CHAPTER ONE #5
She ran every light she safely could and watched the mirror more than the road, and no low dark car came up behind her, and by King Street her pulse had dropped enough to let the second-guessing in.
Maybe she'd built two strangers into a story her father's life had taught her too well to tell.
She'd spent her whole childhood learning to read a room for threat; it was nearly her mother tongue, the one he'd handed her in place of the truth, and a girl raised to look for wolves would find wolves in every shadow.
That was what she told herself at the light on Calhoun.
She almost believed it. She wanted to believe it more than she'd wanted anything in a while, because the other thing it could mean was that the door at the back of the Forge had finally swung open and let the dark inside reach all the way out to her.
By the time she pulled into the lot she'd talked herself most of the way back out of it.
A man at a market. A car with a bent plate.
Charleston was full of strange men and strange cars; that was a city, and cities had both.
She'd half decided to say nothing, because saying something meant Tiny got chewed out and the warm bars got a fresh lock, and she was so tired of fresh locks she could have cried.
Then she came through the front and saw her father's face, and the marsh-dark thing she'd been outrunning since the shed caught all the way up to her.
Bishop stood in the front of the shop with three of his officers around him and a stillness on all of them she had never once been allowed to witness, because this was business, and business happened behind the door.
That it was happening out here, in the open, in front of her, told her more than any of them ever would have said.
"Daddy."
He crossed the floor fast for a big man. His hands came up to her shoulders and ran down her arms like he was checking her for holes, and his eyes did the same, and only when he'd looked her over did the breath go out of him.
"Where's Tiny," he said. Not a question.
She could have lied. She'd lied to him a hundred small times over the years. But there'd been two men at the market with a folded plate, and the truth had teeth tonight, and she found she didn't have the lie in her.
"I went down to the market alone," she said. "Twenty minutes. Daddy, there were two men. They were watching me. I lost them, I'm fine, I'm sure it's nothing, but they were—"
"It's not nothing." His voice came out rough.
He pulled her in and folded her up, all of her vanishing into the leather and the smell of him, oil and coffee and the smell of her whole childhood, and over the top of her head he said something low to the men.
A door opened at the back and boots moved, fast, and she understood the same as she understood everything in this building — by what they didn't tell her.
When he held her back out at arm's length, his face had changed into the one she hated most, because it was the one she could never win an argument against. It wasn't anger. It was closer to grief — the grief of a man watching the thing he'd built to keep her safe turn out not to be big enough.
"You're not going anywhere alone again," he said. "Not the hospital, not the market, not the end of the driveway. Not till this is done."
She'd heard those words her whole life. Take Tiny. Text me when you land. Stay where I can see you. You're not going alone. She'd heard them so many times they'd worn smooth as the awl, as a thing handled by two generations of women until it had no edge left.
They had an edge tonight. She felt it go in.
She wanted to fight it. The girl who'd held a stranger's heart going on the other side of her own two hands last Tuesday wanted to plant her feet and say she was not a thing to be moved from room to room for her own good.
But two men had stood between her and the street tonight with their plates folded up, and they hadn't been there for her father.
They'd been there for her, the soft thing he loved, exactly like he'd said.
For once the cage and the danger were pointing the same direction, and that frightened her more than either one alone.
"Okay," she said. The word tasted like surrender and she made herself swallow it whole. "Okay, Daddy."
But she stood in the middle of the shop while the men moved around her and her father made his calls, and she made herself a promise in her grandmother's language, the private half of her the club would never get to hear.
Whatever was coming, whoever they put at her shoulder — she was done being only the thing men carried out of the weather.
She'd kept a stranger breathing with her own hands.
She would not spend whatever came next being handled like the books.
The cage had just become a countdown. She didn't know yet to what. She only knew she meant to walk out the far end of it as something more than the president's protected daughter.
Da time coming, her grandmother would have said, watching weather move in off the water. Best you ready.
She was getting ready.