Chapter 2 #2
I did not know. Not until I watched Diesel, mid-sentence, mid-laugh, catch sight of me over Ivy's shoulder, and go so pale I thought for one absurd second he might actually be the one who fainted.
The glass in his hand hit the floor and didn't break, just rolled, and the sound of it rolling was the loudest thing in the room because every other sound had simply stopped.
"That's not—" Sable's voice, small, disbelieving, from somewhere near the pool table.
"Cormac," Gemma breathed, one hand flying to her mouth.
And then Knox.
I want to describe this carefully, because it's not mine to make dramatic for its own sake — Knox doesn't get performed at, he gets told the truth, and the truth is that I watched the President of the Iron Thorn MC, a man I'd seen absorb bullet wounds and betrayals and the death of his own father without his face so much as flickering, come apart in real time in front of forty witnesses.
He stood so fast his chair went over backward and hit the floor with a crack that nobody flinched at, because nobody was looking at the chair.
He crossed the room in maybe four strides, and I braced — genuinely, physically braced — for a fist, because I'd have understood it, I'd have taken it and thanked him for it, because he'd spent two years believing he sent a brother to his death.
He didn't hit me.
He grabbed my face in both hands, hard, thumbs pressing into my cheekbones like he was checking I was solid, checking I wasn't some grief-built hallucination the whole room was sharing, and he said my name like a question and an accusation and a prayer all at once, and then he pulled me into him so hard it knocked the air out of both of us, and I heard, close to my ear, a sound come out of Knox Calloway that I'd never heard before in a decade of knowing him.
Broken. Wrecked. A sound with no President in it at all, just a man who'd spent two years believing he killed his brother, finding out he hadn't.
"I sent you," he said, voice destroyed. "I sent you on that job. I signed off on it. Every day for two years I—"
"You didn't kill me," I said, gripping the back of his cut hard enough to hurt both of us. "You hear me? You didn't do this. I'm standing right here. Whatever guilt you've been carrying, put it down. It's over. I'm home."
The room broke open after that — not orderly, not one at a time, just everyone at once, Diesel crushing me into a hug that nearly cracked a rib, Nadia crying into Sable's shoulder, Ruth already praying out loud without seeming to notice she was doing it, Beckett gripping my forearm and just shaking his head over and over like his brain had hit a wall it couldn't get past, Gemma sobbing, Priya asking someone, anyone, if this was actually happening or if she'd fallen asleep at the bar.
Priya got to me eventually, once the first wave broke, small and fierce and near hysterical, gripping my forearm with both hands like she needed the physical proof before she'd let herself believe her own eyes.
"Wilder's going to lose his mind," she said, half-laughing, half-sobbing.
"He's on a supply run in Millbrook, he's going to walk in here in twenty minutes to absolutely nothing having prepared him for this. "
"Somebody should call him," I said.
"Nobody's calling him," Diesel said, wiping his own eyes with the back of his hand, entirely unashamed of it. "This is happening in person or not at all. I want to see his face."
Marisol appeared at my other side, quieter than the rest, studying me with the careful, assessing look I remembered from a decade of knowing her — the look that meant she was already three steps ahead, already calculating what this meant, what came next, what needed doing.
"You're hurt," she said, not a question, nodding at the way I was favoring my left side without realizing I'd been doing it.
"Old damage. Mostly healed."
"Mostly isn't fully. You're seeing Doc Palmer tomorrow, first thing, no arguments.
" It wasn't a request. I recognized the tone — the same tone Beckett used when he'd made a decision and expected the world to simply fall in line behind it, and something in me, some old fondness, surfaced at hearing it aimed at me instead of at some unlucky prospect.
"Yes, ma'am," I said, and she almost smiled, which from Marisol was practically a parade.
Ruth found me next, having finished whatever murmured prayer she'd been saying, and she took both my hands in hers, her eyes wet and steady.
"I don't believe in coincidence," she said, quiet, just for me.
"I believe the Lord doesn't waste a resurrection.
