Page 42 of Sting of Sin

She slid down the wall. And the room was very quiet.

But I wasn’t in the fog anymore.

Somewhere in her dying, the last of it had burned off me, grief and rage will scour out anything, and I lay on that bed with my whole body returned to me, every wire live and singing and mine, and three truths dropped into place at once, clean as struck matches.

He thought I was still under. He'd been so drunk on his own voice and so busy with his door that he had not once, in all that time, watched my hands.

Eli was on a road right now. Holly had bought that with her life, and I was not going to waste it.

And the man standing over her body with his sleeves still neat, the man who'd taken everything from me and the voice in every nightmare and now this poor brave stupid woman, had built his entire life on one thing. On being the man who is never in the room. The voice with no face. The name on a wall. The nobody you can't point at, can't name, can't catch.

He'd told me so himself, proud of it.

But he was in the room now. He was right here, close enough to touch, with his back half-turned and his certainty wrapped around him like a coat, certain I was broken, certain I was a thing on his table, certain of the one fact he'd built four years on: that in all that time, across all those soft-lamp sessions, he had never, not once, knew the real me.

He thought I belonged to him.

I was the one thing he was never going to get.

I opened my eyes all the way. Quietly, with my whole body finally answering me, I began to move.

CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

THE ROAD THAT took her turned out to be nothing.

That's the part I've never gotten past. Not a fortress. Not a compound. Not some black tower you'd build a nightmare inside. A county road going nowhere, a gravel cut, and a little tan house sitting alone in a burnt-brown yard under a flat afternoon sun. Sitting there in the heat like it had nothing to hide. There was a swing set rusting in the side yard. Somebody's kids grew up there once and moved off. Most ordinary house in the world, and a monster inside it, working.

We came off the highway doing a hundred and I cut my pipes two miles out and threw a fist up, and twelve bikes went dark and quiet behind me, because you do not announce yourself to a man holding a hostage. We rolled the last stretch on coast and murder, laid the bikes down in the dirt at the mouth of the turnoff, and came off them already moving, already fanning out, already the thing this club turns into when the laughing's done and something needs killing.

Hex had patched Holly's open line into the burner in my cut, and for the last twenty minutes of that ride I'd had it screwed into my ear, and I'm going to hear what came down it till the day I die. Not words. He stayed off the phone, mostly. Just the voice. Soft, tired, patient. A man with all the time in the world, going and going and going, and occasionally a murmured reply. My girl. And me on a bike three towns too late, listening to it.

Then, close in, the line changed.

A voice came up sharp — Holly’s, not Bee's — shaking and furious and defiant, saying something fast I couldn't make out. Then movement. Then a sound, short and final, the kind you spend your whole life trying to unhear. Then that soft voice again, closer to the phone now, almost gentle. And then nothing. The line died in my ear and left me with the wind.

I didn’t know for sure who’s sound I’d heard.

That's the thing I need understood about the next four minutes of my life. I'd heard a woman's last breath three feet off a phone, and I didn't know if it belonged to the one who took her or the one I'd burn the whole world down for, and I had a half mile of gravel left and nothing in me but the cold. Not scared. Past scared. That place out past the far side of it, where you'll do any goddamn thing that needs doing and not feel one second of it going in.

Throttle hit the yard a half step off my shoulder. He'd had the line in his own ear the whole ride, and his face had gone to something they'd already buried. Both of us would've gone straight through the front wall of that house if Warden's hands hadn't come down hard on our shoulders and stopped us cold.

"Slow." Low and flat, the voice that's held this club together through worse than this. "You go through that door blind and loud, he opens her throat before your boot hits the boards. We don't have her yet. Slow's the only way we walk back out of here with her." His eyes went me to Throttle and back. "You want to run in there and die pretty? Or you want to carry your girl home?"

Her. Only word on God's earth that could've slowed either one of us. Her.

So we did it right, with everything in me screaming to do it wrong. Ashen and two more ghosted around back. Rex went low along the front wall and came up under the window, one eye past the edge of the glass. The rest of us stacked down the front of that little house in the dead heat, guns up, breathing slow, a dozen loud bastards gone dead quiet, and I put my back to the wall beside the door I was about to take off its hinges and made myself wait on Rex's read while my heart went like a fist on a locked door.

He came off the window and gave it to us on his fingers, fast and clean. One room. One man, standing, back half to the window. A woman down along the far wall, not moving. Throttle's whole body lunged for the door and I got a fist in his cut and held him, held him, because Rex's hand was still going.

Bee.

On her feet. By the bed.

Standing.

I've been a wall my whole life. Stepped in front of every bad thing that ever came at anybody I loved, and I was proud of it, and it turned out to be the one thing that couldn't save her, because you can't wall a woman in, you can only stand in her doorway, and I'd been standing at the wrong one, three miles up a road, while a soft-voiced man walked her out a back door I wasn't at. All that muscle. All that watching. And when it finally came for her, the wall was somewhere else.

But Rex's fingers had said standing. On her feet. Up. I couldn't make it fit, not then, but something in me that had been going under since Wren said gone came up hard for one second, because whatever was happening on the other side of that wall, my girl was on her feet in the middle of it.