Chapter 16
After
~
He drove her home a little before two in the morning, both of them quiet in a way that had nothing left of the careful, guarded silence they'd started with weeks ago, and stood in her driveway a long moment after she'd gone inside before he made himself get back on his bike and ride home alone.
The roads were empty that time of night, just his headlight and the white line and the after-image of her face still sitting behind his eyes, and he took the long way back to the yard without quite meaning to, the same instinct that had once sent him out onto a switchback in the rain to warn a man who wouldn't listen now sending him circling the county at two in the morning because going straight home felt like arriving too fast at the end of a night he wasn't ready to have end.
He passed the falls overlook without slowing down.
He noticed himself not slowing down, and noticed, too, that for the first time in three years, driving past it hadn't put a fist around his chest the way it usually did.
Fifteen years he'd built a life around a simple, load-bearing rule: don't let anyone close enough that losing them could break you.
It had cost him things over the years, he knew that — Marcus had told him as much more than once, gently, the way a man told his oldest friend a hard truth he wasn't ready to hear.
It had also kept him upright through things that should have put him on the ground for good.
He didn't know yet, riding home under a sky just starting to go gray at the edges, whether he'd broken that rule tonight or simply admitted, finally, that it had never actually been keeping him safe. Just alone.
He didn't sleep. He sat on the edge of his bed until the sun came up properly, turning over every version of what came next, and by the time he made it out to the shop the next morning he'd landed on exactly nothing except the plain, undeniable fact that he didn't regret a single second of it.
Marcus took one look at his face over the coffee pot and didn't ask.
Wire wasn't so restrained.
He found Silas in the office an hour later, closing the door behind him with a deliberate quiet that told Silas this wasn't going to be a short conversation.
"Heard you were out at her place most of last night," Wire said.
"Heard from who."
"Doesn't matter who. Matters that half this club already knows, and the other half's going to know by lunch, and you're sitting here like that's not a problem.
" Wire's arms were crossed, the same stance he always took when he had something to say and hadn't decided how much of it he was willing to let show.
"You want to explain to me what exactly happened out there? "
"No."
"That's not really an option anymore, Silas.
" Something had shifted in Wire's voice, less confrontation than genuine alarm, the sound of a man watching a thing he'd predicted finally arrive and hating that he'd been right.
"You're not just spending time with a badge anymore.
You're — what, together with her? Sleeping with her?
However you want to phrase it, you've crossed a line this club is going to have opinions about, and you know it, or you wouldn't be looking at me like a man bracing for a hit. "
Silas didn't answer right away, weighing how much of it was worth explaining to a man who'd already decided the shape of his own conclusion.
"Her father left a note," he said finally.
"Before he died. Proof I tried to warn him, proof the club had nothing to do with it.
I've been carrying it three years, too scared to hand it over. Gave it to her last night."
That landed differently than Wire had clearly expected it to. His jaw worked, some of the heat going out of his posture. "That true?"
"True enough that Hal Prewitt can confirm every piece of it, if you want to hear it from somebody who isn't me."
Wire was quiet a long moment, recalibrating.
"Doesn't change the problem," he said finally, though with less conviction than he'd walked in with.
"Doesn't matter how good your reasons are.
You're the president of this club, and you've gotten involved with the one woman in this county whose entire career depends on this club staying exactly as clean as it's always claimed to be.
One bad headline, one wrong photograph, and every man in this room takes the fall for whatever the county decides to call it. "
"I know the risk."
"Do you? Because from where I'm standing, you've spent fifteen years making sure this club never had to answer for anything you could take on yourself instead.
And now you're standing here telling me you did the one thing guaranteed to put all of us in that position at once, and you don't even look sorry about it.
" Wire's voice had gone rougher, something underneath the anger that sounded almost like grief again, the same note Silas had heard from him weeks ago in the gravel lot.
"I've followed you eleven years because you never once let this club pay for something you could carry alone.
I don't know how to follow a version of you that's decided the opposite. "
The words landed harder than Silas wanted to admit, because there was truth buried in them under all the fear — a truth he hadn't fully reckoned with himself yet, about what it meant to be a president who no longer put distance between himself and every risk his own heart might create for the people who'd sworn loyalty to him.
"I'm not asking you to follow me blind on this," Silas said. "I'm telling you where I stand, and I'm telling you I'll answer for whatever it costs the club, same as I always have. That hasn't changed. What's changed is I'm not doing it by pretending there's nothing here worth protecting."
"That's a nice speech." Wire's hand was on the door now, not quite storming out, but close to it.
"I want it on record that I raised this properly, and I want it on record that I think you're making a mistake this club's going to be cleaning up for years.
If you won't step back from it voluntarily, I'm bringing it to a vote.
Full patch. Let the room decide if they're as comfortable with this as you seem to be. "
"You're within your rights."
"Don't sound so calm about it." Wire opened the door, then paused, something almost like reluctance crossing his face before he spoke again.
"For what it's worth — and I don't say this because I've changed my mind about the risk — I hope you're right about her.
I really do. I just don't think hope's a strategy, and I've watched this club bleed before because somebody at the top decided it was. "
He left. Silas sat alone in the office a long while after, turning the threat of a vote over and finding, underneath the very real fear of what losing it might cost him, a steadiness he hadn't expected to find there at all.
He thought about the twenty-two-year-old Birdie liked to describe, skinny and scared and doing everything he could not to show it, and wondered what that kid would have made of the man he'd become — a president willing to risk a vote of his own brothers over a woman he'd known less than two months, when for fifteen years he'd have called that kind of risk exactly the carelessness that got people killed.
He didn't have an answer that satisfied him.
He only had the plain fact, sitting heavier in his chest than Wire's threat had, that he'd rather lose the gavel than go back to being the man who'd let a badge walk out of his yard three years ago without ever telling her the truth.
Whatever came next, he wasn't going back to the man he'd been before last night. He'd spent fifteen years believing that distance was the only kind of leadership that kept people safe. He was starting, slowly and against every old instinct in him, to believe he'd had it backward the whole time.