Page 49 of Crow’s Shadow

Crow stops him with a hand.

“I’ve got him,” Crow says.

Crow says the words. His voice catches halfway through, but he clears his throat and keeps going.

When he’s done, Mercy comes up beside him.

“Took you long enough.”

Crow looks at him.

Mercy wipes a hand over his face. “Don’t start. I’m allowed to be fucking emotional at a funeral.”

Crow’s mouth twitches. “Didn’t say anything.”

“You were thinking it.”

“I usually am.”

I log it in the book. Ruin Ridge. Deke. Ground, with words. My hand is steady.

The club hasn’t figured out what the fuck to do with us since the mountain.

Every man there saw Renner rot without anybody touching him. They saw me set half a mountain on fire. There’s no pretending anymore.

Some of them can’t look at me. Some stare too long.

Stryker hasn’t said a word to me since we got back, but he won’t leave a room I’m in either.

“Are you following me now?” I ask when he appears in the kitchen for the third time that morning.

“No.”

“You don’t even drink coffee.”

He looks at the mug in his hand.

“Fuck off, Shadow.”

Progress.

Sable is still in the wind. Loco put every charter on her. Sooner or later, somebody will find her.

Loco calls it in church, the week after, with the doors open for the first time I can remember, because there’s nothing left worth keeping behind them.

“Forty years,” Loco says, and the table is every patch plus, for the first time in the history of the Grave Prowlers, every woman. Ariea. Nova. Ember. Me. We stand along the wall where the prospects usually stand, and not one man tells us to leave. “Forty years we thought we were lucky. We weren’t lucky. We were kept.” He looks down the table, then at us along the wall. “Every close call we walked out of. Every rival who moved on us and missed. Every raid the county ran and came up empty on. It was never us. It was the women we didn’t bother to look at.”

Silence. Then Buck, quiet, not looking up from his hands. “My Grace. Forty-one years married. She never said a word.”

“She couldn’t,” Ariea says gently. “It was the whole point. A witch who’s known is a witch who’s hunted. We kept you alive by letting you think you kept us.”

Loco lets it sit, then he does the thing I have watched him do my whole life, the thing making him president. He decides.

“Then here’s how it is now. No more edges. No more women at the periphery keeping us breathing while we drink and take the credit. They sit at this table. They ride in this club’s decisions.” His eyes come to me. “And the book. Shadow.”

My name in church. I have never once heard it in this room.

“You kept our sins your whole life and never let them walk. You went into the dark and came back fire. You’re not the stray we fed anymore, and I’m ashamed it took a war for me to say it out loud.” He stands. The founding skull shifts on his shoulder. “You want a place in this club, it’s yours. Name it.”