Chapter Five
Lark
I woke with the blanket pulled up to my chin and no idea where I was for three full seconds.
The ceiling was wrong. Not my popcorn texture, not the water stain in the corner of my rental.
This ceiling was smooth and white and unfamiliar.
The light coming through the window was the wrong shade of pale.
I lay still beneath the blanket, taking in the shape of the room by degrees -- the dresser against the wall, the empty nightstand, the narrow bar of morning light cutting across the floorboards.
None of it belonged to me yet, but none of it felt like a threat either.
That difference mattered more than I wanted to admit.
I sat up. The blanket slid to my waist, and I pulled it back up around my shoulders without thinking.
The yarn was soft against my collarbone.
I’d slept in my T-shirt and underwear, same as always, and the morning air coming through the window had a bite to it that my rental’s paper-thin walls never managed to keep out -- or in, depending on the season.
Missouri in late spring, humidity already building outside, but this room stayed noticeably cooler than my apartment ever had.
Better insulation, maybe, or just a house built solid enough to keep the heat honest.
My duffel was propped against the wall where I’d left it.
I’d unpacked nothing except the toothbrush I’d set on the bathroom sink and the paperback I’d placed on the nightstand.
My few toiletries were still buried in the bag -- face wash, deodorant, the lip balm I kept in my pocket at work -- exactly where I’d shoved them the night before.
No one had touched them. That should have made me feel better.
Instead it just underlined the obvious: everything I owned that mattered fit in one bag, and even that bag looked out of place sitting against someone else’s wall.
The door was closed. I stared at it for a long moment, then swung my legs over the edge of the bed and crossed to it.
The handle turned easily in my hand. Not locked.
I hadn’t locked it last night -- had stood in the doorway looking at the lock and decided, in the exhausted hollow of my brain, that if I needed to lock a door inside this man’s house, I was in the wrong place to begin with.
The door opened onto the hallway, and beyond it, nothing stirred.
I moved to the window and looked out.
The compound spread beyond the window like something from another life.
Houses spaced at intervals, each with its own porch and driveway, gravel lots between them catching the early light.
The clubhouse sat near the main gate, its double doors closed, the Hades Abyss logo burned dark into the wood.
The row of bikes along the far edge of the lot was missing two -- gaps in the lineup where chrome should have been.
My shoulders dropped. I hadn’t realized they were up around my ears until they weren’t.
I let the slat fall back into place and turned to the duffel.
The pair of jeans with the frayed hems I saved for days off.
A flannel shirt that had been my grandfather’s, too big in the shoulders, the cuffs rolled twice.
I pulled them on and wrapped the blanket around myself like a shield, tucking the edges under my arms. My feet were bare on the hardwood floor, and the cool of it traveled up through my soles and into my ankles.
I hadn’t brought slippers. Hadn’t thought that far ahead.
The hallway was still, Roulette’s bedroom door shut.
The living room was exactly as it had been last night -- the leather couch, the coffee table with the half-empty water glass, the club memorabilia on the wall catching the light from the front windows.
I moved through it toward the kitchen archway, and the smell reached me before I crossed the threshold.
The kitchen smelled faintly of toast and clean soap. On the counter beside the sink sat a folded dish towel, a glass of water, and a sticky note written in block letters: HELP YOURSELF. Nothing elaborate. Nothing sentimental. Just evidence that someone had thought ahead before leaving.
I stood in the doorway and looked at it. His boots were gone from the mat by the back door. The saddlebag was missing from the hook beside the refrigerator. The specificity of it -- not a gesture, not an offer, just a thing done because it needed doing -- closed my throat for a second.
I drank the water in small swallows. It was cold enough to make my teeth ache, and I kept both hands around the glass while I stood at the kitchen window and looked out.
The compound was waking up. A group of men crossed the gravel lot toward the clubhouse, their voices carrying in indistinct fragments -- someone laughing, the sound sharp and then gone.
A woman on the porch of the house across the way was hanging something on a clothesline strung between two posts, quick and sure with each clothespin.
A dog -- some kind of shepherd mix, black and tan -- trotted between the houses with its nose to the ground, following a scent beyond human capability.
The morning light caught the chrome on the bikes still parked along the edge of the lot and threw it back in bright, fractured glints.
The water cut through the stale taste in my mouth. I didn’t realize how thirsty I was until the glass was half-empty, and then I kept drinking, letting the cold settle me from the inside out.
The blanket was warm around my shoulders. My bare feet were cold on the flooring, but the glass grounded me -- cool, solid, real -- and I stood at the window watching the world beyond it.
When the glass was empty, I set it in the sink. I pulled the blanket tighter around me and turned back to the window.
The men had disappeared into the clubhouse.
The woman was gone from the porch, but the clothesline she’d been working still swayed with a row of shirts and towels pinned along its length.
The dog had vanished between two houses.
The gravel lot lay undisturbed, the bikes standing in their patient rows, and beyond them the tree line at the edge of the property caught the light and held it, green and still and impossibly far from the cracked sidewalk I walked every morning to Patsy’s.
I stood there until my feet went numb from the cold, and then I turned toward the rest of the day.
