22. Declan
DECLAN
The dark sedan disappears before June turns into the clinic lot, and every part of me that has ever kept a man alive demands I get on my bike, find the bastard with the camera, and break enough of him that he tells me who sent him.
Avery stands beside her car with one hand beneath her coat, carrying our child’s picture while I hold the copy she chose to give me inside my cut.
I could catch the sedan before it reaches the highway.
I could also prove, less than half an hour after hearing my baby’s heartbeat, that Avery’s instructions matter only until I get scared.
Clinic security takes my description twice.
I give the man, camera, coat, partial plate, and direction, stopping at the edge of what I actually saw, then stay against the brick wall while June gets out of her car and goes straight to Avery.
She checks Avery first, not me. I used to resent how fast June put herself between us when Avery and I fought, as if my wife needed somebody to protect her from a man who loved her.
Now June opens Avery’s passenger door, waits until she’s inside, and looks at me over the roof with enough disgust to strip paint.
“Tomorrow morning,” Avery says through the open window.
She has already given the order, but she makes me hear it again while Cruz listens on speaker.
“My kitchen. Every option, every name, every cost. You get the address because I would rather choose the day you learn it than find out later that you already had it. Nobody puts a man near my home before I approve him.”
I want to tell her the photographer is already near her home even if he hasn’t found the new address.
He followed her clinic, knows June’s car, and has an index full of places we once treated as safe.
The words crowd behind my teeth while Avery watches to see whether fear will make me turn an argument into an order. “I’ll bring the list.”
“Cruz brings it,” she says, fastening her seat belt. “You may come and argue. You don’t control the paper.”
The correction hurts exactly as she intended. I nod once and move away from the car. “Cruz brings it.”
June pulls out first, Avery behind her. I remain beside the clinic until both cars turn beyond the light, then walk to my motorcycle with the ultrasound picture pressing against my chest beneath the leather, and ride the other direction.
By the time I reach the clubhouse, Cruz has three legal pads covered in names, and I spend the night hating every option that leaves Avery in her house.
The next morning, Avery opens her front door after Cruz and Trigger have already crossed the yard.
I wait at the bottom of the porch steps until she looks directly at me and moves aside.
She wears black work pants, thick socks, and one of the sweaters she bought after her old clothes began pulling across her stomach.
For six years, I entered every place she lived without knocking.
This rental has never known me as her husband.
I wipe January mud from my boots and pass her with a foot of air between us.
Her kitchen table is barely large enough for four people and the stack Cruz drops in the middle.
Avery has arranged colored tabs, a notebook, four pens, and a plate of crackers beside the chair that keeps her back away from the window.
She takes the crackers everywhere now. I know it from watching her eat two in the planning room when nausea cut across her face.
I don’t ask whether she has eaten. Watching her closely doesn’t become care just because I know what the signs mean.
Cruz sits across from her and turns the first page around. “Visible car at Bell & Rourke during work hours, drive-bys after close. Same two drivers, names and plates listed here. Clinic keeps its own patrol. We don’t put a club vehicle there unless you call.”
Avery writes beside each name, then looks at Trigger. “Have either of them worked for Declan privately?”
Trigger glances at me before answering, which gives her the answer before he speaks. “Hale watched the old house twice in October.”
“Then Hale isn’t on my work car.”
“He’s good,” I say, already hating the other name. “He kept Sasha from getting within half a mile of the garage.”
Avery puts down her pen. “He also took orders from you that I didn’t know existed. Pick somebody who hasn’t already proven he’ll hide a man outside my home if you tell him it’s for me.”
“He followed my order then. He’ll follow yours now.”
“And when they conflict?”
The answer I want is that they won’t. I signed away the right to give another private order after she caught the deputy missing from my contact list, yet everybody at this table knows what I become when Avery is threatened.
If a car came through the yard tonight, Hale would look to me before Cruz finished reaching for his phone.
Avery knows it too, and she has known it longer than I have. “He’d look at me.”
“Then he’s out.”
