CHAPTER 2 #2
I know both those things. I know them with the same certainty I know my own name, and I send Bear the address anyway, because there's a difference between a woman not liking something and a woman being safe, and right now, tonight, with what little I know about why a woman like Selene drives with both hands on the wheel and checks every light in her house before she sleeps, I'm choosing safe every single time. She can hate me for it after.
I don't fall asleep until almost five, and when I do, I dream the way I always dream when something's clawed its way back into my chest that I thought I'd buried — fractured, useless things.
Selene at seventeen, laughing in the passenger seat of my truck, window down, hair loose.
Selene tonight, soaked through in a diner uniform, holding her daughter like a shield.
My father's voice, low and mean, the night I told him what I'd agreed to.
You're a fool, boy. Nobody pays a debt that big for a girl who'll forget your name in a year.
She didn't forget my name. I wake at seven with that thought sitting heavy in my chest, and I lie there a minute in the gray morning light letting it settle, because twelve years of silence should have been enough to erase me from her life completely, and instead she looked at me last night like I was a wound that never fully closed.
Maybe I wasn't the only one who never let it heal right.
I get up, shower, pull on yesterday's jeans and a clean shirt, and head down to the garage floor, where Bear's already waiting with a cup of coffee and a look on his face I don't love.
"Quiet night," he says, before I can ask. "No activity at the house. She's up now — kid's in the yard, Selene's on the porch with a coffee, watching her play."
"Good."
"That all you got? 'Good'?" Bear leans against the workbench, arms crossed, studying me with the particular patience of a man who's watched me lie to myself for a decade and is done letting me get away with it.
"Damon. Twelve years you don't say her name.
Not once. I bring her up, you shut it down.
And last night she walks into your garage and by three in the morning you've got a security detail running on her house. "
"Car broke down. Kid's seat was busted. I fixed it. That's the whole story."
"That ain't the whole story and you know it.
" Bear's voice drops, gentler now, which is somehow worse than if he'd pushed harder.
"I was there, brother. I know what your old man's debt cost you.
I know why you left her the way you did.
You've spent twelve years telling yourself it was for nothing if she ever found out different — that the not-knowing was part of the price. You gonna tell her now?"
I don't answer that right away. I think about the crumpled legal document still sitting in the lockbox in my apartment, the paper that spells out in cold legal language exactly what I traded and to whom, evidence I kept all these years for reasons I've never fully let myself examine.
Proof, maybe. Or penance. A thing to hold onto in case the day ever came where the truth mattered more than the silence protecting it.
"Not yet," I finally say, and it comes out rougher than I mean it to. "She's got enough on her plate. Something's got her running scared, Bear. That's not a woman who left a bad relationship. That's a woman who's still being hunted."
Bear straightens off the workbench, coffee forgotten. "You think somebody's after her?"
"I think," I say slowly, turning the puzzle pieces over one more time — the hyper-vigilance, the lack of security at her house, the way she flinched at a car horn last night like it was a gunshot — "that a woman doesn't build walls that high for no reason.
And I think whoever put them up is the reason she's here, in Oakhaven, working double shifts at a diner instead of wherever she was before. "
"You gonna find out?"
"Yeah." I say it flat, final, the same way I close out every piece of club business that requires a decision instead of a discussion.
"I'm gonna find out. And whatever it is, whoever it is —" I feel something cold and certain settle into place behind my ribs, an old instinct sharpened by twelve years of running an organization built on protecting what's mine, "— they're gonna have to go through the whole damn club to get anywhere near her. "
Bear studies me a long moment, and something in his face shifts — not surprise, exactly. More like watching a piece finally click into a puzzle he's been working for over a decade.
"Copy that, Pres," he says quietly. "I'll pull Slick and Marcus onto the rotation full-time. Anybody comes sniffing around that cottage, we'll know before she does."
"Good." I grab my own coffee off the workbench, black and bitter and already gone cold, and drink it anyway. "And Bear — keep it tight. Nobody spooks her. Nobody lets her catch on that she's being watched. Not until I know what we're dealing with."
He nods once and heads for the door, and I'm left alone in the garage with the morning light coming gray and thin through the open bay, thinking about a woman four blocks away drinking coffee on a porch with a busted light, watching her daughter play in a yard with no fence, no camera, no protection beyond whatever two years of hard-won vigilance can buy her.
Twelve years I told myself the silence was a mercy. That walking away clean, without explanation, was easier for her to survive than watching me get swallowed by the same rot that killed my father's soul years before it finally caught up with the rest of him.
I don't know yet if I was right. I only know that whatever's coming for Selene Vance and her daughter is going to have to come through me first, and after twelve years of paying a debt in silence and blood, I find I'm not tired anymore.
I'm just getting started.