3. Declan
DECLAN
Avery’s taillights disappear beyond the fence while I stand barefoot in the gravel holding the pregnancy test she meant to place in my hand.
I should run after her, call her, do anything except let the road take her away, but she told me not to follow, and I’ve already ignored enough of what she wanted.
The engine fades toward the highway, but I keep staring at the empty road as though she might turn around once she gets far enough to breathe.
She’ll remember she’s pregnant. She’ll remember she shouldn’t be alone.
She’ll remember I’m her husband and come back so I can get her out of the car, wash the blood from her hands, and help her forget what she saw.
Every thought is fucking insane, and I know it while I have it.
I look down at the test. Two lines sit inside the little window, pink against white plastic, and my mind refuses to hold the fact for more than a second before Avery in the doorway replaces it: her green blouse, the socks torn open in her fist, her face when Sasha spoke about the reading.
My wife drove here carrying our baby, smiling before she opened the door.
I saw the smile die. There are things a man can spend his whole life trying to forget, and I know before the gravel stops moving that I’ll see that one every time I close my eyes.
“Declan,” Trigger says from the porch, his gun holstered now and his face turned toward the field. He has enough sense not to look at me. “Zip your pants.”
“Get the others off this property.” I push the test into my front pocket, then realize my jeans are open and my dick is hanging out like I haven’t already given them enough to talk about.
I fasten them with hands that don’t want to work.
“Nobody calls the clubhouse. Nobody calls Cruz. Nobody says Avery’s name. ”
Trigger finally looks at me. He’s a prospect, young enough to believe rank protects a man from consequences and old enough to understand he just watched mine leave in a grey sedan. “They heard her.”
“I know what the fuck they heard. Clear the property!”
He goes because that’s what prospects do when the Enforcer gives an order, but for once, he doesn’t say yes and he doesn’t lower his eyes.
He gathers the other two from the hall, and their boots move through the house while I walk back to the bedroom.
The door is open. The little cardboard hanger tab lies near the wall where it tore loose, and one speck of Avery’s blood marks the edge.
I crouch to pick it up, then stop with my hand above it.
She brought three pairs. I saw grey and white in her fist when she left. Yellow is missing.
The test was supposed to be mine. The socks were supposed to be mine. Instead, one hit me in the chest while another broke open in the room where I had been fucking Sasha, and I want to tear the bed apart until I find every piece of what Avery carried through that door.
Sasha comes out of the bathroom in jeans and a black shirt, her blond hair twisted away from her face. The hoodie lies on the floor where she dropped it after I ordered her to take it off. She steps over it with her eyes on the door.
“You need to get the burner before she finds it,” she says. “And I want the eastern route notes.”
My head comes up. “What?”
“The burner is in your garage. She’ll search the house now, and if she finds it, she finds the rent and every time we met.
” Sasha reaches for her boots, talking fast while I stare at her.
“Get it first. The route notes too. You said you’d give me the eastern routes once Cruz approved the source package, and I’m not leaving without them because your wife lost her shit. ”
Sasha is still standing in the bedroom where Avery left us, and my stomach turns as I listen to her.
She doesn’t sound like the woman I’ve spent six months bringing here.
Sasha always wanted the routes. I knew it the first time she asked.
I told her club routes stayed out of bed, and then I laughed when she climbed over me to reach the folder on the nightstand.
I liked watching her treat rules as if they were mine to bend.
“Why do you need the burner?” I ask, though the excuse she gave me makes sense. Avery can’t see it. Cruz would need one look at it. The phone holds half a year of what I chose, and wanting it erased doesn’t explain the panic in Sasha’s voice.
“You paid my rent from an account that can lead back to you. Do you want Cruz seeing that before you explain?” Sasha shoves one foot into a boot and looks at the bedroom door. “The prospects heard Avery announce the pregnancy. You have an hour before every wife in the club knows. Maybe less.”
“You knew she might find the phone.”
Sasha’s mouth pulls tight. “I told you not to keep it at home.”
I should ask why she wants the routes tonight.
I should open the cabinet in the office and check every binder before another vehicle leaves.
I should call Cruz, lock the safehouse down, take Trigger’s keys, and search Sasha before she crosses the porch.
I’ve been Enforcer long enough that the steps arrange themselves without effort.
Avery is driving with blood on her hands and our baby inside her. The word our belongs to me even if she never lets me near either of them. Panic turns every club problem into something that can wait, which is how I treated my wife every time Sasha wanted something.
“Get out,” I tell her. “Leave the key on the table.”
Sasha goes rigid with one boot unlaced. “You’re blaming me now?”
“I’m telling you to get the fuck out of my house.”
“This isn’t your house.” She glances toward the hall, then back at me, and there’s no hurt in her face.
There never has been. I liked that about her.
Sasha wanted sex, money, information, and a man everybody else feared.
She never asked why I stopped coming home or whether I could look at Avery after leaving this bed.
“This place belongs to the club, and if Avery has the burner, you’re about to lose that too. ”
She’s right. I hate her for saying it, which is easier than hating myself for making it true.
“The key. Now.”
Sasha pulls it from her ring and throws it.
I catch it before it hits the floor, the same small silver key I gave her in June after she waited in the car through a storm.
Avery’s copy has a green rubber cap so she can find it fast in the dark.
I stood in our kitchen when I made that one for her, guiding her hand through the alarm code and telling her this safehouse would always be somewhere she belonged.
I gave Sasha the same door. No speech, no promise, only a cut key and a place to keep shampoo, which may be worse. I made cheating on Avery part of an ordinary week.
“You were the one who kept coming back,” Sasha says while lacing her boot. “Don’t look at me like I dragged you into bed.”
“I know what I did.”
I answer too fast. I know what I chose. That isn’t the same as knowing what it did to Avery, and some rotten part of me is already rehearsing an explanation that might keep her from leaving.
April second, Sasha brought real information about the faction moving product along the eastern route.
I could have taken her to Cruz. I could have made her wait while Bones checked her story.
Instead, I wanted to be the one who delivered the win, so I brought her here, sat her at the office desk, and treated every correct answer as proof I had been right to skip the rules.
Three weeks later, I stalled over a shipping manifest. The letters moved and doubled while Sasha watched me pretend I was checking totals.
She took the page, read the line I had missed, and never laughed.
I should have taken the paper back. I should have told Avery that night, put the stack on our Tuesday table, and admitted I had let pride put a source too close to club business.
Instead, I kissed Sasha.
The first time had an ending available at every point.
I could have stopped when she touched my belt.
I could have walked out when she asked whether my wife knew I was here.
I could have left after and told myself I had done one unforgivable thing instead of returning the next week to do it again.
I went home, took a shower in my own bathroom, and climbed into bed beside Avery.
She woke when the mattress moved, reached for me, and I let her.
I had condom wrappers in the truck and my wife under me before dawn, and the only thought I allowed myself was that Avery couldn’t know.
I didn’t want to leave her. I didn’t want Sasha to replace her.
I wanted the woman who knew every shameful part of me at home, and I wanted the woman who made those parts feel dangerous instead of broken waiting here.
I told myself loving Avery made the affair smaller.
I treated my own love like permission to lie to her.
The first rent transfer was in May. Sasha said her landlord had seen club bikes and she needed somewhere less exposed.
I paid because moving her protected the source.
That excuse lasted until I set up the second transfer, then the third, long after she stopped pretending the apartment was only for meetings.
I gave her a key to this house. I brought the blue mug after waking late and grabbing it from our kitchen without thinking.
When Sasha drank from it, I should have taken it from her hand.
I watched the lipstick print appear and left it there.