Chapter 11 #4
“You?” I asked. “Who’s that for you?”
Her jaw worked. She looked at her hands for a second.
“Liberty,” she said. “But not the way you and Miami are. Not… exactly.”
“Tell me,” I said.
She took a breath.
“I was nineteen when I met him,” she said. “The man I was with. Thought I was grown. Thought I was hard. Thought no one could tell me what to do.”
“That didn’t last,” I said gently.
“No,” she said. “It didn’t.”
Her eyes went distant, flicking somewhere way beyond the walls.
“He was older,” she said. “Good-looking in that way that makes you feel chosen when he looks at you. Charming. Said all the right things. ‘You’re not like other girls.’ ‘You’re tougher than they are.’ ‘You could run with me, not behind me.’”
“Classic,” I said.
“Yeah,” she said. “He loved that I had teeth. Loved that I’d fight. Until I fought him.”
Her fingers tightened in her lap.
“It didn’t start with fists,” she said. “It started with little cuts. ‘Don’t wear that, men will stare.’ ‘Don’t talk to her, she’s a bad influence.
’ ‘I worry when you go out alone; you know how dangerous it is.’ Controlling dressed up as concern.
By the time the first slap landed, I had nowhere left to go.
No friends he hadn’t chased off. No money he hadn’t already put his hands on. No family who wanted to hear from me.”
I felt something crawl cold under my skin.
“One night,” she said, “he got drunk. Drunker than usual. Came home from work angry about something I wasn’t even there for.
He wanted to go out, drink his anger away.
I obliged. But then he put his hands on me in public for the first time.
Not in a backroom. Not behind a door. Just there, in the middle of a bar.
Fingers around my throat. Pinned against a wall because some guy looked at me too long like it was my fault. ”
My hands curled into fists.
“And Liberty was there,” she said.
She looked at me, eyes hard now.
“She was tending the bar,” Valkyrie said. “Just another night in a place full of broken people. She saw him pin me. Saw my feet come off the floor. Put her bottle down. Walked all the way around the bar, slow, like she had all the time in the world.”
“What’d she do?” I asked.
“She put a hand on his shoulder and told him to put me down,” Valkyrie said.
“Voice like ice. He laughed. Told her to mind her own business. She said, ‘I am.’ He let go. Shoved me so hard I hit the table behind me. Glasses broke. He raised a hand to strike Liberty until she showed a knife. No one else stepped in.”
Her mouth twisted.
“Except for her,” she said. “She looked at me on the floor after he fled and said, ‘If you ever decide you’re done dying slowly, come find me.’ Then she wrote an address and a phone number on a napkin, handed it to me, and went back to work like nothing ever happened.”
“And you went,” I said.
“Not right away,” she said. “Took another couple of months. A couple more hits. A couple more apologies that sounded good in the moment and felt like poison after. Then one night he broke my wrist because I was ten minutes late coming back from the store. Not because I cheated. Not because I lied. But because the line at the register was long.”
Her voice stayed calm. Too calm.
“I looked at my hand hanging wrong,” she said, “and realized I was going to die in that apartment if I didn’t move. Maybe not that night. Maybe not that week. But eventually. Little pieces at a time.”
“So, you left,” I said.
“I waited until he passed out,” she said. “Taped my wrist with kitchen towels. Took the leashes off the hook so he couldn’t walk the dogs without noticing something was missing. Petty, I know. But I wanted him to be inconvenienced. Grabbed a bag I’d half-packed weeks earlier and walked out.”
“You go straight to the address?” I asked.
“I went to a payphone,” she said. “Called the number she’d written under it. Never told me who’d pick up. Never promised me anything. Liberty answered on the second ring. Like she’d been sitting there waiting.”
“What’d she say?” I asked.
“‘You finally done?’” Valkyrie said, voice softening with a ghost of a smile. “I said, ‘Yeah.’ She said, ‘Good. Tell me where. Taxi will be on the way. If you go back inside, I won’t send another.’ Twenty minutes later, a car pulled up. Driver knew my name. Knew hers. Knew where to take me.”
She looked up at the window.
“We pulled through that gate. Same groan. Same fences. Different paint. Liberty met me at the door. Looked at my wrist. Looked at my face. Didn’t say ‘I told you so.’ Didn’t say, ‘What took you so long?’ Just said, ‘Welcome to your new home. We’ll handle the rest from here.’”
My chest felt tight again, for different reasons.
“What happened to him?” I asked.
She shrugged one shoulder. “He came looking,” she said. “Of course he did. Men like that think we’re possessions, not people. Came to the gate once. Twice. Three times. Liberty talked to him the first time. Indigo and Medusa introduced him to the end of a bat the second.“
“And the third?” I asked.
She smiled. It was small and sharp.
