We both knew what that meant.
Anchor leaned against the bar to my left and took a sip of his coffee.“How is she?”he asked.
“Quiet,” I said.“Didn’t leave the room all night.Didn’t call out.Did cry loud enough to hear through the door, though.”
Anchor’s jaw tightened.“You heard her crying?”
“Yeah.”
He shot me a look.
I ignored it.“I stayed in the chair by the door in the hallway,” I added.“She knew I was there.”
He nodded once.“Good.”
The word didn’t feel like enough.
Nothing felt like enough.
I rolled my shoulders like that could loosen the tension lodged under my skin.
“She’s going to have questions,” Anchor said.
“Yeah,” I answered.“So do I.”
He lifted his mug.“We need to know why she’s a target.”
“We know that he thinks she matters,” I said.“We don’t know why.”
Anchor’s mouth flattened.
I clenched my hand tighter around the mug.“You talk to Pearl yet and find out any more about what Bernice said?”I asked.
He shook his head.“All we know is we have to find ‘her,’ but we have no fucking clue who ‘her’ is.”
I nodded.
Nothing made sense.
We all knew Bernice’s last words.
Pearl had been the one holding her hand at the end, but half the damn club was in the room.
“Find her,” Bernice had whispered.
Maybe she meant Shay?Maybe she meant someone else completely.We had no way of knowing because Bernice was dead, and last I checked, none of us knew how to talk to the dead.
A big part of me wondered if Bernice had all of the answers that we needed, but we hadn’t asked her.Not until it was too late.
Anchor finished his coffee in one long swallow and set the mug on the bar.
He rubbed his eyes.“Vin’s going to start digging through old records.I want Piney and Skull to re-walk the northern trail once the fog thins.You…”
“Stay with Shay,” I finished.
“Yeah,” he said quietly.“You good with that?”
Not really.I wanted to do everything.Go through old records, keep Shay safe, and even raise Bernice from the dead to find out just what she had known.
