Chapter Nine
WE’D SAT AT that table over Drago enough times by now that the room had stopped pretending it was going to be nothing.
First word had come in weeks back, secondhand, our man on the inside passing along that Drago was making noise.
That’s all it was then. A caged animal running his mouth, and caged animals run their mouths, so we’d noted it, doubled a couple of things and gone on.
But Devil didn’t call the full table twice over a man just talking.
And he’d called it again tonight, everybody, patched and prospecting, phones in the box by the door and Bolt standing Sergeant-at-Arms with his back to it like he was holding the room shut.
So it wasn’t nothing anymore.
I took my seat and did the thing I’d been doing all week, which was try to keep my head where it belonged and out of my damn garden three nights back, off a pouch of tea and Amy’s fingers brushing mine and the way she’d stood there looking at me afterward.
Wasn’t working worth a shit. But I’d learned a long time ago how to keep one part of my head on business while the rest went somewhere it had no business going, so I set my forearms on the wood and gave Devil what he needed.
Devil let the room settle. He was good at that. He didn’t grab a room, he waited until it came to him, and it always came.
“Our man inside got close to something real,” he said, when everyone stopped talking.
“Drago’s not venting anymore. He’s working.
He’s put word out through the wire that he wants a job done on the outside.
Paying, or promising, I don’t know which yet, and it doesn’t matter.
” He let that sit a beat. “It’s Zeynep. It was always going to be Zeynep.
He’s not asking for us dead first. He’s asking for her to be taken, held for him, and everything else after. ”
The table made the low sound a table like ours makes when a thing lands. Not loud. We’re not a shouting kind of club, not in church. Just a shift, a settling of weight, a couple of men leaning back and a couple leaning in.
I felt it go through me like everybody else.
Zeynep. I could see her in my mind, watchful, careful with herself the way people get careful when they’ve spent a long time belonging to a man who counted every move they made.
She’d come to us out of the worst Dragon Fire ever did, more than half dead of it, and it was Mystic who’d pulled her the rest of the way back to the living.
Nobody’d have called those two. Mystic barely spoke, wore his war on the outside and worse underneath, that mismatched stare of his, one eye blue and one gold, that made most people look away before they knew they were doing it.
She hadn’t looked away. She’d looked dead at the broke places in him, married him for them, and these last months I’d watched her learn to sit with her back not quite to the wall, watched her unclench in a way I hadn’t figured she had left in her.
And she was carrying now. Four, five months along, starting to show it.
Mystic’s kid. The men had gotten meaner about keeping those two safe the second her belly rounded, the way a club does when there’s a baby coming even if nobody says much about it.
And Drago wanted her carried back to a cage.
“He can’t get to her from a cell,” Gearhead said. “Whoever he’s payin’ can’t neither, not if we do this right.”
“That’s the job,” Devil said. “That’s why we’re all sitting here.
” He put both hands flat on the table. “I want her covered like the president’s daughter.
Beef all of it up: the walls, the road, the cameras, the family homes off-property.
Nobody on this compound moves alone till it’s done.
We rotate it round the clock and we start tonight. ”
Mystic hadn’t moved at all since it started, hadn’t so much as shifted his weight, and when he spoke it came hard and final and not offered up for a vote. “Rotate whatever you want on the walls and the road. Ain’t nobody guardin’ her but me.”
Devil looked at him.
“She don’t wake up to a face she don’t know.
She don’t get handed off shift to shift like somethin’ in a lockbox.
” That mismatched stare didn’t come off Devil, one eye blue and one gold, and nothing in it moved.
“I’m her detail. All of it, every hour. The rest of y’all keep the world off my back and I’ll keep her and the baby breathin’.
That’s the only version of this I’m sittin’ still for. ”
Nobody argued. You didn’t argue that with Mystic, not about Zeynep.
The man had gone into hell after her once already and come back out dragging her with him, he’d made it plain more than once he’d do it again and not break stride.
Devil just nodded, slow. “The rest of us build the wall,” he said. “You’re inside it with them. Done.”
“Then whose hands is Drago usin’?” Mystic said, and now there was a thing underneath you didn’t ever want turned your way. “He’s in a cell. Somebody out here does the carryin’. We know the shooter?”
“No.” And I watched that cost Devil something to admit.
He liked knowing. We all did, and not knowing eats at a club worse than any named enemy.
“Our man heard the arrangement, not the name. Somebody Drago trusts to do ugly and not talk. Could be Dragon Fire leftovers. Could be hired. Could be somebody just walked out those gates with a debt to work off and nothing left to lose.” He shook his head.
“We’re blind on the who. So we cover the what. We cover her.”
Mystic’s jaw worked, but he took it. Blind on the who. It’s about the worst thing you can hand a man about the danger coming for his wife, and he took it, because there wasn’t a thing else to take.
