Chapter Twenty-One
What Sabine Tells Her
Sabine came to the studio four days later, still in her paramedic uniform, dark circles under her eyes suggesting she'd come straight from a long shift rather than take the time to change.
"I need to tell you something," she said, once the door had closed behind her. "Colt doesn't know I'm here. He'd probably be furious if he found out. I'm telling you anyway because I think you deserve to know what's actually happening before it's too late for it to matter."
Senna set down the tablet she'd been holding, something in Sabine's tone sending a current of unease through her. "What's happening."
"He's been at a lawyer's office every morning for four days.
Formal exit paperwork, severing himself entirely from Eisenwolf's operations, surrendering any claim to income or protection from the club, including whatever informal safety net came with the debt he's been servicing.
It's not a symbolic gesture, Senna. He's giving up everything the club ever offered him, structurally, permanently, with no way to walk it back later.
" Sabine's voice was steady but urgent. "Rein called an emergency disciplinary vote.
It's set for two nights from now. The club gets to decide whether Colt walks away clean or whether they make an example of him for defying Rein publicly and now trying to leave for good.
I won't pretend the second outcome isn't a real possibility. It could get violent."
Senna felt the floor tilt beneath her. "Why didn't he tell me any of this himself?"
"Because he decided this had to be something he did regardless of whether it won you back.
" Sabine's eyes were fierce, the same directness Senna remembered from their first conversation weeks earlier.
"He told me explicitly, more than once, that he didn't want you to feel obligated to reconcile just because he made a sacrifice.
He said if he told you before the vote, it would look like leverage, like he was trying to buy his way back into your life with a grand gesture instead of actually earning it through who he becomes afterward.
" She shook her head slightly, something like awe under the exhaustion in her voice.
"I've never seen him do anything like this.
Not for our father. Not for anyone. I don't fully understand where he found this in himself, but I think you might. "
Senna sat with that, feeling something in her chest crack open entirely, the exact structural, irrevocable action Greta had implicitly asked her to watch for arriving without being asked for, without being used as currency, precisely because he had understood, finally, that currency was never what this required.
"Why are you telling me now, if he wanted to keep it separate."
"Because I think it's going to get dangerous in two nights, and I think if there's any chance your being there changes the outcome, he deserves that chance even if he'd never ask for it himself.
" Sabine's voice cracked slightly. "I've already lost him to that club once.
I'm not going to lose him again without at least trying to stop it. "
"Take me with you," Senna said, before she'd fully thought it through. "The night of the vote. I want to be there."
"It's not safe for you there, Senna. I mean that as a fact, the same way Colt did the first time you went to the clubhouse."
"I don't care." Senna's voice was steadier than she expected, something in her settling into place with a finality that felt, for the first time in weeks, entirely clear.
"I spent five weeks deciding what his silence meant without ever once standing beside him when it actually mattered. I'm done doing that. Take me with you."
Sabine studied her for a long moment, something shifting in her expression, and finally nodded. "Two nights. I'll come get you myself."
She left as abruptly as she'd arrived, and Senna stood alone in the studio's front room for a long time afterward, turning over everything Sabine had told her: the paperwork, the surrendered claims, the deliberate silence meant to protect her from feeling obligated rather than to hide anything from her at all.
She thought of every condition she'd set weeks earlier, transparency, time, proof through action rather than promises, and understood, standing there in the quiet, that Colt had met every single one of them in the most demanding way possible, without asking a single thing in return, precisely because he'd finally learned the difference between silence as evasion and silence as sacrifice.
She spent the next two days in a state of tightly held urgency, running the studio's remaining sessions on autopilot, counting down the hours until Sabine would come for her, and when the second night finally arrived, she was standing by the door in her coat a full hour before Sabine's car pulled up outside.
She used the waiting hour to call Baumgartner, a strange, practical impulse she didn't fully examine until she was already dialing.
She asked him, carefully, what it would mean legally if the separation proceedings were paused rather than finalized, whether there was a formal mechanism for that, a way to hold the door open without fully reopening it yet.
He explained the process in his usual dry, efficient tone, and she thanked him and hung up without committing to anything, but the fact of having asked at all told her something about where she'd already arrived, even before the night's events had a chance to confirm it.
Imke found her in the front room a little before Sabine arrived, coat already on, and didn't ask where she was going. She simply reached over and squeezed Senna's hand once, briefly, the same quiet solidarity she'd offered through every difficult week of the last two months.
"Whatever happens tonight," Imke said, "you didn't have to go. You're choosing to. That matters, however it turns out."
Senna nodded, throat too tight to answer, and when Sabine's headlights finally swept across the studio's front window, she was already moving toward the door.