Page 39 of Sting of Sin

"Don't try to talk yet. It'll come back. Everything comes back, in time, in here." He gestured, easy, at the clean quiet room, the drawn blind, the rail on the bed, and I understood with a fresh wave of horror that this was no accident of a place, this was built, this was made, a room dressed up like care, like healing, like a hospital, by a man who knew exactly how a place like that looks and feels and smells, because looking like healing was the whole disguise. "You're wondering where you are. You're wondering how. I'm going to tell you all of it, I've wanted to tell you all of it from the very beginning, and I find I can't bear to wait another minute. You're going to understand, Beatrice. By the time we're done you're going to understand everything. That's the part I've looked forward to most."

Behind him, near the door, Holly stood with her arms wrapped around herself, and her face had begun, slowly, to change.

She'd brought me here believing something. I could see it cracking. She was looking at the man she'd called a real doctor, the kind who understands, and she was listening to the smooth cold thing his voice had become, and the first true fear was coming up in her eyes like water rising in a well.

But Reed wasn't looking at her. Reed was looking at me, only me, the way he must have looked at me in the dark of those trees, with all the patience in the world.

"Now," he said softly, folding his hands again, settling in. "Let me tell you everything I am. You've earned it." He smiled, gentle and terrible. "Let's begin where you began. Let's begin in the woods."

CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

THE LUMBER LOT was the first thing that was wrong.

We came up on it hard and fanned out, me and Throttle and Scyth and two more, and I was off my bike before it stopped rolling, Throttle a half step off my shoulder, and I stood in the noon glare looking at a framing crew doing exactly what a framing crew does. Eight men swinging hammers and hauling board, loud and ordinary and not one bit bothered by a pack of bikers walking into the middle of them.

Eight men.

I counted twice. I had the foreman line them up and counted a third time with Hex reading names off his phone, and every last one of them was a man who got paid, a face, a truck, a social, a man who existed. The ninth wasn't there. The quiet one, the ghost, the nobody who'd haunted that rise a month and never once let a camera have him, he hadn't come to work. Of all the days. Today, the foreman said, scratching his head, was the first shift the quiet fella hadn't turned up for.

Throttle looked at me across the lined-up crew, and I watched the same cold thing climb his spine that was climbing mine. "A man spends a month proving he's part of the lumber," he said, low, "he doesn't pick the one morning we come for him to disappear. Not unless he was never what we were supposed to be watching."

My phone went off before I could answer. Rex. And his voice was wrong, and the bottom dropped out of the whole world through it.

"Maul. She's gone."

I don't remember the ride back. They tell me I did ninety on a county two-lane and ran my own gate without slowing and put the bike down in the gravel and came off it already running, Throttle dead on my tail the whole way, because he'd been six feet from me when Rex said it, because he'd heard it too. The next thing I've got is Wren in the common room, gray as ash, saying it again so it would go in, because the first time it hadn't.

"She's gone. I went to sit with her this morning and she wasn't in your room, she wasn't anywhere. Two hours, nobody's seen her." Her hands were shaking. "And Holly's gone too."

Holly.

Beside me Throttle made a sound I've never heard a grown man make—low, gutted, torn up out of the middle of him, and then went very, very quiet, which from him is worse than any noise.

Hex already had the gate feed up on the big screen. Stamped an hour and fifty minutes back, while we were three miles up the road counting hammers: Holly's little car rolling up to the gate, the prospect lifting a lazy hand and waving it through, because it was Holly, because Holly belonged, because nobody on God's earth watches the woman who lives there.

Just Holly. One person in that car. Nothing in the passenger seat. Nobody you could see in it anywhere.

"There." Throttle's finger hit the glass, hoarse. "Back seat. Blow it up."

Hex blew it up. And along the back seat, under a blanket thrown careless across it like laundry somebody meant to fold, there was a low shape. About the size of a folded up woman. You wouldn’t have looked at it twice. You weren't meant to.

Nobody said anything for a second. We were all looking at the same thing, the exact size and shape of Bee, laid flat and covered over and smuggled out three feet from the prospect who waved the car through, close enough to reach out and touch, and not one of us had known she was there.

"He didn't beat the gate," I said, when I could talk. "He didn't beat the guns. He found the one person in this House nobody watches, the one I'd hurt bad enough to turn, and he used her for a door." It was all sliding into place and I was going to be sick. "Holly's new man. The one she's been bragging on. Off the compound. Somebody who actually sees her. That's him. That's who's had her the whole time. And that crew up the road, that ghost I've had every eye in this club chained to for weeks, that was the misdirect. He set one careful man on a hill so we'd all go stare at the hill, and then he walked my girl out the front, hid in the back of a car, while I rode the wrong way to watch a decoy swing a hammer."

Throttle had both hands flat on the bar, head down between his shoulders, breathing like a man coming apart at every seam. Then he lifted his head, and his face had gone somewhere I recognized, because I'd worn it since Rex said gone, out past the grief, into the cold clear country on the far side of it.

"Where." Just that. The brother's whole heart in one word.

And there it was. The only question, and the one I couldn't answer.

Because I'd been so smart. Hex on payrolls, Rex on cameras, Scyth on the rise, a whole machine built to watch a man come at us from out there, and not one gear of it could tell me where a little car went once it cleared my gate and turned onto open country with a two-hour lead. Rex was already tearing through traffic cams and gas-station feeds. Hex was trying to raise Holly's phone and getting nothing, it was off or dead, and every tick of the clock was Bee getting farther down a road none of us could name.

I've been a wall my whole life. The thing you put your back to, the one who steps in front. And I stood in that room with my whole club moving around me and I have never felt as useless as I felt right then, because the one time it was worth more than my own life, the wall had ridden three miles up a road on a hunch and left the side door standing open.

But Throttle wasn't standing still, and Throttle wasn't letting me. He was at Hex's shoulder already, not begging the screens the way I wanted to, working them, Road Captain again, because if he stopped running the hunt for one second the other thing was going to have him. "Every camera on the county roads north and east, she didn't double back through town. Plates, gas stations, anything with a lens. Rex takes north, Hex east. Somebody put a map on the wall." He was holding himself together with both fists so he could go get his sister.

"Come on," I was begging the room, the air. "Give me a road. One road. I don't care which way… just give me a—"