Blind on the who. I turned that over while the table talked logistics, while Chain laid out shifts and Gatsby said something about eyes on the road, the cameras and getting more of them up, while Thunder, always deep in thought, asked hard serious questions about the family homes, the ones of us who didn’t sleep behind the compound walls.
I understood the why of it. He had a house full of what he loved sitting off this property with only him between it and the threat.
And somewhere under the front of me doing its job, the back of me did the thing it does. It went to her.
Had no damn reason to. Nobody had said her name. This was Zeynep. Drago wanted Zeynep, and there wasn’t a thing connecting Amy to any of it. She went to school across the river, slept three doors down from Brenda, and hadn’t given me much more than a cold look since the garden.
Didn’t matter.
Devil said nobody moved alone and there she was in my head: walking that long path out to my cabin after dark, driving that bridge every morning, crossing a campus full of strangers with that purple hair making her easy to pick out in any crowd.
The need to keep her safe came up so fast I damn near had to choke it back down.
Wasn’t mine.
She wasn’t mine.
A man sure as hell didn’t get to put himself on a woman’s back just because he couldn’t quit thinking about her, and Amy had made it plenty clear the last time we stood close that whatever right I’d once had to worry over her, I’d burned it up myself.
“Rune.”
Devil was looking at me. Half the table was.
“You’re no good to me in the rotation,” he said.
“I want you doing the thing only you do.” He held up a finger.
“One. Somebody’s going to come to this compound bleeding before this is through: maybe one of ours, maybe one of theirs we need kept alive long enough to say something useful.
You’re the closest thing to a doctor any of us is ever going to see.
Stocked, sober, ready, day or night.” A second finger.
“Two. You’re already out past everybody else.
That cabin of yours sits at the back with a look at the treeline and the river road nobody else on this property has got.
So you keep sleeping out there. But you keep your ears open, and you watch.
Anything comes up that back line that shouldn’t, I want to hear about it before it’s halfway to the walls. ”
“Yeah,” I said. “Course.”
“Good.” He moved on.
And that was that. Eyes on the back line, and the healer on his shelf waiting to be needed.
Same as I’d always been to this club when you got down to it: the one they kept a little apart, because apart was where I did the most good.
I’d never minded it. A man who keeps to the back sees what the men in the middle miss.
Church ran another hour. We nailed down the shifts and the signals, who took the road and who took the walls. And near the end of it Bolt spoke up from the doorway, where he’d stood with his arms crossed. “What about Amy?”
“Amy,” Devil said, looking down at the sheet in front of him. “She’s across that river every damn morning.”
My back tightened before I could stop it.
“College,” Bolt said. “Five days a week. Sometimes Saturdays.”
“She’s not going alone.” Devil looked up. “And before anybody says keep her home, save it. Girl’s worked too hard getting herself into that school for us to lock her behind these walls because some asshole she’s never met decided to make trouble.”
Nobody argued with that.
Devil looked around the table, past the men already spoken for on the walls and the road, then landed on me. Of course he did. I wasn’t standing a regular shift, and apparently the night wasn’t done finding new ways to screw with me.
“Rune. You’ve got the back line and the doctoring. Add her routes to it. Bridge, campus, wherever she goes, she doesn’t go alone. You’re on her.”
Every damn thing in me went still.
“Yeah,” I said.
Kept my face expressionless. Kept my voice the same as it’d been.
An hour ago I’d been sitting at that table telling myself I had no business wanting anywhere near her.
Josie had stood against the wall, arms crossed, not a vote at that table yet but taking in every word the way he took in everything.
When Devil finally reached for the gavel, Josie caught my eye across the room and gave me the smallest nod.
You good. Not a question, the way he did it.
He’d watched the thing land, and he was telling me anyway, in case I’d forgot.
The gavel came down and the room broke into the low talk that always came after, chairs pushing back, Bolt opening the door, the box of phones going around. I stayed in my seat a second longer than I needed to.
We had the threat. We had the woman it was aimed at. Drago wanted Zeynep, so we’d lock the whole damn compound down around her and make anybody coming for her regret getting through the gate.
Simple.
Come morning, I’d get Amy across that bridge, stay on her until she was back behind our walls, do it again the next day if Devil told me to.
Just a job.
I could call it that now.
I walked back to my cabin near midnight with the compound locked down behind me, brothers on the walls and Mystic’s light still burning yellow in the window where he’d probably sit awake till morning watching Zeynep breathe.
I took my spot out front like Devil ordered and watched the back line, the garden black around me and the woods blacker past it.
Across the yard the clubhouse sat lit up, and I knew without counting which window was hers.
I made myself look everywhere but there.
That was the job: watch the dark for what’s coming, not the lit-up window where the one thing I had no right to want had just shut off her lamp and gone to sleep, safe, a few hundred yards off.
I watched till the birds started up. The treeline stayed empty. The river road stayed empty. I’d be back out here the next night, and the one after, watching the same stretch of dark, certain as every other man on this property that this was the way it would come.
Her window had gone black hours back. I hadn’t looked.
Much.