Whatever you do with this life you got handed back, Cormac Vale, you make it count. You hear me?"
"I hear you," I said, and meant it more than she probably knew.
Joy and horror, braided together so tight I couldn't tell them apart, same as it had been with Josie in the doorway of her shop an hour before.
A room full of people who'd toasted my memory, who'd worn black for me, who'd built a version of their lives with a Cormac-shaped hole in it, now trying to figure out how to fold the real, breathing, aching version of me back into that shape.
And through all of it — through Diesel's crushing hug, through Knox's shaking hands still gripping my shoulders like he needed the physical confirmation, through Ruth's murmured prayers and Beckett's stunned repetition of my name — I found Josie.
She stood at the edge of the room, near the door, apart from the reunion in a way that made something in my chest twist. No ring on her hand.
I'd noticed it in the doorway of the bakery and made myself not react, and I couldn't not-react now, watching her watch the room absorb me back into a family she'd already grieved out of, a stranger's coffee date still sitting on her calendar for Friday.
She wasn't crying anymore. She was just watching, arms wrapped around herself, and I understood, with a clarity that hit harder than anything Knox's men had ever thrown at me in two years of captivity, that the hardest part of coming home wasn't going to be convincing my brothers I was alive.
It was going to be earning back a wife who had already, carefully, at great cost, learned how to live without me.
"Cormac." Knox's voice, close, steadying.
He'd pulled back enough to look at me properly, hands still on my shoulders, his eyes wet and furious and relieved all at once.
"Tell me everything. Tell me who did this to you.
Because whoever it was, I promise you, the club is about to become the last problem they ever have. "
"Later," I said, my eyes still on Josie across the room. "Tonight, I just need to figure out how to come home to the people I actually broke."
Knox followed my gaze, saw where it landed, and something in his face gentled, understanding arriving quiet and complete.
"That's going to take longer than one night, brother," he said.
"I know," I said. "I've got the rest of my life. I intend to use every day of it."
Wilder walked in eleven minutes later, exactly as promised, arms full of supply boxes he'd picked up in Millbrook, and stopped dead in the doorway at the sight of me, the boxes sliding out of his grip and hitting the floor with a crash nobody bothered flinching at, because by then the whole room had already used up its capacity for shock and simply watched, half-laughing, as Wilder crossed the room in a daze and grabbed me by both shoulders like he needed to shake the truth loose from wherever it was hiding.
"You're supposed to be dead," he said, flatly, like he was filing a formal complaint.
"I got better," I said, and the room actually laughed at that, a real laugh, the first one that had cracked through since I walked in, and something in the tightness of the evening eased half a degree.
"That's not how death works, Cormac."
"Apparently it is, sometimes. Ask Ivy. She's got paperwork proving it."
Wilder pulled me into a hug that nearly cracked something in my back, and over his shoulder I found Josie again, still standing near the door, watching the chaos of my homecoming with an expression I couldn't fully read — grief and relief and something wearier underneath both, the specific exhaustion of a woman who'd already used up an entire lifetime's supply of shock in one single evening.
I extracted myself from Wilder as gently as I could and crossed the room to her, weaving through brothers who kept grabbing my arm as I passed, needing one more confirmation, one more handshake, one more disbelieving look at my face.
"You don't have to stay for all of this," I said, quiet, just for her. "I know this is a lot. If you need to go home, I'll understand."
"I'm not leaving," she said, steady, though her eyes were red-rimmed and exhausted.
"I buried you once without getting to say a proper goodbye to the version of you that actually mattered.
I'm not walking out on the version that came back, not tonight, not for anything.
I'm staying until this room runs out of shock to have. "
I looked at her — steady, exhausted, present, choosing to stay in a room full of chaos rather than retreat to somewhere easier — and understood, watching her, that whatever this next chapter of our life turned out to be, she was going to meet it the same way she'd met everything for the last two years.
Head-on, exhausted, and entirely on her own terms.
It gave me more hope than anything else that whole overwhelming night.