Chapter Four
Jonah
Jonah Reyes had learned a long time ago that the biggest man in any room had exactly two jobs: make people feel safe, and never, under any circumstances, make them feel small doing it.
He found Wren Sutter on the clubhouse's back porch a little past six that evening, sitting on the top step with a mug of the clubhouse's famously bad coffee going cold in her hands, staring out at the tree line the way people stared at things when they weren't really seeing them at all.
She'd been at those ledgers with Elias since midmorning, the two of them barely surfacing except to eat, and Jonah figured a woman who'd had somebody try her motel room lock at two in the morning was owed a little air that didn't smell like old paper and burnt coffee.
"You're allowed to take a break," he said, easing himself down onto the step below her, careful the way he was always careful, a big man's permanent low-grade awareness of how much space he took up in a doorway, a chair, a woman's evening. "Nobody's grading you on how fast you solve this."
"Feels like somebody should be." She didn't look at him right away, eyes still on the tree line, on the last gold light sliding down through the pines.
"My father had four days between finding that pattern and dying.
I've had about eighteen hours. I keep doing the math on how much time I actually have before whoever came to my door last night decides a second attempt is worth the risk. "
"That's not your math to do alone."
"It's the only kind of math I know how to do.
" She finally turned her head, and something in her face (tired, sharp-eyed, unwilling to be handled) reminded him, not for the first time since she'd walked into the clubhouse, of every stubborn thing he loved about people who refused to let their own fear make decisions for them.
"You lost someone to this too. Cage told me a little. Your sister."
Jonah hadn't expected the conversation to go there quite so directly, and something in him (some old, careful habit of keeping that particular grief folded small enough to carry without anyone noticing the weight of it) wanted to redirect, deflect, hand her back something easier.
He didn't. She'd earned directness the same way she seemed to earn everything, by asking for it plainly and looking him straight in the eye while she did.
"Her name was Dana," he said. "Four years younger than me.
She worked seasonal for Bitterroot Timber, same as half this town does one way or another, cutting and hauling in the summer months when the crews needed extra hands.
She started noticing things about the second season in: trucks running routes that didn't match the manifests, loads that got weighed twice with two different numbers written down.
She wasn't looking for trouble. She was nineteen, she liked the work, she liked the money, and she made the mistake of mentioning what she'd noticed to the wrong supervisor because she thought she was doing the company a favor by flagging a paperwork error. "
"What happened to her?"
"Officially? Logging accident. Struck by a falling limb during a routine cut, nobody's fault, tragic, the kind of thing that happens in this line of work more than anybody outside it wants to admit.
" His jaw tightened around the words, old and worn smooth from years of repeating them to himself like a stone he'd carried so long it had stopped feeling sharp and started feeling like just another part of his hand.
"Unofficially, in the version I've never been able to prove and never been able to let go of, she asked one question too many to one man who had a reason not to want it asked, and four days later she was dead on a logging site with nobody around to see exactly how the limb came down. "
Wren was quiet for a long moment, and when she spoke, her voice had lost its clinical edge entirely, gone soft in a way he suspected she didn't let it go very often. "Four days. Same as my father."
"I noticed that too, the first time Cage laid out the timeline for you last night.
Some things about that company's got a rhythm to them, if you know to look for it.
Question gets asked, four days pass, somebody stops asking.
" He looked out at the tree line with her, the two of them quiet together in a way that felt, unexpectedly, like relief.
"I was thirty-three. I'd only patched into the club eight months before.
I didn't have Elias's skills or Cage's authority, I just had a body built for taking punishment and giving it back, and no earthly idea how to turn grief like that into anything except rage.
Took me a long time to learn the difference between the two. Longer than I'm proud of."
"How'd you learn it?"
"Cage, mostly. And time. And figuring out that the men who took my sister from me were counting on exactly the kind of reckless, obvious anger I wanted to give them: a grieving kid brother doing something stupid enough to get himself locked up or killed, which would've closed the question of Dana's death just as neatly as her own death closed it.
So I decided instead to become the kind of patient that scares people worse than rage ever could.
I learned everything there was to learn about protecting people, about reading a room before it turns dangerous, about being the last thing standing between somebody I care about and whatever's coming for them.
I told myself I was doing it so nobody else's sister ever had to be a rumor at a job site instead of a person people fought for. "
"That's not nothing, Jonah." She said his name for the first time since she'd sat down, and something in the way she said it, careful and warm and entirely without pity, settled something in his chest that had been unsettled for the better part of a decade.
"That's not rage wearing a badge. That's grief that actually found somewhere useful to go. Most people don't manage that."
"Most people don't have Cage Doyle showing up at their door with a patch and a purpose right when they need one.
" He allowed himself a small, real smile, the kind he didn't often let himself use on anyone outside the club.
"Elias would tell you I'm oversimplifying eight years of therapy he made me go to whether I wanted to or not.
He'd be right. But the short version's still true. "
She huffed something that was almost a laugh, and for a moment the porch felt lighter than it had any right to, given everything sitting underneath the conversation. "Elias made you go to therapy?"
"Man's terrifyingly persistent when he decides something's good for you.
Drove me to the appointments the first six months personally, sat in the parking lot the whole hour so I couldn't talk myself into skipping.
" Jonah shook his head, fond and exasperated in the specific way of a man remembering someone else's stubborn kindness.
"I complained about it constantly. Never once actually tried to make him stop. "
"He does that. Cares about people so precisely it comes out looking like control until you realize it's just...
thoroughness. Attention." She was quiet a beat, turning the mug in her hands.
"I noticed it this morning, watching him work the ledgers.
