Page 12 of Sting of Sin

"It's done. They think she walked. Cops are getting called now."

"Good," Warden said. "You did good."

"Didn't do nothing," Throttle said, and dragged the back of his hand across his eyes. "Just said what I'd be saying anyway."

That was the whole trick of it, and it sat heavy in the room. Half of what protects you is just letting the true thing show.

I gave it a minute, then I said what somebody had to say. "Cops'll come here."

Warden nodded. He'd already known it; he was just letting me be the one to put it on the table. "Brother in a club, sister goes missing. First place a halfway-awake deputy looks is us."

"So we're ready for it." I stood up off the stool. "Story's clean, but a clean story falls apart fast if everybody tells it a little different. Nobody volunteers anything. Nobody gets cute. We haven't seen her, we're scared for her, we want to know what the cops are doing same as her brother does. That's it. That's the whole song, top to bottom." I looked around the room, made sure it landed on every face. "And she doesn’t come out of that hall while there's a badge on this property. Not for any reason. A deputy gets one look at a woman who matches a missing patient flyer and we're fucked. Hex—front camera on the gate, I want to know a cruiser's coming before it turns off the highway. Ross is on call. Anybody so much as knocks, we're polite, we're worried, and we say talk to our lawyer before we say our own names twice."

Heads went around the room. Warden let me run it, which was him saying I had it right.

I was headed back to check on her when Holly stepped into the mouth of the hallway and put herself in it.

"There he is." Half dressed, hair down, that smile she used like a key. She came in close, hand flat on my chest, the old way, the way that used to mean something easy and didn't anymore. "You've been a ghost. Over a month. I’m starting to think you forgot about me.”

"Not now, Holly."

"Why not now?" She didn't move the hand. "C'mon. Walk me to my room. Ten minutes. You look like you could use it." Her fingers spread on my chest. "I miss you, Maul. Whatever's got you wound up this tight, I can take it off you. You know I can."

I took her wrist and moved her hand off me. Not rough. But done.

"There's no more of that," I said. "There hasn't been for a while. You know that as well as I do."

Something flickered behind the smile and didn't quite go out. Her eyes cut down the hall, toward my door, toward the room she'd already worked out wasn't empty.

"It's her, isn't it." Quieter now. Sharper. "Throttle’s sister they snuck in here in the middle of the night. The one nobody'll say a word about." Her chin came up. "She's in your bed, Maul. Your room. You gave up your own bed for some woman nobody's allowed to look at, and you're sleeping on a floor for her, and you're telling me—what is she? What is she to you?"

"That's not your fucking business."

"It's not my—" She laughed, and the hurt came up under it ugly and raw. "After everything? You and me, all those nights, all that I did for this club, I helped out when nobody else would, I earned my place here, and I thought you and me, after all that, I thought we had something. Something real. And now there's some other woman in your bed and I'm not even allowed to ask?"

I went quiet. The men know what it means when I go quiet; Holly should've known too, and some part of her did, because she pulled back half an inch when I finally spoke.

"Listen to me, 'cause I'm only gonna say it the once." Low and flat and final. "Whatever you built up in your head about you and me, you built it by yourself. I never told you it was anything. Never once. And what's down that hall behind my door is nobody's business, but mine and her brother's and the man who runs it, and you, a woman who knows how this works, who's been around long enough to know better, you don’t stand in a hallway and question me about it. Not what she is, not why she's here, not any of it. You know better than that. So you're gonna take your hand and your questions and you're gonna walk away, and you're gonna remember where you are and who you're talking to."

She stared at me. And I watched the last of whatever she'd been carrying for me go hard and cold behind her eyes, watched it turn, right there, into something with teeth, the way a hurt that's got no place to land always does. She was already deciding. Already laying it at the feet of a girl who'd never done a thing to her but exist behind my door.

"Fine," she said. Quiet. And the quiet was worse than if she'd screamed it. "Fine, Maul."

She walked off down the hall, and I stood there feeling like I'd handled something fragile with a fist again, because I had, because I didn't have a soft way left in me with the whole rest of it pressing down, and not knowing if I’d just lit the fuse of a jealous woman with nowhere good to put what I'd handed her.

I should've smoothed it over. Should've left her something to hold that wasn't a grudge.

Instead I went and checked on Bee. Cracked the door, found her still under, still braced even in sleep, and stood there a minute in the lamplight being the wall outside it.

That's the kind of man I am. Make a mess and go stand next to the good thing and let the mess walk off on its own legs to wherever it's going.

CHAPTER EIGHT

I CAME BACK to myself in pieces, the way a thing thaws, from the edges in, slow, and it aches where the feeling returns.

It was my first morning. The first real one, the first time in four years I'd woken somewhere that wasn't a locked room, the first time I'd closed my eyes because I chose to and opened them on my own clock instead of to a cart rattling down a hall. One night behind this gate, just the one, and already there were things stirring in me I'd thought were dead and buried. Hunger—real hunger, the kind with an opinion about what it wanted. The taste of coffee. The pull to be in a room with people instead of hidden from them. Small things. The kind of small that turns out, when you've lived without it long enough, to be everything.

The fear hadn't left. I want to be honest about that, because I'd spent too many years learning what happens to a woman who lies to herself about being safe. It hadn't left and I didn't think it ever would, not all the way, not for someone like me. I still came up out of sleep braced. I still read every doorway before I walked through it, still kept one ear on the dark, still flinched at a voice gone too loud or a hand that moved too fast. The alarm in me still ran.