Chapter 7
CHAPTER SEVEN
Doom
The room is ten by twelve.
I know because I've paced it.
Wall to wall, corner to corner, the distance between the bed and the door, and even the small window that faces the courtyard.
Ten by twelve.
A bed and a chair and a dresser with my clothes still folded in the drawers.
A bathroom no bigger than a closet.
Everything I own is still here except the two things that matter.
My cut is gone. So is my Sig.
They took both during church.
The cut off my shoulders, the Sig from my hip, while Amara asked questions and Python watched me with the flat, professional gaze of an Enforcer doing his job.
I don't blame Python. I'd look at myself the same way if the situation were reversed.
The chair by the window is empty. My cut used to hang on the back of it when I slept.
The leather was just starting to break in the way I wanted it to. The patches were clean.
I kept them clean. I polished the hardware every Sunday morning before breakfast because that cut was the only thing I'd ever earned that meant something. Now it's in a room I'm not allowed to enter, being held as evidence in a case against me.
They're being fair. I can acknowledge that even while this room closes in tighter with each passing day. Amara isn't punishing me. She's investigating.
There's an order here, and I respect it, even though the result feels the same.
I can't leave this room without an escort. Kitchen for meals, and back. That's my circuit.
Rooster walks me down the hall, and the worst part is he won't look at me while he does it.
Rooster, who sat on a rooftop with me planning the Diego rescue. Who covered our exit in Juárez. Who helped carry Mateo through a dry riverbed in the dark.
He walks two steps ahead and keeps his eyes forward.
The other brothers aren't much better.
Compass stops by to drop off a plate Ruby made.
He lingers in the doorway like he wants to say something but doesn't know what, and eventually he just nods and pulls the door shut.
Boulder passes me in the hallway on the way down to get more food, and his jaw works like he's chewing on words he can't get out. He settles for a clap on my shoulder that's too hard to be casual and too brief to be comforting.
Razor doesn't acknowledge me at all.
That stings in its own way because Razor has always been straight with me—direct, no bullshit, a VP who tells you exactly where you stand. His silence says everything a conversation would.
I sit on the edge of my bed and look at my hands.
These hands made pancakes a few days ago. Held Nova's waist on the rooftop. Carried a plate to Lashes without being asked.
These same hands killed eleven men in one night a decade ago, and somewhere in Montana, the club is pulling records to find out if the man attached to them is a threat.
* * *
The days begin to blur.
I don't have my phone—they took that too, checking messages, call logs, anything that might connect me to Kodiak. The window tells me the time based on where the light hits the far wall.
Morning is the left side. Midday is the center. By late afternoon, the light disappears and the room goes gray. I lie on the bed, stare at the ceiling, and wait for tomorrow to start the cycle again.
I think about my mother.
Carmen Cardenas, who worked doubles at the hospital in Henderson and came home smelling like antiseptic and exhaustion.
A woman who raised me alone in a two-bedroom apartment in the Vegas suburbs with her family nearby but no man in the house, because the man who was supposed to be there decided he had better things to do.
She never talked about Curtis. Not with anger, not with sadness. She just didn't mention him, like he was a door she'd closed and locked and eventually forgotten about.
When I asked about my father as a kid—and I asked, every kid asks—she'd say, "He made his choices, mijo. We make ours."
She worked and she cooked. She braided my sister's hair on Sunday mornings while telenovelas played on the TV and the apartment smelled like café con leche and the plátanos she fried in a cast iron pan she'd brought from Colombia when she was nineteen.
She never let me see her cry about it. Not once.
Whatever Curtis took from her when he left, she rebuilt around the empty space and filled it with two kids she loved with the quiet, relentless devotion of a woman who refuses to let absence win.
I wonder if she knows he found me. I wonder if she'd be surprised.
I don't think she would.
I think about my sister, Wren.
That's what eats at me in the dark, in the hours between the light leaving the window and sleep finally pulling me under.
Wren talks to him.
I've turned it over so many times the words don't feel real anymore, but they still cut.
My sister, who chose a new name and a new city specifically to escape everything connected to what happened to her, has let Curtis into that life.
She has coffee with him. She answers when he calls. She sits across from the man who shares our blood and talks to him, and she won't even say my name.
