Chapter 3
Chapter Three
ROGUE
She didn’t make an attempt at freedom last night.
I don't know why that surprises me. The door wasn't locked from outside. I made that choice deliberately, a calculated display of something that isn't trust but resembles it. A test, maybe. Of her intelligence, her self-preservation instincts.
She passed.
I'm at the bar at six AM with black coffee and the weight of a decision I haven't made yet.
The Forge is quiet at this hour. Most of the brothers don't surface until noon unless there's cause.
Sully's here, though, because Sully's always here.
My VP sits three stools down with his own coffee and a look on his face that says he's been briefed.
"Gage handled cleanup," he says. No preamble. "Clean. No cameras at that station. We confirmed it before you went."
"Good."
"The woman, though." He lets it hang. Sully’ doesn't question my calls. But he has a way of putting things in the air that demands acknowledgment.
"She's handled."
"She's here, Rogue. In our clubhouse. A civilian."
"I'm aware."
"What's the play here?"
The play. Like this is just another tactical problem, another variable to neutralize. And it should be. It should be exactly that. A threat assessment, a risk calculation, a problem with a clean solution.
But I keep thinking about her gentle hands on mine. About the efficient way she cleaned my knuckles, no hesitation, no disgust. Twelve years, she said. Twelve years of sticking her hands into other people's worst moments and coming out steady.
"She stays until The Crest situation resolves," I say. "Once it's done, there's no case even if she talks.”
"And if she talks before then?"
"She won’t. She’s here, and she won’t have access to anyone who’ll listen.”
Sully gives me a look that says he's not sure about my certainty. Fair. I'm not sure about it either. But something in my gut, and I don't usually trust my gut with women, I trust it with threats, says that Margot is not going to be the one who brings us down.
"Church at ten," I say. "Full table."
I take my coffee and walk down the hall. Pause outside room six. No sound. She could be asleep or she could be standing on the other side of the door listening to my breathing. I keep walking.
The morning passes in logistics. I make calls.
Rook confirming the Crest's movement patterns, Gage reporting the cleanup went smooth and what was done, a contact at MPD confirming nobody filed a shots-fired report from Lamar Avenue last night.
Small mercies of a neighborhood where gunshots are background noise.
By nine, I'm in my office. A room off the main hall that used to be the ironworks foreman's station. Concrete walls, a desk that weighs more than most men, a window that looks out over the river. I'm going through the Crest intel when I hear her voice in the hallway.
"I just need my phone. Or a phone. I have people who'll worry."
Colt's response is muffled, apologetic. The kid doesn't know what to do with her. Hell, I don't know what to do with her.
I open my office door. She's standing in the hallway in yesterday's scrubs, hair down now. It's longer than I realized, falling past her shoulders in dark waves that haven't seen a brush this morning. She looks like she slept badly and doesn't care who knows it.
"Margot."
She turns. Those brown eyes find mine and hold. "I need to call my hospital. I'm supposed to be on shift in..." She checks a watch I hadn't noticed. “..in two hours."
"I'll handle it."
"You'll handle it. How? You going to call Memphis General and say what, exactly?"
"I'll have someone call. Family emergency. You'll be out a few days."
"A few days." She says it flat. Processing.
"That a problem?"
"Is that a serious question? I have patients. I have responsibilities. People depend on me showing up."
I lean against the door frame. She's angry. Not scared, angry. It rolls off her in waves and it does something to the air between us, charges it with friction. Most people's anger makes me cold. Clinical. Hers makes me attentive.
"You want me to lay out the alternative?" I ask. "Because the alternative is you go back to your life and pray that nobody from The Crest finds out there's a witness. And trust me, Margot. They will find out. They always find out."
She goes still. Her jaw sets in a hard line and I can see her running it that scenario. She’s not stupid. She knows I'm right.
"Fine," she says. "But I need clothes. And a phone call. One phone call, supervised if you want, I don't care. My neighbor feeds my cat."
"You have a cat."
"Is that relevant? Do you have a problem with cats too?”
"No." I turn back into my office. “Colt will get you clothes. You can use the bar phone for your call. One call. Keep it short, keep it vague."
She doesn't say thank you. Good. Gratitude would be wrong between us. Too soft, too conciliatory. This is negotiation, and she understands that instinctively.
I close my office door and stand there for a moment with my hand on the knob, listening to her footsteps fade toward the bar.
