Page 14 of Iron and Ivory

That's its own kind of loyalty. Quiet loyalty. The kind that doesn't get a patch but holds everything together anyway.

And she confirms what all the others said.

Nothing is happenin'.

We eat. We piss. We sit in silence that's neither comfortable or hostile.

Some guys talk a little.

Some of 'em sleep on the couch.

I don't sleep.

The night passes.

The morning passes.

The next two fuckin' days pass like bad debt—slow and ugly and never quite done.

And now I just gotta admit it.

I'm hesitant. But facts are facts and the facts are these—we maybe, possibly, by some grace of a God I don't entirely believe in and some dumb luck I definitely don't deserve… we got away with it.

Or it hasn't started yet.

Which is a thought I stuff down before it gets legs.

By the time that realization starts settin' in, our guard is fully down.

Not lowered—down.

Like a fence that got tired of standin'.

I watch it happen in real time and I don't stop it because I'm tired too, and tired is contagious as hell inside a closed building with too many bodies and not enough air.

People go home. Ones with somewhere to be, anyway.

Dusty's woman shows up—Giselle—and she doesn't ask questions, she just moves straight to the kitchen like she was always comin', like she knew, and within twenty minutes something's on the stove that smells like the opposite of everything the last two days were.

Then Mama Jo is here. And when Mama Jo walks through a door, the whole room recalibrates. She doesn't announce herself or make a show. She just sets her bag down and starts runnin' the table, and card games materialize around her the way order always does around a woman like that—naturally, without anyone decidin' to let it happen.

The music starts. Somebody cranks it and nobody tells him to turn it down.

Drinks flow. Real drinks, not the two-finger paranoid-sip kind we been nursin' for two days. The full pour. The fuck-it pour.

And just like that, it's over.

Well.

Probably not. I know that. It's not over. It's just gone quiet.

But we're dumb right now. Dumb and tired and hungry and lookin' for any version of normal we can stand in for five fuckin' minutes.

And it turns out that waitin' for a siege that takes its time showin' up is worse than the actual siege itself—'cause at least the siege is honest. At least the siege shows you its face.

The waitin' just eats you from the inside and never even has the decency to finish the job.

My phone buzzes in my pocket and I already know who it is. I don't wanna look.