CHAPTER 5
What He Is Not Saying
°°°
Rhys did the sweep himself, alone, because he wasn't ready to explain to anyone in the club why he was suddenly interested in the parking lot of a high school he had no official reason to be watching.
He clocked the spot Dally had described — across from the front entrance, a straight sightline to the pickup lane — and sat on his bike at the edge of the lot for twenty minutes at three-fifteen on Monday afternoon, engine off, doing the kind of patient, boring surveillance work he hadn't done since he was a prospect twelve years ago.
No gray sedan showed. That should have made him feel better.
It didn't. A watcher who'd already gotten what they needed didn't come back to the same spot twice, and the fact that the car hadn't reappeared told him less about whether the threat was real and more about how careful whoever was running it already knew to be.
He sat there long enough to watch the after-school crowd thin out, parents' cars cycling through the pickup lane, a cluster of kids on the sidewalk laughing at something on somebody's phone, ordinary and unbothered in a way that made the whole exercise feel almost absurd — a grown man on a motorcycle, watching a high school like it might produce evidence.
But he'd learned a long time ago that the moments that felt absurd in hindsight were usually the ones that mattered most, and he stayed until the lot emptied out completely before he let himself leave.
He drove to the clubhouse afterward instead of home, and pulled Ghost aside in the garage bay — Ghost, his second, sharp-eyed and close-mouthed, the one man in the club Rhys trusted not to turn a quiet question into clubhouse gossip by dinner.
"I need eyes on Dally's school. Discreet. Nothing that looks like a patch showing up at pickup."
Ghost's eyebrows went up a fraction, the only visible reaction he allowed himself. "This about the Salazar thing?"
"I don't know yet. Might be nothing."
"You don't pull me aside for nothing." Ghost wiped his hands on a rag, unhurried, watching Rhys with the patience of a man who'd known him fifteen years and could read the difference between Rhys being careful and Rhys being scared. This was the second one. "You gonna tell Preacher?"
"Not yet. Not till I know what I'm telling him."
That earned him a long look, but Ghost didn't push, just nodded once and said he'd have somebody rotating through unmarked by Monday, and Rhys felt a fraction of the weight in his chest ease, though nowhere near enough of it.
He should have called Emery that night. He knew it even as he didn't do it — sat instead in his kitchen with a beer going warm in his hand, phone on the counter, running the conversation in his head a dozen different ways and finding a reason to abandon every version of it.
If he told her about the surveillance, he'd have to tell her why it mattered, which meant explaining a debt dispute with a crew whose name he didn't want in her mouth, which meant, eventually, unavoidably, explaining how that crew had come to have leverage over him in the first place.
There was a straight, ugly line running from Sasha Reyes to a gray sedan parked outside his niece's school, and he wasn't ready to walk Emery down it.
He told himself it was because he didn't want to scare her before he had something concrete to tell her.
He knew, somewhere underneath the telling, that it was also because some old and cowardly part of him still wanted to protect the last few days of something that had started, cautiously, to feel almost normal between them.
He hated that part of himself. Recognizing it wasn't the same as being able to switch it off.
The kitchen was too quiet for this kind of thinking.
It had been too quiet for eleven months, ever since the night she'd left it — he still hadn't rearranged anything, still kept her favorite mug in the cabinet closest to the stove even though he never used it, some part of him unwilling to admit that leaving things exactly where she'd left them wasn't the same as keeping her.
He finished the beer without tasting it and went to bed without deciding anything, which was its own kind of decision, and one he was already regretting by the time his alarm went off the next morning.
~ ~ ~
The next signing session was scheduled for Wednesday morning, ten days out from the six-week deadline, and Emery arrived at the title company with the modification language printed and highlighted, three separate colors marking her questions, her concerns, and the parts she'd already decided she wasn't budging on.
Rhys had Feld's revisions ready, and for the first twenty minutes it was almost purely mechanical — clause by clause, careful and businesslike, the kind of meeting either of them could have conducted with a stranger.
It was Emery who broke the pattern first, setting down her pen in the middle of a sentence about disbursement timelines.
"Can I ask you something."
"You can ask me anything, Em. You know that." The words came out before he'd fully thought through how loaded they were, and he watched her catch the weight of them too, a small flinch of something crossing her face before she pushed past it.
"Sasha Reyes." She said the name flat, testing it, watching him the way she used to watch a stitch under the lamp, hunting for the flaw. "Do you still talk to her?"
