Chapter Eighteen
Rein's Opening
Colt hadn't planned to go back to the clubhouse.
Two days after the storm, after Senna's door closed behind him with a finality that felt different from every other closed door of the last five weeks, he found himself there anyway, hollowed out and directionless, riding through streets he barely registered until the depot's familiar silhouette rose up out of the freezing dark.
Rein was waiting in the office, unsurprised, as though he'd known exactly how long it would take for Colt to wash up on this particular shore.
"Sergeant at Arms," Rein said, without preamble, sliding a folder across the desk.
"Offer's still open. I hear the marriage is over for good this time.
No more reason to keep pretending you belong anywhere else.
" His voice carried none of its usual cold amusement, something almost gentle in it instead, the particular gentleness of a man closing in on exactly what he wanted.
"Come home, Colt. This is the only place that's ever actually kept its word to you. "
Colt looked at the folder without touching it, feeling something in him reach for the offer the way a drowning man reaches for anything solid.
Fifteen years of this place had built the only architecture he knew for what a life was supposed to look like: work, loyalty, the particular relief of being told exactly what was expected of him.
Senna was gone. The exit process he'd started with Ledger felt, in this moment, like a door he'd tried to open into a room that no longer existed on the other side.
He picked up the pen.
"Colt."
Sabine's voice, sharp, from the doorway. She'd never once set foot in this office in the years since their father's funeral, and the sight of her here, in her paramedic jacket, stopped him with the pen still in his hand.
"Give us a minute," Sabine said to Rein, and something in her tone, flat and unafraid, made even Rein pause before nodding and stepping out.
"You shouldn't be here," Colt said.
"Neither should you, apparently, given what I'm looking at.
" She crossed the room, took the folder off the desk, and set it face down with a decisiveness that reminded him, painfully, of their father.
"I need to tell you something about Dad, and I need you to actually hear it this time instead of doing the thing you always do where you nod and don't listen. "
"Sabine—"
"He hid the debt from Mom for six years before she found out.
Did you know that? I found the old paperwork after he died.
Six years of him telling himself he was protecting her by carrying it alone, and all it actually did was slowly poison every single thing between them until there was nothing honest left to save.
He died still hiding pieces of it from both of us.
He thought silence was strength right up until it killed him a little every year, and then it killed him for real, alone, having never once let anyone carry any of it with him.
" Her voice cracked, real grief surfacing under the anger.
"You are about to sign yourself into becoming him, Colt.
Not because Rein is forcing you. Because it's easier to disappear into a structure that tells you what to do than to sit in the wreckage of a life you actually have to build honestly. "
Colt set the pen down slowly, his hand not quite steady. "I don't know how to build anything else. I don't know what I am without this place."
"Then find out. That's not permission to hide from finding out.
" Sabine's eyes were wet, fierce. "I lost you to this club for five years after Dad died.
I am not going to lose you to it again because a woman you actually love asked for something honest and it scared you more than staying here ever could. "
Colt sat with that for a long time, the office quiet except for the space heater's useless tick, the folder still face down on the desk between them.
"I'm not signing," he said finally.
Sabine exhaled, something in her shoulders loosening. "Okay."
"I don't know what I'm doing instead. I don't have an answer for Rein and I don't have an answer for Senna and I don't have an answer for myself right now." He looked up at his sister, something raw and lost in his expression that he hadn't let anyone see in years. "I just know I can't do this."
"That's enough for tonight." Sabine reached out and squeezed his shoulder, brief, awkward, the first real physical contact between them in longer than either could probably say.
"Come stay at my place. Don't go back out into that cold tonight thinking about nothing but a woman who told you to leave.
Give yourself a minute to just be a person who doesn't know what happens next. "
Colt didn't answer, but he stood, left the folder on Rein's desk untouched, and followed his sister out through the depot's cavernous main room, past men who watched him go without a word, out into a night that had, at least for the moment, stopped raining.
He didn't know, walking to his bike, what he was going to do next. He only knew, with a certainty that felt strange and new, that whatever it was, it wasn't going to be this.