Chapter 6 #2
Python asking something sharp.
A long stretch of quiet that I imagine is Doom standing in front of the table the way he stands everywhere—still, contained, his face giving nothing away while everything behind it burns.
I sit on the couch, press my palms together between my knees, and stare at the mural without seeing it.
I did the right thing.
I keep saying it. Inside my head, over and over, like if I repeat it enough times, the sick feeling in my stomach will believe it.
Mei comes in after a while.
She doesn't ask what's wrong.
She just sits beside me, close enough that our shoulders touch, quiet in the way Mei is quiet—not because she doesn't have words but because she knows sometimes presence matters more.
She's good at that. Better than most people who've never had their voice taken from them.
Ruby comes through at some point.
Sets two mugs of coffee on the table in front of us without comment, squeezes my shoulder once with a warm, rough hand, and goes back to the kitchen.
Ruby always knows.
She doesn't need to be told.
She reads a room the way Doom reads a building—every detail, every shift, nothing missed.
The church session goes on for a long time.
Long enough that the light through the common room windows shifts from afternoon gold to the deep orange of late day.
Long enough that my coffee goes cold and Mei refills it and I don't drink the second cup either.
I think about Doom in that room.
Facing questions from men he's bled beside.
Men who trusted him yesterday and are looking at him differently today because of what I told their president.
I think about his face, the way it looked when his father dropped the name of his sister like a grenade, and I dig my fingernails into my palms hard enough to leave crescents.
When the church door finally opens, the sound cuts through me like a blade.
Boots in the hallway. Multiple sets.
I stand up from the couch.
Python comes out first.
His face is set, jaw rigid. Zorro follows, then Razor and Axel.
They move past the common room without looking in my direction.
Boulder is the last of the patched members, and he pauses for half a second at the doorway—his eyes find me, and there's something complicated in them before he turns and keeps walking.
Then Doom.
He's walking between Rooster and Compass, and at first I think he's being escorted until I see that his hands are empty.
They took his weapon.
The Sig that lives on his hip is gone. His prospect cut—the one he's worn every day I've known him, the one he earned and worked for and bled in—is missing from his shoulders.
He's just a man in a black t-shirt walking down a hallway, stripped of everything that tells the world who he is.
He looks up.
Our eyes meet across the common room.
Fifteen feet of open space between us.
He sees my face and he knows.
I can see it—his eyes move over me, reading the guilt written across every feature.
The red eyes. The hands I'm pressing together so hard my knuckles ache. The way I'm standing like I'm bracing for impact.
He knows I'm the one who went to Amara.
I wait for the anger.
I wait for his expression to harden, for his eyes to go flat the way they go when he shuts someone out.
I wait for him to look at me like I'm the enemy, like I'm someone who took a knife and slid it between his ribs while he wasn't looking.
It doesn't come.
What crosses his face instead is something I'm not prepared for, and it nearly takes my legs out from under me.
Pain. Raw, open, unguarded pain.
And underneath it, steady and quiet—a nod. Small. Almost invisible. Just for me.
Not anger. Understanding.
Like he knows exactly why I did it.
Like he would've done the same goddamn thing.
Like the fact that I chose the club over him is the reason he's looking at me the way he is right now, with something in his eyes that I'm terrified to name.
Then Rooster's hand is on his shoulder, guiding him down the hallway toward his room.
He turns away. He's gone.
I sit back down on the couch.
Mei doesn't say anything. She puts her hand on my knee and leaves it there.
I stare at the wall and replay that nod over and over.
That tiny motion meant for nobody but me.
He didn't hate me. He didn't look at me like a traitor.
He looked at me like I was brave, and that is so much worse than hatred, because hatred I could survive.
If he'd been angry, I could've told myself he wasn't the man I thought he was.
I could've walked away clean, buried it, moved on.
But he wasn't angry. He understood. And understanding from the man I just destroyed is the cruelest thing I've ever gone through.
I sit on this couch in a clubhouse in Chihuahua with Mei's hand on my knee, and I cry so quietly that nobody hears it.
Mei doesn't ask questions.
She just holds my hand while the sun goes down outside the windows and the compound settles into the particular silence that follows a church session that changes everything.
Somewhere down the hall, behind a closed door, the man I love is sitting alone because of me, and he forgave me for it before I even asked.