10. Penny
PENNY
The pencil taps a steady rhythm against my desk, and I’m surprised no one has told me to knock it off yet.
Two files sit side by side in front of me, close enough that their edges touch.
The Halvorsen murder. The county evidence robbery.
Two cases a few months apart that shouldn’t have anything to do with each other, and yet I keep laying them out like this, looking for a connection I haven’t established.
The account in Erik Halvorsen’s file puts the killer in a Forsaken Kings patch, but when I called over to Ashford asking about it, their club president told me, calm as anything, that any patch seen that night had to be a fake. Somebody playing at being a King who wasn’t one.
I tap the pencil twice more against the desk, staring at the second file—robbery, weapons, professional execution, not a single loose thread except one small, dull ring bagged and tagged and sitting in an evidence locker two floors down from where I’m sitting.
I keep coming back to it. Small stone. Simple band.
It doesn’t mean anything.
It’s a ring. Rings look alike. My brain’s supplying memories and slapping them onto a piece of evidence because I haven’t slept right in two weeks and every road in this county apparently leads back to a man I’ve spent seventeen years trying to forget.
My phone rings before I can talk myself any further down that road, and I don’t recognize the number until I answer and hear her voice.
“Penny?” Sasha, bright and a little breathless, like she’s walking fast somewhere. “It’s Sasha Halvorsen. Well, Sasha Slade, I guess I should say now.”
“Hi, Sasha.” I close both files, one on top of the other, and lean back in my chair. “How was the honeymoon?”
“So good. I’ll tell you everything. Actually, that’s kind of why I’m calling.
” A pause, some rustling, a voice in the background I don’t catch.
“I’m in town shopping and I remembered you said lunch, so.
If you’re free. I don’t want to spring it on you, but I also didn’t want to plan too far ahead and lose my nerve. ”
I glance at the clock. I glance at the files. “I’m free.”
“Really?” The relief in her voice makes something in my chest go soft despite myself. “There’s a place on Main with tables outside. I’m already there, actually. I got here early and panicked and ordered a sweet tea I don’t even want.”
“Give me fifteen minutes.”
She’s exactly where she said she’d be, at a little wrought-iron table under a green awning, both hands wrapped around a glass of tea she hasn’t touched, watching the street like she’s waiting for someone to jump out at her.
The moment she spots me, she relaxes, and she waves like I might not see her otherwise, like there’s any chance of missing that much blonde hair and that wide of a smile in the middle of a Friday lunch crowd.
“You came.” She says it like she still can’t quite believe it.
“Told you I would.” I take the seat across from her, and a waitress appears almost instantly, with menus tucked under her arm.
I order iced tea. Sasha orders for both of us before I can look at a menu—chicken salad, she promises, the good kind, with grapes in it—and once the waitress leaves, she leans forward with her elbows on the table like we’re old friends catching up instead of two women who’ve met twice.
“Tell me everything,” I say. “Where’d he take you?”
“The mountains. This little cabin with a hot tub on the porch and no cell signal for four days.” She laughs, and it’s easy, unguarded, nothing performed about it. “I didn’t even miss the phone. Is that terrible?”
“Sounds like the opposite of terrible.”
The food comes, and we eat, and she talks—about the cabin, about a bear that wandered close enough to the porch that Jenson made her go inside while he stood there like he was going to fight it bare-handed, about how Ruth already has opinions about where the crib should go when the house gets finished.
I let her talk. I ask the right questions in the right places, the kind that keep a conversation moving without steering it anywhere specific.
But underneath all of it, I’m working. Old habit.
“Sounds like you’re settling in,” I say between bites. “Being part of that whole world.”
“I love it there.” She says it simply, no hesitation, no shadow crossing her face. “It’s the first time since I was little that I’ve felt like I actually belonged somewhere. Everyone looks out for each other.”
“Even with everything that comes with it?” I keep my voice light, curious instead of pointed. “The runs, the business. That doesn’t ever worry you?”
She tilts her head, puzzled. “Jenson doesn’t bring that stuff near me. I know they do things, business things, but it’s not—” She waves a hand, searching for the word. “It’s not scary to me. It’s just what keeps everyone fed and housed and safe. Does that make sense?”
It doesn’t, not to the part of me that’s spent a year filing reports on that same business, but I nod anyway, because she seems to mean it. She’s not hiding anything from me. She just genuinely doesn’t see it the way I do.
She means it. That worries me more than an excuse would.
We finish eating, and when the check comes, I reach for it on reflex, and Sasha’s hand gets there first, sliding a card across before I’ve even got my wallet open.
“I’ve got it,” she says.
“You don’t have to—”
“I invited you.” She says it like that settles the matter entirely, chin lifted, and for a second I see something of Jenson in the set of her jaw, some borrowed stubbornness she’s picked up living under his roof. “Next time you can get it. Deal?”
“Deal,” I say, because she’s already handed over the card.
She pulls out her phone once the waitress takes the card away, thumb moving fast over the screen, and lifts it to her ear.
I don’t hear whatever’s said on the other end—just the low murmur of a voice, and Sasha’s answering smile, soft and private in a way that makes me look somewhere else while she talks.
It only lasts a few seconds before she hangs up, setting the phone face-down on the table.
“My ride’s coming,” she says.
“You don’t drive?”
She shakes her head, and her expression tightens before she smooths it back into something easier.
“I never learned. My dad always said we’d get to it eventually, and then—” A small shrug, her fingers finding the condensation on her tea glass and tracing through it.
“I always thought my mom died in a car accident. Growing up, I mean. That’s what I believed for a long time. ”
She doesn’t finish the thought, and I don’t push her to.
“Makes sense,” I say instead. “Cars aren’t for everybody.”
She smiles, grateful for the exit, and we sit a few more minutes in easy quiet until a truck rolls up along the curb across the street, engine idling low.
I glance over on instinct, expecting one of the younger ones—a prospect, probably, sent to fetch the President’s wife because that’s exactly the kind of errand that falls to whoever’s still earning their patch.
I remember enough from watching Evan when he started out, the way he used to get sent on every small, thankless task the club could invent, proving himself one gas station run at a time.
But it isn’t a prospect who climbs out.
It’s Diesel.
He crosses the street with that same unhurried walk I remember from the wedding, cut on, sunglasses pushed up into his hair, and he barely spares Sasha a glance as he reaches the table.
His eyes go straight to me and stay there, dark and steady, boring in like he’s been waiting the whole drive over just to look at me like this.
My heart slams once, hard, then settles into something worse—a fast, uneven rhythm I hope doesn’t show.
There’s something in that stare I don’t have a name for. Something hungry. Something that makes the hair on my arms lift even in the warm afternoon sun.
And I can’t lie to myself about it anymore, not sitting here with my pulse doing this, not after two weeks of catching myself thinking about him at the worst possible moments—brushing my teeth, running radar on Route 9, lying awake at two in the morning staring at my ceiling.
He’s been on my mind since the wedding.
Every single day since.