Then I go back to my desk and try to focus on Crest supply routes that we’re monitoring.
But I can't focus because I can still hear her voice in my head.
I have people who'll worry. And I'm thinking about what kind of life she has out there.
A normal life, an apartment and a cat. Hospital shifts that start at seven.
A life so distant from mine it might as well be another planet.
Church happens at ten, as ordered. The full table.
Sully at my right, Rook at my left, Gage across from me, the other patched members filling out the circle.
The chapel is a room off the main hall, soundproofed, no windows.
An old iron table that came with the building, eight chairs, a gavel that was my father's.
I bang it once. "Crest business. Ricky Salcedo is handled. But that was the courier, not the supply chain. They'll send another."
"They'll send ten others," Rook says. He's young for a Sergeant-at-Arms. Thirty, hard, a marine background that shows in his posture. "Ricky was a message, but they won't read it right."
"Then we send a louder one."
We spend an hour on it. Routes, timing, manpower.
The Crest has been pushing into Memphis for eight months now, ever since their president, a psychopath named Devlin Marsh, decided Nashville wasn't enough.
It's a slow invasion. Testing boundaries, running product through our territory, trying to establish a foothold.
My father died trying to hold this line. I'm not going to let it break on my watch.
But I'm distracted. I'm aware of it and I can't fix it. Somewhere beyond these walls, Margot is existing in my space in a way that shouldn't register but does.
"Rogue." Sully's voice pulls me back. Everyone's looking at me.
"What."
"I asked about the woman. The boys are asking."
"She's a witness to what I did to Ricky. She stays until the heat dies. Nobody touches her, nobody questions her, nobody gets fucking cute. Clear?"
Nods around the table. But Gage catches my eye and holds it a beat too long. Gage knows me. Known me since we were sixteen, running these streets before we had our patches. He sees something in my face that I haven't put there intentionally.
I bang the gavel. Church dismissed.
I find her in the main room an hour later.
She's sitting at a table near the windows, the big industrial ones that look out over the river, reading a book she must have found somewhere.
She's changed into borrowed clothes. Jeans that are slightly too big, rolled at the ankle, and a plain black t-shirt that's clearly a man's, the sleeves falling past her elbows. Her hair is wet. She showered.
The sight of her sitting there, clean and calm and reading a goddamn book like this is a vacation, does something to my brain that I don't appreciate.
I drop into the chair across from her. She doesn't startle. Just marks her page with a finger and looks up.
"Your call go okay?"
"My neighbor thinks I'm visiting my sister in Knoxville. My charge nurse thinks I have a family emergency. My cat will survive." She pauses. "Thank you for that."
There it is. The gratitude. But she delivers it like a receipt, transactional. Acknowledged and filed.
"You eat?"
"Colt made me eggs. He's sweet." She says it simply, without agenda, but the word sweet in the context of my clubhouse sounds foreign. Like a word from a different language.
"Don't let him hear you say that. He'll lose his prospect cred."
A small curve of her lips. Not quite a smile but the architecture of one. I track it like a rifle sight and I hate that I do.
"How long have you been president?" she asks.
"Three years."
"Since your father died." Not a question. She's been gathering information, reading the signs. The memorial patch on Sully's cut, probably. The photos behind the bar. She’s smart, she doesn’t miss a thing.
"Yeah."
"And The Crest, the people who killed him. They're the ones you're fighting."
"I'm not having this conversation with you."
"Because I'm a civilian?"
"Because it's club business."
She nods. Goes back to her book. Just like that. No pushing, no prying, no attempt to dig further. She accepts the boundary and moves on. And somehow that's more unsettling than if she'd pressed.
I sit there longer than I should. Watching the river through the window. Aware of her presence across the table like a heat source.
Fourteen hours. She's been here fourteen hours and she hasn't flinched once. I'm used to the distance fear creates. I use it like a tool, calibrate it, deploy it. That distance is where I operate.
But she's closed that distance without even trying, and I don't know what to do with how near that makes everything.
I push back from the table. "If you need anything, find Colt."
"And if I need you?"
The question lands weird. Weighted. She says it simply enough but something in the directness of it, in the way she looks at me when she asks, makes my chest tight.
"End of the hall," I say. "Last door."
I walk away. And I feel her eyes on my back the whole way to the door.