Page 37 of Sting of Sin

I don't remember getting up off that bed. One second the bottom was gone out of everything, and the next I was on my feet with my boots in my hands, because there was a man a mile down my road who'd been standing at my fence watching her, and everything in me had gone down to a single point, get to him, get my hands on him, and don't quit until he's given up every name he owns.

"I have to go." It didn't sound like my voice. "The one at the gate. The crew, the watcher, that's a thread and I'm gonna pull it till the whole thing comes apart in my hands. Till I've got a name for the man in the dark." I was already moving. "I'm gonna find him, Bee. I swear to you—"

I couldn't finish it. She was two feet from me and I could feel her going, feel her pulling back into someplace I didn't know how to follow, and it was breaking me clean in half, and the only thing I have ever known how to do with a break like that is go find the thing that caused it and take it apart with my own two hands. So that's what I reached for. God help me. Not her. The throat of the man who'd done this to her.

"Eli."

I stopped at the door. She had the sheet pulled up around her and her arms locked around her knees, and her face was a place I'd never seen, four years of grief and a fresh betrayal and the cold of that thing in the dark, all of it at once, and she looked at me like I was already gone.

"Just go," she said. Hollow. "Go do the thing you and Caleb do. I need everybody who's been lying to me out of this room." She turned her face to the window. "Just—go."

And God forgive me, I went. I kissed the top of her bowed head, and she let me and didn't lift it, and I walked out and shut the door on the woman I loved, alone in the morning light, because the clubhouse was full and the gate was watched and the danger was out there, down a road, hanging back in the dark the way he always had.

I found Throttle. I put Scyth and two more on their bikes. And I rode out the front gate at the head of them, hard, toward the one place in the whole county I was certain the monster was waiting.

Out there. Down the road. Away from her.

CHAPTER TWENTY

THE DOOR CLICKED shut behind him and I was alone with all of it.

The men who hurt me were dead. Had been dead for years. My brother and the man I'd given myself to last night had hunted them through the dark and put them in the ground and then sat across from me, month after month, year after year, and let me believe the world still had teeth in it. Every door I'd flinched at. Every night I'd lain rigid waiting for them to come back. All of it could have been a little quieter, a little less, if either of the two men who said they loved me had been brave enough to give me one sentence. And they hadn't. They'd handed me a cage and called the lock a kindness, all of them, every man who was ever supposed to be safe, right down to the last one I'd let all the way in.

I couldn't stay in that room. The sheets still smelled like him.

I got up and I got dressed with my hands shaking and I left the room. The clubhouse was wrong now, the way a familiar face is wrong in a dream. Every man I passed knew things about me I hadn't known about myself. Maybe they all knew. Maybe the whole club had been in on the great kind project of keeping Beatrice in the dark for her own good. I couldn't look at any of them. I couldn't look for Caleb, if I saw my brother's face right then, the same face that used to lean over my bed and promise me the dark couldn't have me, knowing now what those hands had done and hidden, I think something in me would have come apart that doesn't go back together. I just wanted out. Out of the walls, out of the secrets, out into air that didn't have anybody's lie in it.

I was standing in the side hall by the kitchen door with my hand on the frame, trying to remember how to breathe, when Holly found me.

I braced for it, the cold look, the little knife she always had ready for me. But it didn't come. She stopped a few feet off and she looked at me, really looked, and something in her hard pretty face had gone soft and almost wrecked, like she was seeing something she recognized.

"Oh, honey," she said. "Look at you. You're falling apart."

I didn't have words. I just stood there shaking.

"I know we've never—" She stopped, started over, quieter. "I know I haven't been kind to you. I'm not proud of it. But I know that look. I've worn that look. That's the look of a woman who just found out the men in this place will lie straight to her face and call it love." Her mouth twisted. "They do that. It's the one thing they're all good at. And then they ride off to go be heroes somewhere and leave you standing in a hallway holding it."

The part of me, the part I'd finally learned to trust, turned over once, a small wrongness, a note slightly off. But it wasn't fear. There was nothing in her I could point at. She wasn't a danger. She was just a woman being kind to me. So the small off note sank back down under the flood of everything else, because there was nothing under it to hold it up.

"Come here, sit down before you go down." She took my elbow, gentle, steering me off the door frame and onto the little bench in the alcove by the kitchen and crouched in front of me with her hands warm on my knees. "When's the last time you had a thing to eat or drink, honey? You can't come apart on nothing. Nobody can. Let me get you something. Stay right there."

She was back before I'd finished shaking, with a mug, steam ghosting off the top of it, and she folded both my hands around it and held them shut until they could hold it on their own. "Drink this. It's just tea, honey in it, good and sweet, it'll settle you. My mother used to make it for me on the worst days of my life." Her voice had gone soft and low and almost undone, her eyes wet and shining, and some far-down part of me understood that whatever she believed was happening here, she believed it all the way to the bottom; it was costing her something to kneel on that floor.

It was hot and sweet and it did settle me, at first the shaking smoothed out, my shoulders came down from around my ears for the first time since the door clicked shut on Eli, and for a few breaths it was even a mercy, exactly the way she'd promised. The morning went soft at its edges and drifted a little way off from me.

And then the drifting didn't stop.

"There now," Holly murmured, watching my face go loose, and something in her own eased, relieved, the way you let go of a breath when a frightened child finally takes the spoon. "There. Better. Come on… up you come. No, lean into me, I've got you, I've got you. Let's just get you somewhere quiet to lie down."

I don't remember the door. I remember the white noon light hitting me flat across the face. I remember Holly's arm gone hard around my waist, taking more and more of what I weighed, my own feet landing wrong and far away like they belonged to some other woman. I remember a small car off away from the bikes, warm and close and smelling of cigarettes and pine, and Holly easing me down into it, not the front, the back, along the seat, my cheek to cold vinyl, and a blanket coming down over me, over my shoulder, up past my chin, tucked in soft as a lullaby.

"You stay right down under there and rest," she said, low, close to my ear.

And I understood it then, far down, through fathoms of warm gray water, the whole terrible shape of the thing. What had been out there in the dark for years didn't come for me wearing a threat's face. It never tripped a single bell. It came as someone gentle.

That was when the bell finally rang. Loud. Clanging. Up from the bottom of me where the truest things live. Wrong. This is wrong. Get up. Get out. Now.

And I tried.