19. Hawk
Hawk
The waiting room is a hallway.
That’s all it is—a narrow corridor between the front of Dr. Ortiz’s clinic and the back room where he operates on dogs and cats and whatever else comes through the door at two in the morning when someone calls in a favor owed.
There are four plastic chairs lined up against the wall, the kind with the metal legs that scrape the floor every time you shift your weight. A poster about heartworm prevention is tacked above them at eye level. Below that is a laminated sheet listing symptoms of feline leukemia.
I haven’t sat down once.
Six steps to the door at the end of the hall. Six steps back to the front. I’ve done it so many times in the last hour that I’ve worn a path I can feel under my boots, the linoleum slightly softer where I keep landing.
Shadow’s in one of the plastic chairs with his elbows on his knees and his face in his hands. He hasn’t spoken in forty minutes.
That alone tells me how bad tonight was because Shadow always talks, fills the silence the way other men fill glasses, because quiet is where the bad thoughts live. Tonight he’s letting them live there.
Through the door, I can hear Ortiz working.
Low instructions to himself, the metallic clink of instruments, the hiss of a suction line.
Razor’s in there with him because Razor’s Army Ranger field training makes him more useful than either of us in a situation like this, and also because someone needed to stay calm in that room, and it was never going to be me.
I make the six steps again. Turn. Come back.
The bullet went through. Clean entry, clean exit. Razor said it in the van, and Ortiz confirmed it when we got here, pulling back the field dressing.
Lost blood, he said, but through and through. We caught it in time.
She’s not dying. I keep telling myself that. Keep stacking it up against everything else rattling around in my chest like broken glass.
She’s not dying. She made it to Ortiz. Razor knew what he was doing in the van. She held on.
None of it helps.
Because the bullet that went cleanly through her shoulder was meant for me.
My son pulled that trigger. Leveled a gun at my chest and made the decision, fully and completely, that tonight was the night.
Whatever rage had been building in Tyler—and I know it’s been building, I’ve always known, I just spent years telling myself it wasn’t my fault, that boys become men on their own terms, that I owed him nothing because he chose his club and I chose mine—all of it came to a point in that alley, and the point was aimed at me.
And Jade stepped in front of it.
I stop walking. Press my back against the wall and tilt my head up at the ceiling, and breathe through the tightness in my chest that hasn’t let up since I watched her go down.
Twenty-eight years old. A woman who has spent the last four years surviving my son’s hands, surviving his moods and his control and his cruelty, a woman who finally got out and ran straight into us, into me, into one disaster and then another.
She had nothing left to give, and she gave it anyway. Stepped in front of a bullet with no hesitation, because that’s who she is. She doesn’t think about the cost; she just pays it.
I think about the way she looked in the van.
Pale and shaking, eyes glassy with shock but fighting to stay present.
The way she answered my questions about her happiest day with this worn, surprised quality, like she’d forgotten she was allowed to have happy days at all.
Like I’d asked her something in a language she used to speak but hadn’t needed in years.
A blanket fort, she said. Cereal for dinner. Her son asleep in her lap.
That’s the whole thing, she said. That’s what life is actually for.
I’ve spent thirty years inside a motorcycle club.
I’ve had loyalty and brotherhood and the kind of meaning that comes from belonging to something bigger than yourself, from having men who would take a bullet for you and mean it.
I’m not going to stand here and tell myself it was nothing, that it was all wasted, that the life I built was smoke.
But I can’t remember the last time I had a day like that. The last time simple was enough. The last time I was in a room with someone and thought—This is it. This is what it’s all for.
Tyler happened instead.
That’s the truth I keep circling. The one I’ve always found a reason to walk away from before I got too close.
I chose the club over raising my son. Made that choice a hundred small times and a handful of large ones, told myself he was fed and housed and had men around him who could teach him things I was too busy to teach myself.
Told myself boys didn’t need softness. That hardness was a gift.
What I gave him was a template.
He became exactly what I showed him. Violent, controlling, convinced that the people around him exist to serve his needs and absorb his damage.
He joined the Ruthless Saints to spite me and spent the years since building himself into a version of everything I’d been, except without the code, without the line I’ve always known not to cross.
Tyler doesn’t have a line.
I watched him stand in that alley tonight and point a gun at his own father and feel nothing about it, and I know that emptiness didn’t come from nowhere.
I put it there.
And Jade paid for it.
The door at the end of the hall opens, and Razor steps out, pulling off a pair of nitrile gloves. His expression is level, the same watchful stillness he carries everywhere, but his eyes, when they find mine, are tired in a way that goes past physical.
“She’s through,” he says. “Ortiz closed the wound. She’s going to need antibiotics and rest, and the shoulder’s going to be painful for weeks, but nothing permanent. She got lucky.”
Shadow lifts his head from his hands and exhales, long and slow, like he’s been holding it the entire time.
“Can I see her?” I ask.
“Ortiz is finishing up. Five minutes.”
I nod. Go back to walking.
Razor watches me for a moment, then moves to stand in my path, so I have to stop. He doesn’t say anything right away. Just looks at me with those dark eyes that see everything and say very little.
“It’s not your fault she got shot,” he says.
“Don’t.”
