6. Declan
DECLAN
The Enforcer’s chair is empty beside Cruz while I wait at the far end of the clubhouse table, and nobody has told me to move into it.
Gage occupies the space behind that chair with his arms folded, Hutch sits across from me turning an unopened beer between both hands, and Bones has covered half the table with route binders brought from the safehouse.
Trigger stands near the door with the other two prospects.
None of them has looked at me since Cruz left to collect Avery.
The main room beyond the open doors smells like old beer, grill smoke, and the exhaust rolling in whenever somebody crosses the yard.
A motorcycle starts outside, rattles the bottles behind the bar, then cuts off after a man shouts that children are sleeping in the rooms upstairs.
The club keeps happening around the worst day of my life.
Somebody drops a pan in the kitchen. Roxanne swears at whoever left grease on the floor.
Two men argue by the jukebox until Gage turns his head and both voices stop.
My cut hangs from my shoulders, heavy with the patch I’ve worn since I was nineteen.
The pregnancy test and yellow sock press against my chest from inside it.
I put them there before leaving the house, after Avery carried her bags past me one trip at a time.
I wanted to take the bags from her. I wanted to lift her into the truck, put her in our bed, and stand between her and every choice that frightened me.
When she said the police would become the last voluntary contact I ever received, I moved.
My only restraint tonight is that: I let my pregnant wife leave the house I made unbearable, then followed Cruz’s order to sit in a chair that isn’t mine and wait for her to bring the proof.
“How much did she copy?” Bones asks without looking up from the binder he’s checking against a handwritten index.
“All of it, if she had time.” I keep my hands on the table where Gage can see them. “Messages. Payments. Calls. Device records. Avery reads every page in a house once she knows it matters.”
“You knew that when you hid the phone in her garage.” Gage doesn’t sound angry. Anger would give me something to fight. He sounds like he’s checking a fact he already hates. “Under her workbench. In the house she organized.”
“I thought she would never look.”
“Yeah.” He shifts his weight against the wall. “We’re getting a real good picture of what you thought she’d never do.”
I look toward the main room before anger can give me an answer I cannot take back.
Roxanne and Tessa sit at a corner table with three other wives.
Avery’s message reached them before Cruz summoned me.
I read it on Roxanne’s phone while the women watched me realize my wife had told the truth in four plain lines and left me no place to call it complicated.
Declan has had an affair with Sasha since late April. I found them together at the east safehouse this morning. I have left him. I am safe. I will not discuss reconciliation.
Her four lines leave the pregnancy out. Three prospects carried that part, and now every person inside these walls knows my child exists before I’ve heard Avery say anything about the baby except that I no longer get to help choose a doctor.
I should hate the men for carrying that news.
I hate myself for giving them no other way to learn it.
Two engines enter the yard. I know Cruz’s bike from the idle, and Avery’s sedan comes in behind it and stops near the front steps, which means she drove herself here and can leave the same way. I’m halfway out of the chair before I remember where I am.
“Sit down,” Gage says.
I look at him. His arms stay folded, the gun stays on his hip, and the doorway behind me stays clear. Cruz put Gage in the room to see whether I can obey a brother whose rank sits below mine. I sit because I’ve already shown everyone what happens when I refuse.
I sit as Avery enters beside Cruz carrying the freezer bag in one hand and a hard case in the other.
She changed out of the green blouse. A black sweater covers her to the throat, and a clean bandage wraps her right hand.
The coat stays buttoned over the grey and white socks.
I know they are inside it without seeing them, just as I know the yellow one is inside my cut.
Half our child’s first gift is divided between two people who cannot stand on the same side of a table.
Roxanne leaves her chair and comes toward Avery with a bottle of water, then stops before reaching her. “You want this or you want everybody out of your way?”
“The water.” Avery takes it with her left hand and nods toward the women. “They can stay.”
Cruz puts the hard case beside Bones and pulls out the chair across from me. Avery stays on her feet. Her gaze moves from the table to Trigger and the other prospects, then to the empty Enforcer’s chair at Cruz’s side.
“We can clear the room,” Cruz tells her. “Officers only.”
