Page 14 of Sting of Sin

By afternoon I was tired in a way that had nothing to do with sleep, the bone tiredness of being a person all day, of feeling things, of staying in the room.

Eli walked me back. Didn't take my arm, didn't crowd me, just walked at my shoulder down the hall and waited in the doorway while I lay down in his bed in the daylight, lamp off, which I couldn't have done a week before.

"I'll be right out here," he said, the way he said it every time, and started to pull the door to its crack.

"Eli."

He stopped.

I didn't have the rest of it. I didn't know what I'd meant to say, only that I'd wanted to say his name once more before the quiet, wanted to put it in the air and have him answer it, just to know that he would.

"I'm here, Bee," he said, like that was the whole question, which maybe it was. "I'm right here."

I lay in his bed with the gold afternoon coming through the blind and the sounds of a living house coming through the door, my brother's silly baby-voice, a bike turning over in the yard, Julia's laugh, Jewel banging a pot, and I let myself feel a thing I'd gone so long without I'd lost the word for it.

It didn't have edges. It didn't ask anything of me. It was just warm, the warmth of people on the other side of a door who would not let anything through it, and the fear didn't leave, the fear never left, but for once I let it sit in the corner of the room instead of in the middle of my chest, and I let the warmth be louder than the alarm for a little while, and that was new, and that was enough, and I slept.

I slept in the daylight, with the lamp off, because I wanted to.

It was the best day I'd had since that night.

CHAPTER NINE

IT CAME ON a good day, which is how those things always come.

She'd had three of them now, three days in a row I could watch her get a little lighter, and that morning she'd come out to the common room on her own and sat down next to me without me coming to get her first, and that was a bigger thing than it sounds, her crossing a room full of people to put herself at my side like that's where she went now. She had coffee with too much milk in it. She had her brother's baby on her mind, kept asking after Garrick in that small careful way she had, two and three words at a time. The bells in her, whatever I want to call the thing that runs under that girl day and night, had quieted enough that she'd started living again.

Then Hex's voice came over the house line, flat and fast.

"Cruiser. County. Just turned off the highway, headed our way. One car, two up. Three minutes, maybe less."

The room changed without a sound. That's a thing about this club that'd scare a civilian if they ever saw it, how fast we go quiet and smooth, how everybody knows their mark. Warden was already up. "You all know the song," he said, low. "Worried family. We been calling them. Anybody got a problem keeping their mouth shut, you go to the back now and you stay there." His eyes found Throttle. "You and me at the gate. Nobody else." Then they found me. "Maul—"

He didn't have to say it. I was already moving.

Because Bee had heard the word cruiser, and I watched it hit her like a hand around her throat.

She'd gone white. Gone still in that total way she had, the stillness that wasn't calm, the stillness of a thing that's spotted the hawk and is praying it's just a shadow. The cup was shaking in her hands and she didn't seem to know it. And I knew, I knew exactly the shape of what was loose in her head, because it was written all over her: they found me. They've come to take me back.

"Hey." I got down in front of her, got my face in her eyeline the way that worked, blocked out the rest of the room. "Bee. Look at me. Just me."

She looked at me. But she was a long way back behind her own eyes, further back than she'd been in days, all that ground she'd gained that week sliding out from under her in about four seconds flat.

"They're not here for you," I said. Low and even, no room in it for doubt. "You hear me? Nobody is taking you anywhere. Not today, not ever, not while there's a breath in me. That right there is a man asking questions at a gate, and your brother is gonna tell him a whole lot of nothing, and then he's gonna get back in his car and drive away. That's all this is."

Her mouth moved. Nothing came out. The words had gone back wherever they hide when the world gets its hands on her, and seeing that, seeing four years of locked-up silence come down over her again in an instant, I felt something go cold and murderous in my chest, because I'd done this. We'd taken her out of one cage and the world had found her in the next one and put her right back behind the glass without even getting out of the car.

I didn't make her talk. I just took the shaking cup out of her hands and set it down and got her up, and walked her, my arm not around her, never around her, just there, a wall at her back, down the hall to my room. Got her down on the bed. Crouched in front of her.

"I'm not leaving you," I said. "I'm gonna be right here at this window where I can see the gate, and you're gonna be right here behind me, and you don't have to look at any of it. You just look at me when you need to. Okay?"

She didn't say okay. But she folded down small against the headboard and fixed her eyes on the middle of my back like it was the only solid thing in a flood, and that was her saying it.

I went to the window.

I could see the whole front of the property from there. Saw the cruiser ease up to the closed gate and stop, dust drifting off it gold in the morning. Two of them. One stayed in the car. The other got out and settled his belt and looked up at the clubhouse a good long while before he came to the gate, the way they do, letting you look at him looking.

Warden and Throttle walked down to meet him. I cracked the window an inch so I could hear, and put my body square between the gap and the girl behind me.