CHAPTER 7
The Whole Truth, Almost
°°°
He called her Friday night, which broke a pattern neither of them had ever named out loud — their conversations happened at title companies and garage bays, in daylight, with paperwork between them like a fence.
A phone call after nine on a Friday was something else entirely, and Emery stood in her kitchen with the phone against her ear and her heart doing something complicated before he'd said more than her name.
"Can I come by," he said. "Not the shop. Wherever's easiest for you. I want to tell you the rest of it."
She thought about saying no. She thought about it seriously, for the length of one full breath, standing barefoot on her kitchen tile with the dishwasher running behind her — thought about all the reasons this was a bad idea, all the ways a Friday night visit blurred a line she'd drawn on purpose.
Then she thought about Dally's blunt, sixteen-year-old voice on the porch step. Somebody should actually say things.
"My place," she said. "Give me twenty minutes."
He was punctual to the point of being early, which she remembered now was one of his oldest habits, the kind of small consistent thing she'd forgotten she'd missed until it showed up again on her doorstep at 9:47 instead of ten.
She'd changed out of her work clothes into something softer, told herself it didn't mean anything, and opened the door to find him standing there without the leather cut, just a plain gray henley and the plain exhaustion of a man who'd spent all week carrying something heavy and alone.
"Hi," she said.
"Hi." He looked past her into the apartment — small, a converted mill unit with exposed brick and good light, nothing like the house they'd shared — and something crossed his face that she chose not to examine too closely. "Nice place."
"Come in before the neighbors start talking." It came out lighter than she meant it, an old reflex of easing tension with a joke, and she watched something in his shoulders loosen a fraction at the sound of it.
She made tea because her hands needed something to do, and they sat at her small kitchen table with two mugs going cold between them, and for a moment neither of them said anything at all. The dishwasher clicked off in the other room. Somewhere outside a car alarm chirped twice and went quiet.
"Okay," she said finally. "You said you wanted to tell me the rest."
He nodded, and she watched him gather himself the way he used to gather himself before difficult club business, some visible marshaling of resolve that she'd forgotten she found compelling until it was aimed at honesty instead of a fight.
"There's a debt," he said. "Between the club and a crew called Salazar.
It goes back before I was VP — my uncle's generation, some territory arrangement that got renegotiated badly a long time ago, and we've been paying it down slow ever since.
Legitimate, mostly. Boring, even, as far as club business goes.
" He turned his mug a quarter turn on the table, a small nervous gesture she didn't remember him having before.
"About a year ago, they started pushing.
Wanting the terms renegotiated in their favor, using leverage they didn't used to have. "
"What leverage?"
"Us." He said it plainly, meeting her eyes even though it clearly cost him something to hold still under the word.
"The separation. A club with a fractured VP looks weak, Em.
Looks like an opportunity. I think Salazar's been watching for exactly that kind of opening for months, and I think when we split, they finally got one. "
The words landed in her chest with a strange, cold weight — not guilt exactly, not hers to carry, but the sick recognition of being pulled into danger by something that had nothing to do with her own choices and everything to do with his. "So the car outside Dally's school — "
"Was them. Or somebody working for them.
I don't have full confirmation yet, but I'd bet my patch on it.
" His jaw tightened. "That's why I didn't want you at The Wrenhouse alone.
That's why I've had Ghost running unmarked rotations at Dally's school all week.
I should have told you all of this three days ago, in the garage bay, instead of giving you half of it and making you drag out the rest."
"Why didn't you?"
He was quiet for a long moment, turning the mug again, and when he spoke his voice had gone rougher, less controlled.
"Because telling you meant admitting how bad it's gotten.
And admitting how bad it's gotten meant admitting that some of why it's gotten bad traces straight back to me.
" He looked up at her then, and something in his face was more exposed than she'd seen it in years, maybe ever.
"I know I'm not telling you everything, Em.
