Page 13

The room is long and dim, a single overhead fixture casting low light over a wooden table that runs most of the length of the space.

Hansen is at the far end of the table with a phone in his hand that he is not using. He does not look surprised to see me, which tells me he heard the door.

"You should be resting," he says.

"You keep telling me what I should be doing."

He watches me cross the room toward him and says nothing.

I stop on the other side of the table. He is still in everything from tonight — jacket, the same dark shirt, the beginnings of tomorrow's bruising across his cheekbone. There is a bandage on his forearm from the bar wound, slightly thicker now, which means someone attended to it.

He looks like what he is: a man at the end of a very long night that is not finished yet, holding his composure together through habit more than ease.

"I want to say something," I tell him. "And I'd appreciate it if you didn't interrupt me until I'm done."

He nods for me to keep going.

"At the bar," I start, "before everything broke apart. I was sitting there thinking I should leave, I had come to find Grave and I was stalling, and then you walked over and something happened that I was not expecting." I pause, not because I need it but because I want him to understand I am not saying this carelessly. "I felt it. I think you did too."

He does not speak.

"I know who you are," I say. "I know what that patch means. I know you are older than me and that you lead men into the type of situations I spent tonight being on the wrong side of. I know you are Grave's president, and I know exactly what it means that Grave is my brother." I hold his gaze. "I am not confused about any of that."

"Leah..." His voice is low.

"I told you not to interrupt me."

His jaw tightens, but he stays quiet.

"I don't need to be protected from what I want," I say. "I've been making decisions under pressure for years. I sat in that chair tonight and I made a list of things I was not going to keep putting off, and you are on the list." I stop. "I'm telling you clearly. I'm not asking you to fix anything or decide anything tonight except one thing."

The room holds that for a moment.

He looks at me and works through something internal, the muscle in his jaw moving, hands flat on the table.

"Your brother," he says.

"I know."

"He will take this as a personal—"

"I know, Hansen."

"I run this club," he says. "I make decisions that get people hurt. I've been doing it for twenty-two years, and there is no version of me that is uncomplicated or—"

"I work in trauma medicine," I say. "I have held people together while they came apart. I am not looking for uncomplicated."

"The age gap—"

"Does not concern me."

He exhales. It is not quite frustrated and not quite defeated. It is the sound of a man who is running out of arguments he was never truly committed to making, and we both know it.

"You said something at the bar," I say, quieter now. "You said people who belong in Whitetail Falls eventually stop scanning for the exit." I pause. "I have been standing in this building for hours and I have not looked at the exit once."

I walk around the end of the table.

He does not move away. He watches me come toward him.