Page 51 of Thunder

"You can't tell anybody," I whisper. "Shiver, I mean it, nobody, it would⁠—"

"I know what it would." His face doesn't change. "I've known somethin' was there since I sat and had a drink with the man. I'm not askin' to make trouble. I'm askin' as your brother whether the man who's got his hands on my baby sister is worth a damn."

He waits. "Is he?"

"Yeah." It comes out cracked and certain. "He is. He's the best man I know, Shiver. He's the only thing holding me up right now."

Shiver nods slowly, that same slow nod I don't know how to read, and something in it settles.

"Then that's between you and me," he says. "For as long as you need it to be. But Presley—" He glances toward the waiting room doors, toward where I came from, toward a man with a busted hip who drove my sister to the hospital and made faces at a toddler to keep him calm.

"A thing like that doesn't stay secret forever. Things done in the dark come to light. You'd know that better than anybody in this family." His voice gentles. "Just don't let it come out in the worst possible way. Get ahead of it. You've all had enough secrets blowin' up in this family to last three lifetimes."

He leaves not long after, kisses the top of my head, tells me to call him, actually call him, not disappear again.

And I stand there in the waiting room in the aftermath of it all, a nephew born, a sister's hand in mine again, a brother's arms.

A secret spoken out loud for the first time to someone in my own blood, and across the room, Thunder catches my eye.

He's back in the plastic chair, hip stretched out, and he can't come to me and I can't go to him, not here.

Not with Dakota ten feet away and Bex watching and the whole tangle of my family in this room.

So we don't.

We just look, one long look across a hospital waiting room, and he tips his chin at me the barest inch, and I know exactly what it means because I've learned his whole language by now.

You okay?

And I find, standing there, that for the first time in a very long time the answer is something close to yes.

The men are still out there somewhere doing whatever the club sent them to do, and the low bad feeling's still sitting under my ribs.

And on top of it all, there's a grave out past Big Spring and a stranger digging toward it and a whole world of trouble I can't fix.

But my sister's got her son. My brother's got my back.

And the man I love drove us through it and is sitting across the room guarding us all with a body that can barely hold itself up.

The dark's still coming.

But we're not as alone in it as we were this morning.

And I'll take that.

After the months I've had, I'll take that and be grateful.

CHAPTER TEN

Thunder

She tells me she wants my name on her skin on a Sunday, lying in my bed with the afternoon light coming gold through the blinds, and I think for a second I've misheard her. "Say that again."

"You heard me."

She's propped up on one elbow, hair loose and wild, wearing one of my shirts and nothing else, and there's a look on her face I've come to know—the Lyle look, the one that means she's already decided and she's just informing me of the outcome.

"I want ink. Two pieces. And I want you there when I get them."