Chapter 4 #2
"You got Rosalind to keep my booth open every single night for a month."
"She likes you."
"You had someone quietly confirm my car wasn't stolen."
I pause, caught. "That one I can't explain away."
She laughs, real and warm, and something in my chest does the thing it's been doing more and more lately around her — loosens, just slightly, like a knot finally starting to give.
What she does tell me is enough to know she needs more than I can give her alone. So, carefully, and only with her reluctant permission after I explain exactly who I'm bringing in and why, I take it to two people.
Ivy first. Nine years in this club and married into it, and there's no sharper legal mind in three counties — the kind of attorney who reads a threat like a contract and finds every clause the other side didn't know they'd signed.
I lay out June's situation in broad strokes, careful with what's mine to share, and Ivy's face goes very still and very focused, the look she gets when she's already three moves ahead.
"How compromised was the original protection?" Ivy asks, all business now, pen already moving across a legal pad.
"Compromised enough that she ran instead of trusting it a second time."
"That's not paranoia, then. That's a documented failure.
" Ivy taps the pen against the pad, thinking.
"There are ways to do this that don't run through the same broken pipeline.
Federal contacts I trust with my own life, not just my career.
Get her to talk to me directly when she's ready — I don't push people into rooms they're not ready to walk into, but I want her to know the room exists. "
"She's got real options," Ivy says. "More than she probably thinks she does."
Then Cormac. Two years living exactly the kind of life June's been living — hunted, hiding, trusting no one, until this club and a woman named Josie taught him different. If anybody in Clover Ridge understands the specific weight June's carrying, it's him.
Cormac doesn't ask for details the way Ivy does. He just listens, quiet, nodding along like he's recognizing his own reflection in a story that isn't his.
"Tell her she's not crazy for being this careful," Cormac says, when I explain.
"Tell her the fear doesn't mean she's doing it wrong.
It means she's been doing it right, alone, for way too long.
" He pauses, something old and understanding in his face.
"And tell her when she's ready, I'll tell her exactly how you stop having to.
It took me two years to believe I was allowed to stop.
Don't let her take that long if she doesn't have to. "
I carry both of those back to June like offerings, and I watch the wall around her get a little sturdier, a little less like a woman standing entirely alone against the world.
And somewhere in all of it — I couldn't tell you the exact moment, the way you can't pinpoint the exact second a room goes from cool to warm — I realize I've stopped keeping a professional distance from this. I'm not just building a fence around a frightened stranger anymore.
I'm falling for her.
It's inconvenient. It's against every rule I've spent six years enforcing. It complicates a situation that was already complicated by federal-grade danger and a name that isn't real.
I don't stop it. I've broken enough rules this month already. Might as well see how far this one takes me.
I think about Deacon again that night, lying awake longer than I should.
Six years of building a life around the idea that trusting the wrong person costs everyone around you, and here I am, handing my trust to a woman whose name I don't even know, on the strength of nothing but instinct and the way she looks at a room when she thinks nobody's watching her watch it.
If I'm wrong about her, it won't just be my heart that pays for it.
It'll be the club, potentially, if whatever's hunting her decides Clover Ridge is a problem worth solving with more than careful questions.
I know that. I weigh it, the way I weigh everything, turning the risk over from every angle I can find.
I'm not wrong about her. I'd stake six years of careful instinct on it, and six years of careful instinct is the only currency I've got that's never once let me down.
Tomorrow I'll see her at the diner, same booth, same seat with the view of the door, and we'll sit in our comfortable silence like nothing's changed, even though everything has.
That's how this works, I've learned. The biggest shifts happen quiet, and the world keeps right on looking ordinary around them until one day you look up and realize you're standing somewhere entirely different than where you started.
I think about telling Knox the fuller version of things tomorrow — not the club-business version I gave him weeks ago, but the real one, the one where a stranger became a woman I can't picture Clover Ridge without anymore.
He'll want to know if she's safe long-term.
He'll want to know if this puts the club at risk.
Those are fair questions and I don't have complete answers yet, only the certainty that whatever risk there is, I'd rather face it standing next to her than watching safely from a distance the way I've watched everything else for six years.
That, more than anything, is how I know this is different. I've spent six years choosing the safe distance every single time. Tonight, lying awake turning it all over, I find I don't want the safe distance anymore. I want the risk, if the risk means her.