Nobody put a patch on the wood.And those who’d seemed to disagree with him, shifted uncomfortably.
He let the silence sit a long time.Longer than I would have.Long enough to hear, through the wall, the small ordinary sound of someone running water in a sink in another part of the building.Long enough for the Prospect behind me to forget to shift his weight and stand still.
The handheld on the table crackled.
It was a small black radio near Beast’s elbow.A wash of static came out of it, then a man’s voice.
“Two black SUVs on the highway.Out-of-county plates.Doing slow passes north and south of the gate road, two miles out.Just stopped at theMarathonby the four-way.The driver’s inside showing the clerk a photograph.”
A pause.The static.
“Photograph’s of a white female, eighteen to twenty, brown hair.Engagement portrait.”
Every head at the table turned.
They didn’t turn fast.Their attention shifted slower this time.I felt their attention move over me like a cold draft, each gaze landing in sequence -- on my wrist, my borrowed clothes, the hands folded too carefully in my lap.
I made myself lift my chin.
I kept my chin up and met their gazes instead, but I said nothing, because there was nothing to say.
Rogue straightened.
He pushed off the table with the heels of his hands, turned, picked his cut up off the back of the chair behind him -- the leather heavy in his hands, the patches catching the light -- and walked the length of the table without hurrying.
Rogue crossed the distance before I could think to refuse.He settled his cut around my shoulders, kept his hand there, and turned to face the room.“Anybody comes near her answers to me.”
That was all of it.
No one argued after that.Brick uncrossed his arms and set both hands flat on the table, a silent concession.Beast dropped his gaze to the wood.
Behind me, the Prospect’s breathing stopped.The faint sound I’d been tracking was just… gone.
I lifted my hand -- slowly, because everything in me was moving slowly -- and closed my fingers around the front lapel of the cut where it crossed my chest.I held it there.The leather still carried his heat.
Then Rogue lifted his hand from my shoulder.
The meeting ended without a vote.
I kept my hand on the lapel the whole way out.
The brothers gave me room.That was the part I couldn’t predict -- seven men in cuts who’d spent twenty minutes talking around me like a problem on a balance sheet, stepping back from the threshold to let me walk through first.Beast was the one who pulled the door.He didn’t look at me when I went past him.He kept his gaze on the floor, and the small consideration of it -- a man older than my father not making me meet his eyes while I crossed a doorway -- was a kindness so foreign it left me nowhere to stand.
Rogue gave me space as we crossed the clubhouse, walking half a step ahead of me through the main room, past the bar.
The compound looked smaller than it had at night.The fire pit was a black ring of ash.A man in a denim cut was crossing from the garage to the long building with a coffee cup in his hand.He saw us come down the steps and tipped the cup at Rogue and kept walking.The dog past the tree line didn’t bark this time.I heard theclickof its chain instead.
Rogue cut left at the bottom of the porch steps.Not toward the cottages.
He led me along a gravel path that ran behind a row of pines, past a low stack of split firewood under a tarp, around a corner where the compound opened out into a wider yard.There at the back, set apart from everything else, was a house -- the porch light burning even in daylight, forgotten or intentional.
He held the door for me.“This one’s yours now.Anything in here you need, you take.Anything you don’t see, you tell me, I’ll get it.”
I went past him into the front room.
There was a window above the leather couch, the glass clean enough that I could see the tree line through it.A row of three framed photographs sat on a shelf above the television -- I didn’t let myself look long enough to make out faces -- and the kitchen at the back had a dish towel folded over the oven handle and a single coffee cup upside down on the drying rack.
He went past me, down the hall.
