"Four yes, two no." Her eyes flick to the foot of the table, to Finn, who hasn't said a word since he said my name. "And a prospect who doesn't vote and knows it. That's one short of what I want before I put men over an international border."
My stomach goes to water and my hands go cold on the chair back.
One short.
Two hundred and eighty-one nights, and a warm room, and a table full of good men, and it comes down one short.
"So it comes to me," Amara says.
She doesn't make a speech about it.
I've sat in enough rooms with enough men in charge to know what it looks like when somebody's about to turn a decision into a performance.
Amara doesn't do it. She sits there maybe five seconds with her hands flat on the folder. Then she looks up.
"Yes," she says. "We go."
Nobody cheers.
And I don't make a sound either.
I stand against the wall behind the president of a motorcycle club with my hands behind my back and my face wrecked.
The only thing that happens in me is that a wire I've been holding taut for two hundred and eighty-one days goes slack all at once,
My legs nearly go with it, and I lock my knees and stay standing because I'm not going down in this room.
Somebody's coming.
That's what I keep thinking, standing there.
That's what she's been telling herself behind that door every night, the way Lashes told it to herself in Colombia, and every night it was a lie, and in nine days it stops being one.
"Zorro, you were right about the fence and I won't pretend otherwise, so you're not riding. You're holding this club. Axel stays with you. Compass stays—he's the mechanic, and he's got two nieces in that house across the street plus Kelsey is expecting too, so his motivation's in the right place. Marco's men hold the gate. Alejandro sends four more up from Chihuahua tomorrow, and if you want more than that, you tell me tonight and you'll have it."
Zorro sits up straighter.
"You're not being punished," Amara says. "You made the strongest argument in this room and I'm handing you exactly what you asked for. Everybody I don't take north is somebody I trust to hold what's here. That's not the consolation prize. It's the other half of the job."
"Understood, Prez."
"Good." She turns her head. "Rooster."
Finn's head comes up.
"You're riding. You know that ground and you know those men, and there's no world where I leave you behind. You're still a prospect. You'll take orders from every patch on this run, Vegas patches included, and you won't like all of them."
"Yes, ma'am."
"And Camila."
I straighten without meaning to.
Amara looks at me down the length of that table.
There's nothing soft anywhere in her face, and nobody's done anything better for me since I came through that gate.
"I'm not going to insult you by granting you permission," she says. "You were going to be there whether this table voted yes or no. If we'd voted it down, you'd have been on a bus north inside a week with that ledger in your shirt, and every person in this room knows it, and half of them would've followed you anyway."
