Chapter Ten
THE LOCKDOWN HAD been on a full day before it came for the one thing I had left that was mine.
It had gone from a place where men wandered around half-asleep with coffee to a place where everybody moved with a purpose and a direction and one eye on the treeline, doubled up, nobody alone, Zeynep somewhere at the center of it all with Mystic bolted to her side like a second shadow.
Nobody’d told me the details. Nobody tells me details.
But you don’t need the briefing to read a clubhouse that’s gone to war, and I’d kept my head down and my mouth shut and figured if I just stayed small and out of the way, the way I know how to do, it would all happen around me and leave me be.
It found me on the second morning, at my own car, keys in my hand.
“You can’t take that out by yourself.” Chain, coming across the lot, not unkind but not asking. “Not till this is done.”
“I have class at eight.”
“I know it. It’s handled.” He said it like handled was a comfort, and something in the way he wouldn’t quite look at me told me it was going to be the opposite of a comfort. “Brenda wants to talk to you first. Inside.”
Brenda was at the kitchen table with her hands wrapped around a mug she wasn’t drinking, and she had the face on. Not the Tom face. An older one. The one I’d only seen a couple of times, the one that meant she’d gone to bat for me somewhere and come back with nothing.
“Sit down, baby.”
“I’ll stand. I’ve got — ”
“Amy. Sit.”
I sat.
“You can’t drive yourself no more. Not while this thing’s on.
” She turned the mug in her hands. “Devil’s locked the place down, and that means everybody, includin’ you.
You want to keep goin’ to that school, and I want you to keep goin’, so…
somebody’s gotta go with you. There and back. Every day, till it’s over.”
“Then you go with me.” Easy. Obvious. “You come. We’ll make a thing of it.”
And her face did something terrible, because she’d already thought of that, I could see it, she’d already stood in a room and offered exactly that and had it turned down flat.
“I asked,” she said, soft. “I asked to be the one. Devil said no. Said if somebody’s on you, it’s got to be somebody who can — ” her mouth pressed — “somebody who can do somethin’ about it, if it comes to that.
A patch. Not a fifty-three-year-old woman with a bad back and a can of mace.
” She tried to make it a joke and it didn’t take. “It’s got to be one of the men.”
I already knew. I think I knew before she said the next part. My body knew, the way it always knows the thing before the words come.
“And they’re all spoken for,” I said.
“All but one.” She looked at me then, and there was so much sorry in it.
“Baby, I fought it. I want you to know I fought it hard as I could without — without sayin’ things I’ve got no business sayin’ in front of Devil.
But everybody’s spoken for. Everybody’s got a post. There’s exactly one man with the hours free, his own way to get around and nothin’ tyin’ him to the walls. ”
“Say it,” I said. My voice already betraying me. “Say his name, Brenda.”
“Rune.”
There it was.
I don’t know what hit first, except I was mad.
Really mad. The absolute nerve of it. I’d spent months figuring out how not to be wherever Rune was, and now Devil had decided Rune was going to follow me around every day and called it protection, which apparently meant I didn’t even get a vote.
Worse, he was putting him right in the middle of the one part of my day that was mine, that forty-minute drive across the bridge when nobody needed anything from me and I could turn the radio up or leave it off and watch the river go pink-gold for those ten minutes before the sun got too high.
I got to just be Amy out there, and now Rune was going to be there too.
Every morning. God, this was going to suck.
“No,” I said.
“Amy — ”
“No. I’ll take the bus. I’ll — there’s a park-and-ride, I’ll leave the car, I’ll — ”
“They thought of that. He follows the bus too. He follows whatever you do.” Brenda reached across and put her hand over mine and I let her, barely.
“Honey, listen to me. This is not a thing you can win. I already lost it for the both of us. The only choice you got left is whether you make it hard on yourself on top of everything, or whether you get in the car and let the man do his job and don’t give him one inch of yourself past that.
” Her fingers tightened. “You hear me? Not one inch. He drives behind you, that’s all he gets.