* * *
I’d put on socks eventually, found my sneakers by the front door, and stepped off the porch into the gravel without any particular destination in mind.
The clubhouse drew me -- the largest structure on the property, yellow light spilling from its windows, the sound of voices carrying through the walls even at this distance.
I crossed the lot with my hands in my pockets. The gravel shifted under my sneakers, each step a small announcement. A man on a porch two houses down raised his chin in a nod as I passed. I nodded back because it seemed like the thing to do and kept walking.
The clubhouse doors were propped open with cinder blocks.
Inside, the main room was half-empty, the jukebox dead.
The noise was coming from the back, through a doorway I hadn’t noticed.
Kitchen sounds. The hiss of something in a pan, the clatter of a lid being set down, a woman’s voice saying something I couldn’t make out followed by another woman’s laugh.
I stopped at the doorway. The kitchen was larger than I’d expected -- commercial range, industrial fridge, a long stainless-steel counter running the length of the far wall.
A woman stood at the stove with her back to me, one hand on a cast-iron skillet’s handle, the other reaching for a spatula on the counter beside her.
She was maybe forty, maybe older, her dark hair pulled into a loose knot at the nape of her neck, a faded Hades Abyss T-shirt tucked into jeans that had seen better decades.
She glanced over her shoulder at the sound of my footsteps, gave me a quick once-over, and turned back to the skillet without missing a beat.
“You’re the one Roulette’s been hiding out at his place.
Marcy.” She said it like a fact, not an introduction, though it was both.
“Brazil’s mine, for what it’s worth, not that anybody around here bothers with the paperwork on that.
” She handled the kitchen like she owned every drawer, every burner, every inch of counter space.
I got the sense she’d earned the right to it a long time ago.
At the table by the window, another woman folded dish towels into neat squares, a basket of clean laundry at her feet.
Younger than Marcy, or maybe just softer around the edges -- blonde hair cut short, practical, no makeup.
She looked up when my shadow fell across the threshold, and her expression didn’t change except for a slight lift at the corner of her mouth.
“Becca,” she said, not looking up again right away, folding the next towel into its square. “I keep this place from falling down around everybody’s ears. You want coffee, it’s on the counter. You want to sit somewhere that isn’t sticky, that chair by Marcy’s your best bet.”
Marcy turned halfway, spatula in hand, and gave me a once-over that lasted about two seconds. “You eaten?”
“No,” I said.
Marcy nodded toward the counter. “Grab a plate.”
I hesitated in the doorway. My hands were still in my pockets.
The blanket was gone -- I’d left it on Roulette’s porch -- and without it I felt exposed, like someone had taken away the one thing between me and the morning.
The kitchen was warm from the stove, smelled of bacon grease and toast and the yeasty note of bread proofing somewhere under a dish towel.
The familiarity of it caught me off guard.
I stepped in. “Can I help?”
Marcy kept her attention on the skillet. She slid the spatula under a row of eggs, flipped them in one clean motion, and reached for a cutting board on the counter beside her. Handed it to me along with a knife and three tomatoes from a bowl near the sink.
“Chop these. Not too small.”
I took the board and the knife and the tomatoes and found a spot at the end of the stainless counter.
The knife was sharp -- sharper than any knife in my kitchen had ever been -- and the tomato flesh gave under the blade with a clean, wet sound.
I started cutting. Wedges, then smaller, my fingers keeping the tomato steady while the knife did its work.
Becca reached for another towel from the basket. “Titan called this morning. They’re sending someone up from Mississippi next week for the parts run.”
Marcy grunted. “Which one?”
“Didn’t say. Probably Throttle. He likes the drive.”
“Throttle talks too much.”
“Everyone talks too much for you.”
A snort from the stove. I kept chopping. The tomatoes bled juice onto the cutting board, red and slick, and I wiped my fingers on the leg of my jeans and kept going.
“You think somebody should get out to that garden before the weeds take the tomatoes?” Becca asked. “Fox’s wife’s rows are still going, barely, but nobody’s touched it in weeks.”
“It’ll hold. Nobody wants to be the one out there pulling weeds in hundred-degree heat come July.”
“I’d do it.”
“You say that every year.”
The conversation moved around me like water around a stone. I chopped tomatoes.
Nobody asked me anything else. Nobody made a production out of my being there, chopping vegetables in a stranger’s kitchen at eight in the morning in someone else’s borrowed flannel.
Becca kept folding towels. Marcy kept working the stove, calling out instructions without turning around -- watch the toast, hand me that bowl, not that one, the blue one -- like I’d been standing at that counter for years instead of twenty minutes.
By the time the eggs were plated and the tomatoes were divided into three bowls, something in my shoulders had unclenched that I hadn’t noticed was tight.
It became a routine over the next few mornings without either of us deciding it should.
I’d wake up, find whatever note Roulette had left on the counter, and end up at that picnic table outside his house with a cup of coffee, watching the compound come to life, before I wandered over to the clubhouse kitchen to see what Marcy needed chopped that day.
Nobody questioned it. I didn’t examine it too closely either.