“I’m saying it anyway. Tyler pulled the trigger. Tyler aimed at you. What Jade did, that was her choice, not your failure.”
“Those two things aren’t mutually exclusive.”
“No,” Razor agrees. “They’re not. But you can carry the one without drowning in the other.” He steps aside. “Five minutes.”
I stand in the hallway and look at the heartworm poster and try to find the line between the thing I can carry and the thing that drowns me. I don’t find it. I don’t think I’m supposed to tonight.
When Ortiz opens the door and nods at me, I go in.
She looks small in a way that costs me something to see.
Jade is not a small woman in any way that matters.
Not in presence or will or the force of her personality that fills whatever room she’s in.
But on Ortiz’s operating table with an IV line running into her arm and her shoulder bandaged thick and white, she looks like something breakable, and I don’t know how to reconcile that with the woman who shoved me out of the way of a bullet today.
Ortiz talks me through the care requirements. Antibiotics, wound checks every twelve hours, and limited movement in the shoulder for at least two weeks. He asks no questions about how this happened because Razor called in the favor correctly, and Ortiz understands the terms of debts in this world.
He hands me a bag of supplies, squeezes my arm once, and leaves me alone with her.
Her eyes are closed. Her breathing is even. She looks like someone who has earned the unconsciousness she’s in.
I pull a stool from the corner and sit down next to the table. Take her hand, the one without the IV line, carefully. Her fingers are cold.
“We got the drive,” I tell her, even though she can’t hear me. “The evidence is secured. Whatever Tyler tries next, he’s not walking away from what’s on that laptop.” I pause. “You did that. You went in there, and you got it, and you held on, and you did it.”
She doesn’t respond.
“I’m going to fix this,” I say. “Not because it makes up for anything. It doesn’t. But because you deserve to get home to your kid and never have to look over your shoulder again, and that is the one thing I can actually do.”
I sit there until Ortiz comes back and tells me we need to move her.
* * *
We get back to the cabin at half past four in the morning.
I carry Jade inside. Razor holds the door, Shadow moves ahead to turn down the bed in her room, and I carry her up the stairs with her head against my shoulder and her breath warm on my neck.
When Shadow steps back to take her from me at the bedroom door, I shake my head and take her through myself.
I lay her down. Pull the blankets up. Check the bandage one more time.
She surfaces for a moment when I’m adjusting the pillow. Her eyes open to half-mast, unfocused at first, then find my face.
“Did we get it?” she says.
“Shadow.” I raise my voice toward the door.
Shadow leans in from the hallway. “Flash drive’s secure. Everything copied. We got it, Jade.”
Her mouth curves. “Then it worked.”
Her eyes close again, and her breathing deepens, and she’s under before I can respond.
I pull the chair from the corner of the room to the side of her bed and sit down.
Shadow comes at five thirty and stands in the doorway. “You should sleep,” he says.
“I’m fine.”
“Hawk.”
“I’m fine, Shadow.”
He looks at me sitting in the chair next to Jade’s bed, then nods once and disappears back down the hall.
Razor comes twenty minutes later. Stands in the doorway without speaking, takes in the same picture Shadow took in, and leaves without a word. His silence is its own kind of understanding.
I stay in the chair.
Outside the window, the sky goes from black to the deep blue that comes just before the light, that color that belongs to people who are awake when they shouldn’t be and carrying things they can’t put down.
I watch Jade breathe.
Every so often, she shifts, and I watch for signs of fever, for any change in the quality of her color, for anything that means I need to call Ortiz back. There’s nothing. Her breathing stays even. Her face in sleep has let go of the vigilance she carries everywhere when she’s conscious.
It undoes me in a way I don’t have a name for.
* * *
Dawn comes in through the window in stages. Gray first, then the faint rose that bleeds in at the horizon, then the slow gold of actual morning spreading across the floorboards and climbing the wall and reaching the bed.
Jade’s eyes open.
Her eyes go to the window first, reading the light, placing herself in time. Then they come to me.
She looks at me sitting in the chair next to her bed. “You stayed,” she says.
“Yes.”
She reaches her right hand toward me across the blanket. I take it.
“I’m okay,” she says.
“You took a bullet. You took a bullet that was meant for me.”
“Hawk—”
“You almost died because of me. Because of my son, because of every choice I made that turned him into the man who pulled that trigger. That is on me. Every part of it.”
“Stop.” Her hand tightens on mine. “I almost died because of Tyler. Not because of you.”
“Those aren’t separate.”
“Yes, they are.” Her voice is tired but firm. “Tyler pulled the trigger. Tyler made himself into who he is. You weren’t there, and that’s its own damage, but you didn’t make him aim that gun. He did that.”
I look at her. At her face in the morning light, pale from blood loss, shadows under her eyes, her hair loose against the pillow. At the bandage white on her shoulder. The way she’s holding my hand like she has something to give me, even now, after everything this night has cost her.
“I can’t lose you,” I hear myself say.
The words land in the room and sit there, and I don’t take them back. I watch her face as she processes them, as she understands what I’m telling her, as she sees what’s been building since the first night in this cabin and what I have spent every day since then pretending wasn’t there.
She sees it. All of it. Her eyes are very green in the morning light and very steady on mine. Her hand squeezes mine.
“You won’t,” she says.