Chapter 7
CHAPTER SEVEN
Rooster
Church is at nine, and they come get me right on the dot.
Compass does it.
He won’t even look at me.
He comes to the door of my room and knocks on the frame even though it's open. "They want you." He says it to a spot on the wall about a foot to the left of my head.
I stand up. He steps back to let me through and then he falls in behind me down the hall, close, one pace off my shoulder the whole way, like he's walking a man to a bus he's not sure will leave without him.
I could tell him he doesn't have to. I've been walking myself where I'm told for years now.
I don't tell him. Somebody put him on me, and doing what he's told is the only thing either of us knows how to do this morning.
The chapel door's open.
I've never been through it.
For years, I've stood outside that door more times than I can count, waiting, holding something, delivering something, and I've never once had a reason to be on the other side of it, because prospects don't go in there.
That's the whole point of it.
What happens in there is for men who've earned the right to be in the room, and I haven’t earned it.
I'm about to go in anyway, and every man at that table knows exactly what it means.
They're all there.
Amara at the head, Razor on her right, the patched men down both sides, and the big reaper burned into the middle of the wood.
There's a chair pulled out at the foot of the table, away from everybody, and that one's mine.
I don't sit.
Nobody's told me I can sit and I'm not going to until somebody does.
Python clocks that I'm standing, and his jaw works, and I can't tell if he respects it or if he's deciding it's one more thing I'm doing wrong.
"Sit down, Rooster," Amara says.
I sit. I put my hands on my thighs where I can keep them, and I don't put them anywhere else.
"Tell everyone," Amara says. "All of it. Same as the office. They've heard the gist. Now they hear it from you."
So I tell them everything.
Same as her office, except there's fourteen of them and the door's shut and every face is pointed at me.
My name. Sierra Vista. Where my father worked for nineteen years, how I was a sixteen-year-old on a job site. Everything about Ironwood. What they are, where they came from, and what they did to my mother for a town her grandmother was born in.
I get to the federal building in Tucson and I speak flatly. "My father and I informed. We gave them everything we had on the organization."
Nobody says anything for a second.
Then Python leans forward on his forearms. "You're a rat."
"Python," Amara says.
"No. I want him to say it. In here. At this table." He's looking at me the way you look at a thing you're about to break to see what's inside it. "You sat in a federal building and gave up a whole organization. Yes or no?"
"Yes."
"Say the word."
It’s hard to hold his eyes and I do it anyway, because a man who looks at the table right now is a man who thinks he did wrong, and I don't.
"I informed the Feds on everything Ironwood was doing." My voice comes out level. "Call it what you want. I won't argue the word with you."
"Rat's the word." He says it slowly, testing whether it'll move me.
"Then rat's the word." It doesn't move me. He wanted it to, and it doesn't.
He sits back, and I watch him decide he'll come back to me later.
Zorro picks it up before the quiet can land.
"Six years." Zorro's never loud. He doesn't get loud now, and that's worse.
"Six years on this property. On the gate.
In the garage. Eyes on every vehicle through that fence and a key to half the buildings.
" He turns a bottle cap over on the wood, once, with one finger.
"You sat at my Sunday table. You held my son.
And the whole time there's an organization in Arizona that'd put this charter in the ground to get to you. "
Leo. He's about four. He fell asleep on me at a table in September with his fist in my collar and Ruby took a picture of it.
Something goes tight under my sternum, and I keep my face where it is.
"Yes," I say.
"And you said nothing?"
"No."
"Why not?"
I look at him. His finger's still on the bottle cap.
"I thought I'd lost them." It's the truth and it doesn't help. "I crossed the river and went where they wouldn't look, and for six years nobody came. I let myself believe it was done. That's the answer. It's not a good one and I know it."
"It's not a good one," Zorro says, and takes his finger off the cap.
"No."
Axel comes in from the side. "You were here.
Sally Bernard. The auction. Diego. You were on the extraction in Colombia, you helped plan the Torres rescue, you sat in this building while we bled over this trafficking ring, and every one of those times there's a gun at the back of this club only you could see, and you let us stand in front of it blindly. "
"Yes."
"You don't get to just say yes." Axel's out of his chair and his palms hit the table. "You don't get to sit there and agree with me like you're not the reason—"
"Axel." Amara doesn't raise her voice.
Axel looks at her, then down at his own hands on the wood, takes them back, and sits.
He's not wrong.
Everybody at this table knows he's not wrong, and I know it better than any of them.
I sit there and take it because taking it is the only thing I can do right now.
It goes on.
They take everything apart.
What I had access to. Whether the Marshals know where I am. Whether they know where the club is. Whether a man they trained and turned and lost has been a federal thread through the middle of the charter for six years.
Razor asks it and it's the worst question in the room because it isn't about how I feel.
"Are you still theirs?" Razor looks directly in my eyes.
"No."
"You walked out of the program."
"I haven't spoken to a Marshal in ten years." I look at him. "My father's still in it. I'm the reason they'd have a way to find him, so I've spent ten years making sure they can't find me to get to him. I'm not theirs. I'm nobody's."
Razor thinks about it for a second, nods once, and sits back.
Amara's been letting them run it.
She told me in her office she wasn't angry and I believe her, and she's letting Python, Zorro, and Axel take strips off me because they've earned the right and she won't take it from them.
She doesn't step in front of things that belong to her men.
"Anything else?" she asks, looking around the table.
Boulder shifts. He hasn't said a word. Big quiet man, patched last year, and he looks at me down the length of the table.
"Kelsey's brother walks my dog," Boulder says. "Compass. Every morning. Past your garage."
"Yeah."
"You ever think about what walks up that road behind him?"
