Chapter 8
CHAPTER EIGHT
Thunder
Most of my life I didn't have much to lose, and I'll tell you, it made me a hell of a lot braver than I am now.
That's the trade nobody warns you about.
You spend years as a man with a daughter and a club and not much else, and you tell yourself that's lean, that's hard, that's the price of the life.
Then one spring a redheaded girl crosses a bar to say your name, and a few months later you're sitting in your own truck outside church with your hands tight on the wheel because for the first time in longer than you can remember you've got a full hand of things that can be taken from you, and the taking's already started.
Phantom called church for noon.
He doesn't call church for noon on a weekday unless something's wrong, and every man rolling into the lot knows it.
The mood in the clubhouse when I come through the door is the flat quiet of men waiting to find out how bad.
I take my chair.
Sergeant at Arms sits at the head table's right hand, always has, and I lower myself into it, being as careful as I can, so my hip doesn’t make a show of anything.
Phantom stands at the head of the table and puts both hands flat on the wood and lets the room go still.
"Dakota's investigator called her again," he says. "Last week."
And just like that, the temperature in the room drops ten degrees.
He gives us all the details as blunt as can be, because Phantom doesn't dress up bad news, never has.
The man Dakota hired back in the spring—back when she still thought her mama had run off, before any of us knew the truth was going to come clawing up out of the ground—that man never fully let go of the job.
He's the kind that can't.
He pulled a record somewhere, a discrepancy, some loose thread in the story of a woman who supposedly drove off into a new life and left no trace, and it snagged him, and now he's pulling.
"He's talking about Big Spring," Phantom says.
Nobody moves.
Everybody at this table who needs to understand that sentence understands it.
Big Spring is where the ground is.
Big Spring is the word that turns a missing-persons cold case into four men with shovels and a president who gave the order.
There are exactly five people in this room who put their hands on that night, and every one of us goes very still when the word lands.
Me.
Spur.
Banshee.
Blaze.
And the man at the head of the table who told us to.
"How close is he?" Spur asks. His voice is flat, handler-flat, the voice he uses when he's already running the angles.
"Not close. Yet." Phantom's jaw works. "But close enough that I'm not gonna sit here and pretend it's nothin'. A man like that, with a thread and a grudge and no sense to leave a thing buried—" He stops. "He keeps pullin', he doesn't find Jolene livin' it up in Arizona. We all know what he finds."
He finds all of us.
He finds the end of everything.
I sit there and I do the one thing a Sergeant at Arms is never supposed to do at his own table, which is stop thinking about the club for a minute and think about myself.
Because here's what that grave holds for me now, and it's a lot more than it held a season ago.
A season ago, if this went bad, I would lose my freedom and my club, and my daughter gets raised by my mother while I do twenty-to-life.
That was always the deal.
I made my peace with it the night I picked up the shovel.
You do what protects the family and you carry the risk, that's the job, that's what it means to be the sword.
But it's not just that anymore.
Now there's a woman two cabins over who finally stopped running from me.
Now there's a full table and a kid who doesn't look sad and a life I let myself start wanting when I had no business wanting anything.
And all of it—every piece of it I clawed back this last month—is sitting on top of a grave out past Big Spring that a stranger with a laptop is about to start digging up.
I could lose her before I ever really had her.
That's what sits in my gut through the rest of church, cold and heavy, while the brothers talk options that aren't really options.
And it's worse than just me, is the part I keep circling back to.
If this grave comes up, it doesn't only take the five of us who put her in it.
It detonates Presley's whole family all over again—Marlena in cuffs, Phantom in cuffs, the sisters watching both their father and Marlena hauled off, the papers, the trial, the town.
Presley's been clawing her way back toward Grace an inch at a time, texting about a sick heifer, standing close at a cattle pen.
All of that turns to ash the day a stranger finds a body, and she'd be right back to a ghost in a family that's not so much fractured anymore as flattened.
I finally get her back, and the same thing that could take me could take everything she's got left too.
