Sting of Sin (Sins of the Patch #8)

Chapter One

THE DRIVE OUT to Crestwood was ninety minutes of nothing, and I'd memorized every mile of it.

Throttle rode point like always, his bike a black smear against the bleached-out morning, and I held his flank the way I'd held it since we were kids with nothing to our names but each other.

Desert on both sides. Scrub and rock and that flat Arizona sky that didn't care who lived or died under it.

The heat came up off the asphalt in sheets even this early, and I let it sit on me, let it bake the stiffness out of my shoulders, because I always rode into that place tight and rode out of it worse.

We didn't talk on the road. Never did. Throttle wasn't a man who filled quiet, and neither was I. Out here the engines did the talking, and that suited us both fine.

But I knew what he was carrying. Same thing I was.

The same low dread that started somewhere around the county line and dug in deeper the closer we got, until by the time the building came into view, long and pale and institutional, all flat roofs and tinted glass and a parking lot too clean for the kind of business they did inside, it was a fist behind my ribs.

We came every week now.

That was the new part.

For a long time Throttle came once a month, and not because he didn't love her.

Throttle loved that girl more than he loved breathing.

He'd raised her, their folks weren't worth the gas it'd take to drive to their graves, and it was Throttle who'd fed her, Throttle who'd sat up with her, Throttle who'd been mother and father and brother to her since before he was old enough to be any of it.

And then one day he took her out of a stretch of woods half-dead and silent, and the man who'd kept her whole her entire life learned he couldn't keep her whole through that.

It broke something in him I didn't have a name for.

He didn't stop coming. He just couldn't do more than once a month without it taking him apart, so once a month was what he could give her, and he gave it, every month, like clockwork, and drove home gutted every time.

Then Julia and Garrick happened. And somewhere in pulling a different woman out of a different kind of cage, Throttle clawed his way up to where he could breathe again, and the first thing he did with that air was turn it on the one thing he'd never forgive himself for.

Bee.

So now we came every week. Rode out, sat in the sad little visiting room with its plastic chairs and its dying ferns, and we showed up.

My old man, my stepdad, the one good thing that ever wandered into my childhood and decided to stay, used to say that was the whole of it.

Showing up. You didn't have to fix anything.

You didn't even have to know what to say.

You just had to keep walking through the door.

Throttle never had anybody teach him that.

He just figured it out on his own, the hard way, raising a sister he had no business being able to raise.

I was the one who got the lesson handed to me, so I was the one who said it out loud, on the bad days, when his hands were tight on the grips and he didn't want to go in.

Just gotta walk through the door, brother. That's all it is.

Didn't matter that I was being a fucking hypocrite, giving him all that advice when I couldn't bring myself to do the same.

For years I didn't go. Told myself it was for Throttle, that he needed me steady on the outside, needed somebody holding the rest of it together while he fell apart.

Told myself a lot of things. Truth was simpler and uglier than any of them.

Throttle's door had his sister behind it.

Mine had the one thing I'd wanted for years and never had the right to, sitting in a chair so damn broken, and I was too much of a coward to go sit in a room and feel that and keep my face straight.

One day I had this ache deep in my chest to see Bee again and so I did. Rode out beside Throttle that first month back like it was nothing, like I hadn't spent those years finding reasons. He never asked why I'd stayed away. I think he knew. Throttle knew most things he never said.

I killed the engine beside Throttle's and swung off, and for a second I just stood in the lot with my helmet in my hand and looked at the building and hated it.

"You good?" Throttle asked. He always asked.

"Yeah."

We went in.

***

THE SMELL HIT first. It always did. That scrubbed-down hospital smell, lemon over something underneath it that the lemon never quite reached, and beneath that, faint, the canned-air cold of a place where the windows didn't open.

I'd put men in the ground in rooms that smelled better than this. At least dirt was honest.

The woman at the front desk knew us by now.

Buzzed us through without making us sign the clipboard twice, which was either kindness or just fatigue, I never could tell.

We went down the hall past doors with little wired-glass windows, past a common room where a television played to nobody, and the whole time I kept my eyes forward and my hands loose and my face like stone, because that was the only way I knew how to walk through a place like this without putting my fist through a wall.

A man in soft clothes, slacks, a sweater the color of oatmeal, a lanyard, came out of an office as we passed, and lifted a hand like we were old friends.

"Caleb. Eli." Dr. Reed lifted a hand as we passed, easy and warm.

He used our given names like he'd known us all our lives.

Nobody'd called me Eli in too many years to count, to the club I was Maul, had been so long I'd half forgot the other name belonged to me, but I didn't hold it against him.

The staff all used first names here. Supposed to be gentler.

"Glad you came today," he said. "There's something I'd like a moment to discuss when you. "

He was Bee's doctor. Her therapist, the one who sat across from her and tried to coax words out of a woman who didn't have any left to give, and by every account he was good at it, patient, the families said, the ones that came through, which weren't many.

Dr. Reed is wonderful. Dr. Reed is so good with her.

Throttle had shaken his hand more than once.

I never had much to say to the man, but that was me, not him; I didn't have much to say to anybody in a place like this.

"After," Throttle said.

"Of course." Reed stepped back, gracious, opening his hand toward the visiting room like he was giving us something that was already ours. "I'll find you when you're done."

She was by the window.

She was always by the window, in the same chair, turned a few degrees toward the glass like she was watching for something out past the parking lot, out past the desert, somewhere none of us could see. Small. Too small. And that part wasn't just in my head.

Before the woods, before this place, back when she was all light and noise and trouble, the kind of woman who walked into a room and rearranged it just by being in it.

White-blond hair she could never keep tidy, bright as her brother's, always falling loose from whatever she'd tied it back with.

