CHAPTER 7 #2
The name sat in the small kitchen like something dropped and shattered, and Emery watched him absorb it, watched the specific horror of a man realizing the danger circling his family had a face he recognized, a name he'd once said with an entirely different weight attached to it.
"Rhys."
"I have to go." He was already standing, already reaching for his jacket off the back of the chair, some old instinct reasserting itself so fast it looked almost involuntary. "I'm sorry. I have to — Preacher needs to hear this tonight, not tomorrow."
"Go," she said, and meant it, even though some smaller, less generous part of her mourned the moment that had just been interrupted, the door that had almost, finally, opened all the way. "Call me tomorrow. Tell me what happens."
He paused at the door, looking back at her with an expression she couldn't fully read — gratitude, maybe, or the beginning of something neither of them was ready to name yet — and then he was gone, the sound of his bike fading down her street the same way it had faded down Dally's block a week ago.
~ ~ ~
He called her the next afternoon, not with news exactly, but with an invitation.
"Preacher wants to meet you," he said, without preamble, when she picked up. "Not officially. Not club business, or not only club business. He heard I told you about Salazar and he wants to look you in the eye himself before this goes any further. His words."
"That sounds ominous."
"He's not as scary as he looks. Mostly." A pause, and she could hear the ghost of a smile in it, the first lightness in his voice since he'd left her kitchen.
"He's also not wrong to want it. You've got a stake in this now whether either of us wanted that or not.
He'd rather look you in the eye than hear about you secondhand. "
She met them at the clubhouse an hour later — her first time back inside it in over a year, the familiar smell of leather and motor oil and the low thrum of a jukebox someone had never bothered to fix properly hitting her like a memory she hadn't asked for.
Marcus "Preacher" Cade held court from a booth in the corner, a big man gone silver at the temples, with Rhys's same steady stillness but none of his softness on the surface, and he studied Emery for a long moment before he said anything at all.
"You're the one who left him," he said finally, not unkindly, just plain.
"I am."
"Good." Something that might have been approval flickered across his weathered face.
"Man needed to lose something to understand what he had.
Doesn't mean I'm glad you two are hurting.
Means I respect that you didn't just sit there and take it.
" He gestured her into the booth across from him, and Rhys slid in beside her, close enough that she felt the warmth of him without either of them acknowledging it.
"Now. Rhys tells me Salazar's got Sasha working their angles. That true?"
"Confirmed last night," Rhys said. "Ghost saw her with two of their people outside the Pine Street garage. Not a coincidence."
Preacher's jaw tightened, the only visible sign of temper in an otherwise carefully controlled face. "That complicates things." He looked at Emery again, direct and assessing in a way that made her sit up straighter without meaning to. "You understand what you're sitting in the middle of, girl?"
"I'm starting to."
"Good. Better you understand it than pretend it's not there.
" He knocked twice on the table, some old habit or signal she didn't recognize, and stood.
"We'll handle Salazar. That's club business, and it stays club business.
But you keep your eyes open. Both of you.
" His gaze moved between them, something almost paternal in it despite the gravel in his voice.
"And for what it's worth — glad to see you at this table again, Emery.
Wish it was under better circumstances."
He left them there, and Emery sat for a moment in the wake of him, feeling the strange, heavy welcome of a room that had once been hers and hadn't quite stopped being so.
"He liked you," Rhys said, once they were alone in the booth.
"That was him liking me?"
"That was him liking you." A real smile, tired but genuine, the first she'd seen from him all day. "You should see him with people he doesn't."
They sat a while longer, the clubhouse noise rising and falling around them, something almost easy settling between them despite everything the afternoon had held.
She was reaching for her keys, ready to head home, when Rhys's phone lit up on the table between them — turned toward him, not her, and she watched his face change before she'd even registered the buzz.
He didn't show her the screen. He read it, jaw setting, some new calculation running behind his eyes that he didn't let reach his mouth, and slid the phone face-down onto the table with a care that told her more than his expression did.
"What now," she said, already bracing.
"Nothing you need to worry about tonight.
" He caught himself the instant the words left him — heard the old shape of them, the exact sentence that had started every fight they'd had this week — and something flickered across his face, equal parts frustration and self-recognition.
"I'm sorry. Old habit. I'll tell you what I can, when I know more myself. "
It wasn't the full truth, not yet. But it was, she noted, the first time all week he'd caught himself doing it in real time — named the pattern out loud before she had to name it for him — and she filed that small, unglamorous correction away like evidence, one more data point in a case she hadn't decided yet whether she was building toward forgiveness or just toward understanding.
"Okay," she said. "I'll hold you to that."