CHAPTER SIX
Your Choice, Not His
Her father put the new rules on the table three days after the parking garage, and he did it as he did everything that broke her heart — gently, reasonably, with her safety in his mouth like a prayer.
No more solo shifts at the hospital until the leak was found and the hole was sewn shut.
No coffee corner. No errands that weren't run with two men on her instead of one, and never the same route twice.
A guard on the carriage-house stair around the clock, days rotating so no single man learned her habits.
Her phone location shared with the club.
Her schedule scrubbed down to the studs and rebuilt one safe day at a time.
Her whole life folded down small enough to fit inside a perimeter he could draw a hand around and hold.
He laid it out at the long table in the back of the Forge with his reading glasses pushed up into his gray hair and his coffee going cold at his elbow, item by item, in the flat reasonable voice he used for the worst things, and the maddening part, the part that always made her want to put her head through a wall, was that every single line of it was sound.
Smart. The exact thing she'd have told a friend to do.
And every single sound and smart line of it was also a bar in a cage, and he could not, would never, see the cage for the safety.
He slid the list across the table to her like it was a peace offering, three days of his fear written out in his blocky hand on a legal pad, and she read it without touching it.
"It's temporary," Bishop said. "Soon as we plug the hole, you get your life back."
"You've been telling me that since I was nine.
" She kept her voice level because losing it would prove his point — that she was a thing to be managed and not a woman to be reasoned with.
"When Mama left you sent me to that school across the river and called it temporary.
When the Riders shot up the old clubhouse you pulled me out of state for a year and called it temporary.
Every time the world got dark you made me smaller — new rules, shorter leash, fewer rooms I was allowed to stand in.
And every single time you said the word temporary, and every single time the next dark thing came along before the last one ever lifted, and here I am.
Twenty-seven years old. Asking my daddy's permission to go buy a cup of coffee on a Tuesday.
" Her voice slipped, the old tongue rising under the new words the way it did when the hurt got past her guard.
"E ain right, Daddy. It ain neva been right, and you cyan keep callin' it love. "
"You think I like it." He took the glasses off, rubbed the bridge of his nose.
For one second he looked every year of fifty-one.
"I have buried men I loved in this life, Zola.
I have written letters to mothers. I built this whole life so the people nobody else would stand for would have one place that stood for them, and I could not — I cannot — be the man who keeps a city safe and loses his own daughter to it.
You're all I've got left of — " He stopped himself.
He never said her mother's name when he could help it.
"You're all I've got. So yes. I'll make you small.
I'll make you furious. I'll do it every time, because a furious daughter is a living one. "
"You think I want this." It wasn't a question. His jaw was her jaw; she'd gotten the stubborn from somewhere. "Two men put hands on you in a parking deck, Zola. I watched it on a screen. You want me to do less?"
"I want you to do it with me instead of to me," she said.
"Ask me. Plan it with me. Treat me like a grown woman who's allowed to weigh her own risks instead of a vault you're trying to keep the right things locked inside of.
There's a difference between keeping me safe and just keeping me, Daddy, and you have never once in my whole life learned to tell the two apart. "
"Maybe I haven't." He put the glasses back on. The crack she'd seen open for a breath sealed over, as it always did, as she'd watched it seal over a thousand times across a thousand kitchen tables. "But the rules still stand."
He looked at her for a long moment, and something moved behind his eyes that she couldn't read, and she thought for half a second it might crack open into the conversation they'd never had.
Then it closed, the way it always closed, and he put his glasses back down on his nose and looked at his cold coffee and said, "The rules stand.
Knox'll run your detail till it's handled. He's the best I've got."
And there it was. The far wall of the same cage.
Because Knox had spent three days being exactly what her father had just called him — the best he had, professional, a half-step back, his eyes everywhere but her face, yes ma'am and this way and the warm thing they'd built in a stranger's bedroom packed away behind a wall of duty so total it made her want to scream.
He'd decided, somewhere in the wreck of that garage, that keeping her meant giving her up.
To protect her from the fallout of himself.
To be her shadow and nothing else until the war was won and her father's grip eased and there was air to do this right in.
For three days he'd called her ma'am. He'd held doors and watched corners and kept exactly one professional pace between his body and hers at all times, and when she'd caught his eye across the bay he'd let his slide away to the next threat like she was furniture he'd been hired to guard.
She knew what it was. She wasn't a fool.
It was the same instinct that had come the length of that parking deck for her — turned inside out, aimed at himself this time.
He'd looked at what loving her could cost the club mid-war and he'd decided the gift he'd give her was his absence.
Hold her at arm's length. Keep her breathing.
Sort the rest out after, in some clean future that was always going to be temporary too.
She was so tired of men loving her by subtraction. Her whole life, the men who loved her had shown it by taking things away — her freedom, themselves, the truth — and calling the smaller life that was left over safe.
She found him in the bay an hour later, wiping down a bike that didn't need it, and she said nothing at all. She just picked up the keys to the club SUV off the pegboard and said, "Take me somewhere."
"Where."
"Not home. Not the safe house. Not anywhere with my father's name on the lease." She held his eyes until his went wary. "Your place, Knox. I want to see the one place in this city that's yours and not the club's. That's the somewhere."
"Zola—"
"I know it's a bad idea. I know my father set you on me to keep me in a box and taking me to your apartment is the opposite of the box.
" She picked up the SUV keys off the pegboard and closed her fist around them.
"I don't care. For one night I want to be somewhere that's yours.
Not a safe house with motel sheets. Not my place with Doc's alarm on the wall.
Somewhere you chose, that nobody assigned you. You're my detail — so detail me there."
"That's not how — "
"It's exactly how. I'm the principal. I'm telling you my destination." She walked toward the door. "You can drive me or you can follow me on foot through a city you think is full of men who want me. Either way I'm getting in that truck and I'm going to see where Darius Lennox lives."
He drove.
Neither of them said a word the whole way, and the not-talking was loud as a siren — two people who'd come apart in each other's hands two nights running sitting a foot apart in the dark cab of an SUV pretending the foot was a wall.
He took the back streets and watched the mirrors.
And every red light, she felt him want to look at her and not let himself, and the wanting filled the cab up like water until she thought one of them would drown in it before he ever put the truck in park.
His place was a one-bedroom over a shuttered tire shop on the wrong side of the neck, up an outside stair that complained under their feet, and the second he opened the door she understood three things about Darius Lennox she hadn't known an hour ago.
It was spare. Not empty: spare on purpose, a man who'd grown up with nothing and decided he'd rather have a little kept right than a lot kept careless.
A made bed with the corners square. A kitchen with two pans and four plates and not one dish in the sink.
Books, more than she'd have guessed, stacked clean on a shelf he'd clearly built himself.
And on the windowsill over the sink, catching the last of the daylight, a row of small green things in coffee cans, herbs, basil and mint and something flowering, tended, watered, alive.
The most lethal man on her father's whole roster kept something living on his windowsill and turned it to the light.
It undid her a little, that windowsill. She stood in the middle of his small square life and looked at the basil reaching for the last of the light and thought about a boy who'd grown up in a house where things got broken on purpose, who'd learned to hold himself still in rooms where stillness was the only safety, who'd built himself a place as an adult where nothing got broken at all, where everything had its spot and the only living thing he let himself keep was something he had to tend with his own hands or watch it die.
She'd come up those stairs loaded for a fight.
The herbs took some of the powder out of it and put something steadier in its place — not less determined, just aimed truer.
"It's not much," he said, standing in his own doorway like a guest. "I keep meaning to—"