Epilogue
Rogue
It’s a Thursday when Brick puts his fist through someone’s face at The Anvil.
Not a stranger. That would be cleaner. A hangaround named Harlan, who’s been working his way toward prospecting and decided to shortcut the process by running his mouth about club business to a bartender at a Beale Street dive.
Brick found out. Brick’s correction was immediate, anatomically thorough, and loud enough that Sully cut the jukebox so everyone could hear the lesson.
I don’t intervene. Brick knows where the line is. He stops before permanent damage, which for Brick is restraint bordering on poetry.
But Harlan is leaking from three places on his face, and his right hand is bent at an angle that says at least two broken metacarpals, and somebody needs to deal with that before he bleeds on the pool table felt that Gage just had replaced.
“Get Margot,” I tell Colt.
She’s in the main clubhouse. Has been all evening, curled up in the corner of the old leather couch with a glass of wine.
She’s been here four months now, and she’s carved out spaces in The Forge that belong to her.
That corner of the couch. The chair by the window in our room.
The shelf I built that’s already too small because she reads faster than I can add planks.
Colt’s back in under a minute. She comes through the door behind him, takes one look at Harlan bleeding on a bar stool and Brick standing over him with split knuckles, and stops.
“Seriously?” She’s looking at Brick. Then at me. “It’s a Thursday.”
“He had it coming,” Brick mutters with his head bowed like he doesn’t want to meet her eyes.
“They always have it coming.” She crosses the room and I watch the shift happen. The eye-roll gives way to something sharper. Focused. She’s already cataloging the damage before she reaches him. “Come on. Not in here. Bring him through to the back.”
Colt hauls Harlan up and walks him through to the clubhouse side. Margot follows, already pulling her hair back, already in work mode. I lean against the bar and watch them go.
Four months. Four months and she’s got the brothers trained.
They bleed, they come to Margot. Not using the stuff from the old green duffel with expired gauze and fish-mox that Gage used to keep behind the bar.
She replaced that kit in the second week.
She walked in with two hundred dollars’ worth of proper supplies and a look that dared anyone to comment on the expense. Nobody did.
I give it ten minutes. Finish my bourbon. Then I follow.
She’s got Harlan in a chair by the kitchen. Gloves on, that focused calm I’ve seen a hundred times now and still can’t look away from. She tilts his chin up, turns his head side to side.
“Butterfly closures for the eyebrow. The nose isn’t broken, you’re just a bleeder. Your hand is the real problem.” She takes his wrist and rotates it. Harlan hisses through his teeth. “Second and third metacarpals. I can splint this, but you need an X-ray.”
“No hospitals,” Harlan manages.
“I didn’t say hospital. I said X-ray. The urgent care on Poplar. Nine AM tomorrow.” She looks at him. “That’s not optional.”
She knows about the urgent care on Poplar, she has contacts there now.
She knows which clinics file reports and which ones don’t.
She knows the pharmacy that fills scripts without calling the prescriber and the vet supply place in Bartlett where you can get suture kits and antibiotics without a paper trail.
Four months and she’s figured out the underside of Memphis healthcare with the same systematic precision she used to map The Forge’s exits her first night here.
I should find that troubling, but somehow I’m more impressed than anything else.
She works fast. Butterflies the eyebrow, packs the nostril, splints the hand.
Efficient, borderline casual. She’s done this a thousand times, just not usually in a clubhouse at eleven PM on a Thursday while a cat sleeps on a chair three feet away.
Hemingway doesn’t even lift his head. He’s seen worse. We all have.
“Ice for twenty minutes. Ibuprofen, not aspirin.” She strips her gloves, drops them in the bin she made Sully put in here.
Looks at Harlan with the specific disappointment of a woman who is genuinely tired of patching up men who could have used their words.
“Next time, maybe don’t run your mouth at a bar full of people who have no patience for it. ”
“Yes ma’am.”
Ma’am. She’s thirty-one years old, a hundred and thirty pounds, and every man in this building calls her ma’am when she’s got gloves on. Something about the way she holds authority. Like it’s not borrowed. Like it grew there.
She washes her hands at the kitchen sink. Dries them. Turns to Brick, who’s been hovering in the doorway like a kid outside the principal’s office.
“You.” She points at him. “You’re buying me a new box of butterfly closures. That’s the third time this month.”
“Yes ma’am.”
She walks past him. Squeezes his arm once, quickly, so he knows she’s not actually mad. Brick exhales. The man weighs two-fifty and just got absolved by a woman half his size.
I follow her back to the main room. She reclaims her corner of the couch, picks up her wine, tucks her feet under her. Settles back in like she just got up to check on something in the kitchen. Like none of that was a thing.
I drop onto the couch beside her. Not close. Close enough. My arm along the back behind her shoulders.
“You good?” I ask.
“Mm-hm.” She takes a sip. “I can tell Brick was trying to do less damage this time. It’s progress.”
She’s reading the violence now the same way she reads vitals. Cataloging it in that clinical brain alongside blood pressure readings and medication dosages.
“Stop looking at me like that,” she says. She’s not looking at me. She can just feel it.
“Like what.”
“Like I just performed surgery. I put butterfly closures on a grown man who got punched for being stupid. That’s not impressive. That’s a Thursday around here.”
It’s not that, It’s everything. The way she commands a room without raising her voice.
The way the brothers respect her not just because she’s mine but because she’s earned it.
The way she built a life inside a world that should have swallowed her whole and instead she just rearranged it until it fit.
I don’t say any of that. Don’t need to. She reads it on my face and shakes her head with that almost-smile. The one I earned and keep earning.
My hand finds her knee. She leans into me. Just slightly. Just enough.
This is the life she chose. Not in spite of what it is, but because of it. Eyes open, steady hands, no flinch.
Mine.
Her hand comes to rest on top of mine. Light. Deliberate. Like everything she does.
We stay like that. The night does what nights do.
And this, all of this, is enough.