Whatever It Costs
Nora
Fuse catches me by the porch steps leading into Bishop and Lila’s house before I can make it three feet. "I've got to disappear for a few minutes."
I look past him toward the yard where Rose and Emma are racing across the grass with matching paper crowns already slipping sideways. "Everything okay?"
"Yeah." His mouth tightens just enough that I know it's club business. "Crew wants one last drive around the perimeter. Make sure nobody's gotten curious about all the bikes parked out here."
"You can't do it later?"
"I'm trying to make sure there is a later."
The answer steals any argument I might've had.
He brushes a strand of hair behind my ear before leaning down to kiss me, quick and familiar. "Ten minutes. Maybe fifteen if I get stuck behind a tractor."
I smile. "I'll save you cake."
"Better save me the corner piece."
"I thought you weren't a frosting guy."
"I'm whatever kind of guy gets me an extra piece of cake."
I laugh, and some of the tension leaves his shoulders.
He looks past me to where Rose is climbing into the bouncy house. "Stay where the people are.”
She gives him a dramatic thumbs-up without slowing down.
"Eyes on Emma," he adds.
Another thumbs-up.
He shakes his head, smiling to himself. "Ten minutes," he says again, quieter this time as his eyes meet mine.
"I'll be here."
He squeezes my hand once before heading for his bike.
The engine rumbles to life, and I watch him disappear down the long drive, telling myself he'll be back before the candles are lit.
I haven't felt joy like this in years. Real joy, uncomplicated, the kind that doesn't come with an asterisk attached.
The yard's full of noise. Twelve kids shrieking on the bouncy house, Crew at the grill arguing with Holt about lighter fluid, Sunshine cutting cake into pieces twice the size anyone actually needs. Rose and Emma are somewhere in the middle of it, inseparable since the moment they arrived.
I let myself stand here a minute, soaking in an afternoon that feels stolen from someone else's life. Someone luckier. Someone who didn't bury a husband and rebuild from nothing and spend three years convinced this kind of ordinary happiness wasn't going to be hers again.
A thought slips in underneath the joy, uninvited, the kind I've learned not to ignore. Three years I sat on that same park bench, alone, wide open, and Lucas never came. Never a letter, never a face at the edge of a parking lot.
Rose’s uncle only found us after I stopped being alone. All that time I blamed myself for handing him a map—but he was never following my routines. He was following my happiness.
I shiver once in the warm sun and shake it off. Not today. Today the war stays outside the gate.
The nausea hits without warning, the way it has the last few mornings, except now it's afternoon and there's no warning at all. I press a hand to my stomach, breathe through it, decide I need five minutes inside with a glass of water before it gets worse in front of everyone.
"I'll be right back," I tell Lila, who's closest. "Need a minute."
She waves me off without really looking, deep in conversation with Iris. I slip inside, find the kitchen, run the tap until the water's cold enough to settle my stomach.
Five minutes. Maybe six.
When I step back outside, it's wrong before I can even name what.
The music's still playing, too cheerful against whatever's shifted. Fewer voices than there should be. A dropped paper plate on the grass, nobody stooping to pick it up. Somebody calling a name too many times in a row, pitch climbing higher with every repeat.
"Rose?" Bishop, calling out across the lawn. "Rose, Emma, where are you?"
My whole body goes cold before my brain catches up to why.
I'm moving before I decide to move, pushing through the cluster of adults gathering near the treeline at the edge of Bishop and Lila’s yard, scanning every face for my daughter's and not finding her in any of them.
"Rose!"
Nothing.
Then Emma comes stumbling out of the trees alone, no Rose beside her, face white, breath coming in broken gasps that aren't quite words yet.
Lila reaches her first, drops to her knees, hands on her daughter's shoulders.
"Em, baby, where's Rose? What happened?"
“The bad men." The words come out in pieces, choked between sobs. "Bad men took Rose. One grabbed her and she screamed and I bit him and I ran, I ran so fast, I tried to—"
"Where? Which way?"
"Just like they did to me." Emma's whole body is shaking now, the sentence tearing out of her like it's been waiting years to surface. "Just like before. You’ve got to find Rose, Mama!"
Nobody asks her what she means. Nobody has time, and some instinct in every adult in this yard understands that whatever she's referencing isn't worth chasing down right now, not with Rose still gone, not with seconds mattering more than answers.
But Lila's face changes anyway, something old and terrible crossing it for half a second before she locks it back down to be steady for her daughter. Whatever happened to Emma once, this club already fought that war.
I don't know the shape of it. I know they won it, and I know it cost them, and right now that's the only thing about it that matters.
I don't remember deciding to run. One second I'm standing frozen and the next I'm sprinting for the treeline, screaming my daughter's name loud enough to leave it raw, and it's only Ash's arms locking around me that stop me from disappearing into the woods after her.
"Let me go! That's my daughter, let me GO—"
"Nora. Nora, look at me." Ash stays steady even as I claw at his grip. "You go in there blind, you're no help to her. You're a target. Stay here. Let us work."
"I can't just stand here while—"
"You're not standing here. You're getting Crew on the phone with every brother we've got, and you're staying alive for that kid when we bring her back. That's the job right now. That's the only job."
I hear Fuse before I see him, his bike tearing up the driveway at a speed that should be illegal on a residential street, skidding to a stop hard enough to nearly take out Bishop's mailbox.
He's off the bike and running before the engine even fully dies. "What happened? Where's Rose?"
"Taken." Bishop, grim, already moving toward his own bike. "Treeline, maybe ten minutes ago. Emma saw a man grab her."
Fuse's whole face goes through a string of expressions I've never seen on him, rage and terror and a kind of focus so absolute it's almost frightening to witness. "Lucas."
"Has to be."
"Then we move. Now."
The yard that was full of balloons and birthday cake an hour ago turns into something else entirely in the space of thirty seconds—brothers grabbing keys, Iris already on her laptop pulling location data, Holt shouting coordinates,
Crew barking orders with the kind of calm that only comes from a man who's done this before and hates that he has to do it again.
Fuse grabs my face in both hands, forces me to look at him through the panic clawing its way up. "I'm bringing her back."
"Fuse—"
"I'm bringing her back, Nora. Whatever it costs. You hear me?"
I nod because I can't make words work right now, and he kisses my forehead once, hard, before he's gone, swinging back onto his bike and tearing out of the driveway with Crew and Bishop and Holt falling in behind him like a single moving weapon.
I stand in a stranger's front yard, surrounded by abandoned party decorations and the wreckage of an afternoon that was supposed to be safe. A paper crown lies crushed in the grass by the porch steps, and I can't make myself look away from it.
I've never prayed for anything in my life the way I pray right now, standing barefoot in someone else's yard, bargaining with a god I stopped talking to the day they buried Butch. Bring her back. I'll trade anything still mine to trade. Just bring her back whole.