—still in her scrubs from work, her hair pulled back, her badge still hanging from the lanyard around her neck.
She sees Garrett and stops.
They talk. I can't hear what they're saying, but I can read the body language—Leah's hands on her hips, the tilt of her head that means she's asking a question she already knows the answer to.
Garrett's arms crossed, his chin down, giving her nothing.
The Mercer standoff. I've seen it before.
Neither one of them will win because they're both too stubborn to lose.
She comes inside with the printouts and a look on her face that tells me she got nothing out of her brother, and she's not happy about it.
"Physical therapy exercises," she says, handing me a folder.
Her eyes sweep my kitchen—taking in the dishes in the sink, the homework spread across the table, the photos on the fridge, the lunch boxes already packed for tomorrow because I always pack them the night before.
"Thanks," I say. "Wrenleigh's in the living room."
Leah goes to Wrenleigh.
Within five minutes they're on the living room floor, Leah showing her stretches for the leg, Wrenleigh complaining about every single one while doing them perfectly.
Leah is patient in a way that isn't soft—firm, clear, no-nonsense, but warm underneath it.
The kind of patience that comes from dealing with people in pain every day and knowing that sometimes the best thing you can do is make them work through it.
And then Sadie Jo drifts in.
She doesn't announce herself.
She just appears the way she always does—quiet, small, settling onto the couch with her homework in her lap and her blue-gray eyes on Leah.
Watching. Measuring. The way she measures everyone who comes into our house, checking them against some invisible standard that only she knows.
"Do you want help with that?" Leah asks, noticing Sadie Jo's math textbook.
Sadie Jo looks at me. I nod.
"It's fractions," Sadie Jo says. "I hate fractions."
"Everyone hates fractions. They're terrible." Leah sits down next to her on the couch, and I watch my dark-haired daughter—the cautious one, the one who doesn't let anyone in, the one who looks to me for permission before she trusts—lean toward this woman like a plant turning toward light.
I stand in the doorway of my own kitchen, watch Leah help my daughter with fractions, and feel something crack inside my chest.
Not breaking. Opening.
It's been ten years since a woman sat in my living room and helped my kids.
Ten years since someone other than me or Ellie or one of the brothers was here, in this space, making it feel like something more than a single dad's survival bunker.
A decade of holding it together alone, and now there's a woman with a scar that matches mine sitting on my couch explaining denominators to my thirteen-year-old, and my sixteen-year-old is laughing at something she said, and the house sounds different.
Fuller. Warmer.
Like something that was missing just walked through the door and filled a space I'd stopped noticing was empty.
I don't get to want this.
Not now.
Not with photographs of my girls in the hands of men who'd use them as leverage.
Not with a drug pipeline flooding my town and a debt I didn't earn and a war on two fronts that hasn't even started yet.
I don't get to want this.
But I'm standing in my kitchen watching Leah brush a strand of dark hair behind my daughter's ear while she explains how to find common denominators, and Sadie Jo is smiling.
Actually smiling, the real one, the one I see maybe twice a week if I'm lucky, and I want it so badly it scares me.
Leah stays for dinner.
I don't ask her to.
Wrenleigh does, because subtlety isn't her thing. "Stay for dinner. Dad always makes too much anyway."
She looks at me. I nod before I can talk myself out of it.
We eat at the kitchen table. The four of us.
The girls on one side, Leah and me on the other.
Wrenleigh talks enough for all of us.
Sadie Jo eats her food and watches Leah with those quiet eyes and doesn't say much, but she doesn't need to.
Her being at the table, present and open and not retreating to her room, says everything.
Leah helps clear the dishes.
Our hands brush at the sink—knuckles against fingers, warm and brief and electric—and neither of us says anything about it, and both of us feel it, and I know she feels it because her breath catches for half a second before she picks up the next plate.
She leaves at eight. The girls are doing the rest of their homework in the living room, and I walk her to the door.
"Thanks for the PT stuff," I say. "And for Sadie Jo. She doesn't warm up to people."
"She's a good kid, Coin. They both are." She pauses on the porch, her keys in her hand.
The October air is cold and she's still in her scrubs and she should be home, warm and resting.
Instead she's standing on my porch looking at me with those steady Mercer eyes—the same ones her brother has, but softer. Warmer.
"You've done something good here," she says. "With them. By yourself." She gestures at the house behind me. The light in the windows, the sound of Wrenleigh arguing with the cat about the couch again, Sadie Jo's music playing low from the living room. "This is a good home, Coin."
The words hit somewhere I don't have armor for.
Ten years of doing this alone and no one—not one person in a decade—has looked at what I built and called it good.
Not out loud. Not to my face. Not standing on my porch with the porch light catching the scar above her eyebrow and her eyes saying something her mouth hasn't figured out how to say yet.
"Thank you," I say. And I mean it in a way that I don't have the words for, so I just say it once and hope she hears everything underneath it.
She holds my gaze for a moment. Then she nods, turns, and walks to her car.
Bloodhound is in the shadows at the end of the porch.
He watches his sister drive away, then looks at me.
I wait for it—the warning, the threat, the that's my sister conversation we already had once.
He just nods. One nod. Then he settles back into the porch chair and goes back to watching the street.
I close the door. I lean against it. I listen to my daughters in the next room.
Alive, safe, laughing about something stupid, existing in the warm space of a house that a woman just called good.
Then I pull the coin from my pocket and flip it in the dark hallway, catch it, hold it, and think about all the things I can't afford to want and the one thing I might not be able to stop wanting no matter how hard I try.
The photographs are still in my wallet.
The clock is still ticking.
But my house is warm, and my girls are laughing, and for five minutes tonight, it sounded like a home instead of a bunker.
I'll take it. Five minutes is more than I've had in a long time.