Wide blue eyes that didn't know how to hide a single thing she felt.

She'd been soft then. Full. All curves and warmth and a laugh you heard before you ever saw her come around the corner.

The woman in the chair had been pared down to the bone.

The hair was still there, pulled back loose, but dull now, like the place had leached the color out of it along with everything else.

The eyes were the same blue and somehow not—open, but turned inward, fixed on something out past the glass that none of us could see.

And her body, the body that used to take up room in the world like she had every right to it, had gone thin and careful inside clothes that hung off her wrong.

The meds did that. The years did that. This building did it, an inch at a time, every week, while we drove out and sat with her and told ourselves showing up was enough.

It made me want to put the place in the ground. I kept my hands loose in my lap and I didn't.

Throttle went to her first. Crouched down by the chair so he wasn't looming, got himself into her eyeline slow and easy the way you'd approach something that startled.

"Hey, Bee," he said, and his voice did the thing it only did for her, went soft at the edges, lost all the gravel. "It's me. We're here."

She didn't answer. She never answered. But her eyes moved to him, and something in her face eased a fraction, and that was the whole victory, every week. That flicker. That fraction. Proof she was still in there.

Then her eyes moved past her brother.

To me.

I made myself hold still and let her look.

That was the only thing I knew how to give her in that room, stillness, distance, the promise written in every inch of how I held my body that I would never, ever come closer than she wanted.

I was a man built for breaking things. My hands had a name attached to them and the name wasn't gentle.

There was exactly one thing in this world I'd never put those hands wrong on, and she was sitting three feet away looking at me like I was something other than what I was.

Like I was safe.

I didn't deserve the way she looked at me. I'd known that for years and I'd made my peace with it the way you make peace with a wound that won't close, you stop expecting it to.

"Bee," I said. Just her name. It was all I ever trusted myself with.

Her gaze stayed on me a beat longer than it stayed on most things. Then she turned back to the window.

We sat with her. Throttle talked low, about Julia, about Garrick, about the weather, about nothing, the steady stream of ordinary he brought her every week like an offering.

I didn't talk much. I watched the door, old habit, and I watched her hands, and I let myself be in the same room as her for the only hour I got.

It was almost over when Reed came back.

He stood in the doorway, hands folded. "I don't want to keep you from your visit. But there's been a change to Beatrice's care plan, and you should hear it from me."

Throttle's jaw set. "What change."

"We brought in a specialist for a fresh assessment—Dr. Sutter, he consults for us.

" Reed said the name like it ought to mean something to us, then went on when it didn't. "His evaluation calls for a higher level of care than we can give her here.

A residential program in Flagstaff, more intensive.

Better suited to where Beatrice is now. As of his recommendation, her care moves under his direction. "

"Says who," Throttle said. “That’s three hours from here!”

"Says the people the court appointed to make that call.

" Gentle. Not unkind. That was the worst of it, how kind he kept it.

"I know it's hard to hear, and I'm sorry to be the one saying it.

But the placement isn't the family's to decide, and it isn't really mine either.

It's clinical. Dr. Sutter will be taking over her care, and the transfer's set for the end of the week.

" A small, sorry tilt of the head. "I wanted to tell you myself.

Rather than have you drive all the way out here some morning and find an empty chair. "

I felt Throttle go rigid beside me.

I felt something else, too. I felt her.

Bee had gone stone-still in her chair, stiller than still, the stillness of an animal that's heard the brush move, and her hands had locked white-knuckled in her lap, and her eyes had come off the window for the first time all visit, fixed on nothing, gone wide and glassy and somewhere far off, like one of those words had reached into her and pulled a wire.

I clocked it. I just read it the easy way, the way it asked to be read.

I thought it was the place. Thought she was scared of being moved, packed up and driven somewhere new, somewhere even farther from the only two faces she knew, and God knew that was reason enough to lock up like that.

Throttle didn't say anything else. His hand had closed to a fist on his knee, and I could feel the no coming off him like heat.

It didn't matter, and that was the part we carried out of that room without understanding it yet, how little our no was worth against a piece of paper with a court's name on it.

And under the table, where nobody could see, her hand came off her lap and found the edge of my sleeve.

Just the edge. Two fingers. The lightest weight I'd ever felt in my life.

I didn't move. I didn't breathe wrong. I sat there with my best friend's sister holding onto my cuff like it was the only solid thing in the room, and I would have stayed in that chair until the building came down around us.

Reed had gone by then, slipped out the way he came, soft-shoed, his piece said.

A minute later Throttle's phone buzzed against his hip, and he pulled it out and his face did the thing it only did for Julia or the kid.

He muttered something about needing to take it, squeezed Bee's shoulder, and stepped out into the hall with the phone to his ear and the door easing shut behind him.

And then it was just the two of us.

I should've said something. Filled the quiet.

Told her again nobody was moving her, told her we'd fight it, told her anything.

But I'd learned a long time back that with Bee the quiet did more than words ever did, so I sat there and let her hold on to my cuff and waited, the way I'd wait out a storm or a standoff or anything else that couldn't be pushed.

She turned her head. Looked at me. Those blue eyes came all the way up off the floor and found mine and held them, and there was a person back there, present, awake, climbing up out of four years of gray to do something I could see was costing her everything.

I watched the work of it move across her face.

Like she was hauling a weight up a long rope, hand over hand, from somewhere with no bottom.

Her fingers tightened on my sleeve. She leaned in, close enough I could see her mouth shape the words before any sound made it out, close enough to hear her drag them up from someplace so deep and so long buried I felt the four years on them.

Four years she hadn't said a word. Not to the doctors. Not to the nurses. Not to her brother, who begged her every single visit.

She said it to me.

"Get me out."