Chapter Six
Elias
Elias Voss had built a career, first in uniform and then out of it, on the principle that patience was the only weapon that never ran out of ammunition, and by midnight he had used every last bit of that patience narrowing four hundred names down to one.
Dutch Larsen. Twenty-six years old, patched in eighteen months ago, ran deliveries for the club's legitimate towing business and had, according to the phone records Elias had spent six careful hours pulling through contacts he preferred not to think too hard about maintaining, made a two-minute call to an unlisted number eleven minutes after Elias mentioned in the common room that Frank Sutter's daughter was coming to handle the books.
The same unlisted number that traced, after another hour of careful work, to a burner phone purchased with cash from a gas station forty miles outside Cedar Bend, the kind of purchase a man made when he wanted a call to be untraceable and didn't realize the purchase itself left its own trail.
Elias sat with the name a long time before he took it to Cage.
He understood, in a way he suspected the other two didn't fully share, what it cost a man to be the one who found the traitor in his own house.
He'd done this work before, on a larger scale, in places where the stakes were measured in more than one family's grief.
He had learned, in rooms that still visited him some nights when he let his guard down enough to sleep, exactly how a discovery like this one could curdle a unit from the inside if it wasn't handled with precision.
He did not intend to let that happen here.
Not to Cage's club. Not to the fragile, unlikely thing that had started growing in this clubhouse over the last three days, the thing none of them had a name for yet but all of them, he suspected, had already started protecting instinctively.
He found Cage in his office a little after one in the morning, the legal pad from that morning's meeting still open on the desk, Cage himself slumped in his chair with the particular exhaustion of a man who'd spent the day being strong for three other people and hadn't yet found five private minutes to be anything else.
"I have a name," Elias said.
Cage sat up immediately, exhaustion burning off in an instant. "Who."
"Dutch Larsen."
Something moved across Cage's face, not surprise, exactly, more the particular grim confirmation of a suspicion he'd been carrying quietly and hoping wouldn't turn out to be true. "He's young. Green. I'd have said he doesn't have the stomach for something like this."
"He might not have known what he was doing.
That's possible, and I'd rather we find out the truth of it before either of us decides how to handle him.
" Elias set the printed records on the desk between them, precise, methodical, the way he laid out any evidence he needed a man to trust without having to take it purely on faith.
"The call went to a burner traced to a gas station purchase forty miles out.
That's not sophisticated tradecraft. That's a scared kid doing something he was told to do by someone who scared him worse than whatever consequence he imagined coming from us. "
"You think somebody's got something on him."
"I think it's worth asking before we assume the worst. People make one bad decision under pressure that doesn't define the rest of who they are.
" Elias heard the words leave his mouth and understood, with the particular clarity that came to him sometimes late at night when his guard was thinnest, that he wasn't only talking about Dutch Larsen.
"I'd rather understand the whole shape of it before anyone in this clubhouse decides Dutch is simply a traitor and treats him accordingly.
That kind of certainty gets people hurt who didn't necessarily deserve it. "
Cage studied him for a long moment, something perceptive and quiet in his expression, the look of a man who'd known Elias long enough to hear what wasn't being said as clearly as what was. "You're not just talking about Dutch."
"No," Elias admitted. "I'm not."
? ? ?
They brought Dutch in together, just the two of them, in the small hours when the rest of the clubhouse was quiet enough that a hard conversation could happen without an audience making it harder.
The kid (and he was a kid, Elias thought, watching Dutch's hands shake around a mug of coffee he wasn't drinking, twenty-six going on considerably younger under the fluorescent light) broke almost before they'd finished laying out what they knew.
"He said he'd tell my parole officer I violated," Dutch said, voice cracking.
"Said all I had to do was let him know when she landed, where she was staying.
Said it was nothing, just information, nobody was gonna get hurt over information.
" His eyes came up, wet and terrified, fixed on Cage like a man facing a sentence he already knew he deserved.
"I didn't know somebody was gonna go to her door.
I swear to God, Cage, I didn't know that was gonna happen. I'd have never..."
"Who," Elias said, quiet, steady, the voice he used when a frightened source needed one fixed point to hold onto in order to keep talking. "Who told you to call?"
"Never give a name. Just called himself a friend of the department. Had a voice like..." Dutch searched for the word, found it with visible effort, "...like a man used to people doing what he said the first time he said it."
Elias felt something cold settle into his chest, confirmation of a shape he'd already half suspected.
Harlan Voss did not, as far as anyone had ever established, make direct contact with anyone below the level of people who mattered to him.
That he'd reached down to a scared twenty-six-year-old with a parole violation hanging over his head told Elias something important: the man was not merely protecting an old secret out of habit anymore.
He was actively, personally managing threats, which meant he no longer trusted his usual careful distance to keep him safe.
Which meant, Elias thought, watching Cage's jaw work as he decided how to handle a frightened kid who'd made a bad choice under real pressure, that Harlan Voss was more frightened than any of them had yet understood.
Cage's judgment, in the end, was measured rather than merciless: Dutch would keep his patch, on probation, under watch, required to work directly with Elias on whatever came next until trust was rebuilt the slow, deliberate way trust always had to be rebuilt in this world.
It was, Elias thought, exactly the kind of decision Frank Sutter would have respected: firm enough to mean something, human enough not to break a scared kid over a mistake made under a threat he hadn't been equipped to resist alone.
Dutch left the office looking like a man who'd been handed a second chance he hadn't expected and didn't fully believe he deserved, and Cage watched him go with an expression Elias recognized, because he'd worn it himself more times than he could count over the years: the particular weariness of a leader who understood that mercy was harder work than punishment, and chose it anyway because the alternative built a club full of men too afraid of their own mistakes to ever admit to one honestly.
