Chapter 1 #2
"I'm thinking about it as a thought experiment," I said, which was a lie, and we all knew it was a lie, and Nadia's eyebrows went up slowly like a drawbridge.
"Ivy."
"It's just math," I said. "It doesn't mean anything. It's a signature."
But even as I said it I knew the problem with the plan wasn't the law.
The law was easy; the law I could do in my sleep.
The problem was the person, the impossible person, the local, established, asks-no-questions, wants-nothing man who did not exist, because the men who wanted nothing from a woman like me were not the kind who agreed to marry her, and the men who'd agree were exactly the kind I'd spend the marriage defending myself against.
I left the diner a little before one with the idea sitting in me like a coal — too hot to hold, too useful to drop.
Wren made me promise to sleep. Nadia, unrepentant, called after me that she knew a guy.
I told her I'd let the joke die a natural death and walked out into the warm spring night, and the night did the thing this town's nights had started doing to me lately without my permission, which was be beautiful.
I had not wanted Clover Ridge to be beautiful.
I had come here for the work, the underserved valley, the families nobody else would take, and I'd intended to keep my head down and my heart out of it the way I'd kept it out of every other place I'd ever briefly lived.
But it was late spring now, and the honeysuckle was coming on thick along every fence and porch rail, and the air at one in the morning was warm and green and full of it, that heavy sweet smell that gets into your chest and makes you feel things you've decided not to feel.
The streetlights buzzed. Somewhere a screen door banged.
The town was asleep and breathing and it belonged to itself completely, and I walked through it like a woman walking through someone else's good dream, the way I'd walked through every town, on my way to the next one.
No roots. Garrett Vance was right and didn't even know how right.
My route home from Marlene's took me past the Iron Thorn clubhouse, and I usually walked it fast, head down, the way Wren had once gently teased me about — you speed up like you're walking past a kennel, Ivy.
I had reasons. I had a foster father, the only one who'd ever felt like the real thing, a soft-spoken man named Theo who'd taken me in at fourteen and taught me chess and told me I was smart enough to be anything, and Theo had died in a parking lot when I was sixteen, caught in the crossfire of something between two motorcycle clubs that had nothing to do with him, a man who'd never hurt anyone in his life bleeding out on asphalt because men on bikes decided a patch of gravel was worth more than him.
I had been at his funeral. I had decided things at that funeral, about leather and engines and the men who wore one and rode the other, and those decisions had hardened into a part of me I no longer questioned.
When I saw a cut, I saw the kind of men who'd left Theo on the ground. I did not apologize for it.
So I walked past the clubhouse fast, the way I always did.
Except tonight there was someone on the steps.
He was sitting alone in the wash of the porch light, a big man made lean and still by the dark, and he had a piece of wood in one hand and a knife in the other, and he was whittling.
That was the thing that stopped me — that small, patient, domestic motion, the knife paring curls of pale wood that fell to the step between his boots, a man making something small and useless and beautiful in the middle of the night outside a place I'd taught myself to fear.
He didn't look up. He didn't see me, or if he did he gave no sign.
There was a stillness to him I had no word for, the stillness of someone who'd learned to take up no more space than he had to, and his face in the porch light was all hard planes and shadow, dark-featured, a scar pale across the knuckles of the hand that held the knife.
I knew who he was. Everyone knew who he was.
The defector. The Reaper who'd crossed over, the one the town wasn't sure about, the one even some of his own brothers watched out the corners of their eyes.
Dominic Salcedo. Viper. A man with a past so bad they'd given him a snake for a name, sitting on the steps at one in the morning whittling a piece of wood like a man with nothing left to do but make small good things in the dark.
I stood across the street in the honeysuckle dark and I looked at him longer than I had any business looking at anyone, and a thought arrived in my head fully formed, uninvited, the worst possible thought, the thought I would have given a year of my life to take back.
Him.
Local. Established — eighteen months patched, vouched for by Knox himself, a fixture at every ride, exactly the kind of planted, recognized town presence Pruitt would clock in a heartbeat.
A man with a past so heavy he had nothing to gain from a woman like me and everything to lose, which meant he'd want nothing, expect nothing, mistake nothing.
A man who, if the rumors were even half true, needed precisely what I could offer — the cover of a respectable wife, the visible proof that the town had taken him in for good, a counterweight to the Reaper shadow he couldn't seem to outrun.
A man who would understand a transaction, because by every account his whole life had been one.
He would be perfect. He was the exact shape of the impossible person the plan required, and he was sitting forty feet away from me whittling a piece of wood, and I hated, with a sudden vicious heat that scared me more than the idea did, that of all the men in this town my mind had reached for him — a biker, a leather cut, the precise costume of the men who'd left Theo on the ground, the living center of everything I had spent my entire life learning to cross the street to avoid.
The knife paused. He looked up.
For one second, across the dark street, in the smell of honeysuckle thick enough to drown in, the defector and I looked straight at each other, and I saw — I didn't want to see it, I have spent a long time since trying to unsee it — that his eyes weren't what I'd braced for.
They weren't hard. They weren't dangerous.
They were tired in a way I recognized, tired in the specific way of a person carrying something they can't set down, and they looked at me the way I imagined I looked at the world: braced. Ready for it to take something.
I turned and walked home fast, head down, the way I always did.
But I didn't sleep. I lay in my too-empty apartment above the office with the window open and the honeysuckle pouring in and Garrett Vance's motion glowing behind my eyes and the Delgados' eleven weeks ticking, and I thought about a signature, and roots, and a man on the steps making something small in the dark, and somewhere around three in the morning I stopped pretending the idea was a joke.
By dawn I had a plan, and the plan had a name, and the name was the one I'd sworn I'd never go near.
God help me, I was going to ask him.