That’s all any of them ever get, if you’re smart, and you’re the smartest girl I know. ”
She meant it to keep me from getting hurt. She’d already paid for that lesson herself and was trying to give it to me for free.
“Fine,” I said. “Not one inch.”
And I meant it, walking out to my car. I meant it all the way down to my shoes.
* * *
He was already there.
Out past the gate, off to the side of the road, straddling that bike of his with the engine off and one boot planted on the ground.
He wasn’t looking at me. He was watching the road, the trees, everything around us, because apparently Rune took follow Amy to school as seriously as he took everything else.
He had his cut on, dark glasses hiding his eyes, sleeves pushed up enough to show his forearms, and the whole big-biker-on-a-Harley thing should not have worked on me nearly as well as it did.
Great. Apparently being furious with Rune did not make him less hot.
That was the problem with him. I could be mad at him all I wanted. My body apparently hadn’t been invited to that decision.
I got in my car, not looking back at him as I pulled out onto the road, in my mirror the bike came to life and swung out behind me, and that was it, that was us, that was the new routine of every morning until further notice.
A girl in a Honda and the man who broke her, forty minutes to the city, him hanging back exactly far enough that it never once felt like company and never once let me forget he was there.
Here’s the thing I wouldn’t admit to myself, the thing that made me grip the wheel till my knuckles went white halfway across the bridge.
I wasn’t scared.
I should have been. Not of him. Of the feeling of it, a man behind me, following, matching my turns, his eyes on my back all the way.
That’s the exact thing my body is built to come apart over.
I have panicked in a grocery store because a man I didn’t know took the same three aisles I did.
I have gotten off buses a stop early, walked the long way and doubled back, heart going like a bird, because somebody stood too close too long.
Being followed is the oldest and worst of all my alarms, the one that never quits, the one that’s kept me alive.
And he fell in behind me and it didn’t go off.
It just...didn’t. That was the weird part.
I’d been mad since Brenda told me, mad when I got in the car, mad when I saw Rune sitting out by the gate waiting for me.
But somewhere between there and the bridge, my hands loosened on the wheel.
My shoulders came down. I stopped checking every car that got too close because there was a motorcycle in my mirror and I knew exactly who was on it.
I hated that.
My body had always been better at knowing when something was wrong than the rest of me.
I’d learned to trust that feeling because it had kept me out of my father’s way more times than I could count.
It had gone off with the man across the street in Charleston before I’d even figured out why I was scared.
But it had never gone off around Rune.
Not once.
Not in his cabin. Not alone with him in the woods.
Not when he kissed me. Not in the garden three nights ago when he got close enough that I could smell dirt on his skin and all I could think about was his mouth.
Not now, with him following me across a river.
That should’ve made me feel better. Somehow it made me want to scream.
So I did the mature thing and refused to look at him.
Mostly.
The pink-gold water came and went while I was busy pretending I had absolutely no idea what Rune looked like on a motorcycle in my rearview mirror.
Which was a lie.
I knew exactly what he looked like.
That was ruining the drive way more than the protection detail.
* * *
Sawyer clocked him in under a minute.
Of course he did. I’d texted him a warning that morning: Compound security thing.
There might be a guy around. He’s supposed to be there.
Don’t ask. Because the alternative was letting Sawyer think some random bike was following me around, and that would’ve gone over great.
He’d sent back three question marks and a knife emoji, I’d sent back DON’T ASK, and he’d answered fine but I’m asking with my eyes forever.
He found me at the coffee place at ten and did what we always did in public, leaned down and kissed the top of my head, dropped into the chair beside me instead of across, one arm going along the back of mine while his other hand stole my coffee like he hadn’t ordered his own.
Easy. Automatic. Anybody looking saw boyfriend and girlfriend and quit looking, which was the reason we’d started doing it in the first place. Usually I barely noticed anymore.
This morning I noticed.
Because Rune was across the street.
“Don’t look,” Sawyer murmured, close to my ear, for all the world like he was saying something sweet. “But there’s a biker.”
“I know there’s a biker.”
