Page 19 of Sting of Sin

Eli steered me to the end of the long couch and sat close, his thigh warm against mine, his arm along the back behind me, a roof I could move under if I wanted. I wanted. I leaned. He let out a breath like he'd been holding it in.

Sometime past midnight Wren settled onto the arm of the couch near me with a fresh coffee and bumped her knee against mine, once. I bumped back. It was a whole conversation.

"They care about each other," I murmured.

"It's the best thing they do." She looked at the ring of them in the lamplight, the toughest ones sitting forward now with their elbows on their knees, gone quiet and boyish over a baby three towns away. "Took me a long time to believe it was real. It's real."

I believed her. I was sitting in the middle of the proof.

And still, I'd promised her I'd always tell the truth, still, underneath all that warmth, the bell rang. Quiet. Far off. But there. It had been ringing low since the cop came to the gate, something, something, not done, not over, and it didn't care how happy the room was. When the back door banged in a gust of wind I was halfway off the couch before I knew I'd moved, every hair up, and Eli's hand pressed warm on my shoulder, easy, just the wind, and I made myself fold back down. And once, scanning that ring of lamplit faces, I went looking out of old habit for the one cold face I'd marked weeks back, the sharp, pretty woman who watched me, and watched Eli, and she wasn't in the light anywhere. I didn't know where she was. I told myself it meant nothing, the way you tell yourself a thing you can't prove, and I kept my eyes on the door a beat too long, and then I let it go.

I would not turn the bell off. But I was done letting it take the whole room from me.

The call came at 4:11. The whole bar was watching the clock by then.

Warden's name lit Ashen’s phone and the room went dead silent, and Ashen thumbed it to speaker, and out came Warden's voice—Warden, who I'd never heard make a sound that wasn't iron, and it was wrecked, cracked all the way open.

"She's here. They're both—" He had to stop and find it. "It's a girl. We got a girl. Elara's perfect, they're both perfect, they're both—" and then the President of the Devil's House MC just cried, openly, down the phone into a room full of his men, and not one of them thought a thing of it except to start roaring.

The bar came apart. Up, all of them, grabbing each other, big men hauling bigger men off the floor, a whoop that rattled the bottles, a girl, it's a girl going around and around. Throttle scooped me clean off my feet before he caught himself and set me down careful, laughing—"Sorry—Bee—a girl, did you hear, a little girl"—and I laughed. Out loud. Into the noise. And then, surprising no one more than myself, I was crying too, the good kind, the kind the gray hadn't allowed, standing in a roomful of outlaws all laughing and crying at once over a few pounds of brand-new person three towns up the road.

Eli was there when I turned. Of course he was. He didn't grab me or spin me. He just looked at the wet on my face and the laugh still sitting on top of it, and something moved through him so big and so careful it scared us both, and he reached up slow and caught one tear off my cheek with his thumb like it might break.

"There she is," he said. Soft. Just for me. And I knew he didn't mean the baby.

I held his eyes and let him see all of it, the crying, laughing, living woman who'd been in here under the years the whole time, and I didn't step back behind the glass. Not this time. I stood right in it.

Somewhere three towns away there was a brand-new little girl who'd grow up inside this, this fierce, chosen, dangerous, gentle family. Luckiest girl alive.

And under the joy the bell rang once more, low. I didn't silence it, and I didn't let it win. I just held it in the one hand and held all the rest in the other, and stood there full of both, because that was the new thing I was learning, in the noise and the light: that a person could be afraid and be alive in the very same breath. After years of being neither, I'd take it.

I'd take it gladly.

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

THE WEEK AFTER Warden's girl, Violet, came, the whole clubhouse went soft.

I don't know how else to put it. A clubhouse full of men who'd put each other through walls for sport spent that week walking around grinning at nothing, passing a phone hand to hand to squint at a picture of a wrinkled little thing in a hospital blanket, arguing in low serious voices about which of them she'd already decided was her favorite. Warden came back two days later looking ten years older and lit up from the inside, and he let Rex hold her, and Rex—Rex, who I have personally watched bite a man, held that baby like she was made of smoke and might blow away if he breathed wrong. Soft. The whole place.

But that's not what I was watching that week. I was watching Bee.

Because something had shifted in her the night that baby came, in the noise and the crying and the joy, and it hadn't shifted back. I'd seen it happen, stood close enough to feel it, the second she laughed out loud into that roomful of outlaws and then started crying the good way and didn't run from either one. Something in her that had been clenched shut for four years had cracked open a half inch in all that warmth, and the crack hadn't closed.

She talked more, that week. Little things, to people who weren't me. I caught her saying good morning to Jewel like it was nothing. I watched her thank Ashen for moving a chair, watched Ashen go still and careful and pleased like a man a wild bird had just landed on. She sat in rooms now instead of at the edges of them. She'd started touching things as she passed, the back of a couch, the doorframe, the dog, like she was learning the House with her hands, claiming it an inch at a time. And once, just once, I came in off the lot and heard a sound I didn't recognize coming from the kitchen, and it took me a stupid full second to understand it was her, humming, low and absent over a cup of coffee, and I stood in the hall like an idiot and didn't go in because I didn't want to be the thing that stopped it.

I'd loved her scared. I'd have loved her behind that glass the rest of my life and called myself lucky. But this, watching her come up out of the dark a degree at a time, watching the girl from before start bleeding back through into the woman I already couldn't breathe right around, this was something else. This was a man finding out the thing he thought was the whole sky was just the part he'd been able to see.

So of course I started planning how to keep it.

I'd gone out onto the lot for a smoke and a minute of cold air, the want of her got too big to sit still under some nights, and I needed the dark to get my own face back, when the door went behind me and footsteps came across the gravel, and I didn't have to turn around to know it was Holly.

"Maul." She came up and leaned on the porch railing beside me, hip cocked, easy, like we were a couple of old friends picking a thing back up. "You're a hard man to get a minute alone with lately."

"Busy."

"You're never too busy to have a little fun." Her hand found my arm and slid up it, and there was the smile again, the one that used to be enough for what it was. "Come on. It's cold out here. I know somewhere warmer. Old times. No strings."

I took her hand off my arm and set it back on the railing.