Chapter 6
EDEN
The house had held Sunday’s heat all night and let none of it go, so I came up out of sleep in a room the temperature of a proofing box, the sheet damp along my back and my hair stuck to my neck.
Outside, men called along the inner road and a motorcycle crossed the compound at a crawl with the throttle held down to nothing.
Nobody started an engine without permission.
Every radio carried enough static that I kept waiting for it to resolve into another shot.
Under all of it the house still smelled like Saturday, butter and sugar and three hundred pastries going hard on every surface I owned, and the dough I never saved had set up like cement in Gladys’s bowl.
I stayed where I was until I understood I wasn’t listening for Ryder.
I was checking whether the night had ended without anyone deciding I had to leave my own room.
Leah had slept on the couch downstairs after refusing the guest room, which was her way of proving she hadn’t come to occupy anything. I could hear her in the kitchen now, opening cabinets with the confidence of a woman who had kept my spare key for four years.
I showered, took my controller medication, and dressed in jeans and a black shirt with a collar high enough to cover the scrape his beard had left below my ear.
My purse held the burner, the spacer, my wallet, the document drive, one rescue inhaler, and the folding knife Aunt Beth gave me the year a man followed us through a parking garage in Indianapolis.
She had shown me where to set my thumb on the spine and told me a woman owed politeness to nobody who frightened her.
Ryder knew that story. He had put a new edge on the blade at our kitchen table once, testing it against his thumbnail, and made me promise to carry it.
I moved it to the front pocket where I could open it one-handed, and I did that because of him.
Leah had set the medication pouch in the middle of the kitchen table where nobody could reach it without me watching them do it.
She stood over a pan of eggs dry enough to cure hunger on contact, yesterday’s clothes creased from the couch.
“Bear sent a prospect to ask whether you’ll move into the east guest rooms until the gate opens.
The basement has better cover than this row if they come off the county road again. ”
“Bear can move Ryder’s pregnant girlfriend wherever he likes.” I found his mug at the front of the cabinet, set it in the sink hard enough to make Leah look over her shoulder, and poured my coffee into one of mine. “I’m sleeping in my bed.”
“That’s what I told him. I used fewer words about the pregnant girlfriend, because Tessa was standing close enough to hear me.
” Leah carried the pan to the table. She hadn’t asked whether I wanted breakfast. She had made enough for two and left me free to refuse it, which was the exact species of care my husband said he was tired of providing.
“Where did Leo and Maya sleep?”
“Basement shelter with Gage’s group and the east houses.
Maya built a bed out of the raffle baskets and Leo told her she was stealing from the club.
” She put a plate in front of me and sat down across from it rather than watch me decide about it.
“Gage has them until the briefing. After that they’re in the secured yard where I can see them. ”
“Does everyone include Jess?” Saying the name cost me more than I wanted it to.
“Her room is next to the infirmary. She’ll be in the common areas unless Bear puts her somewhere else. Ryder’s in a bunk in the old officers’ hall. Gage had a prospect carry his bags over after midnight.”
The relief came first, small and humiliating. He hadn’t come into the house after I fell asleep. He hadn’t used his key, or his rank, to remind me whose name the property sat under. I hated needing that proof from a man who had already packed my car for me.
“Did he ask about coming back?”
“He asked whether the rear windows had been checked after the shooting. I told him they had, and that he wasn’t getting a second answer about anything inside this house.”
I picked up the fork because the medication sits badly without food. “If he asks whether I slept, tell him you don’t know. If he asks whether I used my inhaler, tell him to go ask the woman whose health he can tolerate.”
Leah’s hand stopped over her plate. She had heard most of the porch through the window. Not that part. “What did he say to you?”
“He said he got tired of planning his life around whether I could breathe.” I went on cutting the eggs after the piece on my fork had become too small to be worth eating.
“Jess is healthy. The baby is healthy. He put a refill in my car and pointed me at the highway. Apparently he found something that works for everybody.”
Leah pushed her plate away and reached for the phone in her back pocket with the expression of a woman deciding between a weapon and a summons.