My hands press down on my thighs before I can stop them.
I don't have an answer for that.
"Every day," I say, and my voice isn't as level as it was. "I think about it every day."
Boulder holds my eyes for a second, then nods slowly and looks back at the table.
He's not done thinking about it. I can see that. He's just done saying it out loud.
"Is that everything?" Amara asks.
I sit here because it's not everything.
There's one more, and it's the one that matters, and I'd give anything not to say it in this room.
"No," I say. "There's more."
The room goes still.
My hands won't stay flat now.
I press them down harder and it doesn't work, so I lace my fingers together on the table in front of me and hold on to my own knuckles.
"The woman who appeared at the gate. Camila Bacani.
" My knuckles go white and I look at them instead of anybody's face.
"I grew up across the street from her. Her parents raised me half the time.
I ate at their table more nights than my own.
Ten years ago, I ran without telling her, because she was the one person Ironwood would've looked for, and I thought if I disappeared, they'd never have a reason to touch her. "
Nobody moves.
"I sent postcards. To her folks. Ten years, no return address, cash when I had it, because I knew they were struggling and there wasn't anything else I could do. I paid the taxes on their house so nobody could take it. That's the only tie I let myself have. I thought I was being careful."
My throat's closing and I go through it.
"Ironwood found the mail. I don't know how. She doesn't either. But they worked out that mail was coming to that house and who it was from. They went there to get my location from her parents."
Somebody breathes out slowly.
"Her mother and father were in that house a week before anybody found them."
My eyes go and I don't do one thing about it.
I let it come down my face in a room full of men who've never seen me anything but emotionless, and I don't wipe it.
I don't look up, and I keep hold of my own hands on the table.
"They had two people and all the time in the world, and neither one of them gave me up. They died on the floor with my address in their mouths, and they never said it."
The chapel's dead silent.
"She got out a year after they were already dead.
Went home. Found the house cleaned up, and her parents in the ground and a safe with my address in her father's handwriting.
That's what my lie cost. Two people who raised me.
And nine years of her life on top of it.
The ones who took her weren't even Ironwood.
I burned my whole life down to protect her, and it was the wrong men.
It was always going to be the wrong men. "
I look at Amara because I can't look at anybody else.
"So vote me out. That's your choice to make, and I won't say one word against it.
But nothing this table does to me touches what I already did to her.
There's no punishment for me in this room.
I already got the one that burns through me.
It's that she's out there right now and I can't fix one thing about what happened to her.
I'll carry that every day of my life, whether there's a cut on my back or I'm on a bus to nowhere. "
Then I shut my mouth, because I'm a prospect, and I've already said more than a prospect's got any right to in a room that isn't mine.
Nobody talks for a long time.
I look at the reaper burned into the table because I can't look at them, and the heater in the corner ticks, and somewhere out in the building a baby cries and then stops.
A chair scrapes.
Doom stands up.
I've said maybe ten words to Doom the whole time we've both been here. He patched last year. He's the quietest man in the room, quieter than me, and I've watched this club go silent for him exactly once, the day he got his colors. It goes silent for him now.
He doesn't look at me. He looks at the table.
"Do you remember when you sat and asked whether I was a threat?" His voice is gravel and he uses it like it costs money. "My blood. Who my father was. What I might be because of where I came from."
Nobody says anything.
"You cleared me because I chose. Not for what I was born into.
For what I chose to do about it." He puts two fingers on the wood.
"He chose too. His whole family was getting killed, and he chose to burn down the men doing it, and he's paid for it for ten years, alone, with no club, no name, no one by his side. "
He takes his fingers off the table.
"Every one of us rode through that gate carrying something we didn't say. Mine came for me last year in the middle of this club, and every man here stood in front of it with me. His came for him this week. That's the difference. He's not less than us because his came late."
He sits down.
That's all of it. He barely speaks, and he just spent more on me than I've heard him spend on anybody.
I didn't ask him to, and I'll never pay it back either.
Amara lets it settle among the group.
Then she stands, and the room comes to order around her the way it does.
She looks down the length of the table at me.
"Here's where we are. You lied about your name. Every man in here did. You informed on a white power group, ten years back, before you ever saw our patch. I don't hold that against you and I told you so in my office."
She swallows and looks around the room.
"What I hold against you is six years of silence. You owed this club the day you rode up to that gate, and part of what you owed was telling us what might be riding up behind you. You didn't. That's real. It doesn't go away because your reasons were human."
"No, ma'am."
"So, you stay a prospect."
The room doesn't move.
"No patch. No timeline. You don't ask me about it, and you don't ask anybody at this table about it.
You want back the trust you burned, you earn it, starting now, and it takes longer than you want, and you don't complain about that one single time.
" She puts her hands flat on the table. "There's an organization in Arizona that killed two civilians to find you, and multiple women in a hole in the ground this club is about to have a conversation about.
You're going to be useful to both, because you know more about Ironwood than any man alive who isn't in a cell or the program.
You don't get to run from your past anymore. You're going to fight against it."
She looks around the table.
"Anybody's got a problem with that, say it now."
Nobody says anything.
Python's jaw is still going.
Axel's still got his arms crossed.
Boulder's still somewhere out on that road with the dog.
And not one of them opens his mouth, because Doom stood up, and the room turned when he did, and every man in it felt it go.
"Then we're done," Amara says. "Rooster. Get out. Go find your girl."
I get up. My legs don't want to hold me, and I make them.
I'm at the door when Amara says my name again and I stop.
"She's not down the hall," she says. "She's at the fire pit. Been out there the whole time we've been in here, in the cold, where she can see the chapel door." One corner of her mouth pulls and it isn't a smile. "I don't think she trusts us with you yet."