CHAPTER 25
The Signing
°°°
The morning of the lease signing arrived clear and ordinary, the kind of unremarkable Tuesday that gave no outward indication of how much was riding on it, and Wren dressed with the care of a woman who needed to feel like herself before she could do anything requiring courage.
Silas met her outside the storefront an hour before the signing, dressed down from his usual cut, nothing about him signaling the club beyond the tattoos he couldn't exactly hide, and together they walked the block once, twice, the way she imagined soldiers might walk a perimeter before something they expected to matter.
"Rooster's got two guys posted a block out, both directions," Silas said, low, scanning the street with the same automatic vigilance she'd first noticed in him months ago, in a parking lot that felt like a different lifetime now.
"Dime's inside already, pretending to look at the space like a customer.
Marisol's got the file ready if anything happens that needs documenting in real time. "
"You think he'll actually show."
"Think he's missed his last two parole check-ins, according to Rooster's contact.
Think a man who's already decided he's got nothing left to lose does exactly the kind of reckless thing that gets him caught.
" Silas's jaw was tight, controlled, the coiled readiness she recognized now as his version of fear translated into function.
"Not trying to scare you. Just being straight, the way you asked me to be. "
"I asked for straight. I got straight." She managed something almost like a smile, more armor than actual humor, and appreciated, distantly, how far they'd both come from a version of this partnership where he might have softened that answer to protect her from it.
They went over the plan once more outside the door — Wren would go in alone for the actual signing, the way she'd have done it regardless of any of this, because the storefront was hers and she wasn't going to let Dean's shadow attach itself to the one part of her life still entirely under her own authority.
Silas would stay visible but at a distance, close enough to respond fast, far enough that this remained, on its face, exactly what it was supposed to be: a woman signing a lease for the business she'd built herself.
The landlord, Mr. Halloway, greeted her with the relief of a man who'd finally stopped needing to worry about his own risk calculations, papers already laid out and ready, and for a while — twenty minutes, maybe twenty-five — the morning proceeded exactly as it should have, ordinary and quietly triumphant, Wren signing her name to a lease she'd earned entirely on her own merit, no co-signer, no rescue, nothing but two years of steadily climbing numbers and a business plan detailed enough to make the risk impossible to justify refusing.
She was still holding the pen, still feeling the unfamiliar lightness of a dream finally made real on paper, when she heard the bell over the door and looked up to see Dean standing in the entrance, and understood, with the sudden, cold clarity of a fear she'd been braced for and still wasn't fully ready to meet, that the easy part of the morning had just ended.