Page 8 of Sting of Sin

"I know," Ross said.

"I raised her." Throttle's hands had gone to fists at his sides. "There wasn't anybody else. I’m the reason that girl made it to grown. And some doctor I’ve never laid eyes on writes my name down in a file as the thing that's hurting her?"

"I know," Ross said again, because there wasn't anything else to say and because he wasn't a man who lied to make you feel better.

I put a hand on Throttle's shoulder and felt him shaking under it, all that grief and all that fury and nowhere on God's earth to put it. And I hated that doctor then—Sutter, a faceless fuck driving down that road, in a way I didn't have clean words for.

"So paper won't move," I said, to give Throttle a second, to get it back on the rails. "Not in time."

"Not in two days." Ross shook his head. "I can have a petition filed by Friday. I can't make a judge rule on it. Best case, you're looking at a hearing a month out, and by then she's hours north in Sutter's program and we're fighting to claw her out of a second facility instead of the first. Worst case, that destabilization line holds up and they bar the family from contact entirely while it all plays out." He closed the folder. "Legally, they've boxed you clean. There's no fast door."

"Then we don't use a door." Throttle's voice had gone the other way now, past the heat, into the cold, the certain. "We go around."

Ross looked at him a long second. He was a smart man. He knew exactly what around meant, and he knew better than to be standing there when it happened. He picked up his folder. "I'll keep the petition moving," he said. "Whatever happens—whatever happens—you'll want it already in motion. Cleans up the after." He got in his car and drove off, and that was Ross telling us he hadn't heard a word, which was the most useful thing he did all day.

***

IN THE WAR room we put it together, the whole table, the door shut.

My first thought was the dumb one, walk in the front during visiting hours, hand on her arm, dare 'em to stop me. Hex killed it in about ten seconds, and he was right. That place was locked tight. Badge doors, a buzz-in front, an elevator that didn't move without a card, security on the floor and a duty nurse whose whole job the second I tried it would be to slap a button and drop every lock in the building. I'd get her as far as the first set of doors and then we'd both be standing in a glass box waiting on the county to come collect us. You don't muscle your way out of a place built to keep people in. You go in where they ain't looking.

"So we don't go loud," I said. "We go quiet. Middle of the night, skeleton crew, in and out before anybody knows the bed's empty."

"Then I gotta get inside their walls first." Hex was already chewing on it, that twitchy hot-wired way he got when you handed him a system to crack. "Give me a day. Door logs, staffing, shift change, the camera grid, which badge opens what. There's always a soft spot—laundry, loading, a smoke door somebody props 'cause they're too lazy to badge back in out of the cold. I'll find the window where the floor's down to two nurses and a rent-a-cop scrolling his phone, and I'll get you a way in that don't trip a thing."

Ashen pushed off the wall. "And after? They find that bed empty, Friday, or before, first place they come looking is here. Everybody in three counties knows whose sister she is."

"Then nobody can ever know we set foot in that building," Warden said. "We don't take her out. She walks out. That's the whole job." He let it land. "The way Hex gets us in has to be a way a confused woman could've found on her own. A propped door. A dead camera. A hole in the watch. We go in through it and we come out through it, and we leave that room looking like exactly what they'll be on their knees praying it was, a patient who got up in the night, found a door nobody locked, and wandered off into the dark. No forced locks. No faces on a camera. Not one thing in that room to say two grown men were ever standing in it. Far as that place ever knows, she let herself out."

"They'll still call you," I said, looking at Throttle. "Second they find that bed cold. You're her next of kin."

"Good," Warden said. "Let them. And when that phone rings, Throttle, you come apart on it. You're the brother who just got told the place that swore up and down it'd keep his sister safe lost her in the middle of the night. You're terrified. You're out of your mind. You want to know what they're doing, you want cops, you want answers, every single thing a man feels when somebody misplaces the sister he loves." His voice went flat. "And it won't be hard, 'cause most of it'll be true. Only lie in the whole thing is that you already know exactly where she is."

Throttle's jaw flexed, slow. "So I tear their heads off for losing her."

"You rip them a new asshole," Warden said. "A guilty man goes quiet and hides. A scared brother makes noise and demands answers. You're gonna make noise, brother. Loud as you want." He turned to Wreck. "You and Scyth run the outside. Eyes on the lot, eyes on the road, a second cage staged a mile out in case the first one gets burned. Maul and Throttle go in, nobody else inside. More bodies is more noise."

"I'm not leaving without her," Throttle said.

"I wouldn’t expect anything else." Warden's eyes moved to me. "And she talked to Maul, so Maul's the hands on her. The only two people who touch that woman getting her out of there are the two she trusts. Anybody else so much as reaches for her, you break the reach."

Rex spoke up from the corner. "I'll run records next to Hex. Quiet. If this Sutter's gonna be a problem for us after, I want to know who he is before he knows we're looking."

"Do it," Warden said. "Hex—while you're inside their system, you pull everything. The place, the licensing, the money behind it, this Sutter, that other one, Reed, all of it. They come at us legal after, I want to already know where every body's buried."

"On it," Hex replied.

Then Warden stood, and the whole table knew to shut up.

"One more thing, and it's not a small one, so every man hear me." He let his eyes go around the room, slow, landing on each of us. "When she's on this property, she's under the patch, and that means something. This woman is Throttle's blood, and she’s been through things, in that place and before it, that not one of you wants the details of. She is not a club girl. She is not a woman who's just around. Nobody touches her. Nobody crowds her. Nobody raises his voice in a room she's standing in. You give her space, you give her quiet, you let her come to you, or you keep the hell away from her. She's not somebody's anything. She's a person we are keeping alive, and the first man who forgets that answers to me, Throttle, and Maul.”

"Yeah, Pres," went low around the table.

It was a thing he'd have said about any woman we ever brought in scared. It wasn't aimed at one man more than another.

It went into me like it had been carved with my name on it.

Because I knew what I was, and I'd known it a long time, and now the one woman I'd never had the right to want was going to be sleeping near me, behind my gate, under my roof. And Warden had just laid the law down for the whole club without the first idea that the man it was going to cost the most was sitting right there at his table, nodding along like it was nothing.