Chapter 4
CHAPTER FOUR
Nova
The days after the rescue have a different feel to them.
The compound is lighter somehow.
Not quieter—it's never quiet around here, not with Xiomara's chalk art empire spreading across the courtyard and Compass dropping wrenches in the garage at all hours—but the weight that's been pressing down on everyone since Mateo was taken has lifted just enough that people are breathing again.
Imani hasn't left her father's side.
Brick set up a recovery room on the ground floor, away from the noise, with an IV drip and monitoring equipment he sourced from a medical supply contact in the city.
Mateo's conscious now, more or less—he drifts in and out, and when he's awake his words come slowly, muddy from months of sedation, but he knows where he is.
He knows Imani's there, and I think that might be enough for him. He’s no longer in that god awful place.
I've been helping Brick with the medical side when I can.
My clinical rotation doesn't cover cartel-level detox, but the fundamentals are the same—vitals, fluid balance, watching for seizure activity as the midazolam works its way out of his system.
Brick lets me take some of the night shifts so he can actually sleep next to Imani for a few hours instead of in the chair beside Mateo's bed.
It gives me a reason to be at the clubhouse more often. That's what I tell myself, anyway.
The truth is the reason I'm at the clubhouse has curly hair under a red bandana, makes pancakes at six in the morning, and looks at me across the Sunday dinner table like I'm the only person in the room.
Sunday dinner is the heartbeat of this place.
Ruby starts cooking around noon.
By four, the kitchen smells like birria and cilantro rice and the warm corn scent of fresh tortillas that she refuses to buy from a store.
The courtyard table gets dragged out and extended with a folding table from the garage, and somebody—usually Compass—strings lights between the garage wall and the rooftop overhang, so the whole space glows amber by the time the sun drops.
Everyone comes. Amara and Dante.
Python and Astra, with Lyra on Astra's hip.
Python has leftover pastries from CatsAndJava that the kids demolish before anyone else gets a shot.
Axel and Rosa with Rex running laps around the courtyard table.
Boulder and Oakleigh with Xiomara and Itzel.
Brick and Imani, who's been coaxing her father into sipping bone broth and reports every swallow with the fierce pride of a woman who's getting her family back one spoonful at a time.
Lashes sits at the end of the table, the spot she always claims, where she can see the gate and the kitchen door without turning her head.
She's got a plate of rice and shredded chicken and she's eating slowly, carefully, the way she does everything now.
I sit next to her.
It’s our thing at this point.
She doesn't ask me to and I don't announce it. I just sit down and we exist beside each other while the noise of the club swirls around us.
Mei's here too, tucked between me and Lashes at the end of the table, quiet but present.
She's been coming to Sunday dinners for the past few weeks, staying a little longer each time.
Tonight she's on her second plate of Ruby's rice, which is more than she ate her first Sunday here when she sat for twenty minutes and left without touching anything
Doom is across the table, wedged between Rooster and Compass, his plate piled high because Ruby refuses to let any man under the roof eat less than what she considers a real meal.
He's not talking—he almost never talks at group events—but he's present in a way I've learned to read. His shoulders are lower than usual.
His jaw isn't locked.
He almost laughed at something Compass said a minute ago, and the effort it took him not to was visible from six feet away.
Every few minutes, his eyes find mine across the table.
It's never long. A second, maybe two, but it's deliberate.
He's not scanning the room the way he usually does, clocking exits and weapons.
He's looking at me. And I look back. Every damn time.
We're not official. We're not anything, technically.
We've slept together once, in his narrow bed here at the clubhouse, and we haven't talked about it since.
No labels, no conversation about what this is.
Just his eyes across the dinner table and the memory of his hands on my skin, with a tension that hasn't loosened since that afternoon in the kitchen.
But he saved me a seat at this table. Moved Compass down without being asked. And when I sat down, he set a bottle of Topo Chico in front of me because he's noticed I don't drink beer.
That's Doom's version of a love letter.
* * *
I find Lashes in the main room after dinner, curled into her usual corner of the couch, right by Oakleigh’s mural.
The compound has gone quiet. Most of the couples have retreated to their houses or rooms.
Compass is on gate duty. Ruby left a mountain of leftovers in the fridge with handwritten labels in Spanish.
"Hey." I sit down beside her and tuck my legs under me. "You barely ate tonight."