If I lose, I don't lose alone.
Not anymore.
Then Rogue speaks up, and it gets worse.
"While we're layin' out threats," he says, and something in how he says it makes every head turn. "I've been sittin' on this till I was sure. I'm sure now."
He puts his phone on the table and slides it to the center.
I lean in with the rest of them, and my blood goes to ice.
It's a photograph.
Long lens, grainy, shot from distance.
And it's Bex, Grace, and Dakota, and Grace's belly round with the baby, standing in the church parking lot at what looks like last Sunday's supper.
Somebody was parked far enough off to need a telephoto lens to take it, and close enough to catch every face clean.
"There's more," Rogue says, scrolling, flat and grim.
"The kids at the swimming hole. Mama Lou's car outside the school. Waylon in the yard."
He stops on one and doesn't turn it around and I'm glad, because I don't want to see which of ours it is. "They're not watchin' the clubhouse anymore. They're watchin' our families. Buildin' a book on who we love."
"The Firm," Blaze says.
Not a question.
"The Firm."
Rogue takes his phone back.
"Hartley's people don't forget, and they don't forgive a man walkin' away, and now they know exactly where to put the knife if they decide they want to. This isn't surveillance anymore. This is a target package."
Photographs of our kids.
An investigator pulling a thread on a grave.
I sit at that table with a busted hip and a stack of other men's cameras pointed at everything I love, and I’ve never in my life felt less like the sword and more like a man standing in a doorway with his arms spread, trying to cover too many people with a body that can't even hang a gate anymore.
Church breaks with no answers, the way it does when the problems are bigger than the night.
The brothers filter out to their bikes and their families and whatever they do to sit with news like this.
I stay behind because my hip's stiffened up from sitting and I'd rather work it loose before I try to look normal walking out.
So I'm still in the clubhouse when Shiver comes through the door.
I forgot he was coming.
Word was he'd ride over from the Reapers Rejects to see his sisters—Grace and Dakota both here for church day, and Shiver doesn't get down this way as often as he'd like, and blood's blood even when the family's cracked down the middle.
He's Phantom's oldest, though you'd never make them for father and son unless you knew.
Where Phantom's gone soft and heavy with the years, Shiver's all lean hard angles, road-worn, that Reapers Rejects MC cut on his back, and he moves through the clubhouse like a man who grew up in it, because he did.
Grace and Dakota are at a table in the corner.
He goes to them.
And I should leave.
I know I should leave.
But my hip's got me pinned to my chair another minute, and the clubhouse is quiet, and I can't help but hear.
"—not blaming Marlena or Presley," Shiver's saying, low, his big hands wrapped around a bottle he isn't drinking. "I need you both to hear me on that. Whatever she did, she did with a knife comin' at her. That's not on her. That's never been on her."
"Then who?" Dakota asks, and her voice is raw in a way I've never heard from her. Dakota who's all sharp edges and quick mouth.
"Who do I get to be mad at, Shiver, because I gotta be mad at somebody or I'm gonna come apart?—"
"Dad." Simple. Flat. "You get to be mad at Dad. For the cover-up. For lettin' us all think she abandoned us when he knew, when he could've—" His jaw flexes. "That's the part I can't forgive. Not the killin'. The lie. The years of the lie."
Grace says something too low for me to catch, and Shiver's face does something complicated.
"You want to know the part that eats me?
" he says. "She was textin' me. Those last few weeks.
Middle of the night, stuff that didn't track, gettin' more and more—wound up.
Paranoid. Sayin' things about Dad and Marlena that didn't make sense.
I told her she needed to see somebody. Get on somethin' to level out.
I told her—" His voice cracks, just slightly, and he covers it with the bottle.
"I told her we'd figure it out. And then she was gone, and I spent two years thinkin' she took off because I didn't do enough, didn't call enough, didn't drive down and drag her to a doctor myself.
Two years of that. Turns out she didn't leave at all.
Turns out I couldn't have saved her from what actually happened no matter what I did. "
The two of them go quiet.