“There is a biker, Amy.” Still low, still leaned in, still smiling like we were the two happiest people on King Street, while his eyes did something else entirely over the top of my head.
“A large, tattooed, deeply biker guy, who followed your car this morning, I watched him, and who is, at this exact moment, parked across the street pretending to be a road sign. I’m giving you the forecast. Sunny, mild, with a hundred-percent chance of felony across the street. ”
I picked up my coffee to hide my mouth. “He’s doing a job. Ignore him.”
“I cannot ignore him, he’s the size of a vending machine.
” He laced his fingers through mine on the tabletop, reflex, cover, the thing we did a dozen times a day, and to the room it read as tender and to me it was Sawyer using my hand as a stress ball.
“Assessment. Since I’m forbidden to ask and can only observe, like a nature documentary.
Big. Tattoos climbing right up his neck, so that’s a backstory I’ll never get.
Clean-shaved. Did not expect that, he’s got the jaw for a beard and he’s denying us, selfish.
And still. Amy, he is so still. Has not looked at his phone one time.
Do you know how unwell you have to be to sit somewhere an hour and not touch your phone?
He just watches. He watches everything. It’s upsetting. I don’t like it.”
I laughed into my cup before I could stop it, and Sawyer’s face lit up, because getting me to laugh in public was his blood sport. And to anybody watching, to a certain somebody watching, we were only a couple being stupid over coffee.
I knew he was over there. That’s the part I’m not proud of.
I knew Rune was across the street watching us, and I leaned into Sawyer a little more than I needed to.
I laughed harder when he said something stupid.
Once, I even left my hand on his arm longer than I normally would, and every bit of it was for Rune.
I wanted him to see me having a good time with somebody else.
I wanted him to see me laughing and comfortable and wanted, and maybe wonder what it felt like knowing somebody else got the version of me he’d decided he didn’t want anymore.
It was petty. I knew it while I was doing it.
I did it anyway.
And, God help me, I enjoyed it a little.
“I want to bring him a muffin,” Sawyer said.
“Absolutely not.”
“On my own time. A little muffin. As a treat. For the murder monk.” He squeezed my hand, playing it for the room and for me at the same time. “’Stay hydrated, Motorcycle Batman’. You can’t stop me, he’s a public biker on a public street and I am a generous soul.”
“You bring that man a muffin and I end this relationship in front of everybody.”
“You would never. I’m the best fake boyfriend in the Lowcountry and you know it.
” Then he went quieter, and the performance stayed up, heads close, the picture intact, but the voice under it dropped straight into the real thing, the way only Sawyer could fall through a joke without moving his face.
“You okay, though? For actual. A guy following you. I know your stuff, Ames. I know that’s the worst kind of thing for you.
Say the word and I’ll get you out of here right now.
I’ll make a scene. I’ve been dying to make a scene. ”
And there it was. Sawyer being Sawyer. He didn’t know who Rune was or what any of this was really about, but he knew me well enough to know being followed should’ve scared me.
“I’m okay,” I said. And the strange, awful truth of it sat right there in my mouth. “I’m actually okay.”
“Weird.”
“Very weird.” I wasn’t about to tell Sawyer that the biker across the street was the only man alive my body had ever decided not to fear, mostly because I had no words for it and partly because saying it out loud would make it real.
“Drink your coffee. And kiss my head again, the lady by the window keeps looking, let’s give her the show. ”
He kissed my head again. The lady by the window smiled at us, charmed to pieces.
Across the street, not looking at his phone, not looking at anything but us, the biggest stillest shape on King Street watched a boy kiss my hair, and I let him watch it, and I told myself the warm ugly thing in my chest was satisfaction and nothing else.
Nothing like the other thing, the thing that would’ve had to admit it mattered whether his eyes were on me at all.
Not one inch, I’d promised Brenda.
And here I was spending his first morning making good and sure he got a long look at a lie. Which is its own kind of inch, if you’re honest about it.
I wasn’t feeling especially honest. I finished my coffee and let my fake boyfriend hold my hand and let the other man watch, and it was the worst, safest, most complicated morning I’d had in a long, long time.