"Wasn't hungry." She's got her hand on her belly, rubbing slow circles over the swell. She does this when she's anxious.
A self-soothing thing, I think, though I'm not sure she realizes she's doing it.
"Nausea?" I ask. "When did you eat last before dinner?"
"I had crackers around lunch. It's not the nausea." She pauses, staring at the far wall. "My back's been killing me and I couldn't get comfortable in that chair. And the noise..."
She trails off.
"Too many people?" I lean back into the couch cushion, keeping my voice easy.
She nods. The admission costs her something—I can see it in the way her mouth tightens. Lashes hates admitting that normal things are hard now.
She spent months in captivity having her autonomy stripped away, and admitting that a dinner table full of friendly people makes her want to crawl out of her skin feels, to her, like letting the people who did this win.
"That's not weakness," I tell her. "That's your nervous system doing exactly what it's supposed to after what you went through.
It's called hypervigilance, and it's your brain trying to keep you safe.
The fact that you came to dinner at all, that you sat there for two hours with all that noise—that's the win, Lashes. Not whether you cleaned your plate."
She's quiet for a while. Her thumb traces the curve of her belly.
"I had a dream about her last night," she says. "The baby."
"Yeah?"
"She was small. Really small. And she was crying, and I picked her up and she stopped." Lashes looks down at her stomach. "She stopped crying the second I held her. Like she knew me."
My throat tightens. "She will know you. She already does. She hears your voice, your heartbeat. You're her whole world right now."
"What if I'm not enough?" The question comes out raw, and she doesn't look up from her belly. "What if I look at her and love her and still can't stop thinking about how she got here? What if I hold her and my hands shake because the last time someone held me down—"
She stops herself. Her breathing goes uneven and she presses her fingers into the couch cushion hard enough that her knuckles go pale.
I don't touch her. I wait.
"I want to be her mom," Lashes says after a long time. "I want it so badly it scares me. But I don't know how to be someone's safe place when I don't even feel safe in my own body yet."
"You don't have to have it figured out before she gets here," I tell her.
"You just have to show up. That's what my mom always said—the bar for being a good parent isn't perfection.
It's presence. You wake up, you hold her, you try.
And on the days you can't do it alone, you let the people around you help. "
"I don't know how to let people help." She picks at a thread on the blanket across her lap.
"You're letting me sit here right now," I point out gently. "That counts, don’t you think?"
She exhales. A shaky, uneven sound, but some of the tension leaves her shoulders.
"Hope," she says quietly.
"What?"
"Her name. I think I want to name her Hope." She almost smiles. "Cheesy, right?"
"Not even a little bit." I cover her hand with mine on her belly. "That's perfect."
Lashes ends up telling me she’s tired and heads to her room, so I head around the clubhouse and look for Doom.
I end up finding him on the rooftop.
He's sitting in one of the beat-up lawn chairs with his boots propped on the milk crate, staring out at the city lights beyond the compound wall.
The sky is purple-black and clear, stars thick enough to make your neck hurt looking at them.
The air has cooled enough that I can smell the desert—sage and dust and the clean, dry scent that stretches for miles in every direction.
"Hey," I say, climbing the last rung of the ladder.
He turns his head, watches me walk across the rooftop toward him.
He doesn't say anything, but his eyes track me differently than they track everything else—slower, heavier.
I don't sit in the other chair. I sit on the arm of his, close enough that my thigh presses against his shoulder.
He doesn't move away. His hand comes up and rests on my knee, casual, like he's done it a hundred times. He hasn't.
"Lashes is going to name the baby Hope," I tell him.
He nods once. "Good name."
We sit in the quiet for a while.
The clubhouse is calm below us—a few lights in the kitchen, the glow from Brick and Imani's room, the faint sound of Compass' radio from the gate.
"You're good with her," Doom says. His voice is low, gravelly, half-lost in the night air.
"With Lashes?"
"Yeah. She talks to you." He rubs his thumb across my kneecap. "Doesn't talk to many people."
"She just needs someone who isn't going to rush her." I lean into him slightly. "Same as someone else I know."
He exhales through his nose. Almost a laugh. "I don't need rushing," he says.
"No. You need someone to sit still long enough for you to decide she's not going anywhere." I bump my shoulder against the side of his head.