Chapter 16 #3
"Zorro, you were right about the fence and I won't pretend otherwise, so you're not riding.
You're holding this club. Axel stays with you.
Compass stays—he's the mechanic, and he's got two nieces in that house across the street plus Kelsey is expecting too, so his motivation's in the right place.
Marco's men hold the gate. Alejandro sends four more up from Chihuahua tomorrow, and if you want more than that, you tell me tonight and you'll have it. "
Zorro sits up straighter.
"You're not being punished," Amara says. "You made the strongest argument in this room and I'm handing you exactly what you asked for. Everybody I don't take north is somebody I trust to hold what's here. That's not the consolation prize. It's the other half of the job."
"Understood, Prez."
"Good." She turns her head. "Rooster."
Finn's head comes up.
"You're riding. You know that ground and you know those men, and there's no world where I leave you behind. You're still a prospect. You'll take orders from every patch on this run, Vegas patches included, and you won't like all of them."
"Yes, ma'am."
"And Camila."
I straighten without meaning to.
Amara looks at me down the length of that table.
There's nothing soft anywhere in her face, and nobody's done anything better for me since I came through that gate.
"I'm not going to insult you by granting you permission," she says.
"You were going to be there whether this table voted yes or no.
If we'd voted it down, you'd have been on a bus north inside a week with that ledger in your shirt, and every person in this room knows it, and half of them would've followed you anyway. "
My eyes go hot all over again and I keep my chin up.
Nobody has ever done that. Not once in my life.
Every good person who ever loved me handled me—my parents deciding what I could know, Finn deciding what I could survive, Marie deciding when to take a mirror off a wall.
All of it was kindness, yes, but it was done over the top of my head.
And a woman I've known for nine weeks just told a room full of armed men that I was going with or without them, and said it like it was weather.
"So you're not coming because I'm allowing it.
You're coming because you're the only living person who's been inside that hallway, and there's not one man at this table worth what you're worth to this operation.
" She stands, and the whole room stands with her.
"You ride in my vehicle, you brief my people, and once we're on that ground you do what I tell you.
If you can't say yes to the last part, say so now and we'll have a different conversation. "
"Yes, Prez."
"Then it's done." She raps her knuckles once on the wood. "We go in nine days. Everybody out. Rooster, Imani, Camila—you three stay. There's a map to finish."
The room empties.
I'm still standing when Zorro comes past me, and he stops.
He's a big man with a soft face and hands like slabs of meat.
He plants himself in front of me and I make myself hold his eyes, because I refuse to be the woman who can't look at a man for telling the truth.
"I voted against you," he says.
"I know."
"I'd vote against it again if she called it again in five minutes." He says it plainly. "That's my job. Somebody's got to count our own or there's nothing to come home to."
"I know," I say. "You're not wrong."
"That's not—" He stops. Starts over, and his voice comes out different. "What you said in there. About saying thank you."
I don't answer. I can't.
"My wife's asleep down the hall right now with my son," he says. "And I have laid in bed at night and heard about somebody else's kid on the news and been glad it wasn't mine. Glad. And then hated myself for a week." His throat works. "I didn't know anybody else did that. I thought that was mine."
My eyes fill and I let them.
"It's everybody's," I say.
"Yeah." He looks at the floor for a second.
"A few days from now I'm going to be standing on this property with a rifle, and my family's going to be behind me.
You're going to be in a hole in Arizona pulling eleven women out of the ground.
Both of those are the job." He puts one enormous hand out.
"Don't die. Ruby's already planning the party for when you all get back and she's ordered too much meat. "
I shake his hand.
"Tell her I'll help her cook," I say.
"You cook?"
"My mother taught me." My throat closes and I get around it. "I haven't in ten years. I think I remember how."
"You'll remember." He squeezes my hand once, and lets go. "That stuff doesn't leave. My mother's been dead sixteen years and I still can't make rice without hearing her tell me I'm doing it wrong."
Then he goes to find his wife.
And I stand in an empty chapel in a motorcycle club in Mexico thinking about a promise I made through a door, and for the first time since I climbed out of that hole, I'm not walking there by myself.
Two hundred and eighty-one nights.
Only a few more, and then I'm going to knock on that door and she's going to knock back, and I'm going to open it.