Page 1 of Sting of Sin

CHAPTER ONE

THE DRIVE OUT to Crestwood was ninety minutes of nothing, and I'd memorized every mile of it.

Throttle rode point like always, his bike a black smear against the bleached-out morning, and I held his flank the way I'd held it since we were kids with nothing to our names but each other. Desert on both sides. Scrub and rock and that flat Arizona sky that didn't care who lived or died under it. The heat came up off the asphalt in sheets even this early, and I let it sit on me, let it bake the stiffness out of my shoulders, because I always rode into that place tight and rode out of it worse.

We didn't talk on the road. Never did. Throttle wasn't a man who filled quiet, and neither was I. Out here the engines did the talking, and that suited us both fine.

But I knew what he was carrying. Same thing I was. The same low dread that started somewhere around the county line and dug in deeper the closer we got, until by the time the building came into view, long and pale and institutional, all flat roofs and tinted glass and a parking lot too clean for the kind of business they did inside, it was a fist behind my ribs.

We came every week now.

That was the new part.

For a long time Throttle came once a month, and not because he didn't love her. Throttle loved that girl more than he loved breathing. He'd raised her, their folks weren't worth the gas it'd take to drive to their graves, and it was Throttle who'd fed her, Throttle who'd sat up with her, Throttle who'd been mother and father and brother to her since before he was old enough to be any of it. And then one day he took her out of a stretch of woods half-dead and silent, and the man who'd kept her whole her entire life learned he couldn't keep her whole through that. It broke something in him I didn't have a name for. He didn't stop coming. He just couldn't do more than once a month without it taking him apart, so once a month was what he could give her, and he gave it, every month, like clockwork, and drove home gutted every time.

Then Julia and Garrick happened. And somewhere in pulling a different woman out of a different kind of cage, Throttle clawed his way up to where he could breathe again, and the first thing he did with that air was turn it on the one thing he'd never forgive himself for.

Bee.

So now we came every week. Rode out, sat in the sad little visiting room with its plastic chairs and its dying ferns, and we showed up. My old man, my stepdad, the one good thing that ever wandered into my childhood and decided to stay, used to say that was the whole of it. Showing up. You didn't have to fix anything. You didn't even have to know what to say. You just had to keep walking through the door. Throttle never had anybody teach him that. He just figured it out on his own, the hard way, raising a sister he had no business being able to raise. I was the one who got the lesson handed to me, so I was the one who said it out loud, on the bad days, when his hands were tight on the grips and he didn't want to go in.

Just gotta walk through the door, brother. That's all it is.

Didn't matter that I was being a fucking hypocrite, giving him all that advice when I couldn't bring myself to do the same. For years I didn't go. Told myself it was for Throttle, that he needed me steady on the outside, needed somebody holding the rest of it together while he fell apart. Told myself a lot of things. Truth was simpler and uglier than any of them. Throttle's door had his sister behind it. Mine had the one thing I'd wanted for years and never had the right to, sitting in a chair so damn broken, and I was too much of a coward to go sit in a room and feel that and keep my face straight.

One day I had this ache deep in my chest to see Bee again and so I did. Rode out beside Throttle that first month back like it was nothing, like I hadn't spent those years finding reasons. He never asked why I'd stayed away. I think he knew. Throttle knew most things he never said.

I killed the engine beside Throttle's and swung off, and for a second I just stood in the lot with my helmet in my hand and looked at the building and hated it.

"You good?" Throttle asked. He always asked.

"Yeah."

We went in.

***

THE SMELL HIT first. It always did. That scrubbed-down hospital smell, lemon over something underneath it that the lemon never quite reached, and beneath that, faint, the canned-air cold of a place where the windows didn't open. I'd put men in the ground in rooms that smelled better than this. At least dirt was honest.

The woman at the front desk knew us by now. Buzzed us through without making us sign the clipboard twice, which was either kindness or just fatigue, I never could tell. We went down the hall past doors with little wired-glass windows, past a common room where a television played to nobody, and the whole time I kept my eyes forward and my hands loose and my face like stone, because that was the only way I knew how to walk through a place like this without putting my fist through a wall.

A man in soft clothes, slacks, a sweater the color of oatmeal, a lanyard, came out of an office as we passed, and lifted a hand like we were old friends.

"Caleb. Eli." Dr. Reed lifted a hand as we passed, easy and warm. He used our given names like he'd known us all our lives. Nobody'd called me Eli in too many years to count, to the club I was Maul, had been so long I'd half forgot the other name belonged to me, but I didn't hold it against him. The staff all used first names here. Supposed to be gentler. "Glad you came today," he said. "There's something I'd like a moment to discuss when you."

He was Bee's doctor. Her therapist, the one who sat across from her and tried to coax words out of a woman who didn't have any left to give, and by every account he was good at it, patient, the families said, the ones that came through, which weren't many. Dr. Reed is wonderful. Dr. Reed is so good with her. Throttle had shaken his hand more than once. I never had much to say to the man, but that was me, not him; I didn't have much to say to anybody in a place like this.

"After," Throttle said.

"Of course." Reed stepped back, gracious, opening his hand toward the visiting room like he was giving us something that was already ours. "I'll find you when you're done."

She was by the window.

She was always by the window, in the same chair, turned a few degrees toward the glass like she was watching for something out past the parking lot, out past the desert, somewhere none of us could see. Small. Too small. And that part wasn't just in my head.

Before the woods, before this place, back when she was all light and noise and trouble, the kind of woman who walked into a room and rearranged it just by being in it. White-blond hair she could never keep tidy, bright as her brother's, always falling loose from whatever she'd tied it back with. Wide blue eyes that didn't know how to hide a single thing she felt. She'd been soft then. Full. All curves and warmth and a laugh you heard before you ever saw her come around the corner.

The woman in the chair had been pared down to the bone. The hair was still there, pulled back loose, but dull now, like the place had leached the color out of it along with everything else. The eyes were the same blue and somehow not—open, but turned inward, fixed on something out past the glass that none of us could see. And her body, the body that used to take up room in the world like she had every right to it, had gone thin and careful inside clothes that hung off her wrong. The meds did that. The years did that. This building did it, an inch at a time, every week, while we drove out and sat with her and told ourselves showing up was enough.