“He hasn’t been back,” she said.
I didn’t need more details. Whatever they’d done, it put enough fear in him to make him stay gone. Or he wasn’t breathing anymore. Either way, problem solved.
“Since then,” she said, “this is it. This is my whole world. These walls. These women. This patch on my back. Liberty gave me my life back. I’m not letting anyone take it without losing something important in return.”
I looked at her. Really looked.
Past the tattoos and the sharp mouth and the swagger.
At the healed places. The scars you couldn’t see until someone turned the light just right.
“Your club before everything,” I said.
“Yeah,” she said. “And you?”
“Club before everything,” I said. “Then Miami. The rest of the world can burn.”
Her eyes searched my face. Something like understanding settled between us.
“And this ledger?” she asked. “Where does that fall?”
“It’s a bomb,” I said. “I’ll guard it. I’ll use it if I have to. But if it comes down to that book or my family, it burns.”
She nodded slowly. “Good,” she said. “We’re on the same page, then.”
We fell quiet.
Outside, the compound shifted in its sleep. A bike revved, then cut. Laughter floated up faintly from somewhere down the hall. A door slammed. Footsteps passed, then faded.
There was a knock a few minutes later. Short. Two taps, pause, one more.
“Come in,” Valkyrie called.
Indigo stuck her head in.
“Slow roller on the road,” she said. “Black sedan, tinted windows. Did a crawl past the fence, didn’t stop. No plates we could read. Arizona got photos. Medusa’s already pissed about it.”
Valkyrie’s jaw tightened. “They get a good look?”
“Maybe at the gate,” Indigo said. “Not inside. We kept the girls back. They didn’t linger long enough to be brave, just long enough to be noticed.”
“Rotate watch,” Valkyrie said. “I want eyes on that direction the rest of the night. If they come back, I want make, model, dents, stickers, anything. I don’t care if they’ve got a Hello Kitty air freshener on the front fucking mirror. I want it noted.”
Indigo smirked. “Copy that,” she said. Her gaze flicked to me. “Hope you sleep good, Devil. Might be your fan club looking for you.”
“Tell them to send flowers next time,” I said.
She snorted and closed the door.
Valkyrie leaned back on her hands, staring at the ceiling for a second like she could see through it.
“They don’t know which building we’re in yet,” I said. “Just that whatever they want is somewhere in this compound.”
“Let them circle,” she said. “Sooner or later, they’ll get close enough to lose a hand.”
We let the quiet come back.
She shifted further up onto the bed, pulled her legs cross-legged, boots off now. I slid down onto the mattress, lying on my back. The air mattress whined under the movement, cheap and loud. It would kill my back in the morning.
It didn’t bother me as much as it should’ve.
The light stayed on low. Shadows softened.
At some point, her shoulders sank an inch. The lines at the corners of her eyes eased. She’d been awake through the night before, watching me sleep with that bag at my side. Then all day on her feet, running this place, absorbing every threat like another scar.
Her body hit its limit before her pride did.
Her head dipped once, twice. Then it tilted until she leaned back on her bed and her eyes slipped closed.
She didn’t mean to fall asleep, but she did anyway.
I watched her breathe for a while. Slow. Even. A lock of hair fell across her cheek. Without the sharpness in her gaze, she looked younger. Not soft—never soft—but less carved-up by the world. More like the girl she’d been before some asshole decided to break her wrist for existing.
At some point, the cold in the room crawled in under my shirt. I reached down the side of the mattress and snagged the spare blanket that was left for me that had been kicked half under the bed. I then got up and carefully draped it over her.
She didn’t wake. Just shifted a fraction, curling into the warmth, making a small, unconscious sound that hit me harder than any punch.
I stood there a long minute, looking at her.
Somewhere beneath our feet, buried in steel and concrete, a ledger sat in the dark, full of names and routes and rot that could crack the spine of the whole East Coast if it ever got loose.
Somewhere out there, men in suits and soldiers in other people’s colors were circling the fences, trying to smell where their power had gone.
In here, a woman who’d already survived her own private war had fallen asleep three feet away from me, trusting my patch and my presence enough to let her guard drop for the first time since I’d met her.
The ledger in the basement might burn the world.
The woman in the bed might burn me.
For the first time in a long damn time, I wasn’t sure which one scared me more.
I laid back down, eyes on the ceiling, listening to her breathing and the distant thrum of the compound around us.
War was coming. You didn’t need a book to tell you that. You could feel it, in the way people checked their guns twice instead of once, in the way Liberty’s voice had gone from sharp to surgical.
When it hit, I didn’t know if I’d die for my club, for that ledger, or for the woman sleeping a hand’s reach away.
All I knew was this.
That whatever fire was on its way; I was already standing in it. And for the first time in my life, I didn’t want to walk out.