Chapter 11 #2
"Did he say something?" My fingers are white around the phone.
"He grabbed my arm." She chokes on the word. "He grabbed my arm, Saylor. He leaned in and he said—he said Dennis wants me to stop being difficult."
Stop being difficult.
The words hit me like a closed fist.
Stop being difficult is the phrase my father used when my mother filed for divorce.
Stop being difficult is what he said to Christine Pelletier in the parking lot before he pulled out a knife.
Stop being difficult is the last thing a woman hears before a man who believes he owns her decides to prove it.
"Are you home?" My voice sounds like it belongs to someone else. Someone calmer, someone steadier, someone whose vision isn't narrowing to a pinpoint.
"Yes, I'm back home now. I locked everything." She's crying and talking at the same time, the words tumbling over each other.
"He smiled at me after he said it, Saylor." Her breath hitches. "He smiled and walked away. Like grabbing a woman in a parking lot and threatening her is a normal thing people do."
I push off the wall, already reaching for my jacket. "I'm coming to get you."
"No. Stay where you are. Stay at your friend’s place."
My fingers tighten around the phone. "Mom?—"
"Saylor, listen to me." Her voice steadies by sheer force of will, the same way mine steadies when the shaking gets bad. Like mother, like daughter. "If you come here and he's watching the house, he sees you. He follows you. Right now the safest place you can be is where you are."
She's right. I know she's right. And knowing it makes me want to scream until my lungs give out.
"I'm telling Rookie." I push off the wall. "And then I'm calling you back. Don't open the door. Don't go outside."
Her breathing slows by a fraction. "I won't."
I press my palm flat against the wall. "Promise me."
Her voice breaks again. "I promise."
I hang up and walk through the bar with my phone in my fist and my face set in concrete.
Rookie is at a table near the window, nursing a Coke, his laptop open in front of him. He looks up when I stop beside him, and his body goes rigid before I say a word.
He reads me the way he reads code. One look. Every detail processed.
"Saylor." He closes the laptop. "What happened?"
"Creedy was at my mom's office." My voice is flat. Level. Costing me everything to keep it there. "He grabbed her arm. Told her my pathetic excuse of a father wants her to stop being difficult."
Rookie's expression empties.
Not anger. Not shock. Something deeper than both. A stillness that starts in his shoulders and moves through his entire body until even his breathing goes flat.
I've seen him angry.
I've seen him pace his room and hit walls and shake with the effort of not hunting Creedy down in the dark.
This is different. This is the version of him I haven't met yet.
The one that lives underneath the college student and the prospect, underneath the man who makes me laugh with ridiculous pens and kisses my forehead when I'm scared.
This version is very, very calm.
He pulls his phone from his pocket. Dials. Holds it to his ear without breaking eye contact with me.
"Prez." One word. "Creedy put hands on Saylor's mother. Her workplace. Tonight."
He listens. Nods once.
"I'll send you the address." He ends the call.
Tildie appears at my elbow. I didn't hear her come up behind me. She's holding a glass of water, and she puts it in my hand without asking and stands beside me with her hip touching mine.
Leah is behind her. Phone already out, already dialing. "What's your mom's address? I'll go to her."
I give her the address. My voice is mechanical. Leah nods, grabs her jacket, and walks out the front door.
Ellie is in the kitchen doorway. Arms crossed. Watching.
She doesn't move, doesn't speak. She stands there like a wall—solid, immovable, present.
The women don't wait for the men to organize. They move on instinct.
Someone is hurt. Someone needs help. You don't wait to be asked. You go.
Tildie's hip presses against mine. Warm. Steady.
"Breathe." She says it the way she says everything—direct, without pity, like she's handing me a tool and expecting me to use it. "Leah will be there in fifteen minutes. Your mom won't be alone."
I breathe. Because Tildie told me to and because my body won't do it on its own right now.
Rookie’s standing in front of me. The phone is back in his pocket. His expression hasn't changed from that empty, still, calculating version I've never seen.
He reaches out and takes the water glass from my grip because my fingers have gone white around it and sets it on the table.
Then he takes both my wrists—gently, so gently it makes my throat close—and holds them between us.
"He's not going to ever touch her again. You have my word." He says it without volume. Without heat. Without any of the fury I've seen from him before.
It's not a threat. It's not a promise.
It's a fact. Delivered the way you'd say the sun will come up tomorrow.
And the certainty in his voice terrifies me more than Creedy ever did.
Because I'm looking at the man I am now realizing I love and seeing, for the first time, what lives behind every other part of him.
The club isn't a group of men who ride motorcycles and drink at a bar named after a road.
The club is a machine. And when someone threatens its people, the machine starts moving.
It's moving now. I can feel it in the way Rookie holds my wrists, in the way Tildie stands beside me, in the way Ellie watches from the kitchen door and Leah drives through the dark toward my mother's house without being asked.
The machine is moving, and Dale Creedy is standing in its path.
I close my eyes. Press my forehead against Rookie's chest. Feel his heartbeat, steady and slow, the calmest thing in the room.
"Okay." I whisper it into his shirt.
His arms wrap around me, and he holds on.
And somewhere in the dark, between the clubhouse and my mother’s, things are already being set in motion that I'm not allowed to see.