He doesn't miss anything. It's unsettling how much I like that about him. "
Jonah heard what she wasn't quite saying underneath what she was saying, and decided, the way he decided most things, plainly and without unnecessary drama.
"You don't have to feel strange about that.
Any of it. Not with him, not with Cage, not...
" he paused, chose the next words with more care than he usually bothered with, "...
not if it turns out there's something here worth feeling strange about with me too, someday, when there's less blood and grief standing in the way of finding out. "
Wren looked at him for a long moment, something careful and searching in her expression, the particular look of a woman doing the math on a question she hadn't expected to be asked so plainly, so soon, by a man built like a doorframe who'd just handed her his sister's death like it was nothing at all to be trusted with.
"I don't have a column for that yet," she said finally, and there was the faintest, unguarded warmth in it that told him she wasn't closing the door so much as marking the page. "But I'm not going to pretend I haven't noticed you either. Any of you."
"Good," Jonah said simply. "Take your time. We're not going anywhere."
? ? ?
They sat together long enough that the porch light kicked on automatically overhead, drawing the first moths of the evening, and Jonah found himself talking more than he usually did with anyone who wasn't already patched in: telling her about Dana properly, not just the four days and the falling limb, but the person underneath the grief, the sister who used to sneak him cigarettes she stole from their uncle's truck and lecture him about his diet in the same breath, who'd wanted, before Bitterroot Timber took the choice away from her, to save enough seasonal money to go to community college for forestry management, the honest kind, the kind that would have put her on the other side of exactly the operation that killed her.
"She'd have liked you," Jonah said, surprising himself with how easily it came out. "Dana didn't suffer fools, and she definitely didn't suffer men who thought being big meant you got to skip being gentle. You've got the same look she used to get when somebody underestimated her."
"I'll take that as the highest compliment anybody's given me since I got off the plane."
"It was meant as one." He glanced sideways at her, the porch light catching the tired lines around her eyes, the stubborn set of her jaw that hadn't eased once all evening despite everything they'd both just handed each other.
"You don't have to carry all of this like it's yours alone to fix, you know.
Your father's case. My sister's case. Whatever this turns out to cost before it's done.
You've got three grown men in this clubhouse who'd all tell you the exact same thing if you asked them separately, which tells you something, given how bad the three of us usually are at agreeing on anything. "
"I'm not used to being handed help without strings attached."
"There's a string." Jonah allowed himself a small, crooked smile.
"The string is you let us actually help, instead of doing the thing I suspect you've done your whole adult life, where you carry the weight alone and call it independence because depending on people got too expensive the one time it mattered most."
She went quiet at that, quiet enough that he wondered if he'd overstepped, said something too close to a bone she wasn't ready to have touched by a man she'd known less than a day.
But when she finally spoke, her voice had gone unexpectedly rough, unguarded in a way he suspected didn't happen often.
"That's uncomfortably accurate for someone I met yesterday."
"Grief recognizes grief. It doesn't take long once you know the shape of it.
" He shrugged, easy, careful not to make more of the moment than she seemed ready for.
"I'm not asking you to hand over the whole case tonight.
Just asking you to remember, when it gets heavy, that you don't have to set it down alone to rest for a minute. "
"Duly noted." A small, unguarded smile crossed her face, the first he'd seen from her that didn't look like it cost her something to produce. "You're better at this than I expected from a man Cage described as running the floor and keeping the peace."
"Cage undersells me. It's part of his charm." Jonah's grin was easy now, some of the evening's weight lifted by the small warmth passing between them. "Ask Elias sometime what I actually do around here. He'll give you the version with footnotes."
? ? ?
The porch door banged open behind them before either of them could say anything further, Elias appearing in it with his phone in hand, his careful composure cracked wide enough that Jonah was on his feet before Elias said a single word.
"I ran the rental agency's records properly instead of just the plate," Elias said, voice tight.
"The card used to pay for that sedan belongs to a shell account.
Same shell account that's been quietly funding Harlan Voss's office budget for the last three years, routed through a line item nobody outside his department would ever have reason to check.
" He looked at Wren, and something in his face was equal parts vindication and dread.
"I think we just found out who's been afraid of you since the moment you landed. "
Wren was on her feet a half second behind Jonah, all the softness of the last hour folded back away into the same sharp, focused stillness Jonah had watched come over her in the office the night before. "Show me."
"Cage should see it first."
"Cage can see it at the same time I do." She was already moving past Elias into the clubhouse, and Jonah caught the look that passed between the two men behind her back: Elias's faint, helpless almost-smile at being overruled so efficiently, and something else underneath it, something that looked, to a man who'd spent a career reading rooms for danger, a great deal like a man falling for someone whether he'd given himself permission to or not.
"She's something else," Jonah said, low, just between the two of them.
"She's Frank Sutter's daughter," Elias said, which wasn't a denial so much as an admission dressed up as an explanation. "I don't think either of us stood a chance the moment she walked in that door asking for names instead of apologies."
Jonah clapped a hand on his shoulder, brief and solid, the closest thing to comfort either of them usually allowed themselves in the open. "Then I guess we'd better figure out how to keep her alive long enough to see where that goes."
He followed Elias inside, the porch light clicking off automatically behind them, and told himself that whatever came next (Harlan Voss, the shell account, the eight years of grief finally getting somewhere to go) he'd meant every word he'd told her on those steps.
She didn't have to carry it alone. None of them did, not anymore, not with all three of them finally looking in the same direction instead of nursing their separate guilt in separate rooms.
It was, he thought, walking back into the clubhouse's fluorescent light with the weight of Harlan Voss's name settling over the building like a change in the weather, the first time in eight years that felt less like waiting for the other shoe to drop, and more like finally reaching for it themselves.