Chapter 6
Dominic
I was falling in love with my fake wife, and it was the most honest thing I'd ever done, and it scared me more than any man I'd ever faced down with a gun.
I'd been afraid before. Plenty. Fear and I were old company.
But I'd never been afraid like this, because every other fear in my life had been about what someone could do to me, and a man who's decided he doesn't much deserve to live has a built-in floor under that kind of fear.
This was different. This was the fear of a man who had, against every rule he'd made for himself, started to want a future, and a man who wants a future has handed the world a hostage.
I'd spent two years making sure I had nothing to lose.
It was the only safety I'd ever trusted.
And in a matter of weeks a woman in a blazer had quietly undone all of it, and now I had everything to lose, and I lay awake at night doing the math on it and the math terrified me.
Because she was — God, she was. Brilliant in a way that made me feel slow and grateful to be slow near her.
Fierce in the specific way of a person who'd been hurt young and decided to spend her life standing between the world and everyone smaller than her.
And broken in places she'd let no one near, places I'd glimpsed by accident — the flinch, the grief that came through a wall on the back of a smell, the way she said roots like a wound, the eight-year-old she kept locked somewhere behind the blazers — and the thing I wanted, the impossible greedy thing I had no right to want, was to stand in every one of those cracks until she trusted me enough to let me fill them.
Not fix her. She didn't need fixing; she was the most fully built person I'd ever met.
Just stand there. Just be the thing that didn't take, in a life that had been all taking.
I wanted that more than I'd ever wanted to be forgiven, which was saying something, because being forgiven was the only thing I'd let myself want for two years.
The not-kiss under the streetlight had told me everything.
She'd looked away first, and I'd felt her look away, and I understood it completely, because looking away was a thing I'd have done myself — the instinct of a person who knows that the moment you hold a thing is the moment the world starts planning to take it.
We didn't speak of it. We went back to the coffee and the plates and the careful narrow-hallway mornings, and underneath all of it the thing we hadn't done sat in the apartment like a piece of furniture we both walked around.
And then Stokes reminded me that I'd been right to be afraid, just wrong about why.
It came the way these things come — sideways, through channels, a word passed from a man to a man to a man until it reached the right ear.
One of the brothers heard it from a contact who heard it from someone who still had a foot in the Reaper world, and he brought it to me low and serious in the corner of the clubhouse.
Stokes hadn't forgotten me. Of course he hadn't; men like Stokes don't forget a defection, because a defection is a crack in the story they tell to keep everyone else in line, and a crack has to be sealed or the whole thing comes down.
For two years I'd been a settled debt in my own mind, a man who'd gotten out clean.
I'd been wrong. To Stokes I was an open account, and the word coming through the channels was that he'd decided to collect.
Not against the Iron Thorn. That was the thing that turned my blood to ice water.
Stokes was no fool; he wasn't going to start a war with a club that would bury him.
The word was that he meant to hit me where it would actually land — not at me, at anything I cared about.
A man who's gotten out clean has nothing.
A man who's built a life has handholds. And I had, in the space of a few weeks, gone from a man with nothing to a man with a wife and a town and a foster program and a future, every one of them a handhold, every one of them a way to make me hurt that didn't require Stokes to ever come near me himself.
I'd made myself a target the exact moment I'd let myself want to live.
I took it to Knox before I took it anywhere, because that's the rule I've never broken.
I laid it out flat. Knox listened with his closed-door face, and when I finished he was quiet, and then he said the thing I'd been dreading because it was the thing I already knew.
"He's not wrong about the math," Knox said.
"You got soft spots now. First time in two years.
" He didn't say it as an accusation. He said it as a fact, the way you'd note a man had grown a limb that could be broken.
"We tighten up. Eyes on the apartment, the office, the wife when she's out.
Quiet — she doesn't need to know unless she needs to know.
Stokes wants you scared and pulled apart.
We don't give him scared." He looked at me. "You're not gonna do anything stupid."
"Define stupid."
"Push her away to keep her safe." Knox does not miss things.
"It's the move you're already turning over.
I can see it on you. Don't." He leaned back.
"First, it won't keep her safe — Stokes already knows she's yours, the marriage is public record, pushing her off changes nothing except she's alone when he comes.
Second, you'd be deciding for her, and from what I hear that woman does not take kindly to men deciding things for her.
Third —" and here something almost gentle came into the closed door of his face, which from Knox is like the sun coming out — "you spent two years earning the right to have something.
Don't hand it back to a man like Stokes the second you get it.
That's just letting him win without firing a shot. "
He was right. He was right about all of it, and I knew he was right, and I went home that night and lay in the dark and turned over the move anyway, because being right doesn't stop a man from being afraid, and the fear had its own logic, and the logic said the only way to keep her safe is to give her nothing of yours for them to break.
I was trapped, and I knew it. I couldn't pull away — the court was monitoring the marriage, a sudden estrangement would crater the standing she'd married me to build and torpedo everything, including the Delgados.
And I couldn't pull away — the larger truth under the legal one — because I didn't want to, because pulling away from her now would be its own kind of harm, the kind I'd sworn off in a parking lot three years ago.
Trapped between protecting her and being near her, with no clean exit, which was, I was coming to understand, just what it felt like to love someone.
There's no version where you're safe. You just pick which danger you can live with.
It was that same week that she had the nightmare.
I was awake — I'm always awake, or near it — when the sound came through the wall.
Not a scream. Worse than a scream. A gasping, a high tight panicked breathing, the sound of a person fighting something in their sleep and losing, and I was up and through my door and into the hall before I'd decided to move, two years of one-ear-open snapping me out of bed the way it always did, except this time it wasn't a threat I was rising to meet, it was her.
She was in the hallway. She'd made it out of her room and no further, backed against the wall and sliding down it, in her pajamas in the dark, gasping, her eyes open but not seeing me, not seeing the hallway, seeing something else, somewhere else, hands pressed flat to the wall behind her like she was trying to hold the world still.
I knew that look. I'd worn it. It's the look of a person whose body has been hijacked by the worst thing that ever happened, dragged back into it with no warning, reliving it in real time in a hallway at two in the morning.
I did not touch her.
That was the most important thing I have ever not done.
Every instinct in me wanted to gather her up, hold her, the way you'd hold anyone you — but I knew, with the certainty of a man who'd been on the receiving end of well-meaning hands at the wrong moment, that to a person trapped in that particular dark, a sudden touch is not comfort.
It's the thing arriving. It's the men coming.
It's hands, and hands were the whole problem.
So I did the only thing I knew, which was the thing someone should have done for me a long time ago and didn't.
I sat down on the floor. Across the hall from her, against the opposite wall, far enough that I was no threat, low enough that I was no looming shape, and I started to talk.
Low. Steady. Nothing important. I didn't say you're okay — you can't tell a person they're okay when their whole body is screaming that they're not; it just makes them feel unseen on top of everything.
I didn't ask questions. I just made the sound a voice makes, a low even river of nothing, the way you'd talk to a spooked animal or a man on a ledge.
I talked about the bike, the early rides, the way the fog sits in the valley before dawn and burns off when the sun clears the ridge.
I talked about a carburetor I was rebuilding, the patience of it, the way you can take a dead thing apart and find the one small wrong piece and make it run again.
I talked about the honeysuckle, how it climbed the fence at the clubhouse, how it came up the same every spring whether anyone deserved it or not.
I just talked, low and slow, a voice in the dark she could follow back, and I watched her breathing without seeming to watch it, the way you watch a needle on a gauge.