"You did the right thing," Elias said, once the door had closed.
"I did the thing your report convinced me was right.
" Cage rubbed a hand over his face, the gesture of a man who'd been awake far longer than was good for him.
"Doesn't mean it doesn't sit heavy. A kid that scared of losing his freedom that he'd hand a stranger's daughter over to whoever asked, that's on Bitterroot Timber and Harlan Voss for building a world where a scared kid's only options are bad ones.
But it's also on us, for not making sure he had somewhere safer to bring that fear before it turned into a phone call. "
"We'll do better."
"We will." Cage looked at him, something searching in his gaze. "Go get some sleep, Elias. You've been carrying this whole night on your own shoulders and you look like it."
"Soon," Elias said, and didn't explain where he was going instead, though he suspected Cage already knew.
? ? ?
Wren was still awake when Elias finally made his way back to the office near two in the morning, hunched over the ledgers with the particular stubborn focus he was beginning to recognize as entirely, exhaustingly her: a woman who apparently did not know how to set a problem down until she'd wrung every possible answer out of it.
"You should be asleep," he said, echoing, without quite meaning to, the same thing Cage had told her two nights before.
"So should you." She looked up, taking in whatever the last few hours had left on his face, and something in her expression softened. "You found the leak."
"A scared kid with a parole officer and no good options.
Not the villain, just a symptom of one." Elias sat down across from her, more tired than he wanted to admit, and found himself, for the first time in longer than he could easily account for, simply talking instead of carefully managing what he said.
"I keep thinking about how young he is. How young I was, the first time somebody with real power over my life told me exactly what they needed from me and made it clear what would happen if I said no.
I didn't have the excuse of a parole officer.
I had a uniform and an oath and a very clear understanding that saying no to the wrong person could get people killed.
I said yes anyway, more than once, and told myself it was duty instead of fear. "
"Is that what happened to my father? Duty instead of fear?"
The question landed exactly where she'd aimed it, precisely as everything else about her, and Elias found he didn't want to deflect it the way he might have three days ago.
"I told myself, the night he asked me to look at those numbers, that helping him was the right thing to do regardless of the risk.
I still believe that was true. But underneath it, if I'm honest with myself the way I wasn't for a long time afterward, I also wanted to matter to someone the way I'd mattered to people overseas, wanted a purpose that made the things I'd seen and done feel like they'd been in service of something instead of just damage I was carrying around.
Your father gave me that purpose. I have spent eight years unable to decide whether that makes what happened to him partly my fault, or whether it just makes me a man who wanted to be useful and paid a terrible price for wanting it. "
Wren was quiet for a long moment, studying him with an attention that felt, unexpectedly, like being truly seen for the first time in longer than he wanted to admit.
"I don't think those are the only two options," she said finally.
"I think you can have wanted a purpose, and had it cost you something you never wanted to pay, without either of those facts canceling the other one out.
Grief doesn't need a villain in every corner of it, Elias.
Sometimes it's just grief. Sometimes the truest thing is simply that a good man died doing something brave, and everyone who loved him is left holding the different, complicated shapes of what that cost them. "
Something in Elias's chest, some careful architecture he'd maintained for eight years specifically to keep grief and guilt in their separate, manageable compartments, cracked quietly open.
He reached across the desk, slow enough that she could have pulled away if she wanted to, and covered her hand with his.
"I don't know how to do this," he admitted, low, honest in a way he rarely allowed himself to be.
"Wanting you. Wanting it alongside Cage and Jonah instead of in competition with them, which should feel strange and doesn't, which frightens me more than almost anything else has in longer than I can remember.
I am not a man who's good at wanting things without immediately calculating everything it might cost."
"Then calculate it," Wren said softly, turning her hand under his so their fingers laced together. "You're good at math. Tell me what the numbers actually say, instead of what your guilt's been telling you they say for eight years."
He looked at her for a long moment, feeling something in his careful, guarded chest finally settle into a column that balanced. "They say," he said slowly, "that I would rather risk being wanted and losing it than spend one more year being careful enough to guarantee I never do."
He leaned in slowly, giving her every chance to stop him, and when she didn't, when she met him halfway instead, the kiss that followed was careful and searching and entirely unlike the controlled precision Elias brought to every other part of his life, an admission, finally, spoken in the one language he'd never quite trusted himself to use honestly until now.
When they broke apart, Wren's hand still folded in his, she rested her forehead briefly against his, both of them breathing a little unsteadily in the quiet office.
"Cage should know," she said softly. "And Jonah. I don't want this to be something we're hiding from them."
"I don't want that either." Elias found, to his own mild surprise, that the thought of Cage and Jonah knowing didn't bring the old cold calculation he might have expected: no instinct to compete, to protect territory, to guard what he wanted the way he guarded everything else.
"I think, if I'm honest, they've both been waiting for one of us to say it out loud first. None of us have ever been particularly good at going first." "Then I suppose that makes me the practical one in this arrangement.
" A tired, genuine smile crossed her face, the kind he was already coming to think of as rare and worth earning.
"Somebody has to keep the books balanced.
" "I would expect nothing less." He pressed a last, gentler kiss to her knuckles before finally releasing her hand, some old careful part of him already calculating how to protect this fragile, unlikely thing that had just cracked open between them, and finding, for the first time in eight years, that the calculation came without dread attached to it.
"Sleep, Wren. Tomorrow we tell them, and then we go back to the harder work of keeping you alive long enough to see where the rest of this goes. "
"Together," she said. "Together," he agreed, and meant it more than he'd meant almost anything in longer than he could remember.