“No.” Avery places the burner in front of him but keeps two fingers on the freezer bag. “Three men heard me ask how long while Sasha wore my husband’s clothes. The women heard whatever those men managed to repeat. I’m not letting anyone shorten the truth to protect Declan.”
I want the room empty. I want the witnesses gone, not to protect my rank but to keep Avery’s face from becoming another story people trade over the bar.
That choice belonged to me before I brought Sasha into the safehouse.
Asking for privacy now would only make Avery defend her right to the truth again.
“Open it here,” Cruz says.
Bones cuts the top of the freezer bag and keeps his fingers off the phone. Avery hands him a printed list of steps, copies, and file names. He reads it once, glances at her, then sets a clean evidence bag beside the burner.
“You did all this today?” he asks.
“Before Declan got home.” Avery unbuttons the coat, folds it over the back of the chair across from Cruz, and sits there rather than in the one across from me. “The archive is in three places. You can have the device after I watch the copy finish.”
Bones nods. “Fair.”
It’s one word, but it gives Avery more respect than I did every time I turned my phone facedown and let her question die. She earned a seat at this table in an afternoon because she knew what to do with evidence while I was busy hiding it.
Cruz rests both hands on the table. “Before we touch a message, Declan tells the room what we’re looking at. Start with how long.”
“Late April until this morning.”
The women behind Avery don’t move. Trigger looks at the floor. Gage watches me as though he expects the answer to get worse, and he’s right.
“How did Sasha get into the safehouse?” Cruz asks.
“I brought her in on April second. She had information about the rival faction moving through the eastern routes. I didn’t run the complete check before I gave her the location.”
“Why?”
I could tell him the information was accurate. It was. I could say we needed a source inside the faction, and we did. Neither fact answers him. “I wanted to be the man who brought you the lead.”
Cruz leans back, studying me with the same face he uses before a vote. “When did the source become an affair?”
“Late April.”
“How many times did you bring her into that house after?”
“Weekly. Sometimes more.”
Avery turns the water bottle in her left hand until the label bunches.
She keeps her face turned toward the bottle.
I know she has read the schedule, but hearing me say it hurts her in a way the screenshots didn’t.
I want to stop. I want Cruz to move to the missing logs and let me become useful again. He waits.
“I gave her a key in June,” I continue. “She kept clothes and toiletries there. I paid the rent on an apartment connected to East Parish Holdings. We met there too. I used marital money.”
“You used our account,” Avery says, her attention fixed on the wrinkled label. “Say you took it from us.”
“I took money from our account and paid her rent with it.”
“Did she have access to club papers?” Cruz asks.
My mouth dries. Hutch lifts his eyes from the bottle for the first time, and I know he understands what the answer is hiding.
He found me in the clubhouse office when I was twenty-two, furious at an insurance form I couldn’t read fast enough, and helped me memorize what every box meant, then kept it between the two of us.
Avery knows too. Sasha knew. I chose every person who learned about my dyslexia, then gave one of them enough access to use it against everyone here.
“She handled some papers,” I say.
Avery looks at me now. There are no tears in her face, which would be easier. “What does handled mean?”
“She read manifests connected to her information.”
“At the safehouse?”
“Yes.”
“How did that start?”
Too many people are here, every breath and boot scraping the floor reaching me at once. I want to tell her this part is mine. The thought is so obscene after Sasha threw it at Avery that I clamp my teeth together until it passes.
“I got stuck on a manifest,” I say. “Sasha took it and read the line aloud. After that, I brought her papers when I wanted help getting through them.”
Avery places the bottle on the table before she crushes it. “The way I used to read them at our kitchen table?”
“Yes.”
The answer reaches every person in the room.
Gage looks at the binders, then at me. Trigger’s head lifts.
Roxanne swears under her breath, not at the breach alone.
They don’t know all of it, but they know enough to understand I gave Sasha documents and an intimacy my wife believed I trusted only to her, and not one man at this table asks why a manifest stopped me.
“What kind of papers?” Bones asks, his voice returning the room to the problem in front of him.
“Shipping manifests. Route notes. Visitor pages. A few safehouse inventories.”
“Family sheets?”
“No.” The answer comes fast. “I told her those were off-limits.”