I try to understand it. Lying on this bed in the dark, I try.
Maybe it makes sense from where she's standing. I'm the one who was there.
I'm the one she saw in the doorway with blood on my hands, the one whose face is permanently fused with the worst moments of her life.
Curtis wasn't there. Curtis is clean, at least in her eyes. He's just a man who shows up and buys her coffee and pretends to be a father without any of the baggage that comes with being the brother who killed to save her.
She doesn't have to look at Curtis and remember the chain bolted to the wall.
She doesn't have to look at him and smell copper and gunpowder and see the hallway in Pahrump.
Maybe that’s all she can handle right now.
That doesn't make it hurt less. But lying here with nothing to do but think, I can almost understand the logic of it. Almost.
And underneath the hurt is the fear.
Because Curtis didn't find Wren out of love.
He found her because she's useful.
She's a lever, and she doesn't know it, and I'm locked in a room in Chihuahua with no phone and no way to warn her.
* * *
It’s been four days and Brick finally shows up.
He knocks twice—his pattern, same as it's been since Montana—and lets himself in.
He's carrying two bottles of water and a paper bag from a taquería I don't recognize.
"Ruby's is better," he says, setting the bag on my dresser. "But I figured you were tired of the same plates."
"Thanks." I take one of the water bottles and crack the cap.
He sits in the chair by the window. I stay on the bed. The room feels smaller with two people in it.
We sit in the quiet for a minute.
Brick doesn't rush conversation, and right now, I don't have much to give.
"Zane got back to Amara yesterday," he says finally, rolling the water bottle between his palms. "They confirmed your prospecting history. Clean. No flags, no contacts with Kodiak during your time up there. Four patched members vouched for you."
I nod. I don't ask who. It honestly doesn't matter right now.
"Amara's being thorough," Brick continues. "She's running your communications, your financials. She's not going to find anything because there's nothing to find, but she has to do it." He leans back in the chair. "You know that."
"I know," I say, picking at the label on the water bottle.
He watches me for a beat. "You okay?" he asks, though the question sounds like he already knows the answer.
"I'm in a locked room without my cut." I take a drink of water. "How okay do you think I am?"
It's not a question, and he doesn't treat it like one. He just nods.
"Diego," he says, shifting gears. "Alejandro's men came for him two days ago. He's being held at one of Alejandro's properties outside the city. I don't know the details, and I don't think Amara wants us to."
"Alejandro handling it himself?" I ask, setting the bottle on the nightstand.
"Looks like it." Brick's expression is neutral in the way it gets when he's deliberately keeping his thoughts to himself. "Mateo is Alejandro's compadre. Diego betrayed the Torres organization. That's cartel business, not club business. Amara handed him over."
I don’t think too much about it, other than the fact that Diego's off the compound.
One less thing to think about in a room that gives me nothing but time.
"How's Imani?" I ask.
"Better. Her dad's eating soft food now. Talking more." Brick pauses, scrubbing a hand over his jaw. "She asks about you. Told me to tell you she knows you're not what they're saying."
My hand tightens on the edge of the mattress. I don't have a response for that.
Imani, who has every reason to be focused on her own father's recovery, is thinking about me. Vouching for me.
"And Lashes?" I ask after a moment.
"Doing her thing. She's tough." He hesitates, and I know what's coming before he says it. I can read it in the way he shifts his weight, the way his eyes drop to the bottle in his hands.
"Nova left yesterday," he says. Straight. No cushion. "She went to Vegas. Staying with Kat and Damon."
The room goes very quiet.
"She tell you why?" I ask. My voice is steady. The rest of me isn't.
"She didn't have to." Brick meets my eyes. "She's hurting, Doom. She did what she thought was right and it's tearing her apart. She couldn't be here, in this city, or even the damn clubhouse, knowing you were on the other side of that wall."
I set my elbows on my knees and stare at the floor. The concrete is cracked in a line that runs from the bed to the door.
I've memorized that crack over the past four days. Every ridge, every split. I know it the way I know the compound layout, the way I know useless things when the useful ones are out of reach.
Nova's in Vegas because of me.
Not because I lied to her. I never lied. But I kept things back.
I kept my odd familiarity with the Kodiak MC back, kept my father back, kept it all behind my silence where she couldn't reach it.