Priest was asleep in the guest room. I’d lain beside him for an hour after he fell asleep, my hand on his chest, listening to him breathe, and I’d made my decision with the part of me that understood cost.
These men had families. I’d lived in Forsaken long enough to know that. I’d seen their women in town, at Rosie’s, at the grocery store. I’d seen the little girl on the sidewalk on Saturday mornings. I’d heard about the baby. I knew what a compound full of people who loved each other looked like from the outside, and I knew what a bullet through a window sounded like, and I wouldn’t be the thing that connected those two facts.
Marco’s crew had already shot up Main Street. They’d come again. And the longer I stayed, the closer the next attempt got to someone who had nothing to do with my choices.
I slipped out the side door, crossed the lot to my car, and pulled through the gates with my headlights off.
I took the back road east. Not Highway 12, which was the obvious route and the one anyone looking would watch first. The two-lane through the foothills, the one I’d driven once, weeks after arriving in Forsaken, memorizing it like every other exit. The habit that was keeping me alive right now.
Two hours of empty road. Mountains black against stars. The wheel steady in my hands and every mile pulling at the place in my chest where his heartbeat had been.
The motel was a single-story building off the highway in a town I didn’t bother learning the name of. A vacancy sign buzzing in the lot. A clerk who took my cash without looking at my face and handed me a key on a plastic diamond.
Room 7. A bed, a chair, a bathroom with a shower curtain that had seen better decades. I locked the door, put the chain on, and sat on the edge of the bed with my bag at my feet.
I was alone.
I’d been alone since arriving in Forsaken and it had been manageable. Lonely, yes. Hard, yes. But manageable because I hadn’t known what the alternative felt like. Now I did. For forty-eight hours I’d been inside something real. A man who knew my name. Men who’d heard the truth and chosen to help instead of look away. The warmth of someone’s arms around me in the dark, someone who’d protected me through gunfire to keep me alive and then memorized how I took my coffee because that was just how his mind worked.
I’d walked away from it. I’d walked away because staying felt selfish and because I’d already cost him a bullet injury and because the next cost could be someone who wouldn’t be so lucky.
I sat on the bed. The clock read four forty-seven. A truck passed on the highway, headlights sweeping across the curtain. The room smelled like industrial cleaner and old stale carpet.
I didn’t cry, no matter how much I wanted to. The discipline held, as it always held, muscles clenched around the thing I was carrying because if I let go I wasn’t sure I could pick it back up.
I sat there for I don’t know how long feeling completely numb.
The knock came justafter dawn.
I was still on the edge of the bed, but lying down at this point and staring blankly at the ceiling. I hadn’t moved, hadn’t slept, and hadn’t opened my bag. The light through the curtain had shifted from black to gray to thin gold and I’d watched it change without processing any of it.
The knock came again. Steady, unhurried. The knock of someone who knew you were inside and was willing to wait.
I looked through the peephole.
Priest.
Standing in the corridor, hands at his sides. He was wearing the same clothes from yesterday. He hadn’t slept either. It showed in the set of his jaw, the fatigue around his eyes, the stillness of a man who’d been driving for hours on nothing but focus.
I opened the door.
He looked at me. Took in the bag on the floor, and the room.
“How did you find me?” My voice was hoarse.
“You wouldn’t take the highway. Too obvious, too exposed. The back road east was the logical route, and there are only ahandful of motels between Forsaken and Billings.” He paused. “I just kept driving and checking until I found you.”
Simple. Clean. He’d thought about where I’d go, how I’d think about it, and he’d followed the logic until it led him to a parking lot with my car in it.
“You need to go,” I said.
“No.”
“Priest. Listen to me. Marco’s people shot up my shop. They know where the compound is. As long as I’m near you, near the club, the people you care about are at risk. I won’t be the reason someone else gets hurt. You already took a bullet protecting me, I don’t want it to be worse next time.”
“That’s not your decision to make for us.”
“It is. It’s the only one I have left.”