The question landed like a physical thing, a fist closing somewhere under his ribs, and he made himself hold still, made himself not do the thing his whole body wanted to do, which was flinch or look away or reach for his phone the way he had twice now this week when the ground under a conversation got too uneven to stand on.
"No," he said. "I haven't talked to her in months."
"But you have. Recently. Before that."
It wasn't quite a question. He understood, watching her, that she already half-knew something, or suspected it, or had simply reached the outer edge of what she could stand not asking anymore, and the honest answer sat right there in his mouth — Sasha's name had come up because Sasha's name was tangled up in exactly the thing he was keeping from her, the debt, the surveillance, the whole ugly shape of the danger he hadn't told her about — and he watched himself, almost outside his own body, choose the smaller truth instead of the whole one.
There was a version of this conversation where he simply said it.
Sasha's tangled up with the crew that's been leaning on us, and I think that's how they knew you and I were separated, and I think that's why there was a car outside Dally's school.
Four sentences. He'd rehearsed something close to them in the shower that morning, standing under water gone lukewarm, and had felt, even then, the old pull toward silence winning out before he'd finished drying off.
"Her name's come up. Club business. Nothing that involves you.
" He heard himself say it and felt something in his chest tighten at how easily the half-truth came, how practiced it already sounded, and understood with a clarity that scared him that he was doing, right now, in this room, the exact thing that had cost him everything the first time.
Deciding for her what she needed to know.
Managing her feelings by managing the information.
He'd promised himself, somewhere in the eleven months since she'd left, that he would never again let himself believe protection and concealment were the same instinct wearing different clothes.
He was doing it anyway.
"Rhys." Her voice had gone quiet, careful, the tone she used when she already suspected the answer and was giving him one last chance to be honest before she stopped asking.
"If there's something going on — something that could touch Dally, or me, or the club — I need you to just tell me.
I'm not asking to relitigate anything. I'm asking because I'm not stupid, and I've watched you flinch at your phone three times in the last week, and I know what your face looks like when you're protecting me from something instead of telling me the truth. "
Every word of it landed exactly where she meant it to land.
He sat there with the truth sitting heavy and available right behind his teeth — the surveillance, the debt, Sasha's role in it, all of it — and felt himself weigh the cost of saying it against the cost of not saying it, and chose, in the space of about three seconds that would matter more than he understood yet, to protect her from the fear instead of arming her with the truth.
"There's some tension with a crew we've had dealings with.
Money stuff. It's being handled." He watched her face while he said it, watched her decide whether to believe the smallness of the answer, and hated himself in real time for how carefully he'd constructed it to be true enough to survive a follow-up question and small enough to end the conversation.
"I promise you, Em, if it ever got anywhere near you or Dally, I would tell you everything. "
"Would you." Not quite a challenge. Something sadder than a challenge. "Because that's what you used to say about a lot of things."
The comparison hit exactly as hard as she meant it to, and he had nothing to offer back except silence, because anything he said in that moment would either be another lie or an admission he wasn't ready to make in a title company conference room with a paralegal down the hall.
She held his gaze a moment longer, waiting, giving him one more beat of room to say something true, and when he didn't fill it, she picked her pen back up and returned to the disbursement clause like the conversation had never happened.
They finished the session twenty minutes later, businesslike again, the wall back up between them thicker than it had been walking in.
"Same time next week for the final signing?" she asked, gathering her papers.
"Works for me." He hesitated, watching her stack the folder, and made himself say the next part even though every instinct told him it was a mistake. "I could come by the shop before then. If you wanted to go over anything."
"I don't think that's necessary." She said it evenly, without heat, which somehow landed worse than anger would have. "I can email Feld directly if I have questions."
"Em — "
"I have two sessions scheduled this week I need to prep for." She was already standing, folder against her chest the way she'd held it the first day, a small unconscious retreat he recognized and hated. "Solo. Just me and the paperwork. It's fine."
He watched her walk out, watched the door swing shut behind her with its soft mechanical click, and sat alone in the conference room for a long moment with the weight of everything he hadn't said pressing down on his chest like something physical.
Solo sessions. Just her and the paperwork, at The Wrenhouse, on a schedule she'd now announced out loud in a room where — he made himself think it through fully, the way he should have thought it through from the start — where anyone with an interest in watching him closely might also be watching who came and went from a property that had his name on the deed.
He picked up his phone. Not to call her. To call Ghost, and confirm the rotation at Dally's school was solid, and ask, as casually as he could manage, whether anyone had eyes on The Wrenhouse this week too.
He told himself it wasn't the same thing as telling her the truth. He knew, even as he told himself that, exactly how thin the difference was.