I know you can feel that. I'm not ready to hand you the rest of it yet — not because I don't trust you, but because some of it isn't finished being true yet, and I don't want to lay a half-formed thing on you and make you carry the weight of it before I even understand it myself. "
It wasn't the full truth. She could feel the shape of the missing piece the way she always could, some specific absence in the story that his account skated carefully around — but what he'd given her tonight was real, verifiable, costly to say, and after a week of watching him flinch at his phone and retreat behind manufactured excuses, she found she believed the honesty of what he had told her even while she clocked exactly what he hadn't.
"Okay," she said. "Thank you for this much."
"You're not angry?"
"I'm furious." She said it evenly, without heat behind the word, which seemed to unsettle him more than shouting would have.
"I'm furious that this has been happening for a year and I'm only hearing about it now.
I'm furious that my name is on a deed that's apparently made me a target without my knowledge.
But I'm not angry that you're finally telling me something true, Rhys. Those are different things."
He exhaled, long and slow, like a man setting down something heavy for the first time in days. "I don't deserve that grace."
"I'm not giving it to you as a gift. I'm giving it to you because it's accurate.
" She reached across the table, not quite touching his hand, just close enough that the space between their fingers felt charged with everything neither of them was saying.
"I left because you decided things for me and called it love.
If you're standing here now actually telling me the truth, even an incomplete version of it, that's not nothing. That's the opposite of what broke us."
Something shifted in his face at that — relief, maybe, or the ache of being understood exactly right when you'd braced for judgment instead. He turned his hand over on the table, slow, giving her every chance to pull back, and when she didn't, his fingers closed loosely around hers.
"Em."
"Don't," she said, though her voice had gone soft instead of sharp. "Don't say something you can't take back yet."
"I wasn't going to say anything." His thumb moved once against her knuckles, small and unbearably familiar. "I was just going to say thank you. For staying at the table. For not walking out the second I said Salazar's name."
"I thought about it." Her voice had dropped too, some careful distance between them collapsing by degrees. "For about half a second, when you first called. I thought about telling you I couldn't do this, and hanging up, and going back to not knowing."
"Why didn't you?"
"Because not knowing almost got someone hurt at Dally's school.
" She held his gaze, steady even though her pulse had picked up in a way that had nothing to do with fear.
"And because some part of me wanted you to come here tonight.
I'm not going to pretend that isn't true, even though I probably should. "
The kitchen had gone very quiet. He was closer than he'd been a minute ago — she wasn't sure which of them had moved, maybe both of them, some old gravity reasserting itself without permission from either — and when he lifted his free hand to tuck a strand of hair behind her ear, his knuckles brushing her cheek on the way, she didn't pull back.
"Emery."
"I know," she said, and didn't know herself whether it was an invitation or a warning, and the distance between them had narrowed to almost nothing, his forehead nearly resting against hers, both of them breathing like the air in the room had gotten thin, when his phone buzzed hard against the table between the two mugs.
He didn't reach for it. For one long, suspended second he stayed exactly where he was, close enough that she could feel the warmth of him, and she watched him make the choice — watched him choose her, choose this moment, over whatever the phone wanted from him — and something in her chest cracked open at the sight of it, the first real evidence she'd had all week that some old pattern might actually be capable of changing.
Then it buzzed again. Twice more, in the specific, urgent rhythm that she now understood meant club business, and she saw the war on his face plainly — the wanting to stay, and the years of training that told him ignoring that pattern of buzzes was a mistake he couldn't afford to make twice in one week.
"You should check it," she said quietly, and pulled back enough to give him room, though she kept her hand loosely in his.
He checked it. She watched his face change — watched the warmth drain out of it and something colder and more alert take its place — and felt her own stomach drop in sympathy before she even knew what the message said.
"What is it?"
"It's from Ghost." He set the phone down, slow and careful, like it might go off again if handled wrong. "Sasha's been seen with Salazar's people. Confirmed, not rumor. She's not just tangled up with them anymore, Em. She's working for them."