She lets it sit.
"And somebody did. Brick came. Not because I was his blood, and not because I had a claim on this club. He came because I was a person, and he decided that was enough." She looks around the table. "If this club had counted the way you're counting today, I'd still be down there. I'd have had my baby in a room with a bucket in it. Or I'd be dead, which is what most of us end up, so let's be honest about the odds."
"That's not fair," Zorro says. It comes out rough.
"It's completely fair. It's only uncomfortable." Lashes doesn't blink. "You're a good man doing your job, and I'd be dead if this club had done that job the way you're arguing for it. I'm not asking you to pick between those. I'm asking you to hold both of them and vote anyway."
Zorro looks at her a long moment.
"I hear you," he says. "I'm still voting no."
"I know." Lashes sits down. "I love you anyway. But no woman should ever suffer the way I suffered, and I'm never going to be quiet about that, and if this club won't go pull eleven women out of the ground, then I don't know what the patch is for."
Her hand finds mine down between the two chairs and grips it hard, and I grip back, and neither of us looks at the other one.
Amara closes the folder.
"Is that it?," she says. "Anything else gets said now, because after this it's a vote, it's binding, and nobody brings it back up in the kitchen."
Nobody speaks.
"All right." She sits back. "The proposal is that this charter, in partnership with the Vegas charter, executes an operation on the property known as La Nada in Cochise County, Arizona, toextract eleven women held there. Timeline to be set. Command shared between myself and Damon."
She looks down the table.
"Razor."
"Yes."
"Python."
Python's quiet a second. "Yes. With the head count noted."
"Noted. Boulder."
"Yes."
"Brick."
"Yes."
"Doom."
"Yes." One word. It's the only one he's said in this entire meeting.
"Axel."
Axel's got his arms crossed. He looks at Zorro, then at Lashes, then down at the wood.
"No," he says. "Same reason as Zorro. I've got a kid too."
Something goes out of me at that and I keep my face still. I've had a lifetime of practice keeping my face still.
"Noted. Zorro."
"No." He says it clean, no hedging, a man voting his conscience in front of a room that's already gone the other way. "And for the record, if it goes, I'll do whatever I'm told and I'll do it right. But no."
Amara nods once.
