Page 43 of Thunder

He finds all of us.

He finds the end of everything.

I sit there and I do the one thing a Sergeant at Arms is never supposed to do at his own table, which is stop thinking about the club for a minute and think about myself.

Because here's what that grave holds for me now, and it's a lot more than it held a season ago.

A season ago, if this went bad, I would lose my freedom and my club, and my daughter gets raised by my mother while I do twenty-to-life.

That was always the deal.

I made my peace with it the night I picked up the shovel.

You do what protects the family and you carry the risk, that's the job, that's what it means to be the sword.

But it's not just that anymore.

Now there's a woman two cabins over who finally stopped running from me.

Now there's a full table and a kid who doesn't look sad and a life I let myself start wanting when I had no business wanting anything.

And all of it—every piece of it I clawed back this last month—is sitting on top of a grave out past Big Spring that a stranger with a laptop is about to start digging up.

I could lose her before I ever really had her.

That's what sits in my gut through the rest of church, cold and heavy, while the brothers talk options that aren't really options.

And it's worse than just me, is the part I keep circling back to.

If this grave comes up, it doesn't only take the five of us who put her in it.

It detonates Presley's whole family all over again—Marlena in cuffs, Phantom in cuffs, the sisters watching both their father and Marlena hauled off, the papers, the trial, the town.

Presley's been clawing her way back toward Grace an inch at a time, texting about a sick heifer, standing close at a cattle pen.

All of that turns to ash the day a stranger finds a body, and she'd be right back to a ghost in a family that's not so much fractured anymore as flattened.

I finally get her back, and the same thing that could take me could take everything she's got left too.

If I lose, I don't lose alone.

Not anymore.

Then Rogue speaks up, and it gets worse.

"While we're layin' out threats," he says, and something in how he says it makes every head turn. "I've been sittin' on this till I was sure. I'm sure now."

He puts his phone on the table and slides it to the center.

I lean in with the rest of them, and my blood goes to ice.

It's a photograph.

Long lens, grainy, shot from distance.

And it's Bex, Grace, and Dakota, and Grace's belly round with the baby, standing in the church parking lot at what looks like last Sunday's supper.

Somebody was parked far enough off to need a telephoto lens to take it, and close enough to catch every face clean.