Cruz sets his pen down flat on the page.
“Hale wasn’t on the list you handed her at the gate.
” His voice stays even, and his eyes stay on me instead of looking to Avery before he goes on.
“October. Six names, and you swore that was all of them. Your name comes off every roster this club runs. You don’t sit at my table until Gage puts the sling down.
Every mile you drive on club business goes through Gage on paper before you turn the key.
I told you what I would do if she found one you kept. ”
Three months later, I still can’t pretend I forgot Hale.
I gave him two nights on the old house and left him off the page because writing him down meant admitting I never intended to stop.
Cruz waits. Avery waits with her pen flat against the notebook, and she doesn’t look surprised, which takes more out of me than the ruling does.
“Take it,” I say, and I keep both hands on the table while my name comes off a list I have been on since I was twenty-two.
Cruz crosses out Hale and writes Bones beside the second driver’s name.
Bones won’t take my order over Avery’s after seeing Gage bleed at the storage property, and the fact makes him the right choice.
It also makes me want to flip the table.
I drag my chair farther from it instead.
“Put two men at work. One car can be pinned.”
“One marked car where my employer can see it,” Avery says.
“There is a county detective holding a gunshot report with Gage’s name on it, and Marisol has his card in a folder with my name on the tab.
Every man you put near me has to be somebody I can hand over with the truth attached.
If the threat rises, I leave. I don’t turn the firm into your second clubhouse. ”
“Sasha walked into that firm and sat in front of you.”
“And I got her trespassed, recorded her, and gave you the admission that led to the rural property. Don’t use the day I handled her to pretend I was helpless.”
Trigger keeps his eyes on the page, clearly wishing one of the names could get him out of the room. Cruz leaves me to it. He leans back with his arms crossed, waiting for me to prove whether yesterday’s question in the parking lot meant anything once Avery gives an answer I can’t stand.
I point to the vehicle section. “Armored SUV. Driver takes you to work and waits.”
“No.”
“You haven’t read the price.”
“I don’t care if the damn thing is free. I’m not climbing into a tank every morning so you can feel better while I’m trapped in the back.”
“You’d have control of the locks.”
“That’s supposed to comfort me? You gave Sasha my schedule, Declan. You canceled our anniversary and sent her a joke about me believing your lie. You don’t get to build a harder car around me and call that safety.”
The memory hits hard. I see the burner message, the dinner Avery ate without me, and Sasha laughing in a bed I came home from before crawling into ours. “The car wouldn’t be mine.”
“The fear is.”
I push away from the table and cross to the sink before I say something that turns her meeting back into mine.
The yard beyond the window is bare, fenced, and too open.
A shooter could lie behind the neighbor’s shed.
A camera could watch through the gap beside the garage.
I catalog each threat while Avery eats one cracker and continues reading, and the sight of her having to feed herself through an argument I helped create makes me grip the counter until the old wood bites my fingers.
“Move into the clubhouse,” I say. I know she will refuse, but the words come out anyway. “Not with me. Take the family room upstairs. June can stay. Gage can lock down the whole property.”
Avery closes the folder. “I work, sleep, eat, and grow this baby in one building full of men you used to command. Every visitor goes through your family. Every time I leave, somebody logs it. If I say no to you in the hall, half the club hears it before dinner. That’s your idea of me having a life? ”
“My idea is you being alive to hate me.”
“And mine is staying a person while I do it.”
The baby moves beneath her sweater. I see the little shift and I can’t make the next argument.
Our child is inside the woman I betrayed, the same woman I made discover the safehouse room one object at a time.
I can imagine every car coming through the window more easily than I can imagine trusting a written plan when both of them are on the other side of town.
“Your plan scares the fuck out of me,” I tell her. “One car at work isn’t enough. No men near the house means the response starts after you call. If you can’t call, June has to understand something is wrong before anybody moves. I would tear the whole page up if it were mine to tear.”
Avery opens her notebook again and leaves me to carry it. “You can be afraid. You still don’t get to decide for me.”