“Don’t arrange my marriage for me.” It came out harder than she deserved, and I put the fork down before anger turned her kindness into another fence.
“I need everybody to stop deciding where I sleep, where he sleeps, when I leave, and what I can stand to look at. I’m going to the briefing.
I’m going to eat in the common room, because that’s where the food is.
He doesn’t get the house and he doesn’t get the clubhouse just because he walked her into both. ”
Leah lowered the phone. The apology I expected never arrived, which is one of the reasons I trust her. “I’m sitting beside you. June takes the other side. Tessa goes across from us, where she can’t reach Ryder without climbing a table.”
“That last part is crowd control.”
“It can be two things.” She scraped both plates into the trash with no sentimental attachment to her cooking. “Bring the pouch. If anybody tries to carry it for you, I’ll handle them, unless you want first refusal.”
“I want first refusal.” I slid the pouch into my purse beside the burner and the knife and followed her out.
Ryder’s bags were gone from the porch. His pillow lay against the rail where the boots going past in the night had knocked it off the pile, one corner printed with dirt. I opened the bin where we keep the oily shop rags and pushed it inside. Leah watched and didn’t tell me I might want it later.
“Path’s clear,” she said. “Stay on my left until we’re past the concrete barrier.”
The safety order came from Bear and not from Ryder, and that difference was the only reason I obeyed it.
We crossed the inner road with a prospect watching the tree line, went past two bullet marks in the clubhouse siding, and came in through the kitchen door.
The fundraiser had been stripped out overnight.
Folding tables stood against the walls, the prize baskets had been shoved behind the bar, and the pastries I spent Saturday making sat in open trays beside powdered eggs while armed men ate between shifts.
People stopped talking when I came in, then worked so hard at starting again that every conversation sounded staged.
June had claimed a table near the interior hall, her clipboard replaced by a legal pad already filled with times, names, and questions Bear probably regretted teaching her to ask.
Tessa sat across the empty place with both forearms flat on the table.
Ryder stood at the common-room door with Jax, his cut buckled over the black riding jacket he never puts on between May and September.
He hadn’t changed his shirt since Saturday either.
I could still see my handprints on the shoulder of it, gray now, worked into the cotton by three days of sweat, from an afternoon when I had both hands in croissant dough and he came across the kitchen to be in my way.
Jess sat near the infirmary corridor with a blanket around her shoulders in July heat, and the paper cup between her hands shook every time the radio behind the bar let out another burst of voices.
Nobody sat with her. Men crossing the room went around her in a wider arc than the tables required, the way people move around something they have been told to be careful of.
She lifted her head when I came in, then looked back into the cup.
Ryder saw me. His attention went over the purse against my side, the pouch showing through the open zipper, and the place where Leah stood at my shoulder. Two days ago he would have crossed the room, taken the bag off me before I asked, and put me where the crowd couldn’t press on my lungs.
He started toward the table anyway. I took the knife out of my purse, opened it below the edge, and laid my wrist beside the plate June had saved for me. Tessa noticed first. Her eyes dropped to the blade and every part of her face approved until June kicked her under the table.
Ryder stopped outside my reach. “When did you last use the rescue inhaler?”
He asked it as though the room hadn’t watched him come through the gate beside her.
I turned the knife once in my fingers and looked at the hand he had started to raise toward my purse.
“Touch me, or anything in this bag that keeps me breathing, and I’ll put this through the back of your hand.
Then you can sit on the floor with it and find out how long it takes somebody to decide you’re worth the trouble. ”
Ryder lowered the hand and laid it flat on the back of the empty chair, where I could see it. He didn’t smile, or call me dramatic, or ask whether I really meant to stab the man who had once knelt on our kitchen floor and counted my breathing out loud.
“You won’t ask about it again, either.” I closed the knife with my thumb. “You said you were tired of my asthma. Enjoy retirement.”
Something crossed his face fast enough that I would have doubted it if I hadn’t spent five years learning to read him at speed. I wanted it to be real.