And I sit ten feet away with my hands around a coffee gone cold.
I understand that I’m eavesdropping on the exact grief I helped cause, and there's a shovel in my history that put that woman in the ground.
Her son is sitting right there wrecked over her, and I’m not sure he knows I'm one of the reasons.
The sisters go not long after—Grace to get off her feet, Dakota trailing her, the two of them folded together the way grief folds people.
It strikes me even through my own guilt that at least the two of them have found their way back to each other in all this.
It's the third sister who's alone in it.
Shiver doesn't leave with them.
He comes to the bar instead, and he drops onto the stool two down from where I've finally gotten myself upright, and he signals the prospect behind the bar for two, and the kid pours two whiskeys and sets them down.
I look at our prospects, Ford and Buckley. "Go wash the bikes out front. Both of you. Take your time."
They know an order when they hear one.
They're gone in ten seconds, and then it's just me and Shiver and two glasses of whiskey in an empty clubhouse.
We drink the first one without talking.
That's the way with men like us.
You don't rush it.
He pours the second himself from the bottle the prospect left.
"How's my baby sister doing, Thunder?" He says it easy. Casual. Eyes on his glass, not on me.
But there's nothing casual about Shiver, never has been, and the question lands exactly where he aimed it, which is straight through the center of me.
I could play it.
I could say which one, or fine, I guess, or any of the dodges a man keeps in his pocket for exactly this.
But this is Shiver, and I've got too much respect for him to insult him with it, and something about the whiskey and the photographs and the grave and the grief I just watched makes me tired of dodging.
I let out a breath that's half a laugh. "Nothing could ever get by you."
"No." He turns his glass slowly on the bar. "Nothing ever could. Ask my mother." A moment of silence, dark and self-aware, and then he lets it go. "You didn't answer me."
So I don't dodge. "She's strugglin'," I tell him, honestly, my eyes on the bottles behind the bar.
"All of it's hittin' her hard. Harder than she lets on, and she doesn't let on much.
Your sister's freezin' her out over a thing she didn't do, findin' out what she found out the same day everybody else did, and carryin' all of it by herself out there because she won't ask a soul for help. "
I turn the glass.
"She's the strongest person I know, and she's about half a step from breakin', and there's not a damn thing I can do about most of it."
Shiver's quiet for a long moment.
"Most of it," he repeats.
"Most of it."
"But not all of it."
I don't answer that.
Which is its own answer, and we both know it.
He nods slowly, like something got confirmed that he already knew, and he doesn't push.
He doesn't get up in my face about it the way an angrier man might over his baby sister and a man my age with my history.
"She could do a lot worse," is all he says, finally, "than a man who'll sit here and tell me the truth when he could've lied. Reckon she's already surrounded by enough liars."
He tosses back the last of the whiskey and sets the glass down softly. "You hurt her, that's different. That's a conversation you and me have with our hands. But you're not, are you? You're one of the few things holdin' her up right now."
"Tryin' to be."
"Then we're good." He stands, claps me on the shoulder once, hard, a brother's hand. "Take care of her. Somebody in this family better."
He's gone before I can say anything back, out into the afternoon toward his bike, and I sit there alone in the empty clubhouse with two empty glasses and a whole world of trouble.
I finish my drink slowly.
An investigator pulling on a thread that ends at a grave I dug.
A shadow outfit photographing my daughter at the swimming hole.
A grieving man who just gave me his blessing to love a woman I helped orphan of her peace, and doesn't know it, and would take that blessing back so fast if he ever found out what my hands have done.
And under all of it, the same cold thing that's been sitting in my gut since church.
For years, I was the sword.
Point me at the threat and I go, and I was good at it, and it never scared me much because I never had enough to lose to be scared.
Now I've got everything to lose, and the threats are coming from three directions at once, and my body can't run down a single one of them.
A man learns what he's made of when he's got something to protect and no way to protect it.
I'm about to find out what I'm made of.
And God help me, so is she.